“Could you inform him?”

The sailor stared at them for a moment, clearly unsure of what to do. He swiped his hand at Hazel. “She don’t need to stay.”

“She’s a”—would it help or hurt to say it?—“a midwife.”

“Huh. Me auntie’s a midwife.”

“Is she, now?” Evangeline winced theatrically. “Oof. Will you please . . .”

As they watched him cross the deck and disappear down the ladder, Hazel whispered, “Well done.”

“Wish I’d thought of it earlier.”

A few minutes later, the sailor reemerged, followed by Dr. Dunne, grimly pale.

Evangeline stepped forward. “Is Olive—”

“She’s resting.”

“And the baby?” Hazel asked, behind her.

“Stillborn. I did what I could.”

“The cord around its neck,” Hazel said.

He nodded. Running his hands along the buttons of his jacket, he found the top one undone and buttoned it. “I was told a prisoner is in labor. Is that a lie?”

Evangeline swallowed. “I think it was . . . a false alarm.”

He gave her a sharp look. Turning to the sailor, he said, “To the orlop deck with both of them.”

Olive appeared on the main deck the next afternoon, her face as pale as dough, with deep hollows under her eyes. Evangeline brought her tea with purloined sugar. Hazel crushed dried chamomile blossoms and stirred them into the tea. “To soothe your nerves,” she said.

Olive had given birth to a boy, with a shock of dark hair and pearly fingernails. She glimpsed him for only a moment before he was covered with a towel and taken away.

They didn’t ask what became of him. They knew.

Clutching her bosom, Olive said, “Christ, they hurt.”

“Just your body doing what it’s meant to do. I can give ye something,” Hazel said.

She shook her head. “No. I want to feel it.”

“Why, Olive?” Evangeline asked.

She sighed. “I didn’t want the child. Many times I wished I was rid of it. But then . . . he was perfect. A perfect baby boy.” Tears glinted in her eyes. “God’s punishment.”

“Not God. Just the way it is sometimes,” Hazel said.

Evangeline nodded. For a moment all of them were quiet. Then she said, “Well, I don’t know if this will help, but . . .” She took a breath. “When you cut down a tree, you can tell how old it is by the rings inside. The more rings, the sturdier the tree. So . . . I imagine I’m a tree. And every moment that mattered to me, or person I loved, is a ring.” She put the flat of her hand on her chest. “All of them here. Keeping me strong.”

Olive and Hazel exchanged dubious glances.

“I know it sounds silly. But what I’m trying to say, Olive, is that I think your child is still with you. And he always will be.”

“Maybe so.” Shaking her head, Olive managed a small smile. “I never thought of meself as a tree, Leenie, but it doesn’t surprise me that ye do.”

“At least she made ye smile,” Hazel said.

Medea, 1840

The convicts had learned to watch the sky as closely as the sailors. So three days later, when the sky turned a sickly yellow, they knew that a big storm must be on the way. In early afternoon they were sent below decks. Wind lashed the sea into huge waves, sending the ship plunging into a deep crevasse, only to be borne to the crest and dropped again. Lightning tore through the sky, forking over the ship. The rain fell in torrents as sailors skidded along the deck, wrangling ropes and pulleys. Climbing the shroud of the foremast, they swayed like flies in a spiderweb.

As the ship lurched and tilted, the orlop deck was thrown into chaos. Women were dumped from their berths, groaning with seasickness, screaming and crying in terror. Water seeped through cracks above, streaming onto their heads. Bibles flew through the air; children wailed. Evangeline tied a corner of her blanket to her bedpost and tucked the rest around her, a makeshift hammock. She huddled close to the wall, fingers in her ears, and somehow, improbably, drifted to sleep.

Some hours later she was woken by a searing pain in her abdomen. She lay still for a moment, listening to the thrumming rain, trying to decide what to do. It was so dark she couldn’t even see the ribs of the bunk above.

“Hazel.” Leaning out of her berth, she reached across the aisle and poked the place she knew the girl would be. “Hazel. I think it might be time.”

She heard a rustling. “What does it feel like?” Hazel’s voice was groggy.

“Like what I did to Buck.”

Hazel laughed.

“I’m not joking.”

“I know you’re not joking.”

