Member-only story
Thieving Hannah
Fiction: desperate measures
‘Hannah Skelton, for theft of a ham, I hereby sentence you to two months hard labour.’
Thank the Lord and his blessed virgin mother, she thought. She could barely stand with the weakness. She had made sure the portly peeler was passing by before she had whipped it off the butcher’s cart. She was that ravenous she would have eaten the shoulder joint raw. She wasn’t sure how she’d managed to make it into town.
Hannah had already lost everything. She had no shame or pride left.
She remembered the day, she woke up from the fever. Her entire family was decomposing on the floor beside her. The baby at her mother’s breast was the freshest corpse. The emptiness in her belly was acute. She had contemplated tearing the heart and liver out of the bairn to eat. Lord knows, she might have done it too if the fire in the hearth hadn’t been as dead and cold as her family.
There wasn’t a seed left to plant. They had eaten them in their desperation to survive. They had eaten their pig too, instead of selling it to pay for their conacre. It had made no difference.
Two days afterwards, the bailiff came and turfed her out in the snow. He’d knocked down all the evicted tenants’ cabins so they couldn’t sneak back in.
