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.

Sitting in the darkness now, prying apart strands of rope, she thought about all the convicts in other cells, each stewing in her own heartache and misery. This place was filled with women who’d had wretched childhoods, who’d been used and deceived, who felt unloved. Who were bitter and spiteful and couldn’t let go of their wounded feelings, their outrage at having been betrayed. Who couldn’t forgive. The truth was, Hazel could stoke her own hot coal until the day she died, but what good would it do? Its warmth was scant.

It was time to let go. She was no longer an angry child. She didn’t want to carry that burning coal around anymore; she was ready to be rid of it. Yes, her mother had been selfish and irresponsible; yes, she sent her out onto the streets to steal and turned her back when she was caught. She also taught her the skills that would save her.

The guard, heartless bastard, was right: Hazel was only hurting herself.

At the end of the fourteenth day, when the cell door opened, Hazel was crouching in a corner. She rubbed her tar-gnarled fingers and blinked into the light. “It’s like the den of a fox in here,” the guard said, hauling her out by an arm.

The Cascades, 1842

While preferable to solitary, life in the crime yard was its own version of hell. Hazel joined a line of convicts hunched over stone washtubs along the walls in the gray winter light. The work was endless. Not only were they responsible for scrubbing the prisoners’ clothing; they washed all the clothing and linens for the ships and the hospital and the orphanage. With broomsticks, they fished the sopping linens out of a tub of warm water and dunked them in a tub of rinsing water and then a tub of cold water—three heavy lifts. Standing ankle-deep in the water that overflowed from the tubs, they fed the linens through a mangle, two rollers and a hand-turned crank. Another group hung wet items on half a dozen clotheslines stretched across the center of the yard. Water pooling in the yard quickly turned to mud.

The women were drenched from morning until night. They shook with chills. Their oakum-ravaged fingers stiffened in the water and bled on the coarse linens. They were not allowed to speak; mainly they communicated through facial expression and gesture. Locked inside stone cells at night for more than twelve hours, they huddled together against the frost like mice in a drain. Twice a day they were berated by the chaplain in a small, dark chapel, separate from the other convicts:

Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brimstone, and an horrible tempest: this shall be the portion of their cup.

The earth shall quake before them; the heavens shall tremble: the sun and the moon shall be dark, and the stars shall withdraw their shining.