The Exiles

by Christina Baker Kline

“Ruby, Ruby, Ruby,” Hazel whispered over and over.

  The walk home was an agony.

  The next morning, Hazel watched a new group of convicts stream in through the wooden gates of the Cascades, bedraggled and wide-eyed. She felt nothing but resentment toward them: more women fighting for food and hammocks and space. More babies crowding the nursery. More misery all around.

  Hazel was accustomed to Glasgow’s harsh winters. The apartment she’d shared with her mother was damp and drafty; wind slithered under the front door and through cracks around the window frame. But the generally temperate weather in Van Diemen’s Land had lulled her into thinking winter would be mild. The brutal cold, when it came, was a shock.

  It was bleak and windy when Hazel joined the assignables in the courtyard for the first time one July morning. The cobblestones were slick with ice; the sky was white, mottled with gray, the color of dirty snow. The convicts stood like horses in two lines, stamping their feet. Their breath smoked the air. When the gate was opened, about a dozen free settlers entered, their thick coats and wool hats in marked contrast to the convicts’ thin dresses and wraps.

  Hazel’s hair was neatly pulled back and her face washed. She wore a clean white apron over her gray dress, and a shawl over that. Maeve had told her that the more respectable-looking and polite a convict was, the nicer her placement. A fancy house didn’t necessarily mean kinder employers, but it did mean better conditions. Sometimes there were even perks: extra rations, clothes, shoes. Perhaps a discarded toy or book she could give to Ruby.

  The settlers strolled up and down the lines, asking questions: What are your skills? Can you cook? Can you sew?

  Yes, sir. I was employed as a plain cook and housemaid.

  I’m a farm servant, ma’am. I can wash and iron. Milk cows and make butter.

  A plump older woman in a navy-blue dress, heavy overcoat, and fur cap paused in front of Hazel and moved on, making her way down the line. A few moments later she circled back. “What is your name, prisoner?”

  “Hazel Ferguson, ma’am.”

  “I haven’t seen you before. What was your past assignment?”

  The woman had a haughty air. She’d probably never been a convict, Hazel thought.

  “I worked at the nursery.”

  “You have a child?”

  “A daughter. She’s at the Queen’s Orphan School now.”

  “You hardly look—”

  Hazel told the truth. “I’m seventeen.”

  The woman nodded. “What are your skills?”

  Hazel chewed her lip. No one wanted a nurse or a midwife, Maeve said; they didn’t trust convicts for that. “I’m qualified to be a housemaid, ma’am. And a ladies’ maid.”

  “You’re experienced with laundry?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ever worked in a kitchen?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Hazel said, though she hadn’t.

  The woman patted her lips with two fingers. “I am Mrs. Crain, housekeeper to the governor of Hobart Town. The standards of my household are exacting. I tolerate no slackness or misbehavior. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I am only here today because I had to let the last convict maid go. Quite frankly, I would prefer not to use prison labor, but it can’t be helped. There are simply not enough free settlers.” Mrs. Crain lifted her arm, and the matron hurried over.

  “This one should do all right, Mrs. Crain,” she said. “We’ve had no complaints.”

  Hazel followed the housekeeper out onto the street, toward a horse-drawn open carriage with bright blue seats. Mount Wellington, looming above, was blanketed with snow.

  “You’ll sit across from me today,” Mrs. Crain said brusquely. “Starting tomorrow, you will travel in a cart with the other convict maids before sunrise.”

  Hazel hadn’t been in a proper carriage since she was six years old, visiting the seaside village of Troon, on the only holiday she’d ever taken with her mother. There’d been another person, a man, in the carriage. His breath had smelled of alcohol and he kept putting his hand on her mother’s knee. Her mother had promised that she and Hazel would share crumpets and cream cakes at a tea shop and take long walks along the scenic shore, but as it turned out, Hazel spent a lot of time shivering on the windy beach alone while her mother and her new friend were “exploring the shops,” as her mother put it.

  One more disappointment. But the carriage was nice, as Hazel remembered.

  Now she sat beside Mrs. Crain, trying not to shiver in her shawl.

