Maggie Cotton

Maggie Cotton is a civilian camp follower with the 60th Rifles. She is married to Captain Vickery's batman Gabriel Cotton and also acts a sutler to the company. She is portrayed by Rebecca Callard and is currently a retired character belonging to sans nom.

Appearance and Personality
Maggie is a short young woman with common average looks, sometimes counted as pretty. She has curly brown hair and blue eyes. She usually keeps her hair knotted back and tucked under a cap, but the curls have a tendency to escape. Her clothing is nothing special, but she is a decent seamstress and washerwoman and she keeps her few garments in good repair, usually protecting them with an apron.

Maggie's general mood is cheerful, if a bit cautious. With her friends she is amiable, teasing, affectionate, humorous and generous. Though at times reserved with strangers, she is not truly shy except perhaps with officers when she fears there might be trouble.

Having attended a mill school for a few years, Maggie knows how to read and write. She also possesses some natural intelligence and a decent mind for figures, useful in her sutlering business. She is generally guarded in speech and behavior, usually managing to avoid drawing undue attention to herself, but she is equally capable of warm friendliness and polite deference when appropriate. She is observant and perceptive of the moods of others which helps her to judge the appropriate behavior on her own part. Although cautious at first and self-sufficient by necessity, she becomes strongly attached and deeply loyal to friends.

The other side of her attachment and loyalty is the sense of guilt and grief when anything bad happens to those she loves, or to herself. She focuses on her own failings almost to the point of being inconsolable. She also suffers from physical weakness, being a woman and a small one at that, and she sometimes descends into fear and despair as a result of a recent attack by a man who raped her. Her low birth and low income give her no standing at all in society, so she has little to depend on apart from a few friends and her own determination, if she can make it last.

Background
Maggie's parents were millworkers in the West Yorkshire town of Dewsbury. Maggie herself worked at the mill as a child and benefited from attendance at the mill school, a radical new innovation for children of her class. At an early age she became friends with James (Jem) Balstrode, a shopkeeper's son. She was close to her mother and namesake, Margaret, but less so with her father.

When her mother died, life at home with her drunken father became intolerable, so she followed Jem to Portugal with the 5/60th rifles. They intended to marry, but he was killed at Vimeiro, leaving her with no protection or support aside from the odd jobs of mending, washing, or obtaining food and stores, work that she quickly developed into the business of sutlering. When Rifleman Gabriel Cotton offered his support and friendship, she found it wise to accept. Their companionable friendship turned to love.

Maggie and Cotton were briefly parted when she was attacked and raped by an army sergeant and she decided to stay behind in a Portuguese town. She was overwhelmed by feelings of guilt and grief. But she soon regretted the decision and rejoined Cotton on the march, realizing that she loved him and he still loved her. She agreed to marry him as soon as she was sure that she was not carrying a child. They were married on the 24th of May in Oporto.