The Exiles

by Christina Baker Kline

The surgeon flicked his hand at her. “Stand over there.” Crouching over the sailor, he repeated Hazel’s movements: he felt down the man’s leg, grasped it between his fingers, put a flat hand to his forehead. Sitting back on his heels, he said, “Someone find a board to transport him to my quarters.”

  “As I said,” Hazel murmured behind him.

  Several days later, Evangeline awoke to find Hazel on the floor between their berths, hunched over sprigs of dried herbs, crushing leaves with two fingers.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Mixing herbs for a poultice. That sailor could die if infection sets in.”

  Hazel had been right: his leg was badly broken. A convict who brought his meals to the infirmary reported that he was delirious with pain, thrashing and cursing. They’d had to tie him to the bed.

  “The surgeon knows what to do, doesn’t he?” Evangeline said.

  Hazel gazed at her with those implacable gray eyes. Then she gathered the herbs into a heap on a rag and tied them into a parcel.

  Early in the afternoon, Evangeline sat on the main deck with a small group of convicts, mending a sail. She watched Dr. Dunne come up from the tween deck, a grim expression on his face, and vanish around a corner. Putting down her needle and thimble, she told the woman beside her she was going to the privy. She caught up with him at a spot blocked from view by a stack of crates. He stood at the railing, resting his chin on crossed arms.

  “How is the sailor?”

  He looked up. “Not well.”

  She, too, crossed her arms on the rail. “Hazel, the girl—”

  “I know who she is.”

  “I saw her crushing herbs. For a poultice, she said.”

  “She’s not a doctor.”

  “Of course not. But if there’s nothing to lose . . .”

  “Only a man’s life,” he said in a clipped voice.

  “He’s doing poorly, I hear. What harm is there in trying?”

  Shaking his head slightly, Dr. Dunne gazed out at the shimmering line between sky and sea.

  Back in the sewing circle, Evangeline watched as he called Hazel over, leaning toward her as she pulled a small packet from her apron pocket and opened it for him to inspect. He crumbled the herbs with his fingers, held them to his nose, tasted them with his tongue. Then he took the packet and disappeared down the ladder.

  Perhaps the result was circumstantial. Perhaps the sailor would have recovered regardless. But three days later he sat lounging on the main deck in a wooden chair, his splinted leg propped on a barrel, pestering a blond-ringleted convict and bellowing with laughter at her retort.

  Medea, 1840

  The surgeon had his hands full. All the beds in the infirmary were occupied. Heatstroke, seasickness, diarrhea. Delirium, ulcerated tongues, dislocated limbs. He treated constipation with calomel, made of one part chloride and six parts mercury. For dysentery he prescribed flour porridge with a few drops of laudanum and a tincture of opium. To reduce fever he shaved women’s heads, a treatment they feared more than delirium. For pneumonia and tuberculosis, bloodletting.

  Word of Hazel’s miracle cure had spread. Convicts who didn’t want to see the surgeon or who were sent away untreated began lining up to see her. She scrounged herbs from the cook and planted some of the seeds she’d smuggled on board with her in a box of manure: arnica for pains and bruises, mandrake for sleeplessness, and pennyroyal, a flowering mint, for unwanted pregnancy. For dysentery, egg whites and boiled milk. For fainting spells, a tablespoon of vinegar. She created a paste from lard, honey, oats, and eggs as a salve for chapped hands and feet.

  “That girl, Hazel, with her witchy powders and potions . . . ,” the surgeon said irritably to Evangeline as she stood at the railing late one afternoon. “I’m afraid she’ll only make things worse.”

  “You have plenty to do. Why should you mind?”

  “It gives the women false hope.”

  She gazed out at the water. It was clear and green, as smooth as a mirror. “Surely hope isn’t a bad thing.”

  “It is if they forgo proper medical treatment.”

  “The sailor who fell from the yardarm is much improved. I saw him shimmying up a mast.”

  “Correlation, causation. Who’s to know?” His mouth tightened. “There’s something about that girl. An insolence. I find it . . . off-putting.”

  “Have pity,” Evangeline said. “Imagine being her age, condemned to this.”

  Giving her a sidelong look, he said, “The same could be said about you.”

