Buck was moaning now, pressing his good hand against the wound. She watched with disinterest as he nursed his arm like a little boy. Presently she heard the clatter of footsteps; the surgeon came around the corner, followed by two crewmen with muskets. They stopped, mouths agape, at the sight of this heavily pregnant woman holding a knife, standing over a blood-soaked sailor on a bloody deck.
“I’ll take that, Miss Stokes,” Dr. Dunne said, holding out his hand.
Evangeline gave him the knife, and he passed it to one of the sailors. “Take your shirt off and tear it into strips,” he ordered the other, who quickly complied. They watched in silence as he knelt in front of Buck and made a tourniquet to bind the wound. When he was finished, he sat back on his heels and turned to a crewman. “Is anyone in the hold?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Shackle him and take him down.”
Holding out his bandaged arm, Buck protested, “She stabbed me.”
“Thwarting an attack, I understand.”
Buck shrugged. “C’mon, officer. Just a bit o’ harmless fun.”
“Hardly harmless. Look at you,” said Dr. Dunne.
“I’m surprised you’re not dead,” Olive said, helping Hazel onto her berth an hour later.
“I would be, but for her.” Hazel nodded at Evangeline, propped on an elbow in her bunk.
Olive tucked the blanket around her. “Not so long ago this kind of thing was just the way it was, and nobody batted an eye.”
“Yes, it’s so civilized now,” Evangeline said.
“He’s in the hold, at least,” Olive said. “He won’t be botherin’ ye anytime soon.”
Even days later, it was hard to deny the evidence of Buck’s assault: the slight girl hobbling through her chores with the deep purple line of a bruise on her neck, one eye red and swollen, her split lip blown up like a sausage.
A sailor stepped forward to claim the pearl-handled knife, which, he said, had gone missing weeks earlier. Buck had threatened her with it, Hazel told Dr. Dunne. She’d only picked it up.
The captain sentenced Buck to twenty lashes and twenty-one days in the hold.
Some of the convicts stood on the deck with the sailors to watch the flogging. When he was brought up from the hold, Buck caught Evangeline’s eye and stared at her until she looked away.
After he was tied to the mast, she slipped from the crowd and went to the other side of the ship, trying to ignore the whistle of the whip and Buck’s anguished grunts. One day soon she would give birth to this baby, and the ship would land, and she’d serve her time, and then perhaps she could put all of this behind her. She wouldn’t be too old. She had some skills: she knew how to sew and how to read. She possessed within herself a cache of poetry, a vault of her father’s sermons. She could translate Latin and recall, at a moment’s notice, the Greek myths she’d studied as a girl. That must count for something.
She thought of those two fine ladies she’d seen strolling down Bailey Street in front of Newgate Prison, encased in corsets and silks, tethered to convention, alarmed by everything beyond the bounds of their own narrow sphere. She knew more about life than they ever would. She’d learned that she could withstand contempt and humiliation—and that she could find moments of grace in the midst of bedlam. She’d learned that she was strong. And now here she was, halfway around the world. The sheltered, unworldly governess who’d entered the gates of Newgate was gone, and in her place was someone new. She barely recognized herself.
She felt as flinty as an arrowhead. As strong as stone.
Medea, 1840
Deep in the Indian Ocean, far from land, Evangeline saw creatures she’d only read about in legends: dolphins and porpoises leaping around the prow, bottlenose whales plunging in and out of the spray in the distance. One afternoon she noticed that the water was undulating with dozens of strange, translucent beings, some resembling cut lemons, others parasols that became luminous as light faded from the sky. It was as if the ship were gliding through molten fire.
“They’re known as jellyfish.”
Evangeline turned her head. Dr. Dunne was standing beside her, wearing dark trousers and a white shirt open at the collar. “Jellyfish?” She laughed. “It’s a surprise to see you out of uniform.”
He glanced down at himself. “I’ve been in surgery. A gangrenous leg.”
“Oh dear. Did you have to amputate?”
