Twee tributes to a mythical past, Ruby thought but did not say.
His father and stepmother retired to the country a few years ago, he told her. Beatrice, his half sister, had gone off to New York City to become an actress but ended up in Schenectady. His half brother, Ned, married an older heiress and moved to Piccadilly, where he dabbled in . . . something. Real estate? “I regret to say that we’ve fallen lamentably out of touch,” he said, pouring more tea through the strainer into Ruby’s cup. “So. Perhaps you might tell me what happened to Evangeline.”
She took a sip. Lukewarm. She put it down. “I’m not sure where to start. How much do you know?”
“Very little. She worked here only for a few months, as I recall. I went off to Venice on holiday, and when I returned, she was gone.”
Ruby gave him a sidelong look. “She was accused of stealing the ring you gave her.”
“Yes, I do know that.”
She felt a pit of anger in her stomach. “You never . . .” She pressed her bottom lip with her teeth. “You never told the authorities that you gave it to her?”
Sighing, he rubbed the back of his neck. “My stepmother knew. Of course she knew. Before I left for Italy, she’d warned me to stay away from the governess. But then . . . apparently Evangeline flew into a rage and pushed Agnes down the stairs. So it wasn’t even about the supposed theft, in fact; it was a charge of attempted murder.”
“Agnes. Your housemaid?”
“Yes. Still here, after all these years.”
Still here. Alive and well. Ruby shook her head. “Did you ever try to find Evangeline, to hear her side of the story?”
“I . . . didn’t.”
Ruby remembered how Olive had described Evangeline in prison, holding out hope that this man would come, and felt close to tears. “She was in Newgate for months. And then sentenced to transportation for fourteen years and locked inside a slave ship. She was murdered by a sailor on the voyage over, an ex-convict.”
He breathed in quietly through his nose. “I did not know. That is truly . . . unfathomable.”
“She was a woman alone, with no means and no one to speak for her. You might’ve at least vouched for her character.”
He seemed a little startled at her nerve. She was surprised, herself. It occurred to her that Dr. Garrett’s bluntness may have worn off on her.
He sighed. “Look,” he said, “I was told in no uncertain terms to let it be. That it was not appropriate to get involved. That I had narrowly avoided bringing scandal to the family, and they had taken care of it, and I was not allowed to make a mess of it again. If it’s any consolation, I felt wretched about it.”
“Not wretched enough to defy your stepmother. You were an adult, were you not?”
He gave her a faint smile. “You are quite . . . direct, Miss Dunne.”
All at once Ruby felt an almost physical aversion to this man sitting across from her. Opening the clasp of her purse, she pulled out a small disk on a faded red cord. Holding it up, she said, “The prisoners were required to wear these around their necks on the ship. This was Evangeline’s. It is all that I have of her.” She dropped it into his open palm. “Except your handkerchief, I suppose.”
He rubbed it with his finger, and turned it over, squinting to see the number, 171, etched faintly on the back. Then he looked up. “What do you want from me?” His voice was almost a whisper.
Ruby listened to the tock tock tock of the grandfather clock in the corner. She felt the metronomic beating of her own heart. “You are my biological father. You must realize that by now.”
He gazed at her in the honeyed lamplight, his hands on his knees, rubbing the fabric of his trousers.
“You knew she was pregnant,” she said. “And you did nothing.”
“I didn’t really know. No one ever said it. But I suppose if I’m honest I must admit I . . . suspected.” He took a deep breath. “There’s a deep moral cowardice at the root of the Whitstone family character, I’m afraid. I hope you haven’t inherited it.”
“I have not.”
Silence spiked the air between them.
“I was lucky enough to be taken in,” she said finally. “I have parents who love me, who fought for me. I don’t want anything from you.”
He nodded slowly.
“Except one thing, perhaps. I would like to see the room where Evangeline lived when she was here.”
“It’s been closed up for years.” He tapped his lips. “But I suppose there’s no harm.”
