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.