The Exiles

by Christina Baker Kline

  He broke into a smile when he saw them. “What a pleasant surprise!” Crouching down, he gave Ruby a hug. “How have you been?”

  “I showed a man my fairy garden and then he got very sick,” Ruby said.

  Hazel cringed. It hadn’t occurred to her that Ruby would blurt it out.

  “Did he? And is he all better now?” Dunne asked.

  “No, he isn’t.”

  “Oh dear.” He looked up at Hazel, seeking explanation.

  “Yes. It’s . . . a long story.” Her heart quavered in her chest. “I’ve got the horse and buggy. I thought we might take a picnic to Mount Wellington. Would that be nice?”

  “Very nice,” he said.

  “In Melbourne there’s talk of ending transport altogether,” Dunne said. “Lots of newspaper editorials. It doesn’t look good in the eyes of the rest of the world.” They were sitting on a large flat rock, the picnic spread out around them. The wind from the sea was warm on their faces and the trees were lush and green. Eagles dipped and soared; low-hanging clouds puffed in the sky. Below them, long swells frothed into sandstone rocks as white as bone.

  “Do ye think it will happen?” Hazel asked.

  “I do. It must.”

  Children and grandchildren of the early convicts were settled citizens now, he said. The place was becoming almost respectable. “It would be wise for Britain to remember the rebellion of the American colonies before they lose what goodwill they’ve got left,” he said.

  Hazel gave him a distracted smile. Go slow, she thought. Ease into it. But that wasn’t her style. When Ruby slid off the rock in search of sticks to build a fairy house, Hazel turned to him. “I need to tell ye what happened.”

  “Oh—yes,” he said, sitting back. “The man who got sick.”

  She took a breath. “Danny Buck was in the garden with Ruby when I returned from the wharf ten days ago. He had a knife. He said he would kill her, and he threatened to rape me.”

  His eyes widened. “My god. Hazel.”

  “Ye know that bush by the front step?” she said, forging ahead. “Angel’s trumpet, it’s called.”

  “The one with pink flowers.”

  “Yes. The sap is toxic. Too much of it is fatal.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “It is. And—anyway—it was.”

  He looked in her eyes. “It was.”

  “Yes.” When he didn’t respond right away, she added, “We called the police, and they took him away. The plant is a narcotic; overdoses aren’t unusual.”

  “I see.” He exhaled through his nose. “My god,” he said again.

  For a few moments they sat in silence, watching Ruby in the distance as she snapped tiny sticks in half and arranged them in piles. Was he horrified? Appalled? She couldn’t guess. “I don’t . . .” Hazel paused, picking her words carefully. “I don’t regret it.”

  Dunne nodded slowly.

  “I’m relieved he’s gone.”

  He sighed, running his hand through his hair. “Look. I actually think you were . . . that was . . . incredibly brave. You saw what you needed to do, and you did it. You saved your life, and Ruby’s. I’m only sorry I wasn’t there.”

  He reached for her hand, and she let him hold it. She looked down at Ruby in the grass, bending over a clump of flowers, and then back at Dunne, at his dark hair curling around his ears, his trim beard and dark lashes. She listened to the dull roar of seawater in the distance, gushing out of caves.

  Tentatively she ran a hand along Dunne’s forearm. He turned clumsily toward her, knocking over the plate of cheese and apple slices between them. Reaching up to his face with both hands, she pulled him close. She felt his skin warm beneath his beard and smelled his sweet, appley breath, and then his lips found hers, his hands through her still-cropped hair. Closing her eyes, she breathed him into her.

  “Mama, let’s make a bracelet!” Ruby shouted, running toward them, holding up a cluster of daisies.

  When Hazel pulled away from Dunne, she felt as she had when her feet touched solid ground for the first time after four months at sea. Unsteady, disoriented, the world around her vibrating.

  After weaving a daisy chain, Hazel sat on the rock while Dunne helped Ruby construct her fairy village in the clearing below. As light faded over the mountain, Hazel gazed out at the jagged, green-tinged cliffs rooted in the sea. How far she had traveled to get here! From the wynds of Glasgow to the bowels of a slave ship to a prison halfway around the world. And now to a sandstone cottage in a frontier town where she was free to ply her trade. To mother a child who needed her. To live in peace with a man she might be beginning to love.