  The horses trotted briskly along Macquarie Street before turning down a long driveway lined with gum trees. They came to a stop in front of a stately sandstone building with two curving staircases that led to the front door. Hazel followed Mrs. Crain to the servants’ quarters, where, she was told, she would change clothes before and after her shifts. Blue cotton dresses for the convict maids to wear hung on a pole; aprons, caps, clean undergarments, and stockings were folded on shelves. Mrs. Crain showed Hazel where to wash her face and hands before beginning work each day, and gave her a comb—which the convicts weren’t allowed at the prison—to part her hair in the middle before tying it back and securing her cap on her head.

  A convict maid must always be busy, Mrs. Crain said. She must not gossip or laugh loudly or sit down, unless she is mending clothing or polishing silver. “You are expressly forbidden from opening the front door; that is the butler’s job,” she said as she took Hazel through the house. “You may not talk directly to any member of the Franklin family or their visitors. You will use the back staircases and hallways. As much as possible, you must stay out of sight.”

  Two of the maids Hazel spoke with later in the morning offered a different sort of advice. Sometimes Sir John grabbed you when and where you least expected it, so you had to stay alert. Lady Franklin blamed anything that went wrong on the staff. Miss Eleanor was not very bright and could be demanding: once she insisted that a convict maid stay awake all night to hem a dress she might wear to a party. (And ended up wearing a different one.) They also told Hazel that the Franklins had taken in a native girl as a strange kind of experiment. She lived in the nursery. One of Lady Franklin’s whims.

  “What is the girl like?” Hazel asked.

  “Seems lonely, poor thing. She had a pet weasel, but Montagu’s dog ate it.”

  “A possum, I think it was,” the other one said. “I’d heard that the natives speak only gibberish, but this one knows French as well as English.”

  “Maybe the clever ones can be trained,” said the first. “Like dogs.”

  Hazel was curious about this child. She’d never seen a native; were they really that different? But she said nothing. She was not going to gossip, or ask questions, or otherwise jeopardize her new position. All she wanted to do was to hold on to her place in this household with both fists, to serve her time and get out.

  Over the next few weeks at the governor’s house, Hazel acclimated to the routine. Just after dawn, as soon as she arrived, she hurried to the shed behind the kitchen outbuilding to get wood for the hearth. After lighting the fire, she filled two big black kettles with water from the cistern in the kitchen and hung them on iron hooks above the flames. When the cook arrived, Hazel and another convict maid went through the main building, lighting fires in the breakfast room and the drawing rooms so that they’d be warm when Sir John and Lady Franklin emerged from their chambers. The maids swept the foyer and front steps and veranda and set the breakfast table for the family, then crossed the courtyard to the kitchen to make toast and scoop butter into tiny dishes. While Lady Franklin and Sir John were eating, the maids went into their bedrooms and knelt in front of the fireplaces, sifting cinders and cleaning the grates, then opened windows and aired feather beds, turning and plumping them. (How different these downy mattresses were from the hard canvas hammocks at the Cascades!) They dusted picture frames and chair upholstery and shelves filled with books. They carried the family’s chamber pots to
the outdoor privy behind the stables, where they emptied them and rinsed them with well water.

  When the Franklins had finished breakfast, Hazel cleared the table and took the dirty dishes to the kitchen to wash in the stone sink, using care not to chip the delicate teacups. Now she could eat her own breakfast: slow-cooked oats, with tea and toast and honey.

  Then she cleaned the candlesticks and trimmed the lamps.

  She refilled kettles all day long. Twice a day, she knelt in front of the kitchen hearth, sifting the cinders and cleaning the grate.

  Once the morning chores were done, Hazel’s work varied by day. On Mondays she cleaned the kitchen, scouring the pantry and the drawers and scrubbing the stone floor on her hands and knees, trying her best to stay out of the way of the cook. Tuesdays and Wednesdays were washing days. She pulled linens off the beds and collected clothing from each room, removing buttons and ribbons before dunking them in large copper urns. Three convict maids fed the washing through the mangle before setting it out on the drying lawn or hanging it on the clothesline. Inevitably, they got soaking wet. They had to change into dry uniforms before hanging clothes in the frigid air.

