These were her people. This was where she belonged. In fact, if not for the Columbia Mission Society, she would have been living among these poor immigrants for the duration of the voyage. No, the truth was, she was lower than them. She wouldn’t have been able to afford to pay for steerage, not even if she lived two lifetimes. The least she could do was offer them comfort, the same she was offering to the women above.

Mercy stepped over the legs of a prostrate man, ducking her head so as not to bump it against the beams. With a sudden lurching of the ship, she grabbed on to a post to keep from falling and hurting herself, or worse, hurting someone else. The lantern swayed and cast its faint light upon a bent head and familiar profile.

Dr. Colville.

Mercy carefully picked her way across the floor until she reached the doctor, who was kneeling next to a man sprawled out on a lower wooden bunk. It was devoid of its straw-filled mattress, which lay on the floor nearby. Children were curled up together on the mattress, one of them in the process of heaving and the others crying.

Next to Dr. Colville, a woman was attempting to help the doctor, but then she paused, bent over, and threw up into a basin. Mercy touched the woman’s shoulder gently and drew her hair out of the way. When finished, the woman wiped her sleeve across her mouth. Fatigue lined her face.

“Rest with your children.” Mercy nodded toward the wee ones. “I’ll help the doctor.”

Dr. Colville glanced her way. His dark eyes were solemn, his hair mussed, and his jaw covered with thick stubble. With his coat discarded and his shirtsleeves rolled up, she was reminded of how he’d looked the first day she met him at the dispensary—tired and harried.

He returned his attention to the patient in front of him. In the dim, swaying light, she glimpsed the man’s arm, a mangle of flesh and bones, and understood why he lay there unconscious, and blessedly so. Nausea burned a path up her throat, and she looked again toward the ladder that would take her to the upper deck.

As tempting as it was to escape, she could no more walk away from the suffering around her than she could ignore it in the cabins above. Swallowing the sickness, she knelt next to the doctor. “How can I help you, Doctor?”

He nodded at the sheet next to the man. “Finish ripping that linen into strips. I’ll need it to bind his arm to the splint.”