The Exiles

by Christina Baker Kline

  Hazel

  As to the females, it is a melancholy fact, but not the less true, that far the greater proportion are utterly irreclaimable, being the most worthless and abandoned of human beings! No kindness can conciliate them, nor any indulgence render them grateful; and it is admitted by everyone, that they are, taken as a body, infinitely worse than males!

  —Lieutenant Breton, Excursions in New South Wales, Western Australia and Van Diemen’s Land During the Years 1830, 1831, 1832, and 1833

  Medea, 1840

  What Hazel remembered most vividly—what she would always remember—was the hem of Evangeline’s gown as she hovered on the railing, her arms flailing in the air. Her disbelieving shriek as she tumbled overboard. The cold rage on Buck’s face when he turned, startled by Hazel’s scream. The quickening in her chest, the disorienting horror.

  After that, all was chaos. The surgeon yelling behind her, two crewmen rushing to apprehend Buck, two others peering over the side. Dunne stripping off his jacket, preparing to jump, and the captain’s shouted reprimand: “Dr. Dunne! Stand down, sir.”

  “One of the crew, then,” Dunne said. “An experienced swimmer—”

  “I will require no man to risk his life for a convict.”

  Hazel and Dunne stayed on the deck for what felt like hours after everyone else had left, standing wordless, helpless, at the railing, scanning the glittery water. Was that a floating cloth, just under the surface? A glimpse of hair?

  The sea, blackly silent, gave up nothing. No sign of her. Evangeline was gone.

  For months, years, afterward, Hazel would dream of Evangeline underwater. The fathomless silence. The absence of sound.

  A tinny wail rose from the tween deck.

  Hazel and Dunne looked at each other. The baby. They’d forgotten about the baby.

  In the surgeon’s quarters, Hazel held the swaddled infant close to her chest, trying to soothe her. “She needs to be fed.”

  “Goats’ milk will do. We can mix it with water and a little sugar.”

  “Mothers’ milk is better.”

  “Of course it is, but . . .”

  Wet nurses were common in Glasgow, where the infant mortality rate was high and mothers of dead children learned that they could at least earn money from their misery. But there were no wet nurses on the ship.

  Hazel looked at Dunne wordlessly. Olive had given birth less than a week earlier. He nodded: he’d had the same thought. Yes, it was worth a try.

  Dunne found a crewman to unbolt the orlop deck. Carrying a candle, Hazel made her way down the narrow corridor to Olive’s berth. Since Olive had lost her baby, she’d been glum and withdrawn. She’d abandoned her sailor’s bed and crept back to her own like an animal licking its wounds. Now she lay hunched under the covers and facing the wall, lightly snoring.

  Hazel tapped her back. When there was no response, she tugged her shoulder.

  Olive turned toward her. “Fer Chrissakes, what.”

  “You’re needed.”

  Olive turned. The flickering candlelight cast ghoulish shadows on her face. She peered closer at Hazel. “Are ye . . . crying?”

  “It’s—it’s Evangeline.”

  Olive didn’t ask any questions. She hoisted herself off the bunk, dragging her blanket with her and pulling it around her shoulders like a cape, and followed Hazel past the rows of sleeping women, up the swaying ladder and into the surgeon’s quarters.

  At the sight of Dunne cradling the infant, Olive stopped in her tracks.

  “It’s hers,” Hazel said.

  “I didn’t know she was ready to—”

  “You’ve been a bit preoccupied.”

  Olive looked back and forth between them. “Where is she, then?”

  There was no easy way to say it. “She’s gone, Olive,” Hazel said.

  “Gone?”

  It was still so unfathomable to Hazel that she hardly believed it herself. “Buck pushed her over the side.”

  Olive looked at Dunne, as if asking him to dispute it.

  “I’m afraid it’s true,” he said.

  “No.” Olive placed a hand to her forehead.

  “She went under and never came up.” He swallowed. “I wanted to go after her, but . . .”

  Tears glinted in Olive’s eyes. “No need to explain.”

