The Exiles

by Christina Baker Kline

  One morning, after chores, Evangeline found Hazel sitting alone, her curly hair half covering her face, whispering to herself and tapping at words in the Bible open in her lap. When she looked up and saw Evangeline, she shut it quickly.

  “Do you mind if I sit?” Without waiting for an answer, Evangeline perched on a corner of the crate.

  The girl gazed at her. “I have chores.”

  “Just for a minute.” Evangeline cast about for something to talk about. “I keep thinking about Psalm 104: ‘There is the sea, vast and spacious, teeming with creatures beyond number—living things both large and small.’ You know the one I mean?”

  Hazel shrugged.

  Evangeline noticed the smattering of freckles across the girl’s nose, her eyes, as blue gray as wood pigeon feathers, the russet fringe of her lashes. “Do you have a favorite?”

  “No.”

  “You’re a Presbyterian, aren’t you?” When Hazel frowned, Evangeline added, “Scotland. I assumed.”

  “Hah. Well. Never been much of a churchgoer.”

  “Your parents didn’t take you?”

  She almost looked amused. “Me parents . . .”

  They sat in awkward silence for a moment. Evangeline tried a different tack. “I noticed your tattoo.” She touched her own neck. “A moon. It’s a fertility symbol, isn’t it?”

  Hazel made a face. “I saw this play once. The characters were drunk, talking nonsense. ‘I was the man i’ the moon when time was.’ I thought it was funny.”

  “Oh!” Finally, common ground. “The Tempest.”

  “Ye seen it?”

  “It’s one of my favorites. ‘O brave new world, / That has such people in’t!’”

  Hazel shook her head. “I don’t remember much, to be honest. It was confusing. But it made me laugh.”

  “You know . . . the surgeon has a whole shelf of Shakespeare in his office. Maybe I could ask to borrow one.”

  “Eh. Don’t have much use for reading.”

  Ah, Evangeline thought. Of course. “You know . . . I could teach you to read, if you want.”

  Hazel gave her a hard look. “I don’t need help.”

  “I know you don’t. But . . . it’s a long journey, isn’t it? Might as well have something to do.”

  Hazel bit her lip. Her fingers strayed absently over the cover of the Bible. But she didn’t say no.

  They started with the alphabet, twenty-six letters on a piece of slate. Vowels and consonants, sound and sense. Over the next few days, as they sat together, knitting words, Hazel shared small bits and pieces of her past. Her mother had built a thriving practice as a midwife, but something happened—someone had died, a mother or child or both. She lost her reputation, and with it, her paying clients. She started drinking. Leaving Hazel alone at night. She pushed her out the door to beg and pick pockets on the streets when Hazel was eight years old. Hazel was no good at thievery; she was nervous and indecisive, and kept getting nabbed by the police. The third time she was hauled into court—when she was fifteen, for stealing a silver spoon—the judge had had enough. He sentenced her to transport. Seven years.

  She hadn’t eaten in two days. Her mother didn’t even come to the hearing.

  Evangeline looked at her for a long moment. If she expressed any pity, she knew, Hazel would slip away. E-A-T, she wrote on the slate. D-A-Y.

  Even after she’d lost everything, Hazel’s mother still practiced in secret. There were plenty of desperate women who needed help. She treated wounds and infections, cough and fever. If a woman didn’t want a baby, she made her problem disappear. If a woman did, she showed her how to nurture and protect the life growing inside her. She turned babies around in wombs and taught new mothers how to feed them after they were born. Many women were afraid to go to the lying-in hospital to deliver their babies because of the stories about childbed fever, an illness that began with sweating and shaking and almost always ended in death, in an agony of vomit and blood. Hazel shook her head at the memory. “Only in hospital. Not in the tenements with the midwives. They say it’s because the poor are hardy, like farm animals.”

  P-O-O-R. F-A-R-M.

  “But that’s not the reason,” Hazel said. “The doctors touch the dead and don’t wash their hands. Midwives know it, but no one listens.”

