This Little Chapel

"Here for murder." If there was a good reason to be in the Grey House, that was it. Nobody messed with you when you were there for murder. Of course they didn't call it that, when they brought her in, or she'd have been hanged. The soldier had been a deserter, so they hadn't been quite able to tell if she hadn't done the motherland a service. But her father knew, her father was furious, and it wasn't just the killing (such a heavy thump the body had made, just like a big hog) and how she and so he as well were the talk of the village and now he'd never win that best merchant's award on the market and the Mayor had stopped saying good morning to him. It was what Magda said when he first hit her for what she'd done, that sealed the matter, that sealed her fate.

He was never there. He didn't do anything around the house. If it wasn't for the regular swell of her mother's belly Magda would hardly know he was ever in the house. She did it all, she and some of the other kids, and Mother. Everything. He grew fat and rich on the work of his army of slaves, who tended the pigs and butchered and sliced and sold while he sat on his fat arse and hobnobbed with the Merchants' Association.

That's what Magda had said, when he'd accused her of conspiring against him, when she'd cut into the deserter she had found fumbling with his breeches, bending over the crumbled, sobbing body of her ten-year-old sister turned belly-down on top of a barrel. She'd do it again, she said, and something had clicked. She would do it to him, she'd said.

At the time, she thought that was the worst beating she'd ever had. Maybe it still was. None of the other times had her older brothers been holding her down.