Over the next few hours, as waves pounded the hull and the ship pitched in the sea, Hazel talked Evangeline through the clenching and unclenching. Breathe, she told her; breathe. The pain in Evangeline’s gut spiked and ebbed. When the hatch of the orlop deck was finally unlocked, Hazel helped get Evangeline up the stairs. “The air will do ye good,” she said.

The women around them were mostly silent. Everyone knew what had happened to Olive.

The sky was the colors of a bruise, yellow and purple, the dark sea strafed by wind and sudsed with white. The air was thick with brine. Sailors shouted from pulpit to jib, tightening the sails as the ship heaved and slashed through the waves.

Hazel and Evangeline paced the deck, pausing when the pain surged or a cloud emptied rain. Sips of tea, a bite of hardtack. Trips to the privy. A distracted game of whist. In midafternoon a commotion lured them toward the stern: Buck—filthy, wiry, with matted hair and sunken eyes—had been released from the hold. Twenty-one days it had been.

He narrowed his eyes at them. Spit on the deck.

“Mr. Buck.”

Evangeline turned.

Dr. Dunne stood several feet away, hands clasped behind his back. “Consider this a warning. Stay away from these prisoners or you’ll be back in the hold.”

Buck held up his hands. “I ain’t done nothin’.” Twisting his lips into a smile, he slunk away.

Hazel looked at Evangeline. “Put him out of your mind.”

She tried. But it was hard to dismiss the menace of that smile.

Time passed slowly. The pain became more intense: a searing clamp. Evangeline could barely stand.

“I think she’s ready,” Hazel told the surgeon.

He nodded. “Bring her down.”

Hazel guided Evangeline down the ladder to the tween deck. Behind a screen in the surgeon’s office, she helped her into a cotton shift. When she was finished, Hazel stood in a corner of the room, making no move to leave. The surgeon didn’t say a word.

Evangeline was delirious, bathed in sweat.

Dr. Dunne began asking Hazel to help in small ways. Hand me a wet cloth. Mop her brow. She brought him a basin filled with water and a bar of lye soap, and after he washed his hands, she gave him a towel to dry them. When she noticed Evangeline tugging at the red cord around her neck, Hazel unfastened the necklace and placed it on a shelf.

After two hours it became clear that the birthing process was stalled. Evangeline wiped her tears with the back of her hand. “What’s happening?”

“Breech.” Dr. Dunne sat back on his stool and rubbed his forehead with his arm.

“Breech?”

Hazel stepped forward. “Your baby is special,” she told her. “Feet first.” To the surgeon, she said, “May I help? I know how to do it. The turning.”

He sighed, then lifted his arms from the elbows as if to say, Come on, then.

Hazel spread her fingers out on Evangeline’s stomach, feeling all the way around it.

Evangeline gazed at her with alarm. “Is the baby in trouble?”

She felt Hazel’s cool hand over hers. “You’ll both be grand. Just listen to my voice. Breathe in.”

She breathed in.

“Now out.”

She breathed out.

Hazel stroked her hair. “Move toward the pain. Think of it as . . . a lantern guidin’ your way.”

The surgeon sat back on his stool, observing.

Surrendering to Hazel’s demands, Evangeline breathed when she told her to, pushed when she told her to, followed the pain as if it were a lantern along a winding path. She began to sense the contractions before they happened, as they gathered force within her, and rode each wave of pain to its crest, the agony so intense that at a certain point it became a kind of euphoria. Rain drummed on the deck above their heads, muting her cries. She felt Hazel’s small hands inside her, shifting, turning, coaxing the baby down. She no longer knew whether she was screaming or silent, writhing or still. And then . . . and then . . . a release. An emptying.

A baby’s piercing cry.

She lifted her head.

Time flattened. Widened. Her senses returned. She smelled the fishy odor of the whale oil in the lamps, the muttony candle wax, the iron sweetness of her own blood. She gazed up at the wide beams in the ceiling, nailed in place by long iron spikes. Heard the soft patter of rain on the deck, the last remnants of the storm.

At her feet, Hazel was smiling her foxy smile. Auburn curls were plastered damply to her forehead, blood splattered on her apron. A naked infant in a blanket in her arms. “A girl.”