  Evangeline palmed her stomach. Prodded it to feel the lumpy limbs just beneath the skin. “Did you learn from your mother?”

  Hazel gave her an appraising look. “You’re afraid of birthing.”

  “Of course.”

  Hazel’s lips twisted into a smile. It was peculiar on her, like a grin on a fox. “She was no good at being a mother. But she was a good midwife. Still is, for all I know.” She tilted her chin at Evangeline. “Yes, I learned.”

  Medea, 1840

  In a great whoosh of flapping sails, the Medea cleared the English Channel and made her way into open ocean, heading south toward Spain. Nothing but water and sky visible for miles. Standing at the railing, gazing out at the expanse, Evangeline thought of a line from Coleridge: Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea!

  In early morning, fog clung to the water like cotton batting. The air was cool and fresh after the stench of the orlop deck, and smelled of pine tar. Women jostled and bartered for places in line; if you were sick, unlucky, or lazy enough to come last, you got the gruel that was burned and congealed at the bottom of the pot. The water they drank, stored in a wine cask, was muddy and tasted as if it had been drawn from a ditch. Evangeline learned to wait a few minutes after it was poured in her cup for the sediment to sink to the bottom.

  The gruel was supposed to hold them until midafternoon, when the women lined up once more, for their final meal of the day: a watery broth of cabbage and turnip and, if they were lucky, tough, salty beef or dried cod, with a hardtack biscuit and another cup of muddy water.

  Evangeline was assigned to a work crew of six women. On a revolving schedule they emptied chamber pots, boiled dirty laundry, cleaned the sheep and goat pens, collected eggs from the hens stacked in cages on the main deck. They coiled sodden rope that had been dumped in a tangle and scrubbed the orlop deck with stones and sand and a straw-bristle brush. They washed the main deck and privies with a mix of lime and calcium chloride that made their noses burn and eyes water.

  As the days passed Evangeline adjusted to the swaying and creaking, the ebb and flow of the waves. Mimicking the sailors, she began walking flat-footed, rocking her hips and bending her knees with the movement of the ship, anticipating the pitch of the deck as it rolled from side to side. The motion of dancing, she thought. Of courtship. She discovered hidden handholds all over the ship, tucked under banisters and ledges and built into ladders, to grab when the sea was rough. Soon enough, despite her growing bulk, she could climb from orlop to tween, from tween to the main deck, as fast as any crewman. She learned where to sit or stand to avoid the spray, how to dodge puddles, how to navigate around rum barrels and tangles of rope without tripping, where to find sunlight at different times of the day. She skirted the grasping hands of sailors as she passed and avoided their sleeping rooms on the tween deck. She got used to the taste of salt on her lips, which she had to rub with lard and whale oil to keep from cracking. Her hands became tough and red and strong. She got used to the chaos: the toll of the bell every half hour, the constant bleating of goats and honking of geese, the reek of the privies and bilge.

  On temperate afternoons the captain brought his orange pet canary in a rusty cage onto the main deck, where it chirped shrilly for hours, perched on its tiny swing.

  She got used to the chirping.

  As if memorizing subject-verb agreements in Latin, she taught herself the language of sailing. Facing the ship’s front—the bow—port was on the left, starboard on the right. The back of the ship was aft. Windward, naturally, meant the direction the wind was blowing; leeward, the opposite. The horizontal pole at the bottom of the mast, the boom, controlled the wind power of the sails.


  The sailors were busy from dawn until dusk, raising and lowering the sails, climbing up and down masts like the acrobats in Covent Garden, patching huge sections of canvas, greasing cables, splicing rope. Evangeline had never seen a man with a needle and thread, and was surprised to learn how adept the sailors were at stitching. Two or three of them would sit amidships on the deck with legs outstretched, mending a sail with long needles and coarse thread, thimbles on the balls of their thumbs attached to their wrists by leather straps.