“I’m afraid so. He waited too long, as these sailors tend to do. Think they’re invincible.”
Watching the horizon line quiver in the heat, she asked, “How is Mr. Buck?”
“Rather . . . unhappy, as you might imagine. It was brave what you did, Miss Stokes.”
“Or foolhardy.”
“Bravery often is.”
She looked up into his greenish eyes, fringed with dark lashes.
A voice from behind them said, “Excuse me, sir.”
Dr. Dunne turned quickly. “Yes, sailor?”
“A convict is in labor and appears to be having a hard time of it. Can ye come?”
It was Olive. Hours later, long after the women had been bolted in for the night, Evangeline could hear her cries.
The next morning, after breakfast, she and Hazel paced the deck.
“It’s taking too long,” Hazel said.
“Do you think you could help?”
“I don’t know.”
Olive’s snaggletoothed sailor passed them, swigging from a bottle of rum.
A cry pierced the air.
“Maybe I could,” Hazel said.
“Let me ask.” Evangeline hurried to the ladder and descended into the gloom of the tween deck. A sailor standing outside the surgeon’s room moved to block the door.
“I need to see Dr. Dunne,” she said.
“You’re a convict.”
“Evangeline Stokes. Number one seventy-one. Will you let him know I’m here?”
The sailor shook his head. “No convicts allowed.”
“It’s urgent.”
The sailor looked her up and down. “You’re about to . . . ” He motioned at her belly.
“No, no,” she said impatiently. “Just—please. Tell him it’s me.”
He shook his head. “He’s busy, can’t ye tell?”
“Of course I can tell. I have someone who can help.”
“I’m sure the good doctor has things under control.”
“But—”
“Stop wasting me time.” He waggled his fingers to ward her off. “You’ll be seeing him soon enough.”
The day became interminably hot. Steam rose from the newly washed deck as if from a griddle. Hazel opened the Bible, mouthed some lines, closed it. Evangeline worked on her baby quilt, trying to concentrate on the stitches.
Olive’s cries lessened, then stopped.
Evangeline looked at Hazel. She wore a grim expression and was knitting and unknitting her fingers.
They didn’t speak. There was nothing to say.
The sun slid down the sky, its reflection puddling on the water before seeping underneath, like liquid on a porous surface. When the convicts were herded below decks, Hazel and Evangeline hunkered down in the stern, behind the wall of chicken crates.
A passing sailor, seeing them in the shadows, did a double take. “Hey, you two. They’re locking up.”
“We’re waiting for the surgeon.” Evangeline clutched her stomach. “I’m—I’m due.”
“Does he know you’re here?”
“Could you inform him?”
The sailor stared at them for a moment, clearly unsure of what to do. He swiped his hand at Hazel. “She don’t need to stay.”
“She’s a”—would it help or hurt to say it?—“a midwife.”
“Huh. Me auntie’s a midwife.”
“Is she, now?” Evangeline winced theatrically. “Oof. Will you please . . .”
As they watched him cross the deck and disappear down the ladder, Hazel whispered, “Well done.”
“Wish I�
��d thought of it earlier.”
A few minutes later, the sailor reemerged, followed by Dr. Dunne, grimly pale.
Evangeline stepped forward. “Is Olive—”
“She’s resting.”
“And the baby?” Hazel asked, behind her.
“Stillborn. I did what I could.”
“The cord around its neck,” Hazel said.
He nodded. Running his hands along the buttons of his jacket, he found the top one undone and buttoned it. “I was told a prisoner is in labor. Is that a lie?”
Evangeline swallowed. “I think it was . . . a false alarm.”
He gave her a sharp look. Turning to the sailor, he said, “To the orlop deck with both of them.”
Olive appeared on the main deck the next afternoon, her face as pale as dough, with deep hollows under her eyes. Evangeline brought her tea with purloined sugar. Hazel crushed dried chamomile blossoms and stirred them into the tea. “To soothe your nerves,” she said.
