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.