  She thought of the moments that had saved her. Watching The Tempest in Kelvingrove Park. I was the man i’ the moon when time was. Evangeline teaching her to read. Olive’s unexpected generosity and Maeve’s camaraderie. Dunne’s compassion. Ruby, the good that had overcome the heartbreak, the promise that Evangeline never lived to see fulfilled. Maybe Hazel had saved Ruby’s life, or maybe she would’ve survived regardless. But Hazel knew with certainty that Ruby had transformed hers.

  She was starting to believe that she belonged in this terrible, beautiful place, with its convict-built mansions, its dense bush and strange animals. The eucalyptus with their half-shed bark and woolly foliage, orange lichen that spread like molten lava across the rocks. Here she was, rooted to the earth. Her branches reaching toward the sky, the rings inside as dense as bone. She felt ancient, as if she’d lived forever, but she was only nineteen years old. The rest of her life in front of her like a ribbon unfurling.

  Ruby

  If society will not admit of woman’s free development, then society must be remodeled.

  —Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell, 1869; British physician, mentor to Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson

  St. John’s Wood, London, 1868

  It was surprisingly easy to track down the address. Armed with his full name—Cecil Frederic Whitstone—Ruby charmed a receptive clerk at the Metropolitan Board of Works near Trafalgar Square, who, within minutes, produced a ledger of London taxpayers and located a Mr. C. F. Whitstone at 22 Blenheim Road.

  “Barrister,” the clerk told her. “Lives alone, apparently. No marriage or birth certificates linked to the name. Are you staying in London for long, Miss Dunne?”

  Ruby had come to England to apprentice with Dr. Elizabeth Garrett, a physician who founded St. Mary’s Dispensary in Marylebone, a place for poor women to receive medical care. It was the first of its kind, staffed entirely by women. Dr. Garrett, only four years older than Ruby, was the first female in Britain to qualify as a doctor and a surgeon. Shortly after opening the dispensary, she placed a notice in London newspapers, seeking college-educated women who wished to become doctors and nurses. In Hobart Town, five months later, Ruby opened the Saturday Review and spied it.

  In her long letter to Dr. Garrett, Ruby explained that she’d grown up with a surgeon father and midwife mother in a frontier town on an island off the coast of mainland Australia. From a young age, she’d been put to work polishing instruments, cataloguing medication, and assisting in the operating room. As the town expanded, so had the family practice. Eventually her father founded Warwick Hospital, named after the town in the Midlands where he was raised. Ruby’s dream was to help her father run the practice one day.

  But she had learned all she could from her parents. Her mother’s medical skills were based on folk remedies and trial and error, not scholarship. Her father had taught her anatomy and the rudiments of surgery, but now, at twenty-eight, she craved the kind of formal education he’d received at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Women were not allowed to apply to medical school in Australia, so this opportunity would be life changing. She proposed studying with Dr. Garrett for three months so that she might return to Warwick Hospital with the latest information and techniques.

  Dr. Garrett wrote back: “I will find you reasonable lodgings, and you will stay for a year and earn a degree.”
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br />   A month after receiving this letter, Ruby was on a ship bound for London.

  Ruby had never met a woman as frank, outspoken, and boldly revolutionary as Dr. Garrett. Determined to go to medical school, in 1862, at the age of twenty-six, she’d found a way in on a technicality. The Society of Apothecaries had not thought to forbid women from taking their exams until after Dr. Garrett passed them all. Later, as a member of the British Women’s Suffrage Committee, she presented petitions to Parliament demanding the vote for female heads of household.

  “Penal transportation to Tasmania only ended fifteen years ago,” she said with characteristic bluntness when Ruby arrived in Marylebone. “I must ask: Are you related to a convict?”

  Ruby blanched slightly. This still wasn’t spoken of freely where she was from. But she was determined to be as forthright as Dr. Garrett. “I am,” she said. “My mother is from Glasgow and was sent to Australia at the age of sixteen. Many people in Tasmania have similar origins, though few talk about it.”