  “She’s much younger than I am.”

  “How old are you, then?”

  “Twenty-one. For another month, at least.” She hesitated, not sure whether it was appropriate to ask. “And you?”

  “Twenty-six. Don’t tell anyone.”

  He smiled, and she smiled back.

  “Hazel’s life has always been hard. She’s never seen . . .” She struggled to find the words. “The . . . good in the world.”

  “And you have?”

  “Of a sort.”

  “It seems to me you’ve had a rather rough go of it.”

  “Well, yes. But the truth is . . .” She took a breath. “The truth is, I was rash and impulsive. I have no one to blame for my misfortune but myself.”

  The wind was picking up. Sunlight splintered brightly in shards across the waves. For a few moments they stood silently at the railing.

  “I have a question,” she said. “Why on earth would anyone choose to be on this ship if they don’t have to?”

  “I’ve wondered that many times myself,” he said with a laugh. “The easy answer, I suppose, is that I’m restless by nature. I thought it would be an interesting challenge. But if I’m honest . . .”

  He’d been a shy only child, he told her, raised in Warwick, a small village in the Midlands. His father was a doctor; it was expected that his son would join the practice and take over when he retired. He’d been sent to boarding school, which he loathed, and then to Oxford and the Royal College of Surgeons in London, where he discovered to his surprise that he actually did have a passion for medicine. On returning to the village he purchased a charming cottage with a housekeeper and set about expanding and updating the practice. As an eligible bachelor, he became a frequent guest at banquets, balls, and shooting parties.

  Then disaster struck. A young lady from a prominent landholding family was brought in complaining of stomach pains and shaking with chills, and had a high fever. His father, having never seen a case of appendicitis, diagnosed typhoid, prescribed morphine for the pain and fasting for the fever, and sent her home. The heiress died in great agony, vomiting blood in the middle of the night, to the disbelieving horror of her family. Their heartbreak required a villain. The doctor and his partner-son were shunned, the practice ruined.

  Some months later, an envelope arrived in the post from his roommate at the Royal College. The British government sought qualified surgeons for transport ships and would pay handsomely. It was a particular challenge to find surgeons for the female convict ships because, “to be frank,” his roommate wrote, “the ships are rumored to be floating brothels.”

  “A gross exaggeration, as I now know,” Dr. Dunne hastened to add. “Or at least . . . an exaggeration.”

  “But you signed on anyway.”

  “There was nothing left for me at home. I would’ve had to start somewhere new.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  The corners of his mouth turned up in bitter comedy. “Every day.”

  This was his third voyage, he said. He spent little time with the rough sailors, the boorish captain, or the alcoholic first mate, whose excesses he’d already treated several times. There was no one he could really talk to.

  “What would you do, then, if you could do whatever you chose?” she asked.

  He turned to face her, one arm on the railing. “What would I do? I would open my own practice. Maybe in Van Diemen’s Land. Hobart Town is a small place. I could start again.”
>
  “Starting again,” she said with a catch in her throat. “That sounds nice.”

  “Ye should charge for your services,” Olive told Hazel on a rare afternoon away from her sailor. “People take advantage.”

  “How’re they gonna pay?” Hazel asked.

  “Not your worry. Everybody’s got something to barter.”

  Olive was right. Soon enough Hazel was in possession of two quilts, a small store of silver pilfered from sailors’ trunks, dried cod and oat cakes, even a down pillow made by an enterprising convict who plucked geese for the officers’ meals.

  “Look at all this,” Evangeline marveled when Hazel lit a taper in a small brass candlestick with a finger loop—another bartered item—and pulled out a sack she’d stuffed under her berth.

  “Want something? Help yourselves.”

  Evangeline sifted through the sack, with Olive peering over her shoulder. Two eggs, a fork and spoon, a pair of stockings, a white handkerchief . . . wait—

  She snatched the handkerchief out of the sack and ran her thumb along the embroidery. “Who gave you this?”

  Hazel shrugged. “Dunno. Why?”

  “It’s mine.”

  “Are ye sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. It was given to me.”

  “Ah, sorry, then. Nothing’s safe, is it?”

  Evangeline pressed the handkerchief on her bedtick, smoothing it, and folded it into a small square.

