Fair Fight by Anna Freeman

what would be the use? I supposed that part of me was broke, along with my teeth and knuckles.
    Ma, in this time, had grown so weak that she sat abed all day, shouting for one or another of us from her pillow and only heaving herself up occasionally to stump about the house, leaning upon her stick, peering at the misses through swollen eyes. She did this even when it made her wince and moan, even when it took her an age to climb the stairs. She drooled in great quantities – caused by the mercury treatments for her sickness, but none the less ugsome. Her face grew steadily more lumpen, her gait skewed. She brought to mind an old hound with a leg missing. Her suspicions were grown as wild as her mind was grown addled, so that she might accuse Dora of holding coins back and never see that she was quite brazenly wearing Ma’s own comb in her hair.
    Dora was mistress of the house in all ways that signified. If Ma gave an order my sister didn’t like, what then could Ma do to make her biddable? Even the bullies never would go near to Ma’s bedside unless sent there by Dora. Slowly, we all felt the changes trickle through the house. At table Ma could no longer stand long enough, nor hold her hand steady enough, to wield the ladle. She only sat, muttering even while she ate. Dora didn’t use food the way that Ma had, as punishment or reward. As soon as my sister had served herself she wasn’t fashed who else might have not enough or too much. She swung her ladle with a sloppy, distracted hand. It wasn’t just, but it set us all a little freer.
    Tom worked the door every night, staying up till dawn to keep the misses safe and the cullies calm. Dora liked to use me as more than just a threat, which was all our Ma had ever done. Ma was always happy to take a stick to a girl’s head herself, but Dora didn’t tend that way. The first time she ordered me to beat a miss, a shivering creature who’d run off still wearing the silks the convent lent her and been dragged back, that first time I looked at her and said, ‘What shall I have for it?’
    ‘Oh, I don’t care,’ Dora said. ‘Take the cut she would’ve kept for herself tonight. It’ll teach her to mind.’
    ‘Then you’d better take the silks from her back or they really will be spoiled,’ I said.
    In truth I didn’t beat her hard, though you’d not think it to hear her. That shivering girl put six shillings and eight into my hand that night and it was the most I’d been allowed to keep for myself for years. After that I played Dora’s beating hand whenever she needed. I began to keep back some of the money from my mills. Whereas Ma had been sharp and wary, my sister was too lazy to quarrel with me over it. She’d rule the girls with a fist of iron because she’d Tom and me to do it for her, but she couldn’t ask us to watch ourselves.
    We needed that money; though Ma hadn’t liked to give away a penny, she’d bought the things we needed, our bread and blankets. Dora wouldn’t stir herself to see to any of that. I bought what we must have and I saved where I could, and slowly I built a hidden purse, which was only what I should always have had. In my mind I kept it either to buy my freedom from Mr Dryer, or more likely, to run away with Tom.
    Then the day came that Dora took it into her head to have Ma’s room for her own. Tom carried Ma upstairs kicking and shrieking and all the house saw it. Ma lived in the garret then, and all her hold over us was lost. The staircase to the garret was so steep and rickety that Ma could barely manage it; soon enough she never came down at all and her only care was that she be kept well dosed with her medicines. Jacky took to hiding up there with her, and would run for whatever she bid him fetch.
     
    The year of 1799, when I turned nineteen, was a hard one even for us in the convent, who never did feel hard times like most. Some folks blamed the war with France and others said the crops had failed. All we really knew