“A small price to pay, if it led to this,” Hazel said, tucking a short strand behind her ear.

Ruby’s attention had shifted back to the blocks. Hazel knelt on the floor and crept closer. When she handed Ruby a block, the girl balanced it carefully on top of her tower.

Hazel wanted to give her a hug, but she was afraid of startling her. “Clever girl.”

“Clever . . . mama,” Ruby said.

“Clever mama,” Hazel said, laughing through tears.

Dunne stood aside as Hazel inspected his surgery, ran her fingers along his implements, lifted the lids from tinctures and powders and held them to her nose, tasted them on her tongue. After Evangeline’s death, he told her, he’d had enough of convict ships. But it took three more voyages before he’d saved enough to set up a practice. Almost a year ago, he resigned from his post as surgeon on the Medea and bought this cottage on Campbell Street in Hobart Town, with three bedrooms, a shed with a cistern, and a long narrow garden in the back.

A few weeks earlier, an unsigned letter had been slipped under Dunne’s door, explaining that Buck had exposed Hazel’s lie and threatened to take Ruby. The letter mentioned that Maeve, a midwife, had recently gotten her ticket of leave; if Dunne took Ruby in, perhaps he could employ Maeve to take care of her until Hazel was released from the crime yard.

Dunne made an appointment with the warden at the Queen’s Orphan School and presented himself as Ruby’s father, Dr. Frum. The warden seemed relieved to release her to his care; she was sickly, he said, and needed medical attention the orphanage couldn’t provide. One fewer death on the ledger was always a good thing. As soon as Dunne saw the child, it was clear to him that she had typhoid. He brought her back to the cottage and set up a nursery in a sunny room facing the garden, then hired Maeve, who lived in a boardinghouse on Macquarie Street. The two of them slowly nursed Ruby back to health. Before long, Maeve was helping out with the details of his practice: organizing surgical implements, stripping cloth into bandages, meeting with patients. She wasn’t literate but could remember every detail of a patient’s complaint.

“I can’t believe how big Ruby has gotten,” Dunne said to Hazel. “These years have flown.”

“For you, perhaps,” she said.

The next morning, Hazel stood at the entrance to the Cascades with the other assignables who had ongoing placements. When Dunne arrived, she climbed into his buggy without a word.

Ruby was waiting on the front stoop when they got to the cottage. “You’re here!” she cried.

Hazel wanted to shout to the rooftops, to sweep Ruby into her arms. But she didn’t. “Of course I am,” she said nonchalantly, getting down from the buggy. “I promised I’d be back, and here I am.”

All day long, the two of them played seek-and-find, built fairy houses in the back garden out of sticks and leaves, read stories and drank sweet tea in the kitchen.

Hazel could hardly believe her good fortune. She would get to spend entire days with Ruby. She would get to be her mother.

On the floor of Ruby’s bedroom sat a large dollhouse. Dunne had seen it in a shop window, he said, and couldn’t resist. It was three stories tall and had many rooms, with servants’ quarters at the top.

“Let’s play,” Ruby said to Hazel. “I’ll be the lady. You be the maid.”

“May I come downstairs, please, madam?” Hazel asked in a high voice, her thumb and forefinger around the doll in the attic. “It’s so dark up here.”

“No,” Ruby said as the lady of the house. “You must be punished.”

“What did I do wrong?”

“You talked too much at supper. And ran down the hallway.”

“How long must I stay up here?”

“For two days. And if you are very naughty, you will be beaten with a cane.”

“Oh.” A cane. Hazel’s heart froze. “But I am all alone. How could I be naughty?”

“You might spill your porridge. Or wet the bed.”

“Everyone spills their porridge sometimes. And wets the bed.”

“Not everyone. Only very bad girls.”

Hazel looked at her for a long moment. “Not only bad girls, Ruby. Good girls too, sometimes.”

Ruby shrugged. “All right. Anyhow, it’s time for you to serve my tea.”