Olive had given birth to a boy, with a shock of dark hair and pearly fingernails. She glimpsed him for only a moment before he was covered with a towel and taken away.
They didn’t ask what became of him. They knew.
Clutching her bosom, Olive said, “Christ, they hurt.”
“Just your body doing what it’s meant to do. I can give ye something,” Hazel said.
She shook her head. “No. I want to feel it.”
“Why, Olive?” Evangeline asked.
She sighed. “I didn’t want the child. Many times I wished I was rid of it. But then . . . he was perfect. A perfect baby boy.” Tears glinted in her eyes. “God’s punishment.”
“Not God. Just the way it is sometimes,” Hazel said.
Evangeline nodded. For a moment all of them were quiet. Then she said, “Well, I don’t know if this will help, but . . .” She took a breath. “When you cut down a tree, you can tell how old it is by the rings inside. The more rings, the sturdier the tree. So . . . I imagine I’m a tree. And every moment that mattered to me, or person I loved, is a ring.” She put the flat of her hand on her chest. “All of them here. Keeping me strong.”
Olive and Hazel exchanged dubious glances.
“I know it sounds silly. But what I’m trying to say, Olive, is that I think your child is still with you. And he always will be.”
“Maybe so.” Shaking her head, Olive managed a small smile. “I never thought of meself as a tree, Leenie, but it doesn’t surprise me that ye do.”
“At least she made ye smile,” Hazel said.
Medea, 1840
The convicts had learned to watch the sky as closely as the sailors. So three days later, when the sky turned a sickly yellow, they knew that a big storm must be on the way. In early afternoon they were sent below decks. Wind lashed the sea into huge waves, sending the ship plunging into a deep crevasse, only to be borne to the crest and dropped again. Lightning tore through the sky, forking over the ship. The rain fell in torrents as sailors skidded along the deck, wrangling ropes and pulleys. Climbing the shroud of the foremast, they swayed like flies in a spiderweb.
As the ship lurched and tilted, the orlop deck was thrown into chaos. Women were dumped from their berths, groaning with seasickness, screaming and crying in terror. Water seeped through cracks above, streaming onto their heads. Bibles flew through the air; children wailed. Evangeline tied a corner of her blanket to her bedpost and tucked the rest around her, a makeshift hammock. She huddled close to the wall, fingers in her ears, and somehow, improbably, drifted to sleep.
Some hours later she was woken by a searing pain in her abdomen. She lay still for a moment, listening to the thrumming rain, trying to decide what to do. It was so dark she couldn’t even see the ribs of the bunk above.
“Hazel.” Leaning out of her berth, she reached across the aisle and poked the place she knew the girl would be. “Hazel. I think it might be time.”
She heard a rustling. “What does it feel like?” Hazel’s voice was groggy.
“Like what I did to Buck.”
Hazel laughed.
“I’m not joking.”
“I know you’re not joking.”
Over the next few hours, as waves pounded the hull and the ship pitched in the sea, Hazel talked Evangeline through the clenching and unclenching. Breathe, she told her; breathe. The pain in Evangeline’s gut spiked and ebbed. When the hatch of the orlop deck was finally unlocked, Hazel helped get Evangeline up the stairs. “The air will do ye good,” she said.
The women around them were mostly silent. Everyone knew what had happened to Olive.
The sky was the colors of a bruise, yellow and purple, the dark sea strafed by wind and sudsed with white. The air was thick with brine. Sailors shouted from pulpit to jib, tightening the sails as the ship heaved and slashed through the waves.
Hazel and Evangeline paced the deck, pausing when the pain surged or a cloud emptied rain. Sips of tea, a bite of hardtack. Trips to the privy. A distracted game of whist. In midafternoon a commotion lured them toward the stern: Buck—filthy, wiry, with matted hair and sunken eyes—had been released from the hold. Twenty-one days it had been.
He narrowed his eyes at them. Spit on the deck.
“Mr. Buck.”
Evangeline turned.
Dr. Dunne stood several feet away, hands clasped behind his back. “Consider this a warning. Stay away from these prisoners or you’ll be back in the hold.”