  “What’s so special about it?” Olive reached for the handkerchief and Evangeline let her take it. Holding it up to the candle, she peered at it closely. “Is this a family crest?”

  “Yes.”

  “This must be from the cad who . . .” Olive gestured toward Evangeline’s stomach. “C. F. W. Lemme guess. Chester Francis Wentworth,” she said, affecting a snooty accent.

  Evangeline laughed. “Close. Cecil Frederic Whitstone.”

  “Cecil. Even better.”

  “Does he know you’re here?” Hazel asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Does he know you’re carrying his child?”

  Evangeline shrugged. It was a question she’d asked herself many times.

  Hazel set the candle on the ledge of the berth. “So, Leenie . . . why would ye keep this?”

  Evangeline thought of the look on Cecil’s face when he gave her the ring. His boyish eagerness to see it on her finger. “He gave me a ruby ring that had been his grandmother’s. He wrapped it in this handkerchief. Then he went away on holiday and the ruby was found in my room, and I was accused of stealing it. They didn’t notice the handkerchief, so I kept it.”

  “Did he return from his trip?”

  “I assume he did.”

  “Why didn’t he come to your defense, then?”

  “I don’t—I don’t know what he knows.”

  Olive crumpled the handkerchief in her fist. “I can’t see why you’d want this lousy piece of cloth, after he left ye high and dry.”

  Evangeline took it from her. “He didn’t . . .”

  But he did, didn’t he?

  She fingered the handkerchief’s scalloped edges. Why did she want this lousy piece of cloth?

  “It’s—it’s all I have left.” The moment she said it, she knew that this was true. This handkerchief was the only remaining shred from the fabric of her previous life. The only tangible reminder that she’d once been somebody else.

  Olive nodded slowly. “Then ye should put it in a place no one’ll find it.”

  “There’s a loose floorboard under my berth where I stash some bits and pieces,” Hazel said, smoothing out the handkerchief and folding it. “I can hide it for ye, if ye want.”

  “Would you?”

  “Later, when no one’s looking.” She tucked the cloth into her pocket. “So what happened to the ruby ring?”

  “No doubt on someone else’s finger,” Olive said.

  Medea, 1840

  Over the next several weeks, the Medea passed the mouth of the Mediterranean, Madeira, and Cape Verde, crossing the Tropic of Cancer and heading toward the equator. By late morning, these days, the sun was hot overhead, the air thick and humid. There was no wind to speak of. What little progress the Medea made was gained by tacking, a job that required great effort by the sailors. The temperature in the lower decks soared above 120 degrees, the humidity so acute it felt like living inside a steaming kettle.

  “They’re boiling us alive,” Olive said.

  A cloud of malaise hung over the ship. More fell ill. Some women’s feet were covered with oozing black sores, and swollen to double their size. The ones who could read carried their Bibles around with them, mouthing verses from Revelation: And the sea gave up the dead which were in it; and death and hell delivered up the dead which were in them. And Psalm 93: The waves of the sea are mighty, and rage horribly; but yet the Lord, who dwelleth on high, is mightier.

  The choice for the convicts was to stay on the main deck and endure the unforgiving sun or suffer in the unventilated hold. The heat made the stink even worse. They aired their bedding, burned sulfur, dusted the surfaces with bleaching powder. Sailors fired pistols below decks in the belief that gunpowder dispelled infectious vapors. But the best the prisoners could hope for in the bowels of the ship was merciful sleep. Mostly, they lay around on the main deck, wrapped in perspiration like gauze, their eyes half closed against the unremitting glare. They made bonnets out of burlap and flour sacks to shade their faces. Some women, not particularly stable to begin with, took to banging their heads against the posts of their berths or the ship railings on the upper deck until they were doused with buckets of water. But most were quiet. It took too much energy to speak. Even the farm animals lolled about, their tongues drooping from their mouths.