  They spoke in a barely comprehensible shorthand that Evangeline only understood through context and pantomime. They called porridge burgoo. They called the stew they ate lobscouse. She didn’t know why. That was just how it was. The sailors received far more daily provisions than the convicts: a pound of biscuits, a gallon of rum or wine, a cup of oatmeal, half a pound of beef, a half cup of peas, a slab of butter, and two ounces of cheese. Sometimes—rarely—the women would get a taste of their rations.

  Some of the women learned to fish. When their morning chores were finished, they cast lines overboard baited with chum, using twine and thread, with padlocks and bolts for weights and hooks. In the afternoons they cured the mackerel and sea robins they caught in the sun. Before long a barter system developed between the convicts and the crew. Dried fish could be exchanged for biscuits or buttons, stockings the women knitted by hand traded for brandy, an even more desirable commodity.

  If a convict did something wrong, punishment was swift. If she got into a fistfight or was caught gambling, she’d be locked in a small, dark room on the orlop deck called the hold. One woman, accused of stealing a crewman’s tortoiseshell comb, was forced to wear a placard around her neck that said THIEF for a month. A narrow box chained to the main deck was used for particularly grave offenses, such as disrespecting the captain or surgeon. The unfortunate convict was buckled into a waistcoat that wrapped around her limbs, then locked inside the box. If she screamed or cried, a cistern of water was poured on her head through the breathing hole. The solitary box, sailors called it. Convicts called it the grave.

  For repeated offenses, a convict’s head was roughly shaved, like that of an inmate in an insane asylum.

  Some prisoners complained to anyone who’d listen. Others bore their burdens with stoic good cheer. It was hard work to keep boredom at bay, and a number of them simply gave up. They ate with their hands and were unashamedly naked in front of one another, spitting and belching and farting at will. Some, out of sheer boredom, began making trouble. Two got into a brawl and took turns in the hold, subsisting on bread and water. Another who swore at the captain was locked inside the solitary box for an entire day. Her muffled yelling and swearing got her an additional half day, plus an unwelcome shower through the breathing hole.

  Evangeline clung to her dignity like a life preserver. She kept her head down, minded her own business, attended divine service, worked on her quilt, and did her chores without complaint, even as her stomach swelled, and along with it her feet and hands. After breakfast, kneeling beside other convicts, she dipped a rag into a tub of seawater, wrung it out, and washed her face, the back of her neck, between her fingers, under her arms. Daily she aired her bedding; once a week, on washing day, she scrubbed her clothing, hanging it to stiffen and dry in the salty air. She still turned her back when she changed out of her dress.

  At night, when the hatch was closed on the orlop deck, Evangeline felt entombed. But she came to welcome the time in her coffin-like berth; it was her only privacy. She’d tuck in her knees and pull the rough blanket up around her ears and shut her eyes. Resting her hand on the bulge of her stomach, she’d feel for a flutter of movement beneath the taut skin.

  On mild afternoons in Tunbridge Wells she used to grab her bonnet from a peg in the foyer and wander down the rutted path to the stone bridge over a stream, passing tangled nettles, butterflies hovering above foxgloves, a field sprinkled with orange-red poppies, listening to the willows rustle in the wind. She made her way to a hill near her house, an easy ascent along a well-trod trail through spiky purple thistles, sheep so intent on grazing on clover that she had to push them off the path to continue on her way. When she reached the top, she’d gaze down at the terracotta roofs of the houses in the village, conjuring lines from the poets she read with her father—Wordsworth, say, or Longfellow, whose words enhanced her own observations: As lapped in thought I used to lie, / And gaze into the summer sky, / Where the sailing clouds went by, / Like ships upon the sea . . .

  In the darkness of the orlop deck, she retreated to that mountain trail. Sidestepping small rocks and avoiding mud puddles, she breathed in the damp earth and the sour-sweet grass, felt the prickle of brambles on her legs and the sun on her face as she made her way toward the summit. She drifted to sleep to the distant bleating of sheep and the sound of her own beating heart.

