After weaving a daisy chain, Hazel sat on the rock while Dunne helped Ruby construct her fairy village in the clearing below. As light faded over the mountain, Hazel gazed out at the jagged, green-tinged cliffs rooted in the sea. How far she had traveled to get here! From the wynds of Glasgow to the bowels of a slave ship to a prison halfway around the world. And now to a sandstone cottage in a frontier town where she was free to ply her trade. To mother a child who needed her. To live in peace with a man she might be beginning to love.

She thought of the moments that had saved her. Watching The Tempest in Kelvingrove Park. I was the man i’ the moon when time was. Evangeline teaching her to read. Olive’s unexpected generosity and Maeve’s camaraderie. Dunne’s compassion. Ruby, the good that had overcome the heartbreak, the promise that Evangeline never lived to see fulfilled. Maybe Hazel had saved Ruby’s life, or maybe she would’ve survived regardless. But Hazel knew with certainty that Ruby had transformed hers.

She was starting to believe that she belonged in this terrible, beautiful place, with its convict-built mansions, its dense bush and strange animals. The eucalyptus with their half-shed bark and woolly foliage, orange lichen that spread like molten lava across the rocks. Here she was, rooted to the earth. Her branches reaching toward the sky, the rings inside as dense as bone. She felt ancient, as if she’d lived forever, but she was only nineteen years old. The rest of her life in front of her like a ribbon unfurling.

Ruby

If society will not admit of woman’s free development, then society must be remodeled.

—Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, 1869; British physician, mentor to Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson

St. John’s Wood, London, 1868

It was surprisingly easy to track down the address. Armed with his full name—Cecil Frederic Whitstone—Ruby charmed a receptive clerk at the Metropolitan Board of Works near Trafalgar Square, who, within minutes, produced a ledger of London taxpayers and located a Mr. C. F. Whitstone at 22 Blenheim Road.

“Barrister,” the clerk told her. “Lives alone, apparently. No marriage or birth certificates linked to the name. Are you staying in London for long, Miss Dunne?”

Ruby had come to England to apprentice with Dr. Elizabeth Garrett, a physician who founded St. Mary’s Dispensary in Marylebone, a place for poor women to receive medical care. It was the first of its kind, staffed entirely by women. Dr. Garrett, only four years older than Ruby, was the first female in Britain to qualify as a doctor and a surgeon. Shortly after opening the dispensary, she placed a notice in London newspapers, seeking college-educated women who wished to become doctors and nurses. In Hobart Town, five months later, Ruby opened the Saturday Review and spied it.

In her long letter to Dr. Garrett, Ruby explained that she’d grown up with a surgeon father and midwife mother in a frontier town on an island off the coast of mainland Australia. From a young age, she’d been put to work polishing instruments, cataloguing medication, and assisting in the operating room. As the town expanded, so had the family practice. Eventually her father founded Warwick Hospital, named after the town in the Midlands where he was raised. Ruby’s dream was to help her father run the practice one day.

But she had learned all she could from her parents. Her mother’s medical skills were based on folk remedies and trial and error, not scholarship. Her father had taught her anatomy and the rudiments of surgery, but now, at twenty-eight, she craved the kind of formal education he’d received at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Women were not allowed to apply to medical school in Australia, so this opportunity would be life changing. She proposed studying with Dr. Garrett for three months so that she might return to Warwick Hospital with the latest information and techniques.

Dr. Garrett wrote back: “I will find you reasonable lodgings, and you will stay for a year and earn a degree.”

A month after receiving this letter, Ruby was on a ship bound for London.

Ruby had never met a woman as frank, outspoken, and boldly revolutionary as Dr. Garrett. Determined to go to medical school, in 1862, at the age of twenty-six, she’d found a way in on a technicality. The Society of Apothecaries had not thought to forbid women from taking their exams until after Dr. Garrett passed them all. Later, as a member of the British Women’s Suffrage Committee, she presented petitions to Parliament demanding the vote for female heads of household.

