The Exiles

by Christina Baker Kline

  “Where are Lady Franklin and Sir John?”

  “Out, I’m afraid. A previous commitment. But they said to tell you that . . .” For the first time, Mrs. Crain seemed to fumble over her words. “Well, that they feel certain that this decision . . . this next step . . . is the right one. For you, and for them. For all of us, frankly. And that we must rise to meet the challenges ahead with . . . with fortitude.”

  When Mathinna left the dining room and went out onto the stone apron of the driveway, she encountered a wooden cart with open sides holding a small trunk and her rush basket. The driver, wearing a patched jacket, slouched against a wheel. Seeing her, he nodded. “There’s certainly no mistaking ye. Ready?”

  “You’re here for me?” she said with surprise. She’d never ridden in a cart.

  “You’re the only black girl here, ain’t ye? Going to the orphan school?”

  Mrs. Wilson had been right. She felt a chill in her bones.

  “There’s a plank in the back,” he said, sensing her trepidation. “Ye don’t have to sit on the straw.”

  “Oh.” It was difficult to swallow. “I—I was told I’d have time to say goodbye.”

  He shrugged. “Take your time. I’m in no hurry to get back to that place.”

  Hazel was in the far courtyard, hanging clothing on the line. When Mathinna told her she was leaving, she dropped the damp clothes into a basket. “Now?”

  “There’s a cart out front.”

  “A cart.” Hazel shook her head.

  “They’re sending me to the orphanage.” Mathinna felt her heart constrict as if it were being squeezed. “I’m . . . I’m scared.”

  “I know ye are,” Hazel said with a sigh. “But you’re a strong girl. It won’t be so bad.”

  “You know it will,” Mathinna said in a quiet voice.

  Hazel’s eyes met hers. She did. “I come on Sundays to see Ruby. I’ll try to find ye.”

  “They won’t allow it, though, will they?”

  Hazel cocked her head. Then she nodded toward a barrel. “Sit there for a minute. I’ll be right back.”

  Mathinna sat on the barrel, gazing up at the gum trees with their stocking-cap leaves and straggly white flowers, the clouds beyond like spun sugar. A parrot alighted on a bush near her and cocked its head, its eyes as dark as seed. Just as suddenly, it rose into the air, a flash of red against the sky.

  “I have something for ye.” Hazel was beside her now, on the barrel. “I’m going to slip it in your pocket.” She sat closer, and Mathinna felt a tug on her apron. “Put your hand in.”

  It was . . . tiny shells. Strung together. A big clump of them. She looked at Hazel.

  “All three necklaces. Yes, I nicked ’em. I doubt Lady Franklin will notice. Anyway, I don’t care. They belong to ye.” Reaching for Mathinna’s hand, she said, “There’s something I want to tell ye.”

  Mathinna looked down at her brown hand in Hazel’s pale freckled one. They were almost the same size.

  “My friend—the one who died—taught me a trick to play in your mind when you’re troubled. Ye think of yourself as a tree, with all the rings inside. And every ring is someone ye care about, or a place you’ve been. Ye carry them with ye wherever ye go.”

  Mathinna remembered what her mother had said about thinking of yourself as the thread of a necklace, the people and places you treasure as the shells. Maybe Wanganip and Hazel were saying the same thing: that if you love something it stays with you, even after it’s gone. Her mother and her father and Palle . . . the spiny mountain ridge and the white sand beach on Flinders . . . Waluka . . . the sister she never knew. Hazel, even. Each a separate shell. All embedded in the rings.

  Maybe she would always be alone and apart. Always in transition, on her way to someplace else, never quite belonging. She knew both too much and too little of the world. But what she knew, she carried in her bones. Her mother’s love. The shelter of her stepfather’s arms. The warmth of a campfire. The silky feel of wallaby grass against her shins. She’d seen a strip of land from the open ocean and learned to rig a sail. Felt the shapes of different languages in her mouth and worn a dress of scarlet satin. Posed for a portrait like the daughter of a chieftain that she was.

