“Here!” Struggling to be heard above the din, she pulled herself toward the cell door. She glanced down at her stained bodice, her hem weighted with filth. She smelled her own rank breath and sweat and swallowed the fear in her mouth. Still, whatever awaited her out there had to be better than what was in here.

The matron and two guards carrying truncheons appeared at the cell door. “Move aside, let ’er through,” one of the guards said, thwacking the grate with his stick as the women surged forward. When she reached the door, Evangeline was hauled out, shackled, and escorted across the street to another gray building, the Sessions House. The guards led her down a narrow set of stairs to a windowless room filled with holding cells stacked on top of each other like chicken pens, each barely large enough for one hunched adult, with slatted iron bars on either side. Once she was locked inside, and after her eyes adjusted, she could see the shapes of prisoners in other cells and hear their groans and coughs.

When a hunk of bread thumped on the floor, Evangeline jumped, banging her head on the top of her cell. An old woman in the cage beside her reached through the slats and snatched it, chortling at her alarm. “Goes to the street,” she said, pointing to the ceiling. Evangeline peered up: above the narrow aisle separating the cells into two sides was a hole. “Some people take pity.”

“Strangers throw bread down here?”

“Mostly relatives, come for a trial. Anybody here for ye?”

“No.”

Evangeline could hear her chewing. “I’d give ye some,” the woman said after a moment, “but I’m starvin’.”

“Oh—it’s all right. Thank you.”

“Your first time, I’m guessin’.”

“My only time,” Evangeline said.

The woman chortled again. “I said that once meself.”

The judge licked his lips with obvious distaste. His wig was yellowed and slightly off-kilter. A fine sprinkling of powder dusted the shoulders of his robe. The guard assigned to Evangeline had told her on the way to the courtroom that the judge had already presided over a dozen cases so far today, probably a hundred this week. Sitting on a bench in the hallway, awaiting her trial, she’d watched the accused and convicted come and go: pickpockets and laudanum addicts, prostitutes and forgers, murderers and the insane.

She stood in the dock alone. Legal counsel was for the rich. An all-male jury sat to her right, gazing at her with varying levels of indifference.

“How will you be tried?” the judge asked wearily.

“By God and by my country,” she said as instructed.

“Have you any witnesses who will vouch for your character?”

She shook her head.

“Speak, prisoner.”

“No. No witnesses.”

A barrister stood and recited the charges against her: Attempted Murder. Grand Larceny. He read from a letter that he said he had received from a Mrs. Whitstone at 22 Blenheim Road, St. John’s Wood, detailing Miss Stokes’s scandalous crimes.

The judge peered at her. “Have you anything to say for yourself, prisoner?”

Evangeline curtsied. “Well, sir. I didn’t mean to . . .” Her voice faltered. She had meant to, after all. “The ring was a gift; I didn’t steal it. My—the man who—”

Before she could continue the judge was waving his hand in the air. “I’ve heard enough.”

The jury took all of ten minutes to announce a verdict: guilty on both counts.

The judge lifted his gavel. “Sentenced,” he said, bringing it down with a bang. “Fourteen years transportation to the land beyond the seas.”

Evangeline clutched the wooden bar in front of her so she wouldn’t sink to her knees. Had she heard him right? Fourteen years? No one returned her gaze. The judge shuffled papers on his desk. “Summon the next prisoner,” he told his page.

“That’s it?” she asked the guard.

“That’s it. Australia. Ye’ll be a pioneer.”

She remembered Olive saying transport was a life sentence. “But . . . I can come back when my time is served?”

His laugh was devoid of pity, but not exactly unkind. “It’s the other side of the world, miss. Ye might as well be sailin’ to the sun.”

