Ellen Potter's short story contest!

Have you ever heared about Ellen Potter???
Well she's a writer (didn't know that until tonight, when I clicked on the link from P.B. 's blog and studied it.

^Photo credit--ELLEN POTTER's site <go there for details.

Well any way, she's having a short story contest for people 9-13 yrs old, and I can enter here is my story I'll be entering:

The

Broken Glass

of Hinning Manor

West Yorkshire Moors, England,

1832

•

The Hinning family, consisting of a father—after the death of the mother--, a brother of five-and-twenty, and a girl of fourteen.

All thought that no trouble could come upon them, but over the course of this story, we will find that this assumption would be very wrong.

When the clock chimed half-past-nine, there came a rough knock at the door, and when the maid walked down the hallway to answer, the door was flung open by a mob of police, and she was pushed aside roughly. “YOU ARE UNDER ARREST*!!!!” yelled the leader of the group to Mr. Hinning: a Mr. Gron who was constable.

“I have done nothing unsavory**!” Mr. Hinning explained, but Mr. Gron explained that he was guilty of arson; setting at least half of the dry moor a lit, and his son was his accomplice.

“NO!” Yelled the girl who had been alarmed at the loud knock.

“This cannot be! My father and brother would never do such a thing! How can you think such a thing?!”

“Shut up, you, or should I say Annabelle?”

“Do not address my sister in such a tone!” The brother said.

“John, please. Do not make them angry.” Annabelle said.

But the mob was angry—they always were—and the two men were escorted out of the house…as prisoners.

*********************************************

PART II

~

Annabelle looked round her at the broken glass—

After her father and brother had been taken from her, angry farmers and their hands took to destroying the previous Hinning Manor.

Windows were shattered and the floor was covered in a film of glass dust.

Some of the farmers’ sons had found it a great pastime while their fathers were busy destroying, to make a circle round Annabelle and pass her to the next boy roughly. Now as she sat in the midst of her destroyed home, her black, bruised eye throbbed.

************************************************

PART III

~

Annabelle lay on her bed in the boarding house of the small Moorish village near her previous home.

She so wanted to be with her family once more. All day she had been brewing up a plan. All she had to do was wait until night.

*********

The streets were dark, as Annabelle made her way to the richest house in the village, and when she reached it she threw a brick at the parlour window; making as much noise as she could as she scrambled through the window.

Once inside, she did not have to wait long, a man came down the stairs with a shot gun, and decided not to shoot seeing she was a woman, but ran over and tied her hands with a scarf that was lying in solitude on the couch—Annabelle let him without hesitation.

Soon the constable*** came, but when he saw her he said,

“Of course it’s you, daughter of an arsonist!”

She was then transported to the prison just out of the village.

Her plan was working—by being in prison she would be able to be once more with her father and brother.

“Are a Mr. Hinning and his son John here?” She asked a guard that was escorting her down the bleak hallway of the prison.

How hopeless a prisoner must feel when he is led down this way. Thought she.

“Hinning?” The guard replied, “Yes, the boy John died this morning with smallpox, and Mr. Hinning died crazy in his bed yesterday.”

Annabelle was drowned in despair at these words. All of this for nothing, it seemed and was.

And then she found herself being pushed into a cold prison cell, and the door being locked behind her separating her from the world she knew.

Conclusion—

Because Annabelle caused no real trouble she was to be let out, but when the guard unlocked her cell door, he found her dead. She had died of sadness; feeling hopeless and wasted, she let herself go.

Like her father and brother before her, she was thrown into a pauper’s grave, unmarked and untraceable.


Notes:

*This of course was a false accusation: Mr. Gron wished to get back at Mr. Hinning, the reason because Mr. Hinning had taken to wed a woman of whom Mr. Gron had been planning on marrying. Mr. Gron is truly the criminal—he setting the fire.

**Mr. Hinning would never do anything unsavory; he was none as an honourable man until a month before his death.

***In case the reader has forgotten, the constable is the horrid Mr. Gron. Almost ironic, isn’t it?