Chapter Text
~5 years before the events in ABP~
“I ain’t no thief!” came the high-pitched, indignant squeal from outside the tent.
Sergeant Eldest of the Queen’s Own Rangers (22nd Shiloh) looked up, searching for the source of the commotion. “I didn’t steal it!” came another high-pitched protest just before Corporal Meg frog-marched the little river-rat into her presence. Eldest looked and saw all too familiar a tale: a hard-faced, waiflike girl in rough homespun shirt and trousers, unkempt, dirty and ill-fed. Only two things set this particular rat apart from the countless others she’d seen in her day- a shock of blonde hair almost like spun gold, and a large ripe red apple, clutched protectively in a vicelike grip.
“What’s this, Corporal?” Eldest asked Meg, though she already knew the answer. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t already acted this particular scene a hundred times before.
“Another rat,” growled Meg. “Filching from supplies.”
“I didn’t steal nothin’!” wailed the girl, twisting in Meg’s grip, almost wrenching free before Meg got her under control by the simple expedient of grabbing a fistful of golden hair with her free hand. Though short, the girl’s hair was raggedly cut, with a knife instead of shears. “I found it, lyin’ on the ground! Someone must ‘ave dropped it, or it fell off a cart, belike!”
The accent was pure river trash.
“I’m sure it did, because apples grow on the ground like potatoes,” Meg growled sarcastically. “Now give me that!” Meg tried to prise it out of girl’s grip, but the little rat curled around it desperately, hedgehog style.
“No! Mine! Finders keepers!”
Eldest sighed and signaled Meg to desist before farce turned into outright tragedy. “On the ground or in a barrel, it’s still an Army apple,” she snarled. “If you want to eat Army food you can bloody well enlist!”
“I tried!” the girl hollered back through tears, clutching the apple like it was life itself. “I told them I were over sixteen, they didn’t believe me, said to come back when I was showing some tits!”
If this little savage was sixteen, Eldest was the Queen Mother. Of course, girls, particularly hungry ones, lied about their ages and the recruiters looked the other way, especially in wartime. But this was peacetime and yes, this little rat hadn’t even the hint of tits to back up her claims. She looked nine or ten. It was true malnutrition stunted the growth of the river trash… But not this much.
She sighed wearily. “Six lashes for filching, Meg,” she told her corporal. “And don’t go easy on her. She can keep the apple though, no one will want it out of her grubby paws.”
They’d been through this a hundred times before. You had to go through the motions. The gutter rats stole, and you had to whup them when you caught them, because the Army couldn’t feed every gutter rat in the land, even when her heart went out to them. Of course, there were ways. Her instruction to Meg not to take it easy on the girl was in fact a command to do the exact opposite. After all, it was only one lousy apple. But you still had to go through the motions. The gutter rats knew it just as well as they did.
“I’m letting you off easy this time, rat,” she warned. “If you’re caught again, I’ll have skin off your hide.”
Meg grabbed the quirt and yanked the shirt off the waif despite her howls of protest, but then froze. Someone had already whipped the girl, and far worse than any Army punishment for filching. But that wasn’t the worst of it. On the girl’s shoulder was a brand Eldest recognized, the angular “B” of the Bozes, upcountry cattle barons.
A year or so ago, her troop had been deployed north, to help put down a rash of cattle thefts. She remembered Carol Boze quite well and still shuddered at the memory. To call the Bozes greedy, mean, hard-handed bitches would be an exceedingly kind compliment and Carol Boze was the worst of the lot, setting the tone for sisters just as ugly and mean as she. Axe-faced, sun-withered, thin and cruel as a rawhide whip, Eldest loathed the woman from the first day of the deployment. Despite the fact the Army -and her Rangers especially- were there to help, it was never enough for Carol Boze. She still remembered having to keep a serene, professional face while Boze screamed invectives at her, as if she was personally responsible for the rustlers. And then she had the gall to demand the Rangers pay her grazing fees for their horses.
Strangely, her Rangers had never managed to catch a single rustler the whole time they were deployed.
“Sooo…” Eldest breathed, rising to get a better look. “This isn’t the first time you’ve been caught filching, has it?”
Pure defiance greeted her in the girl’s gaze. “I ain’t never stolen nothin’ from nobody”.
“Why the whip marks then, girl?” Eldest demanded. The most recent of them looked perhaps a few months old, others crisscrossing her torso older than that.
The girl hesitated, then seemed to come to some decision. “The Bozes, upcountry, they stole somethin’ from my mamma, I was jus’ tryin’ to git it back.”
“And the brand?”
The girl swallowed a sob. “I reckon that was Carol Boze’s way of sayin’ she was gonna keep what she stole.”
“And what was it she stole?” Eldest asked, curious.
The golden-haired girl looked down. “It don’t matter now. My mamma, she’s dead.”
It was the way she said it, with such quiet dignity, that touched her. Eldest crouched low on her haunches, to look the waif in the eye. “They say you can tell a lot about a person by the quality of their friends… and their enemies. It happens I met Carol Boze a while back and didn’t much care for her. What’s your name, girl?”
Wary blue eyes met hers, the color of fine china, lip trembling. She looked down at her treasure, then back to Eldest. “Apple,” she said finally. “My name’s Apple.”
Eldest chuckled at the obvious lie. “Well, at least it isn’t Smith or Jones.” She sighed and rose, taking a few tins of rations from her footlocker, passing them to the girl, who looked at her with wide, disbelieving eyes. “I guess you earned that apple. Finders keepers.” She nodded to Meg, to return the waif’s shirt. “Good luck. Stay away from soldier’s camps. They’re no place for a little one like you.”
The girl stared at her a few long moments, then dashed out of the tent, leaving her alone with Meg, who rewarded her with a sour look. “That just encourages more theft, you know.”
“I know, I know,” Eldest sighed. “But any girl who can spit in the Boze’s eyes can’t be all bad. Besides, it was only one lousy apple and few tins of rations. Small enough.”
“I suppose so,” was Meg’s doubtful reply as she left.
Eldest sighed and turned back to her paper, a four-day-old copy of the Herald, the crass headline proclaiming “First Anniversary of the Durham Theater Bombing- Perpetrators still at large- Does incompetence reign in Queensland?”