exactly.’ She shook her head. ‘I stole the bread I was whipped for.’ He thought she wasn’t going to elaborate for a moment, but then she sighed. ‘Just not for myself. For one of the other women’s sons. He’s only six and has a terrible chest. All skin and bones and his mother was struggling to feed him. So I took a little extra bread to try to feed him up.’
‘And they whipped you for that?’
‘It’s all about control, isn’t it?’ she said with a hint of anger in her voice. ‘They stop seeing us as living, breathing humans with a heart and a history and see us as criminals who shouldn’t have any rights and just need to be controlled.’
‘I think transportation is one of the harshest punishments, aside from hanging, of course,’ George said quietly. ‘They take your freedom, but they take so much more than that. They take your future, or at least the future you’d envisaged. They rip you away from everyone and everything you’ve ever known and ship you to a strange country where even the smallest misdemeanour is seen as a rebellion against the authorities.’
‘But perhaps we deserve it,’ Alice said quietly.
George looked at her, but she’d turned her face away, staring off into the distance. He couldn’t imagine this young woman doing anything so reprehensible that she deserved to be transported for her crimes.
You don’t know her, he reminded himself. He didn’t know anything about her, not other than what she had chosen to tell him. It was a timely warning. She might seem sweet and kind, she might look like an angel from heaven, but something had led her to being convicted and sentenced to transportation and although he knew there were many miscarriages of justice, she’d never protested that this was the case for her.
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