“Penal transportation to Tasmania only ended fifteen years ago,” she said with characteristic bluntness when Ruby arrived in Marylebone. “I must ask: Are you related to a convict?”

Ruby blanched slightly. This still wasn’t spoken of freely where she was from. But she was determined to be as forthright as Dr. Garrett. “I am,” she said. “My mother is from Glasgow and was sent to Australia at the age of sixteen. Many people in Tasmania have similar origins, though few talk about it.”

“Ah—the ‘hated stain’ of transport. I read that they changed the name from Van Diemen’s Land to lessen the unsavory association with criminality.”

“Well, that wasn’t the official reason given, but . . . yes.”

“What was your mother’s offense, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Stealing a silver spoon.”

Dr. Garrett gave an exasperated sigh. “This is why we can’t leave the making of laws to men. They result in travesties of injustice that unfairly burden the poor. And women. Those high and mighty aristocrats, in their black robes and powdered wigs—they have no idea.”

Ruby had been to Melbourne once, on a summer holiday, but had never imagined a city as vast and sprawling as London, with its north and south banks bisected by a winding canal and linked by half a dozen bridges. (She was surprised to discover that London Bridge, familiar from the nursery rhyme, was quite intact.) She shared a room in a boarding house on Wimpole Street with another of Dr. Garrett’s protégés, a young woman from the Lake District whose family believed she was employed as a ladies’ maid. In fact, as Dr. Garrett pointed out when she arrived, Ruby was the only one of her students whose parents encouraged her desire to become a doctor. “It is my sense that, despite its hardships and limitations, living in a new world accords one certain freedoms. Social hierarchies are not as rigidly enforced. Would you agree that this is true?”

“I don’t know,” Ruby said. “I’ve never lived in any other world.”

“Well, now you will, and you can see for yourself,” Dr. Garrett said.

In her free time Ruby explored the sights, from the British Museum to St. Paul’s Cathedral, from verdant parks to bustling teahouses. She sampled strawberryade and fried fish and chips at an outdoor market in Covent Garden. She attended a performance of The Tempest at the Lyceum Theatre and a trapeze show at a pleasure garden in North Woolwich. On one such outing she found herself in front of the imposing stone fortress of Newgate Prison and remembered the stories that Olive, her mother’s friend, had told about life inside its gates—how she’d met Evangeline there and found herself sentenced to transport on the same ship. How a Quaker reformer handed out Bibles and hung tin tickets around their necks—one of which Ruby had brought with her, wrapped in an old white handkerchief, to London.

During her last week with Dr. Garrett, Ruby visited an orphanage. Stepping inside the front gate, she felt lightheaded. She’d never been able to remember much about her early years at the Queen’s Orphan School in New Town, but now she had such an overwhelming sense of panic that she thought she might faint.

Dr. Garrett gave her a curious look. “Are you all right?”

“I—I’m not sure.”

“Let’s sit for a moment.”

On the settee in the reception room, at Dr. Garrett’s insistence, Ruby tried to identify the feelings that had dredged up, seemingly out of nowhere: dread and anxiety and fear.

“It’s only natural that you’d have such a response,” Dr. Garrett said. “You were a child taken from her mother.” She patted Ruby’s hand. “Your understanding of what it’s like to feel abandoned is yet another reason we need qualified doctors like you, Miss Dunne, working with vulnerable populations in far-flung places like Australia.”

Now Ruby was scheduled to return to Tasmania two days hence. Before she departed, there was one thing left to do. Here she was, in front of the house of the man whose monogrammed handkerchief had made its way to Australia twenty-eight years earlier. She’d walked through the neighborhood half a dozen times in the past few months, trying to summon the courage to seek him out.

The creamy white paint of the residence was patchy in spots and peeling from the eaves. Its vermillion front door was chipped; the hedges on either side of the front gate were pocked with brown. Weeds sprung from between the bricks of the walkway.

Ruby pushed the bell and heard it warble inside the house.

After an uncomfortable delay, the door opened, and a man winced into the light. “Yes? Can I help you?”

It was too late to turn around. “Does a Mr. Whitstone reside here, by chance?”