The cobblestones in the courtyard were treacherous with ice. Her vision was blurry, her limbs stiff and achy, her feet unsteady as she plodded back and forth.

For the rest of the day she sat in the darkness of her cell picking oakum. As her cold fingers worried the rope, she tried to view the task as a puzzle rather than a punishment, a way to endure the minutes. This goes here, that goes there. A way to escape the torture of her thoughts. But she could not escape them. Could not stop thinking of Ruby, alone in her bed, wondering why her mother hadn’t come. Hazel seethed like a kettle on a low flame, picking at the oakum, picking at the question of who betrayed her. Which of her fellow inmates was so jealous, so vindictive, that she would ruin the life of a child?

Her hands cracked and bled. Salt seeped into the cuts; they felt as if they were on fire. She tried to manage the pain, as she’d taught women in labor to do: to think of it as a part of her, as much a part of her as her limbs. Without the pain, she could not complete the task. She needed to listen to it, breathe through it. Be alert to its ebbs and flows. Dwell inside it.

At the end of the day, a guard arrived to weigh her bucket. “Five pounds,” he said. “Just.”

Sometimes she made a sound just to hear a sound. Smacked the wall. Flicked her finger through the water bucket. Hummed to herself. Maybe she could drown out the noises in her head, the fear and loneliness and self-recrimination.

A person could go crazy. People did.

She remembered things she thought she had forgotten. She muttered lines from The Tempest she’d memorized on the ship.

I was the man i’ the moon when time was.

You may deny me, but I’ll be your servant / Whether you will or no.

Hell is empty / And all the devils . . .

I wish mine eyes / Would, with themselves, shut up my thoughts.

Even the nursery rhymes she’d sung to Ruby, the ones that made her shudder: Ring a ring o’ roses . . .

Sometimes, on the way to assignment, or in their hammocks at night, the convict women sang a dirge that Hazel had considered maudlin. But now, in her dark cell, she sang it loudly, wallowing in self-pity:

I toil each day in grief and pain

And sleepless through the night remain

My constant toils are unrepaid

And wretched is the Convict Maid.

Oh could I but once more be free

I’d ne’er again a captive be

But I would seek some honest trade

And ne’er become a Convict Maid.

She ran her ragged fingernails down her arms. She didn’t even have the satisfaction of seeing the blood. She smelled it, though, and felt it slick on her skin. She thought, as she often did, about her mother pushing her out on the street to pick pockets. She thought of all the times her mother had sent her out to steal rum, or something she could trade for rum.

That final time she’d stolen for her mother: the silver spoon.

How could any mother do that to her child? Hazel’s anger was a hot coal burning a hole in the center of her chest. In the dark, in the cold, she stoked it, feeling its glow.

When the guard opened the door the next morning, she saw him flinch at the sight of her arms through the threadbare shawl. She looked down at the red crusted streaks, then gazed at him and smiled. Good. See my pain.

“You’re only hurtin’ yourself, lassie,” he said, shaking his head.

The first time her mother was too drunk to help a woman in labor, when Hazel was twelve, she knew what to do. She’d always been a quick learner. “Nothing gets past ye,” her mother said—not necessarily a compliment. It was true; once something was in her head, she didn’t forget. For years she’d accompanied her mother to the homes and hovels of women about to give birth, because if she didn’t, she’d be left at home alone. She’d paid close attention when her mother concocted pastes and potions, noting which herbs to crush with which liquids, how to make a salve or a tonic or a cure. Her mother allowed her to stay in the room, to fetch the water and grind the herbs. She grew to tell the cries apart and to anticipate the most welcome cry: that of the newborn.

Alone with that frantic pregnant woman, Hazel boiled rags and made her comfortable, showing her how to breathe and calming her fears. She told her when to push and when to stop. She lifted the slippery newborn onto its mother’s stomach and cut its umbilical cord, then taught the woman to nurse.