  Most of the women on the ship were familiar with the accommodations of desperation, the compromises and calculations that went into staying alive day to day. Stealing, haggling, deceiving gullible children, trading a place to sleep or a bottle of rum for sexual favors; many had long since overcome any squeamishness about what they considered necessary transactions. Their bodies were just another tool at their disposal. Some simply wanted to make the best of a bad situation, finding protection wherever they could. Others were determined to carve a good time out of the rough timber of the trip. They laughed raucously, drank with the sailors, and made bawdy jokes, toeing the line of insubordination.

  A few convicts, Evangeline noticed, had disappeared from the orlop deck.

  “The sailors call it taking a wife,” Olive explained.

  “Taking a . . . wife?” She didn’t understand.

  “For the duration of the trip.”

  “Isn’t that immoral?”

  “Immoral,” Olive chortled. “Oh, Leenie.”

  Though the surgeon did all he could to discourage it, there were clear advantages to taking up with a sailor, so long as he wasn’t sadistic or downright repulsive. You were spared the hell of the orlop; you could sleep in his relatively comfortable berth, or even, depending on his rank, a private room. You might get extra rations, blankets, special attention. Your alliance protected you from other brutish crewmen, and even, to an extent, the threat of punishment from above. But it was a dangerous gambit. There were few repercussions for sailors who were cruel or sadistic. Women crept back to the orlop deck with welts on their legs, scratches on their backs, gonorrhea and syphilis and all manner of other diseases.

  Despite her own sizable stomach, within a few weeks Olive had taken up with a barrel-chested, much-inked sailor with a snaggletoothed smile and a ruddy neck called Grunwald. She rarely slept in her own berth.

  “I hope that sailor is nice to her,” Evangeline said to Hazel one afternoon as they sat in the stern behind a wall of chicken crates, an out-of-the-way place they’d discovered to meet after their chores were done. Evangeline was working on her quilt, Hazel copying words from the Bible onto the slate with a nub of chalk.

  UNTO. DAY. GOD. LORD.

  “Let’s just hope he leaves her alone for a spell to mend after the baby is born.”

  Evangeline arranged a section of fabric squares and started pinning them together. “Surely he will.”

  Hazel grunted. “Men do as they please.”

  “Come, now,” Evangeline said. “Not all men.”

  “Yours did, didn’t he?”

  The observation stung. Evangeline concentrated on her stitches, inserting the needle in the front of the fabric, grabbing a bit of the back, running the thread through the layers. “Is anybody giving you trouble?”

  “Not really.”

  “What about Buck?”

  Hazel shrugged. “Nothing I can’t handle.”

  Evangeline turned the fabric over, inspecting the line of stitches. “Be careful.”

  “Careful,” Hazel scoffed. Reaching into her apron pocket, she pulled out a silver folding knife with a mother-of-pearl handle and
held it on the flat of her palm.

  Evangeline gaped. “Where’d you get that?”

  “I’m a pickpocket, remember?”

  “A failed one. For goodness’ sake, put that away.” Both of them knew that if Hazel were found guilty of theft from a sailor, she’d wear a placard and shackles in the hold until her feet touched land.

  “No one but you will ever know,” Hazel said, slipping the knife back into her pocket. “Unless I need to use it.”

  One afternoon a sailor lost his footing and fell from the yardarm to the deck, a distance of about twenty feet, near where Hazel and Evangeline sat together prying apart wet rope. They looked up. No one was coming to his aid. Hazel dropped the rope and went to his side, leaning close and whispering in his ear. The sailor howled and groaned, clutching his leg.

  Just then the surgeon emerged from the tween deck. Seeing Hazel bent over the sailor, he called, “Move aside, prisoner.”

  At first Hazel ignored him, running a hand down the crewman’s leg to his shin, probing it with her fingers. A small crowd had gathered. Looking up at the surgeon, she said, “His leg is broken and needs to be reset.”

  Evangeline was struck by the girl’s expression: an air of practiced attentiveness that gave her an unexpected authority.

  “I’ll determine that,” the surgeon said.

  The sailor groaned.

  “He’ll require a splint. And some rum,” Hazel said.

  “What experience have you?”

  “My mother is an herbalist. A midwife.”