He handed her the ticket and she wrapped it in the threadbare handkerchief and tucked it back inside her purse. Then she followed him down a long hallway wallpapered in green-and-pink stripes and around the corner to a door that opened onto a set of narrow stairs. Down they went past a large kitchen and into a humble dining room, where a small, white-haired lady sat at a table snapping beans.
She squinted up at them behind thick round glasses. “Mr. Whitstone!” she cried. “Where did you find Miss Stokes? She is not allowed here, after what she’s done!”
“Oh—no, no,” he stammered, putting out his hand. “You are mistaken, Mrs. Grimsby. This is Miss Dunne.”
“I think I’ve seen a ghost,” she murmured, shaking her head.
Mr. Whitstone gave Ruby an embarrassed glance and they continued past the dining room and turned down a hallway. He opened the door on the right and she followed him into a small room.
The only window, high on the wall, was shuttered. In the weak light from the hall Ruby could make out a narrow bed stripped of bedding, a side table, and a chest of drawers, all coated with a film of dust. She went and sat on the mattress. The ticking was lumpy.
Evangeline had lain here, in this bed. Paced this floor. She’d been younger than Ruby when she came to this house, trying to find her way in the world, and she left it pregnant and scared, with no one to help her. Ruby thought of all the women who came into Warwick Hospital and St. Mary’s Dispensary, seeking treatment. Heavy with child, or writhing in pain from venereal diseases, or carrying newborns and toddlers. All the burdens of being poor and female, as Dr. Garrett put it. No one to catch you if you fell.
Looking down at the worn pine floor, Ruby was struck by a realization: she’d been in this room before, when she was barely more than a whispered thought.
“Will you excuse me?” Mr. Whitstone said. “I’ll just be a minute.”
She nodded. It was late in the afternoon. She wanted to get back to her lodgings before dark. Though she wasn’t looking forward to the long voyage back to Tasmania, she was eager to share what she’d learned during her year abroad.
This moment in Evangeline’s room, she knew, had nothing to do with the rest of her life and everything to do with it. She would leave this house changed, but no one would ever know she’d been here.
When Mr. Whitstone returned, he was carrying a small blue velvet box. He gave it to her, and she opened it. There, couched on yellowed ivory satin, was a ruby ring in a baroque gold setting. “A bit tarnished, I’m afraid,” he said. “It’s been in a drawer all these years. My stepmother insisted that it would go to my wife someday, but as it turned out, I never married.”
Ruby extracted the ring and studied it carefully. The stone was larger than she’d imagined. It shimmered wetly in its setting. The color of velvet drapes, a lady’s dress at Christmastime.
“You should be the one to rescue it from ignominy,” he said. “You are . . . my . . . daughter, after all. I would like for you to have it.”
She turned the ring in her hand, observing how the gem caught and refracted the light. She imagined Evangeline holding it in this room nearly three decades ago. She thought of the lies told and promises broken. How desperate Evangeline must’ve felt—how miserable. Ruby put the ring back in its blue velvet box and snapped it shut. “I can’t take this,” she said, handing it back. “It is your burden to bear, not mine.”
He nodded a little sadly and slipped the ring box into his pocket.
&nbs
p; Standing in the doorway, a few minutes later, he pulled a collection of coins out of his pocket. “Let me pay for your cab.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“It’s the least I can do, after you’ve come all this way.” He dropped several shillings into her hand.
“Well. All right.”
He seemed to be stalling, trying to keep her there. “I want to tell you that . . . that she was a lovely girl, your mother. And very intelligent. Always with her nose in a book. She had a gentleness about her, a kind of . . . innocence, I suppose.”
“You took that from her. But you know that, don’t you?”
Ruby didn’t wait for his reply. As she walked down the front steps, the air was cool and smelled of rain. Soft early evening light washed over the brick walkway, the ancient cobblestones, the purple wisteria climbing a trellis. When she reached the gate, she piled the coins on the flat top of a fence post.