Buck held up his hands. “I ain’t done nothin’.” Twisting his lips into a smile, he slunk away.
Hazel looked at Evangeline. “Put him out of your mind.”
She tried. But it was hard to dismiss the menace of that smile.
Time passed slowly. The pain became more intense: a searing clamp. Evangeline could barely stand.
“I think she’s ready,” Hazel told the surgeon.
He nodded. “Bring her down.”
Hazel guided Evangeline down the ladder to the tween deck. Behind a screen in the surgeon’s office, she helped her into a cotton shift. When she was finished, Hazel stood in a corner of the room, making no move to leave. The surgeon didn’t say a word.
Evangeline was delirious, bathed in sweat.
Dr. Dunne began asking Hazel to help in small ways. Hand me a wet cloth. Mop her brow. She brought him a basin filled with water and a bar of lye soap, and after he washed his hands, she gave him a towel to dry them. When she noticed Evangeline tugging at the red cord around her neck, Hazel unfastened the necklace and placed it on a shelf.
After two hours it became clear that the birthing process was stalled. Evangeline wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “What’s happening?”
“Breech.” Dr. Dunne sat back on his stool and rubbed his forehead with his arm.
“Breech?”
Hazel stepped forward. “Your baby is special,” she told her. “Feet first.” To the surgeon, she said, “May I help? I know how to do it. The turning.”
He sighed, then lifted his arms from the elbows as if to say, Come on, then.
Hazel spread her fingers out on Evangeline’s stomach, feeling all the way around it.
Evangeline gazed at her with alarm. “Is the baby in trouble?”
She felt Hazel’s cool hand over hers. “You’ll both be grand. Just listen to my voice. Breathe in.”
She breathed in.
“Now out.”
She breathed out.
Hazel stroked her hair. “Move toward the pain. Think of it as . . . a lantern guidin’ your way.”
The surgeon sat back on his stool, observing.
Surrendering to Hazel’s demands, Evangeline breathed when she told her to, pushed when she told her to, followed the pain as if it were a lantern along a winding path. She began to sense the contractions before they happened, as they gathered force within her, and rode each wave of pain to its crest, the agony so intense that at a certain point it became a kind of euphoria. Rain drummed on the deck above their heads, muting her cries. She f
elt Hazel’s small hands inside her, shifting, turning, coaxing the baby down. She no longer knew whether she was screaming or silent, writhing or still. And then . . . and then . . . a release. An emptying.
A baby’s piercing cry.
She lifted her head.
Time flattened. Widened. Her senses returned. She smelled the fishy odor of the whale oil in the lamps, the muttony candle wax, the iron sweetness of her own blood. She gazed up at the wide beams in the ceiling, nailed in place by long iron spikes. Heard the soft patter of rain on the deck, the last remnants of the storm.
At her feet, Hazel was smiling her foxy smile. Auburn curls were plastered damply to her forehead, blood splattered on her apron. A naked infant in a blanket in her arms. “A girl.”
“A girl.” Evangeline struggled up on her elbows to see.
Dr. Dunne placed another pillow behind her head and Hazel handed her the featherweight bundle and all at once she was looking into the dark eyes of a baby. Her daughter. Staring at her intensely. Had anyone ever stared at her so intensely?
“Do you have a name?” Hazel asked.
“I didn’t dare to think that far ahead.” Holding the child in the crook of her arm, Evangeline inhaled the yeasty smell of her hair, stroked the tiny mollusk-shell ears and sea anemone fingers. Was that her father’s nose, perhaps?
Hazel motioned to her to open her shift. She guided the baby toward Evangeline’s breast and tapped her bottom lip, prompting her to open her tiny mouth. When the baby latched on, Evangeline felt as if a string had been yanked from her nipple to her gut. “The more she suckles, the faster you’ll heal,” Hazel said.
As Evangeline cupped the infant’s small head, her forefinger found a soft spot in the middle. She looked at the surgeon with surprise.
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