  For a moment all of them were quiet, trying to absorb the enormity of it. Evangeline had been here, and now she was gone. Her life had such little value that the ship wouldn’t even attempt a rescue.

  Olive sniffed. Wiping a tear with the back of her hand, she said, “To hell with all of ’em.”

  The baby, in the surgeon’s arms, gave a lamblike bleat.

  Dunne glanced at Hazel, then back at Olive. “The child is hungry. She needs a wet nurse.”

  She squinted at him.

  “I thought—well, Hazel and I wondered—”

  “It’s a girl,” Olive said.

  “Yes.”

  “Ye want me to feed it. Her.”

  “Yes.”

  With a hard look at Dunne, Olive said, “Ye couldn’t save my baby but now ye want me to save Evangeline’s?”

  He pressed his lips together. There was no answer to that.

  “It’s all terrible, Olive,” Hazel said.

  Slowly she shook her head. “I don’t think I can.”

  “But—”

  “Ye shouldn’t ask me to. Babies survive without mothers’ milk, don’t they?”

  “Some do,” Dunne said. “Many don’t.”

  Hazel knew that Olive genuinely cared for Evangeline. And yet, like Hazel’s mother, her top priority was her own survival. “I know it won’t be easy. But . . . you’d get extra perks,” Hazel said, glancing at Dunne.

  He nodded. “Better rations.”

  “Me sailor gets me those.”

  “You’d never scrub the deck again.”

  Olive gave a short laugh. “I weasel out of chores as it is.” She cleared her throat. “Look. I would help. I would. But me sailor wants me back. And he would not take kindly to an infant in his bed.”

  “Ye don’t need to keep the baby,” Hazel said. “Just feed her now and then.”

  “Where will she sleep?”

  It was a good question. The baby would need to be fed at night. If Hazel slept with her on the orlop deck, they’d be locked in until morning.

  Dunne pursed his lips. Then he said, “Miss Ferguson can stay with the infant in a room on this floor and bring her to Mr. Grunwald’s quarters when she needs feeding.”

  Silence stretched across the space between them.

  “Her baby will probably die, Olive,” Hazel blurted. “Both of ’em dead, and for no reason. You’d be giving her a chance.”

  “I don’t even know if I still have milk.”

  Dunne handed her the small bundle.

  Sighing heavily, Olive sat on the bed. After a few moments she pulled open her nightshirt and Hazel coaxed her forward, helping her to position the infant at a slight angle. The child fretted and squirmed.

  “It’s no good,” Olive said.

  “Shh,” Hazel said. “Give it time.” Reaching over, she swiped a droplet of milk and wiped it onto her finger. When she rubbed it on the infant’s lips, the baby rooted in the air, craning her neck, and Hazel gently guided her mouth to Olive’s breast. “Feels strange at first, I know. But she’ll get the hang of it, and so will ye.”

  Olive gazed down at the child as she suckled. “Poor Leenie,” she said. “She was never meant for this kind of life, was she?”

  It surprised Hazel that she felt so bereft. She’d never been a crier, but here she was, sobbing into her apron, wiping away tears before anyone could see. She was fine, she told herself. She hardly knew Evangeline, after all. It was her own fault she’d allowed herself to feel for her.

  Even so, her true heart whispered: you are not fine. Evangeline was the only person in her life who had been wholly kind. She was gutted.

  Before meeting Evangeline, Haze
l had wondered if she’d ever feel a real connection to another human being. Because she never had, not really. As a child, she’d yearned to feel the warmth of her mother’s love. She searched her eyes, desperate to see herself reflected back, but all she saw was her mother’s own need, her unquenchable desire. When Hazel sought affection, her mother pulled away. When she cried, her mother was annoyed. Her mother ignored Hazel until she needed something, and even then, it was rare that her gaze settled on Hazel’s face.

  In time Hazel had come to feel insubstantial—not invisible, exactly, but not quite seen.

  Her mother bought rum instead of food. She went out for hours, leaving Hazel alone in the cold, dark room they lived in on that narrow Glasgow street as the fire died out. Hazel learned to fend for herself, combing Kelvingrove Park for branches to feed the woodstove, stealing clothes from backyard lines and food from neighbors’ tables. On the way home she’d pass the glow of candlelight through thick windowpanes and imagine the happy lives within, so remote from her own.