She would leave London behind now and return to the place and the people she loved. She would live the rest of her life in Australia, and her days would be busy and full. She would help her father run his practice, as he had done, long ago, with his own father. She would meet a man and marry him, and they would have two daughters, Elizabeth and Evangeline, both of whom would attend the first medical school in Australia that opened its doors to women, in 1890. In the last year of the nineteenth century, with nine other female physicians, they would establish the Queen Victoria Hospital for Women in Melbourne.
Ruby was under no illusions about the place she was returning to—that fledgling colony on the other side of the world that had taken root in stolen soil, choking out the life that already existed and flourishing under the free labor of convicts. She thought of the native girl, Mathinna, wandering through Hobart Town like an apparition, trying in vain to find a place to call home. She thought of the convict women shamed into silence as they struggled to erase the stain of their experience—a stain woven into the very fabric of their society. But she also thought of Dr. Garrett’s observation about social hierarchies. The truth was, Hazel had made a life for herself that would not have been possible in Great Britain, where the circumstances of her birth would’ve almost certainly determined the story of her future.
Ruby turned and looked back. It was the last time she would ever see this man, Cecil Whitstone, without whom she would not exist. This was how she would remember him: hovering on the threshold, one foot out and one foot in. He’d been given so much, and yet he’d done so little. If she came back in five years, or ten, or twenty, she would know where to find him.
She thought of all the women she knew who’d been given nothing, who’d been scorned and misjudged, who’d had to fight for every scrap. They were her many mothers: Evangeline, who gave her life, and Hazel, who saved it. Olive and Maeve, who fed and nurtured her. Even Dr. Garrett. Each of them lived inside her, and always would. They were the rings of the tree that Hazel was always going on about, the shells on her thread.
Ruby tilted her chin at Cecil. He went inside and shut the door.
And she was on her way.
Acknowledgments
Attempting to identify the genesis of a novel can be a fool’s errand. Inspiration is as often unconscious as conscious; our imagination is stirred by myriad events, beliefs, and philosophies, by art and music and film, by travel and family history. It wasn’t until I’d finished writing The Exiles that I realized I’d twined together three disparate strands of my own life history to tell the story: a transformative six weeks in Australia in my mid-twenties; the months I spent interviewing mothers and daughters for a book about feminism; and my experience teaching women in prison.
When I learned, as a graduate student living in Virginia, that the local Rotary Club was sponsoring fellowships to Australia, I leaped at the opportunity. I’d been obsessed with the place since my father, a historian, gave me his marked-up copy of Robert Hughes’s 1986 book The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding. (He spent a year teaching in Melbourne when I was in college.) Only one chapter in Hughes’s six-hundred-page book, “Bunters, Mollies and Sable Brethren,” specifically addressed the experiences of convict women and Aboriginal people. This was the chapter that interested me most. I wanted to learn more.
As one of four Rotary “ambassadors” to the state of Victoria, I toured farms and factories, met mayors and minor celebrities, and learned Australian folk tunes and slang. I fell in love with the wide-open vistas, the offhanded friendliness that seemed to be a hallmark of the culture, and the vividly colored birds and flowers. The Aussies I met were happy to talk about their national parks, their pioneering spirit, and their barbecued shrimp, but seemed reluctant to discuss some of the more complicated aspects of their history. When I did press them to talk about race and class, I was gently, subtly, rebuked.
Several years later, in the mid-1990s, my mother, Christina L. Baker, a women’s studies professor, worked on an oral-history project at the University of Maine in which she interviewed so-called second-wave feminists who’d been active in the women’s movement in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s. I’d recently moved to New York City and met a number of young women who identified themselves as third-wave feminists, literal and figurative daughters of my mother’s subjects. My mother and I decided to write a book together: The Conversation Begins: Mothers and Daughters Talk About Living Feminism. The experience became a powerful lesson for me in the value of women telling the truth about their lives.
Some years later, after learning about the limited resources available to women in prison, I created a proposal to teach memoir writing at the Edna Mahan Correctional Facility for Women, an hour from my house in New Jersey. My class of twelve maximum-security inmates wrote poems, essays, songs, and stories; it was the first time many of them had shared the most painful and intimate aspects of their experience. They were terrified, relieved, and searingly honest. When I read aloud a Maya Angelou poem that contains the lines “You may trod me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise,” more than one inmate wept with recognition.
