“No shackles on board. Unless ye do something to deserve it.”

It surprised her that prisoners were allowed to move freely, but then she realized, of course. Unless they chose to leap into the water, there was nowhere to go.

She couldn’t swim. But for a brief, wild moment, she considered leaping.

“Name is Mickey,” a midshipman told the women after the last of them was released from her chains. “I won’t remember yours, so don’t bother telling me. The ship’ll be docked in the harbor another week or two, until they reach the quota. Quarters are tight and getting tighter. You’ll take sponge baths—clothes on, mind ye—on the main deck once a week, to keep it bearable on the orlop deck.”

He doled out coarse yellow sponges, bricks of lye soap, wooden spoons and bowls, tin cups, and gray burlap shifts, and showed the women how to roll everything into horsehair blankets.

Pointing at a pile of bedticks, he said, “Each of ye, grab one of those.”

The bedticks were heavy. Evangeline smelled hers: it was mildewed, filled with wet straw. But at least it would be better than the hard stone floor at Newgate.

Gesturing at the women’s feet, Mickey said, “When it’s not freezin’ ye should go barefoot on the main deck. It can be rough at sea. Ye wouldn’t want to pitch over.”

“Does that happen?” one of the women asked.

He shrugged. “It happens.”

Motioning for them to follow, he disappeared down the rope ladder. “Ye’ll get the hang of it,” he called from below as they crept down the ladder with their unwieldy bundles and bedticks. Pointing out the officers’ quarters, he led them down the narrow hall to the lip of another opening. He dug a candle stub out of his pocket and lit it. “Hades, this way.”

Struggling to balance their bulky loads, the women followed him down an even flimsier ladder into a low, cave-like space, weakly lit by swinging candle lamps. As soon as Evangeline reached the bottom rung, she dropped her bedtick on the floor and covered her nose with her hand. Human waste and—what could it be? A rotting animal? How quickly she’d recovered from the stench of Newgate and acclimated to fresh air.

Mickey gave her a lopsided grin. “Orlop’s just above the bilge. A stew of filthy water. Fragrant, in’it? Add to that the chamber pots and stinky candles and god knows what else.” Pointing at her bedtick he added, “I wouldn’t set that on the floor if I was ye.”

She snatched it up.

Gesturing toward the narrow sleeping bunks, he said, “There’ll be close to two hundred women and children down here at night. Cozy quarters. I advise ye to keep your soap and bowl under your mattress. And hide anything ye care about.”

Olive claimed an empty top berth. “Need me privacy.” She heaved herself up, grunting.

Evangeline dumped her bedtick onto the berth below Olive’s and unrolled her blanket. The space was half a yard high and half a yard wide. No room to sit up and not long enough to stretch out. But it was hers. After unpacking her things, she took Cecil’s handkerchief, smoothed it out on the blanket, refolded it with the crest and initials hidden, and pushed it deep under the mattress behind her tin cup and wooden spoon.

“The captain steers the ship, but the surgeon runs it.” Mickey pointed toward the rafters. “He’s your next stop. Can any of ye read?”

“I can,” Evangeline said.

“Ye first, then. Dr. Dunne. On the tween deck. Name on the door.”

She made her way to the ladder and clung to it tightly as it swayed from side to side. In the narrow hallway she knocked on the door with the brass plate. From behind the door she heard a curt: “Yes?”

“I was told to . . . I’m a-a convict.” She blanched. It was the first time she’d identified herself that way.

“Come in.”

Cautiously she turned the knob and entered a small oak-paneled room. A man with short dark hair sat at a mahogany desk facing the door, flanked by bookcases, with another door behind him. He looked up with an air of distraction. He was younger than she expected—perhaps in his late twenties—and was dressed formally in a double-breasted navy uniform braided in gold and lined with brass buttons.

Beckoning with his hand, he said, “Close the door behind you. Name?”

“Evangeline Stokes.”

He ran his finger down the page of the ledger in front of him and tapped it. “Fourteen years.”

She nodded.

“Attempted murder, larceny. . . . These are serious charges, Miss Stokes.”

“I know.” She looked at the surgeon’s crisp white collar and gray-green eyes. The silver monogrammed cup and round glass paperweight on the desk. The Shakespeare volumes lined up neatly on a shelf in the bookcase behind him. This was a man she might’ve been acquainted with in her previous life.

He pursed his lips. Shutting the ledger, he said, “Let’s get started, shall we?”

Opening the door behind his desk, he ushered her into a smaller room with a raised bed in the middle. She stood against the wall while he measured her height and around her waist with a cloth tape, checked her eyes, and asked her to stick out her tongue while he peered into her mouth. “Reach toward the ceiling. Now arms straight ahead. Good. Try to touch your toes.” Feeling around her midsection, over her apron, he molded his hand around the bump as if palming a grapefruit. “Six months, give or take. This child will almost certainly be born in my care.”

“Does it seem healthy?”

“If the mother is healthy, the child should be too.” Looking her over, he said, “You’re underweight and your skin is sallow, but your eyes are clear.” Placing the wider end of a hollow wooden tube against her chest, he inclined his ear toward the other end.

When he removed it, Evangeline asked, “What is that for?”

“It’s a way to check for tuberculosis, or what we used to call consumption. The scourge of any ship. You show no signs of it.”

“And if I did?”

“Back to Newgate, into quarantine.”

“No transport?”

“Certainly not.”

“Perhaps I’d be better off.”

He set the tube on a shelf behind him. “The voyage is a long one. And convict life is, no doubt, a . . . trial. But transport can, for some, be an opportunity.”

“It will be a long time until I’m free.”

“It will. But you’re young. And with good behavior you may earn your ticket of leave sooner. The most important thing is not to succumb to despondency. ‘Though much is taken, much abides.’”

“‘Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will,’” she said, almost without thinking.

He raised an eyebrow. “You’ve read Tennyson?”

She blushed. “I was a governess.”

“How . . . unexpected.” He gave her a funny smile, as if he couldn’t quite absorb this bit of information. Then he stepped back. “Well. I suppose I must inspect your fellow travelers.”

“Of course.” She straightened her apron. She felt a little lightheaded, as if emerging from a trance.

Ascending the rope ladder to the main deck, she thought of those children’s tales in which humans are transformed into frogs and foxes and swans, and only when someone recognizes them for who they truly are is the spell finally broken.

That was what this felt like: a faint glimmer of recognition.

Medea, The Port of London, 1840

Within a few days the convicts’ routine was established. They were roused at six in the morning by a series of bells and the unbolting of the hatch, a shaft of light piercing the darkness. Evangeline would lie in her berth for a few minutes listening to the slap of water against the hull, feeling the tug of the ship against the anchor that moored it, beams creaking as it rolled. Women waking, chattering, groaning. Squalling babies. Olive slept heavily, snoring above her, seldom woken by the bell, so Evangeline got in the habit of rapping on the bottom of her bunk until Olive groused, “All right, all right, I hear ye.” They dressed quickly, tucking tin cups and bowls and spoons into apron pockets. Unless it was raining, the prisoners were expected to bring their blankets up the ladders to the main deck, where they’d hang them on netting to air.

After breakfast they queued for the surgeon to inspect their eyes, look inside their mouths, pour a thimbleful of lime juice mixed with a little sugar and wine into their cups, and watch them drink it. “For scurvy,” he said. “It’s sour, but better than losing your teeth.”