A boy, it was. Named Gavin, she remembered, after his no-good father.

That was the day Hazel knew she would be a midwife. She had the touch, like her mother.

Sitting in the darkness now, prying apart strands of rope, she thought about all the convicts in other cells, each stewing in her own heartache and misery. This place was filled with women who’d had wretched childhoods, who’d been used and deceived, who felt unloved. Who were bitter and spiteful and couldn’t let go of their wounded feelings, their outrage at having been betrayed. Who couldn’t forgive. The truth was, Hazel could stoke her own hot coal until the day she died, but what good would it do? Its warmth was scant.

It was time to let go. She was no longer an angry child. She didn’t want to carry that burning coal around anymore; she was ready to be rid of it. Yes, her mother had been selfish and irresponsible; yes, she sent her out onto the streets to steal and turned her back when she was caught. She also taught her the skills that would save her.

The guard, heartless bastard, was right: Hazel was only hurting herself.

At the end of the fourteenth day, when the cell door opened, Hazel was crouching in a corner. She rubbed her tar-gnarled fingers and blinked into the light. “It’s like the den of a fox in here,” the guard said, hauling her out by an arm.

The Cascades, 1842

While preferable to solitary, life in the crime yard was its own version of hell. Hazel joined a line of convicts hunched over stone washtubs along the walls in the gray winter light. The work was endless. Not only were they responsible for scrubbing the prisoners’ clothing; they washed all the clothing and linens for the ships and the hospital and the orphanage. With broomsticks, they fished the sopping linens out of a tub of warm water and dunked them in a tub of rinsing water and then a tub of cold water—three heavy lifts. Standing ankle-deep in the water that overflowed from the tubs, they fed the linens through a mangle, two rollers and a hand-turned crank. Another group hung wet items on half a dozen clotheslines stretched across the center of the yard. Water pooling in the yard quickly turned to mud.

The women were drenched from morning until night. They shook with chills. Their oakum-ravaged fingers stiffened in the water and bled on the coarse linens. They were not allowed to speak; mainly they communicated through facial expression and gesture. Locked inside stone cells at night for more than twelve hours, they huddled together against the frost like mice in a drain. Twice a day they were berated by the chaplain in a small, dark chapel, separate from the other convicts: Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, and an horrible tempest: this shall be the portion of their cup.

The earth shall quake before them; the heavens shall tremble: the sun and the moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their shining.

Some of the women gave in to despair. You could see it in their eyes: a smoky haze. They stopped thrusting their bowls forward or trying to secure a space at the tubs. Every few days one of them was discovered unconscious, collapsed in a heap. When the guards came with food, they’d drag the body to a corner of the courtyard by the heels, leaving it for hours, sometimes days, before carting it away.

The only way to get through this, Hazel saw, was to just . . . let go. She couldn’t think; she only needed to react. If she thought too much she would be paralyzed with dread, and that wouldn’t do her any good at all.

Hazel tried not to think of Ruby, alone at the orphanage. She focused her attention on the sopping laundry, the stains and spots, the bar of lye soap in her hand. Warm water, rinsing water, ice water, mangle. As soon as she finished one piece, she started another. She did not retort when provoked by the guards. When she needed to move, she did so stealthily, like a cat. At mealtimes she wended her way toward the gruel without drawing attention. She stayed as quiet as she could. This, she found, was the trick: you didn’t have to react to each little thing. You could just exist. Let your mind simmer over a low fire.

One morning, a month after arriving in the crime yard, Hazel looked up from the washtub to see Olive coming toward her. She sat back on her heels in surprise.

Olive grinned. “Ahoy.”

“What’re ye doing here?” Hazel whispered.

The guard gave them a sharp look. Hazel put a finger to her lips.

Olive knelt at the tub. “I needed to see ye, so I whistled at muster. As I figured: three days at the tubs.” She looked around. “Can’t believe I’m back in this shitehole.”