  Two and a half months after leaving London, the Medea rounded the jagged cliffs and pristine sands of the Cape of Good Hope near the southernmost tip of Africa and headed due east into the Indian Ocean. Ann Darter, the sickly girl whose baby died in Newgate, took a turn for the worse. When she died, Evangeline felt compelled to attend the makeshift service. Ann’s body, in a weighted burlap sack, lay on a plank draped with a Union Jack. As two sailors held the plank on the railing, the surgeon said a few words—“We commit this prisoner to the deep, looking for the resurrection of the body when the sea shall give up her dead”—and tilted his chin at the sailors, who tipped the plank. The body slid from under the flag and splashed into the sea, floating on the surface for a moment before sinking beneath the waves.

  Evangeline looked down into the water, as blackly iridescent as a raven’s wing. A life extinguished. No one who loved this girl, or even knew her, to witness it. How many convicts had died on these ships, far from home and family, with none to mourn their loss?

  She watched a shark, its fin dipping in and out of the water, following in the wake of the ship. “It smells death,” Olive said.

  Washing day.

  Evangeline was still amidships when the sun sank below the horizon. With all the seasickness and dysentery, the task of scrubbing and rinsing clothes and bedding was taking longer than usual, and she finished her task—wringing out the wet cotton, stretching it over the line, clipping it with wooden pegs—in the gray twilight, the pale moon hovering overhead. Her back ached; her feet were sore. In her third trimester now, she was large and slow.

  All at once she was aware of a strange noise. A cry. She stood, alert, straining to hear. The mainsail flapped loudly above her head. Water lapped at the bow.

  And then a woman’s voice: Stop! Get off me!

  Hazel. She was sure of it.

  Evangeline slung the laundry over the line, wiped her hands on her skirt, and looked around. No one was near. There it was again: that cry. She hurried as fast as she could toward the starboard bow, from where the sound seemed to emanate, only to be blocked by a stack of crates. Turning back, she rounded the port bow, hugging the railing, and saw two figures ahead in the grainy darkness.

  As she came closer, Ev
angeline realized with horror what she was seeing: Hazel, bent awkwardly over a barrel, her dress open to the waist and bunched around her thighs, her head twisted to the side—and a man behind her. It took a moment to realize that the man’s fist grasped the red cord around Hazel’s neck and was pulling it tight.

  Glancing around her, Evangeline spied a wooden pole with a brass hook at the end, used for attaching sails. She grabbed it. “Get off!”

  The man turned toward her. It was Buck. “Don’t be stupid,” he snarled. “You’re in no shape.”

  Evangeline hoisted the pole above her head.

  Buck let go of Hazel, who slid to the ground, gasping. As he advanced toward Evangeline, she saw the flash of a knife blade, the iridescent handle. Hazel’s knife. He must’ve wrested it from her.

  Evangeline moved toward him blindly, swinging the pole. With his free hand, Buck reached for it, missing several times before grabbing the end and yanking it toward him, knocking her off her feet. As he came toward her she was aware of Hazel, behind him, pushing the barrel onto its side and rolling it forward with both hands. It hit him behind his knees. He lost his balance, the knife flying from his hand, skittering across the deck. Without thinking, Evangeline lunged for it, wrapping her fingers around the handle.

  Buck scrambled to his feet.

  Holding the knife out in front of her, Evangeline turned to face him.

  “Gimme that.” He rushed toward her and she stabbed blindly in his direction, slashing his wrist and forearm as he reached for the knife. “Whore!” he spit, hunched over his bleeding arm. Blood gushed from the wound. Buck stumbled around like a wounded animal, cursing and whining, trying to stanch the flow.

  “Go!” Evangeline yelled to Hazel, behind her. “Get help.”

  Hazel tugged her dress down and disappeared around the bow.

  Buck sank to his knees. His white shirt was soaked with blood. As Evangeline stood over him, holding the knife, it took every ounce of self-restraint she possessed to keep from attacking him again. She trembled with adrenaline-fueled rage. She wasn’t just furious at Buck; she was livid at all of the sailors and guards who treated the convicts worse than chattel. The crude catcalls and vulgar groping, the casual brutality, the arrogant assumptions of privilege—she was sick of it. And she was also, she realized, enraged at Cecil. He had merely been toying with her, using her for his own selfish ends. His delight in seeing his grandmother’s ruby on her finger had been nothing more than egotistical self-gratification, an occasion to admire his two shiny ornaments—her and the ring.