  Over time, she grew deeply angry. It was the only emotion she allowed herself to feel. Her anger was a carapace; it protected her soft insides like the shell of a snail. From a bitter distance she watched her mother place gentle hands on the girls and women who came to see her, carrying their shame in front of them, those telltale swollen bellies. Eyes wide with terror or weary with grief, they were afraid of dying, of the child dying, of the child living. Their burdens the result of misplaced love, or drunken fumbling, or the predatory advances of men they didn’t know—or, worse, men they did. Hazel’s mother calmed their fears and soothed their pain. She treated them with a kindness and compassion she was never able to show her own daughter, watching from the shadows.

  Now, faced with Evangeline’s helpless infant, Hazel wanted to turn away, to retreat into her shell. It wasn’t her responsibility; she didn’t owe the child a thing. No one would blame her if she stepped aside. She knew—didn’t she?—that it was a mistake to allow herself to have feelings. Here she was, abandoned again.

  But this was Evangeline’s baby. And she was all alone. They both were.

  The convict was not in her right mind, Buck told the captain. She was loony. Vindictive. She’d lunged toward him and he pushed her away in self-defense. It wasn’t his fault she pitched overboard.

  Hazel was the only witness. She told the captain what she saw.

  “The word of a convict against the word of a sailor,” the captain mused.

  “I can corroborate,” Dunne said. “I was there just after it happened.”

  “You didn’t actually witness the crime.”

  Dunne gave him a thin smile. “As you are aware, Captain, Buck is a convicted criminal. With a history of violence and a motive for revenge. Miss Stokes had just given birth. She was hardly in any state, physical or emotional, to attack him. And why would she? He’d been punished for his crime. Justice was served.”

  Buck was given thirty lashes, and this time Hazel and Olive stood with the surgeon at the front of the crowd, watching him writhe and whine. Most of the throng melted away as soon as the whipping ended. But the three of them watched as Buck was untied from the mast, the stripes on his back already puffing and oozing blood.

  Hazel looked him in the eye. He stared at her dully. “What will happen to him?” she asked Dunne when they dragged him off.

  “He’ll be kept in the hold until we land, and then a court of law will decide his fate. Port Arthur, probably, for a long time.”

  It felt good to stand like a sentinel, to witness Buck’s humiliation and pain. But it didn’t lessen the heartache of losing Evangeline.

  Hazel’s only task now, Dunne told her, was to care for the infant. He moved her into a small room off the infirmary, where she slept with the baby at night. She made a crib out of a drawer from a dresser and set it beside the bed. She’d almost forgotten what it was like to sleep on a real mattress with clean cotton sheets and a blanket that didn’t chafe her skin. To light an oil lamp when she pleased. To relieve herself in private.

  As the days passed, Olive, too, settled into her role. When the two women sat together in the afternoons, Dunne brought them stewed plums and mincemeat pies and fresh mutton, delicacies forbidden the prisoners and most of the sailors, available only to the top brass.

  “Does the captain know you’re feeding the animals?” Olive asked as they sipped tea with milk and sugar and ate toast with blackberry jam.

  Dunne gave a small laugh. “He has no say in the matter.”

  Olive slathered butter on her toast. “I suppose it’ll be different when we land.”

  “No doubt. Enjoy it while you can.”

  At first Hazel and Dunne were wary around each other, carefully formal. She still found him high-handed and arrogant, and reluctant to take her seriously. But as the days passed he began talking with her about his patients’ cases, and even asked her opinion on their treatment. She didn’t know whether it was that she’d earned his respect during the breech birth or simply that he liked having someone to talk to, but she enjoyed sharing what she knew. Many convicts had vague symptoms of anxiety—hysteria, Dunne called it—for which he had no cure. Hazel suggested a tea of motherwort. For menstruation cramps, powdered red raspberry leaves. For fainting, a tumbler of vinegar down the throat. For cuts and sores, a sticky bandage of cobwebs.

