“Where will she sleep?”

It was a good question. The baby would need to be fed at night. If Hazel slept with her on the orlop deck, they’d be locked in until morning.

Dunne pursed his lips. Then he said, “Miss Ferguson can stay with the infant in a room on this floor and bring her to Mr. Grunwald’s quarters when she needs feeding.”

Silence stretched across the space between them.

“Her baby will probably die, Olive,” Hazel blurted. “Both of ’em dead, and for no reason. You’d be giving her a chance.”

“I don’t even know if I still have milk.”

Dunne handed her the small bundle.

Sighing heavily, Olive sat on the bed. After a few moments she pulled open her nightshirt and Hazel coaxed her forward, helping her to position the infant at a slight angle. The child fretted and squirmed.

“It’s no good,” Olive said.

“Shh,” Hazel said. “Give it time.” Reaching over, she swiped a droplet of milk and wiped it onto her finger. When she rubbed it on the infant’s lips, the baby rooted in the air, craning her neck, and Hazel gently guided her mouth to Olive’s breast. “Feels strange at first, I know. But she’ll get the hang of it, and so will ye.”

Olive gazed down at the child as she suckled. “Poor Leenie,” she said. “She was never meant for this kind of life, was she?”

It surprised Hazel that she felt so bereft. She’d never been a crier, but here she was, sobbing into her apron, wiping away tears before anyone could see. She was fine, she told herself. She hardly knew Evangeline, after all. It was her own fault she’d allowed herself to feel for her.

Even so, her true heart whispered: you are not fine. Evangeline was the only person in her life who had been wholly kind. She was gutted.

Before meeting Evangeline, Hazel had wondered if she’d ever feel a real connection to another human being. Because she never had, not really. As a child, she’d yearned to feel the warmth of her mother’s love. She searched her eyes, desperate to see herself reflected back, but all she saw was her mother’s own need, her unquenchable desire. When Hazel sought affection, her mother pulled away. When she cried, her mother was annoyed. Her mother ignored Hazel until she needed something, and even then, it was rare that her gaze settled on Hazel’s face.

In time Hazel had come to feel insubstantial—not invisible, exactly, but not quite seen.

Her mother bought rum instead of food. She went out for hours, leaving Hazel alone in the cold, dark room they lived in on that narrow Glasgow street as the fire died out. Hazel learned to fend for herself, combing Kelvingrove Park for branches to feed the woodstove, stealing clothes from backyard lines and food from neighbors’ tables. On the way home she’d pass the glow of candlelight through thick windowpanes and imagine the happy lives within, so remote from her own.

Over time, she grew deeply angry. It was the only emotion she allowed herself to feel. Her anger was a carapace; it protected her soft insides like the shell of a snail. From a bitter distance she watched her mother place gentle hands on the girls and women who came to see her, carrying their shame in front of them, those telltale swollen bellies. Eyes wide with terror or weary with grief, they were afraid of dying, of the child dying, of the child living. Their burdens the result of misplaced love, or drunken fumbling, or the predatory advances of men they didn’t know—or, worse, men they did. Hazel’s mother calmed their fears and soothed their pain. She treated them with a kindness and compassion she was never able to show her own daughter, watching from the shadows.

Now, faced with Evangeline’s helpless infant, Hazel wanted to turn away, to retreat into her shell. It wasn’t her responsibility; she didn’t owe the child a thing. No one would blame her if she stepped aside. She knew—didn’t she?—that it was a mistake to allow herself to have feelings. Here she was, abandoned again.

But this was Evangeline’s baby. And she was all alone. They both were.

The convict was not in her right mind, Buck told the captain. She was loony. Vindictive. She’d lunged toward him and he pushed her away in self-defense. It wasn’t his fault she pitched overboard.

Hazel was the only witness. She told the captain what she saw.

“The word of a convict against the word of a sailor,” the captain mused.

“I can corroborate,” Dunne said. “I was there just after it happened.”

“You didn’t actually witness the crime.”

Dunne gave him a thin smile. “As you are aware, Captain, Buck is a convicted criminal. With a history of violence and a motive for revenge. Miss Stokes had just given birth. She was hardly in any state, physical or emotional, to attack him. And why would she? He’d been punished for his crime. Justice was served.”

Buck was given thirty lashes, and this time Hazel and Olive stood with the surgeon at the front of the crowd, watching him writhe and whine. Most of the throng melted away as soon as the whipping ended. But the three of them watched as Buck was untied from the mast, the stripes on his back already puffing and oozing blood.

Hazel looked him in the eye. He stared at her dully. “What will happen to him?” she asked Dunne when they dragged him off.

“He’ll be kept in the hold until we land, and then a court of law will decide his fate. Port Arthur, probably, for a long time.”

It felt good to stand like a sentinel, to witness Buck’s humiliation and pain. But it didn’t lessen the heartache of losing Evangeline.

Hazel’s only task now, Dunne told her, was to care for the infant. He moved her into a small room off the infirmary, where she slept with the baby at night. She made a crib out of a drawer from a dresser and set it beside the bed. She’d almost forgotten what it was like to sleep on a real mattress with clean cotton sheets and a blanket that didn’t chafe her skin. To light an oil lamp when she pleased. To relieve herself in private.

As the days passed, Olive, too, settled into her role. When the two women sat together in the afternoons, Dunne brought them stewed plums and mincemeat pies and fresh mutton, delicacies forbidden the prisoners and most of the sailors, available only to the top brass.

“Does the captain know you’re feeding the animals?” Olive asked as they sipped tea with milk and sugar and ate toast with blackberry jam.

Dunne gave a small laugh. “He has no say in the matter.”

Olive slathered butter on her toast. “I suppose it’ll be different when we land.”

“No doubt. Enjoy it while you can.”

At first Hazel and Dunne were wary around each other, carefully formal. She still found him high-handed and arrogant, and reluctant to take her seriously. But as the days passed he began talking with her about his patients’ cases, and even asked her opinion on their treatment. She didn’t know whether it was that she’d earned his respect during the breech birth or simply that he liked having someone to talk to, but she enjoyed sharing what she knew. Many convicts had vague symptoms of anxiety—hysteria, Dunne called it—for which he had no cure. Hazel suggested a tea of motherwort. For menstruation cramps, powdered red raspberry leaves. For fainting, a tumbler of vinegar down the throat. For cuts and sores, a sticky bandage of cobwebs.

Dunne began inviting her to sit with him in front of the small fire in the grate in his quarters before turning in for the night.

“The child needs a name,” he said one evening. “Shall we call her Evangeline?”

The infant in Hazel’s arms was gazing up at her. She lifted her up and kissed her nose. She saw the slope of Evangeline’s nose, her large expressive eyes. The father, she thought, must’ve been handsome too. She shook her head. “No. There’s only one of her.”

Early the next morning, she took Evangeline’s tin ticket on its red cord from the shelf in the surgeon’s quarters and made her way down to the orlop deck. Confronted by the now-unfamiliar stench, the sounds of women hacking and moaning, the overwhelming malaise and disquiet, Hazel nearly turned around. While living in it, she’d acclimated to it. But now, from the distance of only a rope ladder, she felt so far removed from it that even a brief exposure made her heart palpitate.

The women in the bunks stared at her as she passed.

“Look at ’er, so fancy now, in the surgeon’s quarters and all,” one singsonged.

“Ye have to wonder if she shoved the poor girl over the side herself,” said another.