  Sir John’s white dress shirts, half-frozen on the line, looked like an army of ghosts.

  Bedrooms were cleaned on Thursdays, the dining room and drawing rooms on Fridays. Once a week, on Friday mornings, three maids filled the Franklins’ bathtubs with warm water brought by the stable boys, adding oil scented with lavender.

  For the first time in her life, Hazel had a steady job. The house was orderly and warm and redolent of lilacs. She liked the sounds of the courtyard: the horses clip-clopping up the drive, the crowing roosters and grunting pigs. She liked the smells of the kitchen: fruit pies cooling on the counter, lamb roasting slowly on the turnspit. She would have considered herself quite fortunate were it not for the fact that Ruby languished in the orphanage, captive behind its walls.

  Every day, in the midafternoon, Hazel was permitted to take a quarter-hour break in the kitchen and wrap her hands around a cup of tea sweetened with jam. She’d begun collecting pieces of rags from old clothing and sheets too worn to be used by the Franklins, and in quiet moments she pulled out the scraps she’d cut into small, uniform pieces, and worked on a quilt to bring to Ruby.

  One Friday morning Hazel was cleaning the grate in the green drawing room when Lady Franklin came in with Mrs. Crain. Hazel gathered her brushes quickly and stood to leave, but Lady Franklin waved at her and said, “I’d rather you finish your work than leave ashes on the hearth.”

  The two women sat at a small round table, discussing plans for the day. A tinker was stopping by with his cart; Mrs. Crain would need to gather utensils that needed fixing. The display cases in Lady Franklin’s quarters required dusting: could Mrs. Crain assign that task to a convict maid? Oh—and she should inform the cook that Sir John had invited another guest to the dinner this evening. “He’ll need a place card. His name is . . . let’s see . . .” Lady Franklin peered at the paper in her hand through a magnifying glass. “Caleb Dunne. Doctor Caleb Dunne.”

  Hazel, startled, dropped her brush. Mrs. Crain shot her a glance.

  “Sir John met him at a luncheon a few days ago,” Lady Franklin was saying. “He recently moved to Hobart Town and set up a private practice. Apparently, he is unmarried. It’s a pity I can’t think of a young lady with whom to pair him.”

  “Miss Eleanor?” Mrs. Crain suggested.

  “Goodness no,” Lady Franklin said with a small laugh. “Dr. Dunne is an intellectual. He was educated at the Royal College of Surgeons. Seat him next to me.”

  When, later that day, Hazel encountered Mrs. Crain in the courtyard, she offered to stay late to help with the dinner. Mrs. Crain shook her head. “We only employ free settlers at evening events. Lady Franklin doesn’t want the convict maids on the property after dark.”

  The next morning, Hazel casually inquired about the party, but all she managed to glean was that the roast was overdone (according to the cook), and the guests polished off the last of the sherry (according to Mrs. Crain). Neither of them had a word to say about Dr. Dunne.

  On Sundays, standing in front of the wooden prison doors with the other mothers, waiting to walk to the orphanage, Hazel marveled at their dogged calmness, and her own. They trudged the four miles in silence, in the cold, waiting for an hour or more to be let in, then spent two hours trying desperately to make up for a long week of absence.

  We should be rending our clothes, she thought. We should be howling in the streets.

  The warden at the orphanage watched the mothers carefully, afraid they might grab their children and try to escape. He wasn’t wrong to be worried. Every fiber of Hazel’s being longed to snatch Ruby and flee. She spent hours, days, thinking about it. It was thrilling to imagine doing so. To imagine doing anything.

  Hazel recited rhymes from Mother Goose that she remembered from childhood—stories about a boy who tumbled down a hill and cracked his skull, and London Bridge going up in flames, and a man who went to bed and bumped his head and couldn’t get up in the morning. One-year-old Ruby babbled along; the verses delighted her. But Hazel couldn’t help thinking about the heartache and calamity lurking beneath the words. A bleeding child, a bridge on fire, a man dying in his bed. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, / And down will come baby, / Cradle and all.

  The rhymes seemed ominous to her now. They felt like warnings.