  “Ah—the ‘hated stain’ of transport. I read that they changed the name from Van Diemen’s Land to lessen the unsavory association with criminality.”

  “Well, that wasn’t the official reason given, but . . . yes.”

  “What was your mother’s offense, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Stealing a silver spoon.”

  Dr. Garrett gave an exasperated sigh. “This is why we can’t leave the making of laws to men. They result in travesties of injustice that unfairly burden the poor. And women. Those high and mighty aristocrats, in their black robes and powdered wigs—they have no idea.”

  Ruby had been to Melbourne once, on a summer holiday, but had never imagined a city as vast and sprawling as London, with its north and south banks bisected by a winding canal and linked by half a dozen bridges. (She was surprised to discover that London Bridge, familiar from the nursery rhyme, was quite intact.) She shared a room in a boarding house on Wimpole Street with another of Dr. Garrett’s protégés, a young woman from the Lake District whose family believed she was employed as a ladies’ maid. In fact, as Dr. Garrett pointed out when she arrived, Ruby was the only one of her students whose parents encouraged her desire to become a doctor. “It is my sense that, despite its hardships and limitations, living in a new world accords one certain freedoms. Social hierarchies are not as rigidly enforced. Would you agree that this is true?”

  “I don’t know,” Ruby said. “I’ve never lived in any other world.”

  “Well, now you will, and you can see for yourself,” Dr. Garrett said.

  In her free time Ruby explored the sights, from the British Museum to St. Paul’s Cathedral, from verdant parks to bustling teahouses. She sampled strawberryade and fried fish and chips at an outdoor market in Covent Garden. She attended a performance of The Tempest at the Lyceum Theatre and a trapeze show at a pleasure garden in North Woolwich. On one such outing she found herself in front of the imposing stone fortress of Newgate Prison and remembered the stories that Olive, her mother’s friend, had told about life inside its gates—how she’d met Evangeline there and found herself sentenced to transport on the same ship. How a Quaker reformer handed out Bibles and hung tin tickets around their necks—one of which Ruby had brought with her, wrapped in an old white handkerchief, to London.

  During her last week with Dr. Garrett, Ruby visited an orphanage. Stepping inside the front gate, she felt lightheaded. She’d never been able to remember much about her early years at the Queen’s Orphan School in New Town, but now she had such an overwhelming sense of panic that she thought she might faint.

  Dr. Garrett gave her a curious look. “Are you all right?”

  “I—I’m not sure.”

  “Let’s sit for a moment.”

  On the settee in the reception room, at Dr. Garrett’s insistence, Ruby tried to identify the feelings that had dredged up, seemingly out of nowhere: dread and anxiety and fear.

  “It’s only natural that you’d have such a response,” Dr. Garrett said. “You were a child taken from her mother.” She patted Ruby’s hand. “Your understanding of what it’s like to feel abandoned is yet another reason we need qualified doctors like you, Miss Dunne, working with vulnerable populations in far-flung places like Australia.”

  Now Ruby was scheduled to return to Tasmania two days hence. Before she departed, there was one thing left to do. Here she was, in front of the house of the man whose monogrammed handkerchief had made its way to Australia twenty-eight years earlier. She’d walked through the neighborhood half a dozen times in the past few months, trying to summon the courage to seek him out.

  The creamy white paint of the residence was patchy in spots and peeling from the eaves. Its vermillion front door was chipped; the hedges on either side of the front gate were pocked with brown. Weeds sprung from between the bricks of the walkway.

  Ruby pushed the bell and heard it warble inside the house.

  After an uncomfortable delay, the door opened, and a man winced into the light. “Yes? Can I help you?”

  It was too late to turn around. “Does a Mr. Whitstone reside here, by chance?”

  “I am Mr. Whitstone.”

  The man appeared to be in his early fifties. His hair was graying around the temples. He was thin, with pronounced cheekbones and slightly sunken brown eyes. It struck Ruby that he had probably been handsome once, though now he was somewhat frail, the skin on his face like a peach past its prime.

