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.

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.