  She felt her fear unspooling like a tight fist opening. It was as if she’d been standing on a precipice and suddenly tipped forward. There was no point in feeling afraid. She was already falling, falling through the air, and her future, whatever it held, was rushing up to meet her.

  Hazel

  Beautiful as it was, it was sown in blood, as indeed we may say of the whole civilized structure of this island.

  –Oline Keese, The Broad Arrow: Being Passages from the History of Maida Gwynnham, a Lifer, 1859

  Hobart Town, Van Diemen’s Land, 1842

  With the Franklins’ departure date approaching, Hazel’s days were now spent packing linens into cedar chests, wrapping china in rags, cataloguing silverware and figurines, and filling wooden crates.

  The convict maids were told that their employment would end when the Franklins embarked. The new governor might or might not use labor from the Cascades. It was often a surprise to newly arrived British gentry that convicts, not even ex-convicts, would be working in their homes, with convictions ranging from vagrancy to murder. But free-settler labor came with its own problems. You had to pay them, for one thing, and unlike a captive labor force, if they decided to walk off the job there wasn’t much you could do to stop them.

  “Convicts are only permitted to visit their own children,” the warden at the Queen’s Orphan School told Hazel when she inquired about Mathinna. “Even that is a privilege.”

  “But I was her maid at Governor Franklin’s residence,” she said, stretching the truth only a little.

  “That is irrelevant.”

  “I promised I’d visit. To make sure she’s all right.”

  “If you continue to argue, you may be barred from seeing your own child as well.”

  She tried one last tack: “I told the Franklins I’d keep an eye on her.”

  “Unlikely. Besides, Lady Franklin was here only a few days ago,” the warden said with a dismissive wave.

  Hazel was stunned. “She was? For what reason?”

  “She didn’t say. Who knows, perhaps she’d . . . reconsidered. At any rate, the girl had so reverted to her natural savage state, in such a short amount of time, that Lady Franklin chose to leave without seeing her.”

  “What do ye mean, her ‘savage state’?”

  The warden shook his head, clucking his tongue. “It is a mistake to attempt to civilize the natives. The Franklins meant well, no doubt, but the result is a creature who possesses both the natural belligerence of her race and a rather unnatural precocity. Within the space of only a few days here she had become quite ungovernable. We had to separate her from the general population.”

  “But she is only eleven years old.”

  The warden shrugged. “It is a pity, but we had no alternative.”

  Several Sundays later, when Hazel was waiting with a group of convict mothers at the front gate of the Cascades to begin their walk to the orphanage, the matron pulled her aside.

  “The superintendent needs to see you at once.”

  “But I’m going to visit my daughter.”

  The matron didn’t reply; she simply turned toward the superintendent’s quarters. Hazel hesitated. But she knew she couldn’t disobey.

  Inside his office, Mr. Hutchinson stood behind his desk. “We received an anonymous letter, Miss Ferguson, informing us that you are not who you purport to be.”

  Her mind raced. Her head felt light. “Sir?”

  “You are not the mother of the child you claim as your own.”

  Hazel stopped breathing. “But ye have—ye have the birth certificate.” Her voice came out as a croak.

  “Indeed we do. So we undertook an inquiry. The convicts and sailors we spoke with said that at no point during the crossing did you appear to be with child. A
convict with whom you were frequently seen”—he moved his glasses down his nose as he consulted the sheet on the table in front of him—“a Miss Evangeline Stokes, was, in fact, due to give birth. And . . . where is . . .” He rifled around the desk. “Ah, yes. The death certificate. She was murdered, apparently. There was an investigation, and . . . yes, here it is. A crewman, Daniel Buck, was charged with the crime. He was confined on the ship and later sentenced to life in prison. You, Miss Ferguson, gave testimony as a witness.” He thrust the report toward her across the desk. “Is this your name?”

  It was her name. She nodded.

  “Did you not testify to what you saw?”

  “Yes.” She bowed her head.

  “Did you not report that you were present in the room when Miss Stokes gave birth to”—he consulted the sheet—“a ‘healthy female’?”

  Hazel couldn’t speak. She stood before him, trembling.

