Hey :)

This is my first fanfiction I have ever written and it´s originally written in German. You can find the link to the original version on my profile. I do the translation on my own, so I hope that my grammar and vocabulary aren´t completely a mess. If they are…well, you are allowed to tell me. ;)

The cover-image was drawn by me.

I hope you will enjoy this story.

Of course I do not own anything of the AC-Universe!

Free but enchained

January, 1783

„Is this understood? Lillian? Lillian, are you listening? "

Irritated I lifted my head and looked in the reproachful eyes of my uncle, who drummed indignantly with his fingertips on the tabletop. We were having dinner, which had run quietly so far. As always. I had let my mind wander to the book, which I´d been reading for some days now and which was waiting for me in my room upstairs. Lost in thoughts once, I rarely noticed what was happening around me. Just as now. "Pardon me. I…what did you say?"

"I said, that I don´t want to see you tomorrow morning. I´m having guests and there are important things, we have to talk about and I´m not going to accept interruptions by you. Is this understood?"

I nodded slowly, although I wanted to disagree and ask, which kind of visitors my uncle was expecting and when they were going to arrive. But I knew, that my uncle wouldn´t tell me anyway. In his house, everything and everyone had to follow his lead and he was a man, who couldn´t brook opposition. Especially from a woman.

"Very well then." Uncle Richard took a fabric napkin, speckled clean his mustache and gave a sign to the three servants aside, who stepped out of the shadows in the candlelit room, to clear the table. Even though my plate was just halfly drained, I said nothing when it was taken away. When my uncle had decided, that dinner was over, it was over. He rose from his seat and left to his typing pool, without saying a word. Narrowly I could hold back a deep sigh, before I stood up and headed, with slowly steps, for my room in the first floor.

It was dark in here, because I had turned off all the lights, before I went down, but it didn´t bother me. I loved the darkness. I could think best, when it was dark around me. I closed the door and felt my way to the window, to sit down on the ledge and look into the night. Alike many times before, I asked myself, how life was looking like somewhere else. Were there feasts celebrated? Did families sit together, laughing and talking about the passed day? Were there any others like me, who were sitting in the darkness and felt lonely? The sigh, I had held back in the dining room, broke out now and I closed my eyes. I felt, how tears of desperation were blazing their way up.

I hated my uncle. He was a pedant. A tyrant. A man, who was used to it, that everything and everyone was dancing after his pipe. Because I was dependent on his mercy, I had to do as he wished. Without him, I would be nothing. My parents had died, when I was nine years old. At that time, we had lived in London and I could still remember the day, when I had to leave my parental home and move to my grandparents. Both of them had been very old already and it had been obvious, that they wouldn´t be able to raise me, but they had done their best, that I wanted for nothing and that I felt sheltered. But everything had changed, when the guardianship had been assigned to my uncle. To my "welfare". To this unmarried, heartless man, who basically just wanted my heritage. As my warden, he was also the disposer of my parents wealth, they had devised. I was only a means to an end for him and besides a nuisance.

My time in his care wasn´t a happy one. Till this day, I was a bird in a gilded cage. Had to bear his moods and to do, as he wished. Even though I was twenty-four years old. Women at my age were married and took care of at least five children. Richard didn´t even allow me to talk to a man. To wed me, would mean, that he wouldn´t have my parents money at his disposal anymore. Provided that it was still existing. He didn´t even left me behind, when he had decided to go to America, a year ago. While I had friends in London, I was alone now, here in the outland. Isolated from the outside world, which was just wilderness all around the property. It took a semidiurnal journey with the carriage to reach Boston, the nearest city. Consequently, my life was quiet lonely and who was wondering, that I loved to spend my time with reading books and dreaming about better times. However they could look like.

