“Yes. And I have some experience treating infants’ maladies.”

“I see. Well . . .” He sighed. “The ship surgeon’s report is quite positive. And we are understaffed.” Looking up from her chart, he said, “In the morning, you may walk with the new mothers and wet nurses. I’ll make a note for you to assist in the birthing room as needed.”

“Thank you.” She picked Ruby up and held her against her shoulder.

“What are you doing?” he said sharply.

“I’m—I’m taking my baby.”

“No you are not. We will transport this child to the nursery. You may see her tomorrow.”

She felt her heart thudding in her chest. “She has always slept with me.”

“Not anymore. You relinquished that right—indeed, any rights—when you committed your crime.”

“But—”

“That will be all, convict.” Stiffly, he held out his arms.

She hesitated. But what else could she do? She gave him the baby.

He took her as if he were handling a fireplace log.

With one last lingering look at Ruby, who was starting to fuss, Hazel was escorted from the room.

Across the hall, the matron, wearing a pair of long gloves, lifted the hair from the nape of her neck. “No apparent lice,” she reported to a convict scratching notes. “Luckily for you, you may keep your hair,” she said to Hazel.

After being sent to bathe in cold dirty water in a metal tub, Hazel put on her uniform—a coarse gray dress, dark stockings, and sturdy black shoes—and surreptitiously tucked Evangeline’s handkerchief in her wide front pocket. The matron handed her a parcel containing another dress, a shawl, an apron, several shifts, another pair of stockings, a rough straw bonnet, and two folded rags. “For your monthlies. If you’re of age,” she said, adding, “Are you?”

“I have a baby.”

“I would not have guessed.” The matron shook her head. “Pity. A young girl like you.”

At seven thirty, when the supper bell clanged, Hazel was so ravenous that the foul-smelling oxtail soup was almost appealing. She gulped it down and hurried to the chapel for the eight o’clock service, where she huddled on a crowded pew with the other convicts in the near darkness, listening to the chaplain harangue them as he banged his fist on the lectern. “Servants, you must obey in all things your masters; not with eye service, as men pleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God!” he shouted, spittle flying from his lips. “You of depraved and vicious habits, given up to debauchery and idleness, must be brought into habits of decency and industry!”

As the words washed over her, Hazel was reminded of the few times she’d dipped into St. Andrews Cathedral in Glasgow to get warm during Sunday morning services. Even at a young age, she’d bridled against all the talk of sin and depravity. It seemed there were different rules for rich and poor, and the poor were always blamed. They were told that only by confessing their sins would they triumph over illnesses, like typhoid, but the streets and water were filthy. And girls and women had it worst, she’d always thought. Mired in the mud, no way to get out.

When the sermon finally ended, the convicts were divided into groups of twelve and herded into cells filled with four rows of three hammocks. There was barely room to move. “You’ll notice two buckets,” the guard said. “One’s drinking water and one’s a chamber pot. You’ll be smart to remember which is which.”

The bare canvas hammocks crawled with fleas. The floor was sticky. The room smelled sharply of urine and blood and feces. When the door clanked shut, the women were in total darkness. Sitting on a moldy hammock, listening to the moans and coughs and sobs around her, Hazel thought only of Ruby, alone in the nursery. Was she wet? Was she crying? Hungry? It was the first night they’d spent apart. She felt bereft without the warm weight of her in the crook of her arm.

After changing into her nightshirt in the dark, Hazel pulled the white handkerchief from the pocket of her apron and unfolded it. She tied the red cord around her neck and tucked the tin ticket under her nightshirt, tracing the number with her finger: 171. If she couldn’t be with Ruby at night, she would at least wear Evangeline’s ticket. How strange that this visual marker of their incarceration had come to feel like something else: a memento. A talisman.

