“Give my love to your parents, and I do hope you find your dear mother in better health when you get home.”
View attachment 618799
“Thank you ma’am.” Alice counted herself lucky to have an employer as considerate as Ruth. Ruth was the wife of a wealthy merchant, and Alice came in daily to help her with chores, mainly because Ruth’s joints were all painful and inflamed, but also because she knew that Ruth enjoyed her company. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Take care, Alice!”
View attachment 618800
Alice began the walk home. It was more difficult than usual, Jerusalem was crowded for the Passover feast, and the Romans had brought in extra troops to keep order. She was carrying a basket of fruit and vegetables which she’d bought earlier with her meagre wages. She hugged it to herself – it could easily get stolen in this crowd.
She realised that people were trying to get close to one of those itinerant preachers that tended to appear at this time of year from the countryside. This one was supposed to be able to heal people. She wondered if he could help her mother.
Alice dismissed the thought. She would never get near him, and she couldn’t afford him anyway. Nobody could help her mother. Her father Joseph Barabbas had spent the last of his savings on doctors, and now he was destitute and Elizabeth his wife was no better.
Nobody could heal the pain in Alice’s heart either. It had been at Passover three years ago that Nathan, the man she loved and had expected to marry, had got mixed up in some trouble and had died in agony on a Roman cross on the hill of Golgotha, just outside the city. Alice had stayed with him, sitting beneath his cross all day and all night and most of the next day until he had surrendered to the nails. From that day to this she had never gone near Golgotha. Too many terrible memories.
View attachment 618801
Eventually she fought her way to the house which she still shared with her parents, and probably always would now. Although she was only 23, most women were married well before they were twenty. Alice’s hope for marriage had died with Nathan on Golgotha.
“Mum! Dad! It’s me! I got some nice vegetables and fruit!”
View attachment 618802
“Shh!” said Joseph Barabbas, “You’re mother’s sleeping!”
He ushered her into the back yard, then her father embraced her. “Oh, Alice, you’re a good girl. If it wasn’t for you, we’d starve. I daren’t leave her!”
“How is she?”
“Sleeping now, but she’s had a better day. We were laughing earlier.”
“Laughing? What about?”
“That Jesus of Nazareth. He only went and kicked over all the merchant’s tables outside the temple! Filthy money grabbers, robbing innocent folk of their money so they can present offerings!”
View attachment 618803
Alice turned away. “But, Dad! That’s where Ruth’s husband works! That’s what pays my wages!”
“Oh.” The smile disappeared from Joseph’s face. “I hadn’t thought of that!”
Alice began to prepare her vegetables. ‘Bloody do-gooders,’ she thought. ‘Why don’t they stay in the countryside and leave us alone?’
She put some water into a cooking pot and took it back and set it over the fire to heat up, taking the opportunity to kiss her sleeping mother as she did so. She returned to the yard where she sat peeling and slicing the vegetables.
View attachment 618804
She smelt him before she saw him. .
“DA….” She tried to alert her father, but a filthy paw was clasped over her mouth. He grinned at her, revealing a set of rotten teeth. Alice stared in shock.
View attachment 618805
“You be nice to me, and everything will be OK. Try anything, and I’ll break your neck and then have you!”
He pushed her up against a wall and began pawing at her clothes. She was almost surprised when he began to gurgle, and blood started running from his mouth. Was that really her knife, buried deep into his chest? Was it her hand, covered in a stranger’s blood?
View attachment 618806
“ALICE!” Her father’s anguished cry.
“Septimus?” A stranger’s voice. “Where’s this pretty Jewish bitch you were telling us about? Septimus? SEPTIMUS?”
Septimus, if that was his name, collapsed to the ground, clearly dead. In disbelief, Alice gazed at the body, then at her shocked father, then at the two equally shocked Roman soldiers who had just arrived. Finally, she looked at her bloody hand.
View attachment 618807
Joseph recovered first. “It was me. I killed him!”
“What’s your name?” One of the soldiers was a centurion, and took command of the situation.
“Joseph, sir. Joseph Barabbas.”
“What’s her name?”
“Alice…she’s my daughter. Please! My wife is sick… he tried to attack Alice – you have to understand!”
“I understand all right. Your daughter has killed a Roman soldier. You’re coming with us, Alice! With a bit of luck I’ll get to crucify you myself!”
Alice heard the word ‘crucify’, and panicked. She grabbed the knife, hoping to use it on herself. But they were too quick for her. The centurion grabbed her wrist and the knife clattered to the ground.
“Look! She’s trying to kill us, too! Murdering bitch!”
“I wasn’t, I was trying to kill myself! Let me kill myself! Please! Have mercy! I cannot be crucified! My Nathan was crucified! It was horrible! Please! No!”
“It was self defence! He tried to attack her! You must see that!” Joseph was pleading.
“You can explain all that to the Governor. But I’ll warn you now, he’s in a foul mood – he hates Passover!”
Strong hands gripped her arms. A vision of Nathan, writhing and screaming on his cross, filled her mind. This could not be happening to her!
Joseph followed them, still pleading, as the soldiers dragged the screaming Alice off into the crowded street.
View attachment 618808
Romanes eunt domus, eh? 
