Francena Hallett’s Heart--Excerpt from the Novel

Will the struggle between Lizzie and Aphia, that began earlier in the Lizzie Millett series, ever be resolved? Although Francena Hallett’s Heart (2023, Maine Authors Publishing) is the story of Franny’s coming-of-age, this conflict adds great drama.

Francena Hallett's Heart is the third book in the Lizzie Millett Series. I hesitate to say the last. But, more on that to come.

I hope you enjoy this excerpt from the novel.

Prologue

Aphia Stevens is bored to distraction. In seven months confined to the Maine State Prison in Thomaston, she has been forced to mend blankets, a task she hates. All day, a matron armed with a sawed-off broom handle keeps track of her and the five other inmates who sit at a large table using darning eggs and needles to repair holes worn by prisoners in rough woolen blankets. Aphia’s fingers are worn and calloused, her hands often twisted in muscle spasms. Occasionally another woman would throw her work on the table and stand up to stretch. Unless it is time for everyone to rest, something only allowed every two hours, the guard bangs the violator’s chair with the club and forces her back into place.

I bet these holes are made by the men, Aphia thinks. They are such animals. No woman would let herself get so dirty as to use a blanket smelling of piss and sweat.

Her eyes ache all the time. Two dim lights hang from the ceiling so high above her head that

she can barely make out the directions of her cross stitches. Little light comes through the

windows, which are covered by outside shutters or hoods so that male prisoners in the exercise yard would not be able to look in and see the women. If a man were bold or drunk enough to stand outside a window and shout lewd comments, the women might try to ignore him. One time, a tall girl no more than seventeen or eighteen had screamed back obscenities only to be slapped across the face by the bully matron and led out of the room in handcuffs. She had yet to return.

Each morning before going to the workroom, the five women are led in single file from their cold cells in the oldest part of the eighty-year-old institution. In a musty kitchen, they get weak coffee and hard biscuits for breakfast. At the end of each ten-hour day, they are marched back to that same room for a supper of soup or watery stew and slices of stale bread. After months of such an existence, they are all as thin as fence posts.

“Stevens,” bellows the matron, “pick up the pace there! You have been working on that same blanket for two days. Can’t be that badly damaged. If you don’t do your part here, we can always send you to the laundry room.”

Go to hell, Aphia thinks. The change might do me some good.

The woman next to her whispers, “You don’t want to go down there, darlin’. Especially with

summer coming. Hot as hell there in the summer.”

Aphia smiles at the guard through tightly clenched teeth and forces her hands to move faster. She wants so badly to do something else. Perhaps working in the kitchen would be better. She has plenty of time to figure out where it would be best to work. After all, she is here for the rest of her life, thanks to Lizzie Millett and her goddamn family. If those meddlers had only paid attention to their own lives instead of ruining hers, she wouldn’t be in prison. But her being behind bars wouldn’t keep them safe from her revenge.