“Our little Bess died one month shy of her first birthday. I left her to be neglected, without a mother, without motherly love at all. With no one to protect her. I still lie awake at night, sometimes, wondering what else I might have done to save her. I cannot live with myself if I do that again.”

“Yet our Fanny Blood, however dear to us, has her own fate. And is not a child at all.”

“We were, all of us, children once,” I said. “I think of who Bess might have grown to become, to full flowering, if I hadn’t left her there. So while Fanny lives and breathes on this earth, her fate is entwined with mine, the child she once was, the woman she is now, and may yet become. I cannot abandon her.”

Mrs. Burgh put her cane between her knees and leaned her chin on the tiny porcelain head, thinking. Her breathing was labored, her eyelids drooped low. Finally she looked up at me. “I will fight off Mrs. Cockburn as best I can,” she said. “Go to our Fanny. Leave the rest to me.”

I had never traveled by sea, a woman alone, with little experience of the wider world. I left on November 1, All Saints’ Day, knowing that thirty years ago that very day, Lisbon had been crushed by an all-consuming earthquake and tidal wave that swallowed the city, first by crumbling it, then drowning it, and then setting it all ablaze, due to the many candles lit to celebrate the day. I had an ocean to cross to get there, in three long weeks, during which time I prayed every day, on my knees, that Fanny would wait to give birth till I arrived, not even sure anymore if God was listening. I shared my cabin with a man and his wife—she seasick the whole time, and he a consumptive so oppressed by his complaints I never expected he would live to see Lisbon.

A November sea in that part of the world is an angry one, slapping and tossing our ship, daring it to stay afloat. For thirteen straight days the boisterous water came at us, into every cabin and crevice, and almost rolled the ship over. We had such hard gales the captain was afraid we’d be dismasted. The sea was so rough I couldn’t write, couldn’t read, sometimes reduced to staring at the chopping waves, trying to steady my jangled nerves on the straight line of the distant horizon. The last three days we were surrounded by a fog so thick and dark I thought we might disappear in the miasma.