  “Well, prisoner?”

  “I did,” she said quietly.

  He set the report on a stack of papers. “The evidence is undeniable. You claimed the child in order to receive preferential treatment, to be allowed to stay with the infant instead of being sent out on assignment.”

  Her heart was oozing now, dripping into a puddle. “I did it to save the baby’s life.”

  “Did you nurse this child, prisoner?”

  “No, sir, but—”

  “Then you cannot claim that you saved her life. The woman—women, I suppose—who nursed her have more of a legitimate claim to her than you do.”

  “But sir—”

  “Do you deny these charges?”

  “Please, let me explain.”

  “Do you deny them, prisoner?”

  “No, sir. But—”

  The superintendent held up his hand. He looked at the matron, and then back at Hazel. “You are hereby sentenced to three months’ imprisonment in crime class, a fortnight of which will be spent in solitary confinement.”

  “But . . . my daughter—”

  “As we have established, the child is not your daughter. Your visiting rights are revoked.”

  Hazel looked tearfully from the superintendent to the matron. How could this be happening?

  Two guards grabbed her roughly by the upper arms and dragged her past the group of women she’d been standing with only a few minutes earlier, now staring at her open-mouthed.

  “Please,” she blurted, “tell my daughter . . .” Her voice trailed off. Tell my daughter . . . what? That I’m not really her mother? That I might never see her again?

  “Tell her that I love her,” she wept.

  In the crime yard, the matron handed Hazel a spool of yellow thread and a needle and instructed her to embroider the letter C, for “crime class,” on her sleeve, the hem of her petticoat, and the back of her shift. Hazel sat on a barrel and bent her head over the task. It was hard pulling the thread through the coarse fabric, and she kept pricking her fingers. When she was finished, the yellow thread was smudged with blood. The matron motioned for her to stand. Two guards held Hazel’s arms while a third pulled out a large pair of scissors.

  “Use care with this one,” the matron said. “Cut it cleanly.”

  “What does it matter?” the one with the scissors said. “It’s only to be mixed with clay for bricks.”

  The matron fingered Hazel’s thick, wavy hair. “I think it can be salvaged for a wig. Titian hair is in fashion these days, you know.”

  The solitary cells were at the back of the crime yard, separated from the rest of the yard by a stone wall. The guards gave Hazel one sour-smelling, flea-ridden blanket and let her into a narrow cell with a grated open window above the door that let in a weak filtered light. They dropped a heavy bucket on the floor filled with oakum, a caulking compound used to plug holes in ships. Oakum was made of hemp rope, one of the guards explained, fused with tar and wax and crusted with salt. Hazel’s task was to separate the strands by loosening the coils, to unpick the fibers and toss them in a metal bucket. “Ye best get to work. If ye don’t unravel five pounds of this a day, you’ll be beaten with a rod,” he said.

  The other guard tossed a heel of moldy bread on the floor. “If you’re standing when we open the door in the morning, you’ll be let out in the yard for a few minutes,” he told her as they left. “If you’re lyin’ down, you’ll be left in here all day.” They locked her inside with a skeleton key.

  The cell was as cold and deathly quiet as a tomb. Shivering in her shawl against the stone wall in the darkness, Hazel pulled the greasy blanket around her shoulders. She heard the thwack of hammers and the echoey voices of male convicts in the next yard, working on the prison expansion. Smelled the residue of waste in the bucket in the corner, the mold creeping up the walls, her own monthly blood. She rubbed the oval disk around her neck, tracing the numbers with her finger: 1–7–1.

  She thought of Ruby in the dormitory at the orphanage, waiting in vain for her to arrive. She thought of Mathinna, isolated in some dismal room. Evangeline as she fell to her death—a glimpse of gown, arms flailing in the air.

  She’d been no good to any of them.

  Hazel banged her head against the wall. She wailed and sobbed until a guard rapped on the door of her cell, telling her to quiet down or he’d make her quiet down.

  In the morning, frost dusted her blanket. When she heard the clang of a bell and the clacking of locks being undone, she struggled to stand.

