“Slaving ships?”

Olive laughed. Evangeline’s naivete was one of her greatest amusements. “Makes perfect sense, if ye think about it. Dozens of seaworthy vessels just sitting there, rotting in the harbor, and all because a few do-gooders in Parliament got cold feet about owning human beings. Mind ye, nobody has any such qualms about breeding convicts.”

A guard came over and grabbed Olive’s arm. “Stop spreading gossip, you.”

She yanked away from his grasp. “It’s the truth, though, in’it?”

He spit on the ground at her feet.

“How do you know all this?” Evangeline asked after a few more turns around the pen.

“Hang around the pubs in this town after midnight. No telling what a fella will reveal when he’s had a few drinks.”

“They must be lying. Or exaggerating, at least.”

Olive gave her a pitying smile. “Your problem, Leenie, is ye don’t want to believe what’s in front of your nose. That’s what got ye here in the first place, in’it?”

On Sunday mornings the female inmates were herded into the prison chapel, where they were seated in the back, in a section of pews behind tall, slanted boards that allowed them to see the preacher but not the male inmates. A coal stove glowed below the pulpit, but its heat did not reach them. For more than an hour the women huddled in their flimsy dresses and heavy chains as the preacher rebuked, admonished, and berated them for their vices.

The gist of the sermon was always the same: they were wretched sinners paying an earthly penance; the Devil was waiting to see how much lower they could descend before they became irredeemable. Their only chance was to throw themselves on the stern mercy of God the Father and pay the price for their wickedness.

Sometimes Evangeline looked down at her hands and thought: these same fingers plucked flowers and arranged them in a vase. Drew Latin letters in chalk on a piece of slate. Traced Cecil’s face from his forehead to his Adam’s apple. Hovered over her father’s still features and closed his eyes for the last time. And now look at them—dirty, grasping, defiled.

Never again would she describe something as unbearable. Almost anything, she now knew, could be borne. Small white vermin infested her hair, lingering sores developed from small scrapes, a cough burrowed into her chest. She was exhausted and sick to her stomach much of the time, but she wasn’t dying. In this place that meant she was doing all right.

Newgate Prison, London, 1840

In the eternal gloom of the cell it was hard to tell how much time had passed, or even what time of day it was. Outside the small grated window, though, and in the shadow of the spiked wall of the exercise yard, the light from the sun grew warmer and lingered longer. Evangeline’s morning sickness subsided and her belly began to swell. Her breasts, too, grew larger and more tender to the touch. She tried not to think too much about the child she carried inside her—visual proof of her degradation, a mark of sin as unambiguous as the Devil’s red claw tracks on flesh.