There was a knock on the door and I was startled out of my somber thoughts. I wiped away the tears, which had found their way on my cheeks and granted, with a hoarse "Yes, please?", the permit to come in. The door opened and it took several blinks, until my eyes got used to the light in the hallway, which fell into my room. "Please, excuse the disruption, Miss." A young woman, with a dark skin and pitch black hair, entered, lowering her head, her voice nothing more than a whisper. "I wanted to ask, if there is anything you need and to prepare your bed for the night."

Anya was my servant and probably the only person, I was regularly in contact with. I could even exaggerate and assert that she was my only friend, but because she never dared to look at me, or even talk to me freely, I feared that this friendship would be an one-sided one. Nevertheless, I liked her and I was annoyed about her, being so reserved in my presence. Almost as she would be afraid of me.

"Thank you, Anya. Do whatever you have to do and then, you are allowed to leave. I won´t need you today." I gave her a friendly smile, which she couldn´t see because of her gaze being directed to the floor. But I hoped, that at least the kindness in my voice had found its way to her. Quietly I watched Anya inflaming the lamps beside my bed, filling a few of the igneous coals from the fireplace into a coppery bed-pan, putting it under my blanket and finally taking my nightgown out of the cupboard and laying it tidily on my bed. She was doing all of that in a stoic routine, without looking at me once.

"Do you want me to help you out of your clothes?", she asked and lifted her head, shortly enough to see me shaking my head. "You are allowed to leave. Thank you, Anya."

The dark-haired nodded, curtsied and left. I was alone again and even though I had let her go, I wished that Anya would have stayed.

I often had tried to involve her into a conversation, but unsuccessfully. Like all the other servants here, Anya was essentially afraid of my uncle. No one of them was here by choice. They were slaves, coming from every corner of the world and reduced to property and they were treated as such by Richard and the men, he had hired as overseers. I despised them for their doings and tried to treat the men and women with kindness and respect, what they seemed to be even more afraid of. Like Anya.

They are prisoners like you. But you are considerably better of, crossed it through my mind and frustrated about my just existed self-pity, I started to remove the hair pins and slides from my hair, left my seat, ridded myself of my clothes, put on my nightgown, removed the bed-pan from the mattress and laid down on my preheated bed. I didn´t want to ponder anymore and so I spent almost the whole night with reading, before the oil in the lamps was exhausted and the light extinguished. Not till then, I slid into a dreamless sleep.

In the deep of the night, the beating of hoofs on flagging and the rumbling of a cart tore me out of my sleep. As long as it took for me, to keep my eyes open, I laid quietly in my bed and listened into the darkness. From the yard, the voices of several men got to my ears and one of them I recognized as my uncle´s. What did he do out there, in the middle of the night? I straighted up slowly and was shivering a bit, as the blanket slid from my shoulders. It was terribly cold in my room, because the blaze in the fireplace was already extinguished. Even though I would prefer to wrap myself into my blanket again, my curiosity had succeeded and I stood up and went to the window, from where I could take a look out into the yard. My uncle stood with five of his men around a horse-drawn prison-cart and spoke to the coachmen. I couldn´t see his face or hear what he was saying, but he seemed to be angered. Under wild gesticulation, he talked at the coachmen and pointed to the cart, again and again. I didn´t need to be clairvoyant to know what, or better to say, who was in there. More slaves, but until now I had thought, that our "capacities", how my uncle used to call it, were already utilized and I didn´t like the thought, that more poor souls were housed here now.

The conversation down in the yard was already finished and some of the men opened the cart, whereupon eight dark-skinned figures got out, one after another. My uncles henchmen led them behind the house, probably to the slave-huts and out of my sight. My uncle was talking to the coachmen once again and the man actuated the cart and drives away. Richard stayed a while motionless, before he turned and entered the house. Myself returned to my bed, but my tiredness was gone. What did just happened out there? That my uncle used to do business with other slave-traders, wasn´t new to me. But I had never seen him so tight in doing so and above all, these businesses never took place in the deep of the night. My feeling told me, that there had to be something else behind all this and it shouldn´t take so long, before I should learn, what it was.