As a novelist I’ve learned to trust a particular tingle, a kind of spidey sense. Until I stumbled on the little-known historical fact of the orphan trains, I had little interest in writing about the past. But the minute I heard about the American social experiment to send two hundred and fifty thousand children on trains from the East Coast to the Midwest, I knew I’d found my subject. The research I did for the novel Orphan Train laid the groundwork for another novel about rural life in early-to-mid twentieth-century America: A Piece of the World, the real-life story of an ordinary woman on the coast of Maine who became the subject of Andrew Wyeth’s painting Christina’s World. These leaps of time and place inspired me to pursue an even more ambitious story, this time a century earlier and half a world away—one that would address those questions I’d had about Australia’s complex past that were never answered to my satisfaction twenty-five years earlier.
As I began to delve into the topic, I found the website of Dr. Alison Alexander, a retired lecturer at the University of Tasmania who has written or edited thirty-three books, including The Companion to Tasmanian History; Tasmania’s Convicts: How Felons Built a Free Society; Repression, Reform & Resilience: A History of the Cascades Female Factory; Convict Lives at the Cascades Female Factory; and The Ambitions of Jane Franklin (for which she won the Australian National Biography Award). These books became primary sources for this novel. Dr. Alexander, who is herself descended from convicts, became an invaluable resource and a dear friend. She gave me a massive reading list and I devoured it all, from information about the prison system in England in the 1800s to essays about the daily tasks of convict maids to contemporaneous novels and nonfiction accounts. On my research trips to Tasmania, she introduced me to experts, took me to historic sites, and answered question after question, providing vital clarification and insights. She and her lovely husband, James, hosted me for dinner in their Hobart home on numerous occasions. Most of all,
she read my manuscript with a keen and expert eye. I am grateful for her rigor, her encyclopedic knowledge, and her kindness.
Notable among the contemporary books I read on the subject of convict women are Abandoned Women: Scottish Convicts Exiled Beyond the Seas, by Lucy Frost; Depraved and Disorderly: Female Convicts, Sexuality and Gender in Colonial Australia, by Joy Damousi; A Cargo of Women: Susannah Watson and the Convicts of the Princess Royal, by Babette Smith; Footsteps and Voices: A Historical Look into the Cascades Female Factory, by Lucy Frost and Christopher Downes; Notorious Strumpets and Dangerous Girls, by Phillip Tardif; The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary True Story of Female Convicts Bound for Botany Bay, by Sian Rees; The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia’s Convict Women, by Deborah Swiss; Convict Places: A Guide to Tasmanian Sites, by Michael Nash; To Hell or to Hobart: The Story of an Irish Convict Couple Transported to Tasmania in the 1840s, by Patrick Howard; and Bridget Crack, by Rachel Leary. Books I read about Australian history and culture include, among others, In Tasmania: Adventures at the End of the World, by Nicholas Shakespeare; 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account and True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey; The Songlines, by Bruce Chatwin; and The Men that God Forgot, by Richard Butler.
A number of articles and essays were useful, especially “Disrupting the Boundaries: Resistance and Convict Women,” by Joy Damousi; “Women Transported: Myth and Reality,” by Gay Hendriksen; “Whores, Damned Whores, and Female Convicts: Why Our History Does Early Australian Colonial Women a Grave Injustice,” by Riaz Hassan; “British Humanitarians and Female Convict Transportation: The Voyage Out,” by Lucy Frost; and “Convicts, Thieves, Domestics, and Wives in Colonial Australia: The Rebellious Lives of Ellen Murphy and Jane New,” by Caroline Forell. I found a wealth of information online at sites such as Project Gutenberg, Academia.edu, the Female Convicts Research Centre (femaleconvicts.org.au), the Cascades Female Factory (femalefactory.org.au), and the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre (tacinc.com.au).
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