As she made her way, flanked by the guards, back to Newgate and down the dark corridor to the cells, Evangeline forced herself to square her shoulders (as best she could, chained hand and foot) and took a breath. Years ago, she’d climbed to the top of the church spire in Tunbridge Wells, where the bells were rung. As she ascended the circular stone staircase in the windowless tower, the walls narrowed and the steps became steeper; she could see a shaft of light above her head but had no idea how much farther it was to the top. Trudging upward in smaller and smaller circles, she’d feared that she might end up penned in on all sides, unable to move.

That was how this felt.

Passing the cells filled with prisoners, she noticed the ragged, dark-rimmed nails of a woman clutching an iron grate, the large eyes of a baby too weak or too hungry to cry. She heard the thudding flap of the guards’ boots, the dull clang of her leg irons. Under the pungent odor of human waste and sickness was the sour salty smell of vinegar, used every other week or so by the lowliest guards to scrub the walls and floors. A stream of liquid snaked toward a grate beneath her feet. She felt as if she were watching a play that she herself was in—The Tempest, perhaps, with its topsy-turvy world, its chaotic and menacing landscape. A line floated into her head: Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.

“Including you,” the guard said, shoving her along.

She’d said the words aloud, she realized, as if reciting them to her father during a lesson.

Every few days, regardless of weather, a group of prisoners was led out of the cell, shackled, and marched to a desolate exercise pen, separated from other pens by high iron-spike-tipped walls, to plod in a circle for the better part of an hour.

“How long do you think until we leave?” Evangeline asked Olive as they tramped around the pen one gray afternoon.

“Dunno. I heard they fill a ship twice or three times a year. One left just before I was nabbed. Midsummer, if I had to guess.”

It was the beginning of April.

“I don’t understand why they’re sending us halfway around the world,” Evangeline said. “It’d be a lot less money and bother if we served our sentences here.”

“You’re missing the point,” Olive said. “It’s a government scheme. A racket.”

“What do you mean?”

“England used to send its dregs to America, but after the rebellion they had to find a new rubbish dump. Australia it was. Before they knew it there was nine men for every woman. Nine! Ye can’t found a settlement with only men, can ye? Nobody thought that through. So they came up with arse-backward excuses to send us over there.”

“Surely you don’t mean . . . ,” Evangeline said.

“Surely I do. By their reckoning we’re already sinners.” Slapping her belly, Olive said, “Look at us, Leenie! No question we’re fertile, is there? Plus we’re bringing new citizens inside us. Bonus if they happen to be female. And it doesn’t cost ’em much. Fix up a few slaving ships and they’re good to go.”

“Slaving ships?”

Olive laughed. Evangeline’s naivete was one of her greatest amusements. “Makes perfect sense, if ye think about it. Dozens of seaworthy vessels just sitting there, rotting in the harbor, and all because a few do-gooders in Parliament got cold feet about owning human beings. Mind ye, nobody has any such qualms about breeding convicts.”

A guard came over and grabbed Olive’s arm. “Stop spreading gossip, you.”

She yanked away from his grasp. “It’s the truth, though, in’it?”

He spit on the ground at her feet.

“How do you know all this?” Evangeline asked after a few more turns around the pen.

“Hang around the pubs in this town after midnight. No telling what a fella will reveal when he’s had a few drinks.”

“They must be lying. Or exaggerating, at least.”

Olive gave her a pitying smile. “Your problem, Leenie, is ye don’t want to believe what’s in front of your nose. That’s what got ye here in the first place, in’it?”

On Sunday mornings the female inmates were herded into the prison chapel, where they were seated in the back, in a section of pews behind tall, slanted boards that allowed them to see the preacher but not the male inmates. A coal stove glowed below the pulpit, but its heat did not reach them. For more than an hour the women huddled in their flimsy dresses and heavy chains as the preacher rebuked, admonished, and berated them for their vices.

The gist of the sermon was always the same: they were wretched sinners paying an earthly penance; the Devil was waiting to see how much lower they could descend before they became irredeemable. Their only chance was to throw themselves on the stern mercy of God the Father and pay the price for their wickedness.