"May- may I sit here?"
Lucy Barker spoke between repressed sobs, dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief of lace. There was no infant in her arms- Nellie had agreed to watch her daughter while Lucy attended the trial. Alone and broken hearted, she stood by a bench outside the courthouse forcing herself to function.
The redheaded girl only shrugged.
"Thank you."
Lucy collapsed next to her, avoiding the pitying stares of the passerby. Occasionally the girl would look her way, but neither spoke to the other for quite a bit. It was the girl who finally broke the silence.
"Who'd they lock up?"
She had a high, almost childish voice. But then, Lucy realized, the girl practically was a child. Like her own Johanna, perhaps she'd had her father taken away from her, arrested for a crime he did not commit.
"My husband. Benjamin never did anything wrong!"
She burst into tears yet again, as the redheaded girl nodded wisely.
"Charlie says that all mankind is unjustly punished and rewarded. He says that a day of reckoning will come, when the wicked men are wiped from the Earth, torn out in an orgy of bloodshed and rebirth."
Lucy wasn't paying much attention, but she nodded anyway. The girl went on, encouraged.
"They're scared of what Charlie has to say. They locked him up, they called him a murderer..."
The girl started weeping even worse than Lucy had been. Sympathetic, she put her arm around the girl's shoulder.
"You poor thing..."
The girl looked up at her, cheeks stained. She leaned against Lucy's shoulder, and for a moment the two women sat together in sad silence. Lucy stroked the girl's hair in a sisterly fashion.
"Did Judge Turpin give the sentence?"
The redheaded girl nodded. Her hands clenched into fists of rage.
"He wouldn't listen to Charlie! He called me a madman's whore when I went to plead with him, and he wouldn't let me see Charlie."
"He's a harsh man. I don't know why he would want to lock up my Benjamin, or your Charlie." Lucy spoke, of course, having no idea who Charlie might be. "It's unjust and tyrannical!"
The girl looked up at her suddenly. There was a twinkle in her eyes, and she pulled Lucy forward and kissed her on the cheek. Before Lucy had time to react to this startling turn of events, she pulled out a pistol from her handbag.
"Let's kill him!"
"I- I beg your pardon?!"
Still reeling from the kiss, Lucy could hardly comprehend what the girl seemed to suggest.
"With my gun. I tried giving him the evil eye, but it didn't work."
"But- the evil eye- that's witchcraft! It's the sign of the Devil!"
The girl shook her head.
"Charlie's the son of God, not the devil. Anyway, it didn't work."
She picked up the small weapon in her even smaller hands.
"Let's kill him."
Lucy looked at the gun in a mixture of horror and curiosity. It went off in her hands, hitting the ground between her feet.
"Oh no, I shot it!" she exclaimed.
"We just need practice."
The girl took the gun back and fired at a dead car by the road, missing it entirely. Lucy held her hands to her ears, but then began to smile.
"Let me try again..."
She took the gun and began to fire with delight. All of her sorrow, all of her anger, everything she had been feeling came out with the movement of a finger and a cloud of smoke.
Lucy didn't know what the girl was thinking. She couldn't have known that the girl wasn't even thinking about having kissed her mere minutes ago- that it had been a sign of affection, but also recruitment. All the girl thought about now, as Lucy practiced with the gun, was that she needed to buy more ammunition...