She missed her mother. She missed Palle. She missed the smell of the smoke that rose from the elders’ pipes as they sat around the fire pit. She had spent her whole life in a place where she’d been free to roam barefoot as far as she pleased, where she could sit for hours on a rock on the hillside watching seals waffle in the surf, moon birds dip and soar in a choreographed whoosh, the sun slide into a glittery sea. Where everyone knew her. And now she was alone in this strange land, far from anything familiar.

Closing her eyes, she was back on Flinders, threading through wallaby grass on a windy day as it heaved and ebbed around her like waves on the sea, digging her toes into the white sand, running across the top of the hills. Watching embers glow and settle in the campfire on a cool evening, listening to Palle’s languorous voice as he sang her to sleep.

Evangeline

Among other suggestions relative to the classification of prisoners we find one recommending the wearing of a ticket by each woman. Each ticket was inscribed with a number, which number should agree with the corresponding number on the class list. . . . In the case of convicts on board convict-ships proceeding to the penal settlements, Mrs. Fry recommended that not only should the women wear these tickets, but that every article of clothing, every book, and every piece of bedding should be similarly numbered. . . . She considered the most thorough, vigilant, and unremitting inspection essential to a correct system of prison discipline; by this means she anticipated that an effectual, if slow, change of habits might be produced.

—Mrs. E. R. Pitman, Elizabeth Fry, 1884

The Port of London, 1840

As the carriage ground to a halt, Evangeline heard the groan of springs under the driver’s seat and felt the tilt of the chassis. When the door creaked open, she winced. The darkness inside framed a too-bright world: a dirt road with a small crowd of people on the other side, and beyond that, anchored in the harbor between water and sky, a black wooden ship with three sails.

“Out,” the guard barked. “Step quick.”

Stepping quick was impossible, but one by one the women hobbled to the opening, where he grasped them by the upper arms and yanked them onto the dirt.

The crowd surged toward them: a few rough-looking boys, a frail old man with a cane, a ringleted girl hanging onto her mother’s skirt. A woman holding a baby cried, “Slatterns!”

Ahead of them, tied to a dock, was a skiff with two sailors. One of them whistled. “Ay! Over here.”

As the guard pressed the prisoners forward, the crowd tried to block their way, throwing a rotten cabbage, a spray of pebbles. An egg bounced off Evangeline’s skirt and cracked at her feet.

“Dirty puzzles, ye should be ashamed,” the old man said.

“God help your souls,” a woman called, hands clasped in prayer.