“You took that from her. But you know that, don’t you?”

Ruby didn’t wait for his reply. As she walked down the front steps, the air was cool and smelled of rain. Soft early evening light washed over the brick walkway, the ancient cobblestones, the purple wisteria climbing a trellis. When she reached the gate, she piled the coins on the flat top of a fence post.

She would leave London behind now and return to the place and the people she loved. She would live the rest of her life in Australia, and her days would be busy and full. She would help her father run his practice, as he had done, long ago, with his own father. She would meet a man and marry him, and they would have two daughters, Elizabeth and Evangeline, both of whom would attend the first medical school in Australia that opened its doors to women, in 1890. In the last year of the nineteenth century, with nine other female physicians, they would establish the Queen Victoria Hospital for Women in Melbourne.

Ruby was under no illusions about the place she was returning to—that fledgling colony on the other side of the world that had taken root in stolen soil, choking out the life that already existed and flourishing under the free labor of convicts. She thought of the native girl, Mathinna, wandering through Hobart Town like an apparition, trying in vain to find a place to call home. She thought of the convict women shamed into silence as they struggled to erase the stain of their experience—a stain woven into the very fabric of their society. But she also thought of Dr. Garrett’s observation about social hierarchies. The truth was, Hazel had made a life for herself that would not have been possible in Great Britain, where the circumstances of her birth would’ve almost certainly determined the story of her future.

Ruby turned and looked back. It was the last time she would ever see this man, Cecil Whitstone, without whom she would not exist. This was how she would remember him: hovering on the threshold, one foot out and one foot in. He’d been given so much, and yet he’d done so little. If she came back in five years, or ten, or twenty, she would know where to find him.

She thought of all the women she knew who’d been given nothing, who’d been scorned and misjudged, who’d had to fight for every scrap. They were her many mothers: Evangeline, who gave her life, and Hazel, who saved it. Olive and Maeve, who fed and nurtured her. Even Dr. Garrett. Each of them lived inside her, and always would. They were the rings of the tree that Hazel was always going on about, the shells on her thread.

Ruby tilted her chin at Cecil. He went inside and shut the door.

And she was on her way.

Acknowledgments

Attempting to identify the genesis of a novel can be a fool’s errand. Inspiration is as often unconscious as conscious; our imagination is stirred by myriad events, beliefs, and philosophies, by art and music and film, by travel and family history. It wasn’t until I’d finished writing The Exiles that I realized I’d twined together three disparate strands of my own life history to tell the story: a transformative six weeks in Australia in my mid-twenties; the months I spent interviewing mothers and daughters for a book about feminism; and my experience teaching women in prison.