  And then, as if observing an object under a microscope come into focus, she noticed his resemblance to her. The same wavy brown hair and eyes and narrow build. The shape of the lips. Even an unconscious gesture, a certain tilt of the chin.

  “I am”—she put a hand to her chest—“Ruby Dunne. You don’t know me, but . . .” She reached into her purse and extracted the handkerchief. She held it out and he took it from her, examining it closely. “I believe you knew my . . .” She swallowed. She had imagined this moment many times in the past year. Contemplated every possible scenario: He might shut the door in her face or deny ever having known Evangeline. Or perhaps he’d died or moved away. “The woman who gave birth to me. Evangeline Stokes.”

  Ruby felt him inhale at the mention of the name. “Evangeline.” He looked up. “I remember her, of course. She was briefly governess to my half siblings. I’ve long wondered what became of her.” He paused, his hand on the knob. Then he held the door open. “Would you like to come in?”

  The house was gloomy after the afternoon brightness of the street. Mr. Whitstone hung Ruby’s cloak in the foyer and led her into a parlor room with lace curtains in the windows. It smelled musty, as if the windows hadn’t been opened in a long time.

  “Shall we sit?” He gestured toward a set of well-worn upholstered chairs. “How is . . . your mother?”

  She waited until they were settled, then said, “She died. Twenty-eight years ago.”

  “Oh, dear. I’m sorry to hear it,” he said. “Though I suppose . . . I suppose it was quite a long time ago.” He narrowed his eyes, as if calculating something in his head. “I thought she left here around then, but maybe I’m mistaken. My memory isn’t what it used to be.”

  Ruby felt a prickle on the back of her neck. Was it possible that he didn’t know?

  “Your accent is unusual,” he said. “I’ve never heard anything like it.”

  She smiled. All right, then, they would change the subject. “I’m from an island off the coast of mainland Australia—Tasmania, it’s called now. Settled by the British. My accent is a hotchpotch of dialects, I suppose, English and Irish and Scottish and Welsh. I didn’t realize how strange that was until I came to London.”

  He laughed a little. “Yes, in this hemisphere we generally stick to our own kind. Do you live here now?”

  “Only temporarily.”

  A plump, gray-haired housemaid in a blue dress and white apron materialized in the doorway. “Afternoon tea, Mr. Whitstone?”

  “That would be lovely, Agnes,�
� he said.

  When the housemaid left, they talked about the weather for a few minutes—how it had been miserably wet until a week ago, but now it was all sunshine and daffodils, and wisteria, even. The summer would probably be hot, given what a long, cold winter they’d endured. Ruby had grown accustomed to this English style of throat-clearing, but still found it mystifying. In Tasmania, conversation tended to be more straightforward.

  “When do you return to Australia?” he asked.

  “The ship leaves Friday.”

  “Pity. You’ll miss the roses. We’re rather known for them.”

  “We have lovely roses too.”

  Agnes reappeared, bearing a silver tray with a teapot and two bone china cups, a platter with slices of currant cake, and a small bowl of jam.

  “This household is quite diminished,” Mr. Whitstone said as the housemaid poured the tea into the cups and went through the motions of parceling out cake. “It’s only the two of us now, isn’t it, Agnes?”

  “We get on all right,” Agnes said. “But don’t forget Mrs. Grimsby. Ye don’t want me messing around in the kitchen.”

  “No, we can’t forget Mrs. Grimsby. Though I’m not sure how much longer she’ll be with us. I found her putting the eggs in the post box the other morning.”

  “She has got a bit barmy.”

  “Well, I don’t really care what I eat. And we certainly don’t entertain like we used to. It’s quiet around here these days. Wouldn’t you agree, Agnes?”

  She nodded. “Quiet as a fly on a feather duster.”

  The two of them sat in silence for a moment after Agnes left. Ruby looked around the room at the gilt-faced grandfather clock in the corner, the faded brocade sofa, the filigreed bookshelves. To the right of their chairs was a curio chest filled with figurines: porcelain ladies in pastoral settings stepping over turnstiles, leaning against trees, swooning over pastel-painted flowers. “My stepmother’s collection,” he said, following her gaze.