The Cascades, 1840–1841

Roused from sleep by the clanging of a bell, the women dressed hurriedly in the dark and lined up in the chilly kitchen yard for gruel before sitting through another interminable sermon. By the time they emerged from the chapel, a queue of free settlers was filing in to the first yard to choose convicts for assignment. Hazel joined the group of new mothers and wet nurses waiting by the gate to walk to the nursery. It was on Liverpool Street, they were told, near the wharf.

Accompanied by a guard, the women reversed their trip of the day before, passing the high stone wall of the Cascades before turning left across the bridge over the stinking tributary and up the incline of Macquarie Street. Fog hung thickly over the top of the mountain above them, a false ceiling for an enclosed world.

Green lizards darted across the road in quick bursts. Royal blue birds swooped among the trees. As they tramped along in silence, Hazel marveled at the beauty of this new world: the flowering purple shrubs, the golden grass by the side of the road shiny with dew, the feathery gray scrub. She thought of her neighborhood in Glasgow, where she’d had to tread carefully along streets coated with a paste of coal particles and manure and stay alert to avoid rubbish thrown from windows. The cramped room she lived in with her mother, with its single clouded window that let in no air and little light, the dirt floor that turned to mud when it rained. The water in the River Clyde that was so lethal that most people, young and old, drank beer instead. How children as young as six worked in factories and mines and were sent out to steal for their parents, as Hazel had done.

Even so, her life in Glasgow wasn’t all anguish and despair. There was plenty she missed. She’d loved navigating the wynds, the winding cobblestone streets that led to the shops in the West End filled with colorful scarves, leather gloves, bolts of shiny fabric. She’d loved picking at the flaky crust of a Scotch pie and feeling it melt on her tongue. Tatties and neeps and haggis, the rare treat of a trifle. The buttery sweetness of shortbread. Drinking chamomile tea laced with honey at the kitchen table on winter evenings, blowing into the steam to cool it. Her mother, she remembered, would put apples in an earthen jar with a sprinkle of cloves, a bit of sugar, some lemon peel, and a splash of red wine. After an hour in the fireplace it became a delicious mash that they ate straight from the jar with spoons.

Hazel felt a surprising surge of longing for her mother—and then, just as quickly, a spike of anger. She was here, in this terrible place, because of her. Hazel didn’t think she could ever forgive her mother for that.

The building that housed the nursery was dilapidated. Inside, the air reeked of vomit and diarrhea. Hazel made her way through a warren of tiny rooms, searching for Ruby. Infants lay three or four to a crib on soiled, flea-ridden bedding. Those old enough to crawl and walk peered out at her silently, like puppies in cages.

“Why are they so quiet?” she asked a guard.

He shrugged. “A lot are sickly. Some of them older ones were never taught to talk.”

When Hazel found Ruby, in an upstairs crib, she, too, was unusually quiet. Hazel scooped her up and took her to the changing room. Her waste was a brackish green.

There were no doctors on the premises. No medicines or other supplies. Not even enough linens for bedding and cloths. All Hazel could do was hold the baby, so she did. Every now and then, Ruby whimpered. Hazel knew she was hungry, but no wet nurse was available. She would have to wait.

After about an hour, an exhausted-looking woman appeared in front of Hazel and took Ruby from her. Without a word, she swung her expertly under her arm and latched her on.

“Ye know what you’re doing,” Hazel said.

“I’ve had practice.”

“How many babies do you feed?”

“Four, at the moment. Used to be five, but . . .” An expression flitted across her face. “They don’t all make it.”

Hazel nodded, her breath catching in her throat. “It must be . . . hard, sometimes.”

The woman shrugged. “Ye get used to it. When my own wee bairn died, they gave me a choice. I could go to the crime yard for six months and wring laundry. Or I could do this.”

After a few minutes, she pulled away and started buttoning her dress. Ruby twisted her head from side to side, opening and closing her mouth.

“She’s still hungry,” Hazel said.

“Sorry. This cow is dry.”

At the end of the day, Hazel loitered by Ruby’s crib, her throat closing up, her eyes brimming with tears.

“Please—let me stay with her. And help the others too,” she begged the guard.