Fanfiction: The Hardest of Winters, Chapter 4 of The Saga of Giselle
Title: The Hardest of Winters
Style: Prose
Genre: Drama
Rating: R
Length: Drabble
Warnings: Prostitution, Language, Infanticide, Prison
Authoress: cassiopaya
Characters: Giselle
Word Count: 345
Disclaimer: Not mine…not yet.
Dedication: greeneyespurple
Summary: The story of Giselle’s origin, from London whore to Tortuga bride.
Notes: The consequences of imprisonment.
***
The hardest of winters had etched its mark upon her brow; two deep gouges in the skin between her eyebrows from cold, hunger, and illness. Her mother had used to look like her and now she was starting to look more like her mother than like herself.
Brought before the judge the first time for murder she had collapsed upon the floor from child-bed fever and was removed from the court; there was no fun in hanging a half-dead whore. Indeed, it might have been in the court’s best interest to let her die in prison.
It felt as though her womb was being feasted upon by worms, worms with mouths like a cicatrix of teeth, and she was already dead and buried in the ground. Days and days passed and all she had the strength to do was grit her teeth through the pain.
One night she woke and the pain was less. She was hungry and trembled with the cold. The other women in the room, and their infants, were a source of noise she could not stand. Placing her hands over her ears and gritting her teeth she tried to sleep again.
Not a soul had come to visit her, though she half expected her mother to be arrested as well because Fate was cruel in her own way. Each day the pain grew less until it remained as a deep, throbbing ache; a shadowing undulating in the darkness of her.
She was taken from her cot in the room of miserable mothers and their newborns and placed with the general population of poor women in a dark, dank cell with no light. The lice crawled all over her and the hem of her skirt was wet from the overflowing piss pot.
Some of the women in this cell were mad and better suited to Bedlam. They screamed. Sometimes they did not sleep. They spoke to her as if she was someone else, stroking her hair. Had there been light in the cell, she would have seen the rash on their skin.
Style: Prose
Genre: Drama
Rating: R
Length: Drabble
Warnings: Prostitution, Language, Infanticide, Prison
Authoress: cassiopaya
Characters: Giselle
Word Count: 345
Disclaimer: Not mine…not yet.
Dedication: greeneyespurple
Summary: The story of Giselle’s origin, from London whore to Tortuga bride.
Notes: The consequences of imprisonment.
***
The hardest of winters had etched its mark upon her brow; two deep gouges in the skin between her eyebrows from cold, hunger, and illness. Her mother had used to look like her and now she was starting to look more like her mother than like herself.
Brought before the judge the first time for murder she had collapsed upon the floor from child-bed fever and was removed from the court; there was no fun in hanging a half-dead whore. Indeed, it might have been in the court’s best interest to let her die in prison.
It felt as though her womb was being feasted upon by worms, worms with mouths like a cicatrix of teeth, and she was already dead and buried in the ground. Days and days passed and all she had the strength to do was grit her teeth through the pain.
One night she woke and the pain was less. She was hungry and trembled with the cold. The other women in the room, and their infants, were a source of noise she could not stand. Placing her hands over her ears and gritting her teeth she tried to sleep again.
Not a soul had come to visit her, though she half expected her mother to be arrested as well because Fate was cruel in her own way. Each day the pain grew less until it remained as a deep, throbbing ache; a shadowing undulating in the darkness of her.
She was taken from her cot in the room of miserable mothers and their newborns and placed with the general population of poor women in a dark, dank cell with no light. The lice crawled all over her and the hem of her skirt was wet from the overflowing piss pot.
Some of the women in this cell were mad and better suited to Bedlam. They screamed. Sometimes they did not sleep. They spoke to her as if she was someone else, stroking her hair. Had there been light in the cell, she would have seen the rash on their skin.