  Each week, Ruby was paler and more withdrawn. No longer did she cling to Hazel when she arrived or cry piteously when she left. She had become almost indifferent, examining Hazel coolly under her eyelashes. Within several months she was treating her like a benevolent stranger. She allowed Hazel to play pat-a-cake with her, but seemed to barely tolerate it, like a cat struggling against an embrace it didn’t invite.

  One Sunday, Ruby’s upper arms were bruised; another week red strips were visible across the backs of her legs. “Did someone hurt you?” Hazel asked, searching her eyes. Ruby pulled away, discomfited by Hazel’s intensity and too young to understand what she was asking. When Hazel complained to the warden, he tilted her chin and said, “No marks appear on children who don’t deserve them.”

  Hazel’s heart was a wound that wouldn’t heal.

  What was happening to Ruby that she didn’t know about?

  Everything.

  Olive was standing just inside the main gate at the Cascades, waiting for her, when Hazel returned from the governor’s house one evening. Hazel hadn’t seen her in a while. She’d been sentenced to three weeks in the crime yard for profanity and insubordination—no surprise.

  Lifting her chin toward a group of women across the courtyard, Olive said, “Ye need to be careful. Some think you’re getting special treatment. First the surgeon’s quarters on the ship, then the nursery. Now the governor’s house.”

  Hazel nodded. She knew Olive was right. Other convicts had it much worse. Their employers drank, worked them to the bone, beat them. How many women were pregnant now with babies they didn’t ask for? She’d seen women do almost anything to avoid their assignments, including sucking on copper pipe to turn their tongues blue and upset their stomachs so they’d be too sick to work.

  “Just watch out for yourself,” Olive said.

  Mathinna

  It is increasingly apparent the Aboriginal natives of this colony are, and have ever been, a most treacherous race; and that the kindness and humanity which they have always experienced from the free settlers has not tended to civilize them to any degree.

  —George Arthur, Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, in a letter to Sir George Murray, Secretary of State for War and the Colonies, 1830

  Government House, Hobart Town, 1841

  The winter, it seemed to Mathinna, was lasting forever. The courtyard still wore a thin crust of frozen mud that crackled when she walked across it. Her bedroom was unheated; the cold seeped deep into her bones. She crept around the main house, searching for a place to get wa
rm. Shooed out of the public rooms by Mrs. Crain, she sought refuge in the kitchen.

  Slicing a pile of potatoes, nursing a tumbler of sugar-laced gin, Mrs. Wilson talked about her long-ago life in Ireland—how she’d once been a cook on a fine estate on the outskirts of Dublin but was unjustly accused of stealing linens to sell on the street. Her employer had recently returned from Paris with a steamer trunk of linens, and Mrs. Wilson was under the admittedly mistaken impression that she was doing the household a favor by disposing of the old ones. No one would’ve caught on if the napkins weren’t monogrammed; it was her mistake not to remove the stitching. She genuinely believed that her ladyship would’ve been pleased to know that her old cloths—rags, really—were being put to good use.

  “She’d be pleased to know the cook was pilfering her linens?” the newest convict maid said with a smirk, ironing a sheet in the back of the room.

  Mrs. Wilson looked up from her potatoes. “Not pilfering. Disposing of.”

  “Ye pocketed the profits, yes?”

  “It wasn’t her ladyship turned me in,” she huffed. “The butler had it in for me. My mistake, I suppose. Pushed off his advances one too many times.”

  The maid smiled at Mathinna. “What d’ye suppose Lady Franklin would do if I had a mind to lift a table runner or two?”

  “Don’t be getting high and mighty. You’re one to talk. Silver spoons I hear it was,” Mrs. Wilson said.

  “Just one spoon.”

  “All the same.”

  “At least I’ll admit to my crime.”

  Mathinna looked back and forth between them. She’d never heard a convict maid challenge the cook. The maid gave her a wink.

  “I’m just teasin’ ye, Mrs. Wilson. Something to do on a cold gray morning.”

  “You’re lucky to be here, Hazel. Ye should know your place.”

  The maid held up the sheet and folded it by the corners. “There’s none of us lucky to be here, Mrs. Wilson. But your point is taken.”