As the weather warmed, Hazel and Ruby planted flowers in the front, beside the house, and seeds for herbs in a small patch between the house and barn. When the herbs sprouted, they hung them in the sandstone shed behind the house to dry. The front garden became a riot of color. A golden wattle tree grew beside the barn, white roses climbed a trellis, a leafy bush with pale pink, trumpet-shaped flowers sat by the front door.

Dunne’s practice was flourishing as free settlers poured into the port city. It wasn’t unusual for Hazel to show up in the morning from the Cascades with Dunne and find a huddle of people waiting patiently for his return. He’d been corresponding with a group of doctors in Melbourne who were forming an association of licensed physicians, and was learning all about the latest medical procedures. Word of his innovative techniques was spreading.

Curious about the herbs Hazel and Maeve were growing, he pinched a few stalks with his fingers and held them to his nose. “How do you use these?” he asked.

Motherwort, they told him, with its leaves like the palms of an old woman, quieted anxiety. A syrup made of water and the bark of the umbrella bush relieved coughing. The stewed bark of hickory wattle soothed inflamed skin. Crushed leaves of the spotted emu bush could be inhaled to clear nasal passages. Catnip tea fought croup; red alder eased hives.

Hazel could see him fighting to overcome his skepticism. All those years of training—of being told to disregard the natural world, to dismiss the unwritten remedies of women as folk superstition—weren’t easy to overcome.

As time went on, she began assisting in the surgery, along with Maeve. Dunne asked them to monitor the women in labor, and then to help with the births. Hazel was required to return to the Cascades at sundown, but Maeve could stay all night. Soon enough Dunne was delegating most of the obstetric cases to them, and only consulting with them when they asked him to.

The ticket of leave, when it came, was almost anticlimactic. Several months after Hazel began working for him, Dunne wrote a formal letter vouching for her and offering paid employment and lodging.

“Your ticket of leave is a privilege, not a right,” the superintendent said before releasing her. “If you commit an infraction of any kind you will be incarcerated again. Is that understood?”

Yes, she understood.

Reading the letter upside down on his desk, she saw that Dunne had signed his real name. Hutchinson either didn’t notice or didn’t care.

The matron handed Hazel the small bundle of tattered clothing she’d come in with, as well as Dunne’s copy of The Tempest. Hazel smiled. She would put it on his bookshelf where it belonged, with the rest of the Shakespeare.

Before she left, she went in search of Olive. She found her with Liza, playing a game of whist. Despite multiple stints in the crime yard, they would soon be eligible for tickets of leave as well, they told her. “Hutchinson is glad to be rid of us troublemakers,” Liza said. “We was never any good at wringing laundry anyhow.”

“Remember me sailor? Grunwald?” Olive asked.

Hazel nodded.

“He opened a grog shop in Breadalbane. Asked me to barkeep. I told him I’ll only consider it if he hires Liza to do the ledgers. He’s writing letters for us both.”

“Does he know about . . .” Hazel pointed back and forth at the two of them.

Olive grinned her gap-toothed grin. “He won’t mind. The more the merrier.”

“I won’t skim off the top this time unless I absolutely have to,” Liza said with a cackle.

Olive hoisted herself to her feet and pulled Hazel into a smothering hug. “Take care of yourself,” she said. “You’re a better woman than I am, toleratin’ that stiff surgeon. But I s’pose we all take our ticket of leave where we can find it.”

Later, in the buggy with Dunne, Hazel gazed at the long high wall of the prison on her left, felt the rumble under her feet as they went across the tributary bridge, caught a whiff of the sewage. Then it was gone. She was done with that place. She felt as if she were seeing this world anew: woolly sheep in a field of yellow flowers, gray-green hills in the distance, blue butterflies darting in and out of flaxen grass. Black-and-white magpies laughing in the trees. She half worried that if she turned around she’d see someone coming after her, that she’d be hauled back to the Cascades for some infraction, real or imagined.

She did not look back.

That night, she and Dunne stood awkwardly in the hallway after Ruby went to sleep. She had made up one of the twin beds in Ruby’s room for herself. Dunne’s bedroom was down the hall.