When she reached her berth, Hazel felt for the loose floorboard and pried it open with her fingertips. Finding the sack, she sifted through the items: a few spoons, a dented cup, a pair of stockings . . . Ah—here it was. Evangeline’s handkerchief. Tucking it in her pocket, she made her way back up the ladder.

In her room on the tween deck, she spread the small white square on the bed and ran a finger along the scalloped border, the initials embroidered in the corner, C. F. W. Cecil Frederic Whitstone. This flimsy cloth had been the locus of Evangeline’s hopes and dreams, unrealistic as they may have been. Now it was all her daughter would ever have of her. Hazel placed the ticket on the handkerchief, thinking of the ruby ring that Evangeline had hidden in it—the ring that became the catalyst for her journey. She’d once told Hazel that her vicar father considered jewelry a vice; the only ornaments she’d ever worn were the ruby ring and this ticket on a red cord around her neck.

The first a marker of seduction, Hazel thought. The second its result.

Folding the ticket in the handkerchief and tucking it in her pocket, she thought about what Evangeline had said about the rings of a tree, how the people we love live on inside us, even after they’re gone.

Ruby.

It wasn’t a name Evangeline would’ve chosen. But to Hazel it was a way to mend a broken heart. To erase a false accusation. To reclaim a treasure.

Ruby. Precious girl.

Hobart Town, 1840

A shout came from high in the rigging: “Van Diemen’s Land!”

On the main deck, there was an excited rustling. The Medea had spent nearly four months at sea, through storms and suffocating heat and icy rain. The women were sick of each other and even sicker of the ship. They ran to the railing, but there was little to see. A distant smudge on the horizon.

Hazel made her way down the ladder to gather her things. She’d become adept at navigating the crowded deck and going up and down the swaying ladders with Ruby tied to her front. Thanks, in part, to the better food and clean bedding, Hazel was stronger, her eyes were brighter, her skin a little rosy. Even getting up twice in the night to carry Ruby to Olive’s bed, she slept better than she ever had on the orlop deck.

Dunne was at his desk in the anteroom, writing in a ledger, when she knocked on the door and went in. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said, rising. “There’s something we need to discuss. I have not yet filled out the birth certificate. If I state officially that you are Ruby’s mother, you’ll be permitted to visit her in the nursery at the prison. Would you want that?”

Hazel cupped Ruby’s warm head in her hand. “Yes.”

He nodded. “I’ll note on the chart that you had an infection and cannot feed her, and she’ll be given a wet nurse. Olive, if she agrees. You’ll be allowed to spend your days with her, at least for a few months. Eventually they’ll send her to an orphanage.”

“An orphanage?” She held Ruby a little closer.

“It’s protocol,” he said. “But as her mother, you can claim her when you’re released, if you wish.”

Hazel thought of the women in the bunks, envious of her privileges. “What if someone tells the authorities I’m not the mother?”

“Why would anyone do that?”

“Have ye never felt jealousy, Dr. Dunne?”

“You saved this child’s life, Miss Ferguson. I believe you’ve earned the right to call yourself her mother.”

She couldn’t help smiling. She had earned the right, hadn’t she?

“At any rate,” he said, “it would be a convict’s word against mine.”

Back on the deck a little while later, Hazel stood at the railing with Olive and her sailor, holding Ruby in her sling as the ship turned toward the harbor.

They sailed past whalers and a cargo ship and a litter of small boats. Dolphins dipped in and out of the water; white gulls with gray wings cawed overhead. A narrow strip of shoreline sloped into hills of multihued green, with glassy sheets—lakes, Hazel supposed—in the distance. Seals lounging on outcroppings of rock reminded her of the prostitutes who picnicked in Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow in the summer, hiking their dresses above their knees and fanning themselves with newspapers.

Above them, a square flag, half red and half white, fluttered on a mast in the breeze. “To warn the whole island that this vessel is filled with female incorrigibles.” Olive’s sailor grinned.

“Will ye miss him?” Hazel asked her.

Olive swatted him on the behind. “Parts of him, at least,” she said.

From the cove where the Medea was anchored, Hazel could see the busy wharf, and behind it, a tall mountain covered thickly in trees. She watched from the railing as Dunne and two sailors boarded a small boat. Under Dunne’s arm he carried the ledger in which she’d watched him write each day’s account, along with a binder filled with the women’s court records and other documents—including Ruby’s newly filled-out birth certificate.

When the boat made its way back from the pier to the ship several hours later, it held two extra men who turned out to be the superintendent of convicts and a British soldier in a scarlet uniform.

Over the next two days, the convicts were called to a makeshift office on the upper deck where they were catalogued, examined for infection, and quizzed about their skills. They were told that many of them would be sent out daily from the prison on assignment to work in settlers’ homes and shops as housemaids, cooks, flax spinners, straw plaiters, weavers, seamstresses, and laundresses. Others would work inside the prison. Insubordinates would be separately confined.

The superintendent began the assessments. When he called “Ferguson!” Hazel stepped forward.

He ran his finger down the ledger. “Height?”

“Five foot, one inch,” the British soldier said, holding a measuring stick against her back.

“Build?”

“Slight,” he said.

“Age?”

“Seventeen,” Hazel said. Dunne had mentioned offhandedly a few weeks earlier that September had come and gone, and she’d realized that her birthday had, as well.

Freckled complexion. Oval head. Red hair. Wide forehead. Auburn eyebrows. Gray eyes.

“Literate?”

“Somewhat.”

“Trade?”

Dunne stepped forward. “She has an infant, so it is my recommendation that she work in the nursery. She is quite . . . capable.”

She raised her eyebrows at him, and he gave her a smile that vanished so quickly she was the only one to see it.

Twelve hours later, as she stood on the main deck with the other convicts, Hazel gazed up at the moon, as yellow as a yolk in a cast-iron sky. By its light she could make out the phalanx of rowboats waiting to ferry the convicts to shore. The air was damp and cool. The women surged forward as the crew began loading them into boats. “Slow down, ye lot, or you’re never getting off this ship!” the British soldier shouted. “No skin off my nose to keep ye here. A prison’s a prison.”

A light rain began to fall. After some time, Olive came to stand beside Hazel, and, without a word, reached for the baby. She’d learned to anticipate when Ruby was hungry, and often appeared at the door to Hazel’s room just before she woke. Now Olive held Ruby in one arm and deftly unbuttoned her blouse with the other.

“I can’t stop thinking about poor Leenie, tumbling over,” Olive said, looking down at Ruby as she nursed. “I see her in this one’s face and it breaks me heart.”

After a few minutes, Dunne made his way over to them. He brought the Quakers’ bundle, the needle and thread and Bible that Hazel had left in the surgeon’s quarters. “I didn’t know if you wanted these.”

She shrugged. “I don’t have much use for a Bible, to be honest.”

“Maybe you’ll find some use for this.” He handed her his copy of The Tempest.

She looked at him with surprise. “It breaks up your set, Dr. Dunne.”

“Perhaps I shall get it back one day.”

“Ye do know where to find me,” she said.

The sky lightened, washing everything in a grayish tinge. Rain fell steadily. From her seat in the rowboat, Hazel gazed back across the water at the ship. It looked small and ordinary from this distance—no longer the terrifying hulk that loomed over her when she’d seen it from the skiff in London. As she sat there, contemplating how far she’d come, she saw a wiry man in shackles being led down the ramp to the boats. Buck, she realized. Following them ashore.

She nudged Olive, sitting beside her. “Look who’s out here.”

“Should’ve murdered him when we had the chance,” Olive said under her breath.

Hobart Town, 1840