  Dunne began inviting her to sit with him in front of the small fire in the grate in his quarters before turning in for the night.

  “The child needs a name,” he said one evening. “Shall we call her Evangeline?”

  The infant in Hazel’s arms was gazing up at her. She lifted her up and kissed her nose. She saw the slope of Evangeline’s nose, her large expressive eyes. The father, she thought, must’ve been handsome too. She shook her head. “No. There’s only one of her.”

  Early the next morning, she took Evangeline’s tin ticket on its red cord from the shelf in the surgeon’s quarters and made her way down to the orlop deck. Confronted by the now-unfamiliar stench, the sounds of women hacking and moaning, the overwhelming malaise and disquiet, Hazel nearly turned around. While living in it, she’d acclimated to it. But now, from the distance of only a rope ladder, she felt so far removed from it that even a brief exposure made her heart palpitate.

  The women in the bunks stared at her as she passed.

  “Look at ’er, so fancy now, in the surgeon’s quarters and all,” one singsonged.

  “Ye have to wonder if she shoved the poor girl over the side herself,” said another.

  When she reached her berth, Hazel felt for the loose floorboard and pried it open with her fingertips. Finding the sack, she sifted through the items: a few spoons, a dented cup, a pair of stockings . . . Ah—here it was. Evangeline’s handkerchief. Tucking it in her pocket, she made her way back up the ladder.

  In her room on the tween deck, she spread the small white square on the bed and ran a finger along the scalloped border, the initials embroidered in the corner, C. F. W. Cecil Frederic Whitstone. This flimsy cloth had been the locus of Evangeline’s hopes and dreams, unrealistic as they may have been. Now it was all her daughter would ever have of her. Hazel placed the ticket on the handkerchief, thinking of the ruby ring that Evangeline had hidden in it—the ring that became the catalyst for her journey. She’d once told Hazel that her vicar father considered jewelry a vice; the only ornaments she’d ever worn were the ruby ring and this ticket on a red cord around her neck.

  The first a marker of seduction, Hazel thought. The second its result.

  Folding the ticket in the handkerchief and tucking it in her pocket, she thought about what Evangeline had said about the rings of a tree, how the people we love live on inside us, even after they’re gone.

  Ruby.

  It wasn’t a name Evangeline would’ve chosen. But to Hazel it was a way to mend a broken heart. To erase a false accusation. To reclaim a treasure.

  Ruby. Precious girl.

  Hobart Town, 1840

&
nbsp; A shout came from high in the rigging: “Van Diemen’s Land!”

  On the main deck, there was an excited rustling. The Medea had spent nearly four months at sea, through storms and suffocating heat and icy rain. The women were sick of each other and even sicker of the ship. They ran to the railing, but there was little to see. A distant smudge on the horizon.

  Hazel made her way down the ladder to gather her things. She’d become adept at navigating the crowded deck and going up and down the swaying ladders with Ruby tied to her front. Thanks, in part, to the better food and clean bedding, Hazel was stronger, her eyes were brighter, her skin a little rosy. Even getting up twice in the night to carry Ruby to Olive’s bed, she slept better than she ever had on the orlop deck.

  Dunne was at his desk in the anteroom, writing in a ledger, when she knocked on the door and went in. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said, rising. “There’s something we need to discuss. I have not yet filled out the birth certificate. If I state officially that you are Ruby’s mother, you’ll be permitted to visit her in the nursery at the prison. Would you want that?”

  Hazel cupped Ruby’s warm head in her hand. “Yes.”

  He nodded. “I’ll note on the chart that you had an infection and cannot feed her, and she’ll be given a wet nurse. Olive, if she agrees. You’ll be allowed to spend your days with her, at least for a few months. Eventually they’ll send her to an orphanage.”

  “An orphanage?” She held Ruby a little closer.

  “It’s protocol,” he said. “But as her mother, you can claim her when you’re released, if you wish.”

  Hazel thought of the women in the bunks, envious of her privileges. “What if someone tells the authorities I’m not the mother?”