  The cobblestones in the courtyard were treacherous with ice. Her vision was blurry, her limbs stiff and achy, her feet unsteady as she plodded back and forth.

  For the rest of the day she sat in the darkness of her cell picking oakum. As her cold fingers worried the rope, she tried to view the task as a puzzle rather than a punishment, a way to endure the minutes. This goes here, that goes there. A way to escape the torture of her thoughts. But she could not escape them. Could not stop thinking of Ruby, alone in her bed, wondering why her mother hadn’t come. Hazel seethed like a kettle on a low flame, picking at the oakum, picking at the question of who betrayed her. Which of her fellow inmates was so jealous, so vindictive, that she would ruin the life of a child?

  Her hands cracked and bled. Salt seeped into the cuts; they felt as if they were on fire. She tried to manage the pain, as she’d taught women in labor to do: to think of it as a part of her, as much a part of her as her limbs. Without the pain, she could not complete the task. She needed to listen to it, breathe through it. Be alert to its ebbs and flows. Dwell inside it.

  At the end of the day, a guard arrived to weigh her bucket. “Five pounds,” he said. “Just.”

  Sometimes she made a sound just to hear a sound. Smacked the wall. Flicked her finger through the water bucket. Hummed to herself. Maybe she could drown out the noises in her head, the fear and loneliness and self-recrimination.

  A person could go crazy. People did.

  She remembered things she thought she had forgotten. She muttered lines from The Tempest she’d memorized on the ship.

  I was the man i’ the moon when time was.

  You may deny me, but I’ll be your servant / Whether you will or no.

  Hell is empty / And all the devils . . .

  I wish mine eyes / Would, with themselves, shut up my thoughts.

  Even the nursery rhymes she’d sung to Ruby, the ones that made her shudder: Ring a ring o’ roses . . .

  Sometimes, on the way to assignment, or in their hammocks at night, the convict women sang a dirge that Hazel had considered maudlin. But now, in her dark cell, she sang it loudly, wallowing in self-pity:

  I toil each day in grief and pain

  And sleepless through the night remain

  My constant toils are unrepaid

  And wretched is the Convict Maid.

  Oh could I but once more be free

  I’d ne’er again a captive be

  But I would seek some honest trade

  And ne’er become a Convict Maid.

  She ran her ragged
fingernails down her arms. She didn’t even have the satisfaction of seeing the blood. She smelled it, though, and felt it slick on her skin. She thought, as she often did, about her mother pushing her out on the street to pick pockets. She thought of all the times her mother had sent her out to steal rum, or something she could trade for rum.

  That final time she’d stolen for her mother: the silver spoon.

  How could any mother do that to her child? Hazel’s anger was a hot coal burning a hole in the center of her chest. In the dark, in the cold, she stoked it, feeling its glow.

  When the guard opened the door the next morning, she saw him flinch at the sight of her arms through the threadbare shawl. She looked down at the red crusted streaks, then gazed at him and smiled. Good. See my pain.

  “You’re only hurtin’ yourself, lassie,” he said, shaking his head.

  The first time her mother was too drunk to help a woman in labor, when Hazel was twelve, she knew what to do. She’d always been a quick learner. “Nothing gets past ye,” her mother said—not necessarily a compliment. It was true; once something was in her head, she didn’t forget. For years she’d accompanied her mother to the homes and hovels of women about to give birth, because if she didn’t, she’d be left at home alone. She’d paid close attention when her mother concocted pastes and potions, noting which herbs to crush with which liquids, how to make a salve or a tonic or a cure. Her mother allowed her to stay in the room, to fetch the water and grind the herbs. She grew to tell the cries apart and to anticipate the most welcome cry: that of the newborn.

  Alone with that frantic pregnant woman, Hazel boiled rags and made her comfortable, showing her how to breathe and calming her fears. She told her when to push and when to stop. She lifted the slippery newborn onto its mother’s stomach and cut its umbilical cord, then taught the woman to nurse.

  A boy, it was. Named Gavin, she remembered, after his no-good father.

  That was the day Hazel knew she would be a midwife. She had the touch, like her mother.