“The captain steers the ship, but the surgeon runs it.” Mickey pointed toward the rafters. “He’s your next stop. Can any of ye read?”

“I can,” Evangeline said.

“Ye first, then. Dr. Dunne. On the tween deck. Name on the door.”

She made her way to the ladder and clung to it tightly as it swayed from side to side. In the narrow hallway she knocked on the door with the brass plate. From behind the door she heard a curt: “Yes?”

“I was told to . . . I’m a-a convict.” She blanched. It was the first time she’d identified herself that way.

“Come in.”

Cautiously she turned the knob and entered a small oak-paneled room. A man with short dark hair sat at a mahogany desk facing the door, flanked by bookcases, with another door behind him. He looked up with an air of distraction. He was younger than she expected—perhaps in his late twenties—and was dressed formally in a double-breasted navy uniform braided in gold and lined with brass buttons.

Beckoning with his hand, he said, “Close the door behind you. Name?”

“Evangeline Stokes.”

He ran his finger down the page of the ledger in front of him and tapped it. “Fourteen years.”

She nodded.

“Attempted murder, larceny. . . . These are serious charges, Miss Stokes.”

“I know.” She looked at the surgeon’s crisp white collar and gray-green eyes. The silver monogrammed cup and round glass paperweight on the desk. The Shakespeare volumes lined up neatly on a shelf in the bookcase behind him. This was a man she might’ve been acquainted with in her previous life.

He pursed his lips. Shutting the ledger, he said, “Let’s get started, shall we?”

Opening the door behind his desk, he ushered her into a smaller room with a raised bed in the middle. She stood against the wall while he measured her height and around her waist with a cloth tape, checked her eyes, and asked her to stick out her tongue while he peered into her mouth. “Reach toward the ceiling. Now arms straight ahead. Good. Try to touch your toes.” Feeling around her midsection, over her apron, he molded his hand around the bump as if palming a grapefruit. “Six months, give or take. This child will almost certainly be born in my care.”

“Does it seem healthy?”

“If the mother is healthy, the child should be too.” Looking her over, he said, “You’re underweight and your skin is sallow, but your eyes are clear.” Placing the wider end of a hollow wooden tube against her chest, he inclined his ear toward the other end.

When he removed it, Evangeline asked, “What is that for?”

“It’s a way to check for tuberculosis, or what we used to call consumption. The scourge of any ship. You show no signs of it.”

“And if I did?”

“Back to Newgate, into quarantine.”

“No transport?”

“Certainly not.”

“Perhaps I’d be better off.”

He set the tube on a shelf behind him. “The voyage is a long one. And convict life is, no doubt, a . . . trial. But transport can, for some, be an opportunity.”