She hadn’t eaten in two days. Her mother didn’t even come to the hearing.

Evangeline looked at her for a long moment. If she expressed any pity, she knew, Hazel would slip away. E-A-T, she wrote on the slate. D-A-Y.

Even after she’d lost everything, Hazel’s mother still practiced in secret. There were plenty of desperate women who needed help. She treated wounds and infections, cough and fever. If a woman didn’t want a baby, she made her problem disappear. If a woman did, she showed her how to nurture and protect the life growing inside her. She turned babies around in wombs and taught new mothers how to feed them after they were born. Many women were afraid to go to the lying-in hospital to deliver their babies because of the stories about childbed fever, an illness that began with sweating and shaking and almost always ended in death, in an agony of vomit and blood. Hazel shook her head at the memory. “Only in hospital. Not in the tenements with the midwives. They say it’s because the poor are hardy, like farm animals.”

P-O-O-R. F-A-R-M.

“But that’s not the reason,” Hazel said. “The doctors touch the dead and don’t wash their hands. Midwives know it, but no one listens.”

Evangeline palmed her stomach. Prodded it to feel the lumpy limbs just beneath the skin. “Did you learn from your mother?”

Hazel gave her an appraising look. “You’re afraid of birthing.”

“Of course.”

Hazel’s lips twisted into a smile. It was peculiar on her, like a grin on a fox. “She was no good at being a mother. But she was a good midwife. Still is, for all I know.” She tilted her chin at Evangeline. “Yes, I learned.”

Medea, 1840

In a great whoosh of flapping sails, the Medea cleared the English Channel and made her way into open ocean, heading south toward Spain. Nothing but water and sky visible for miles. Standing at the railing, gazing out at the expanse, Evangeline thought of a line from Coleridge: Alone, alone, all, all alone, / Alone on a wide wide sea!

In early morning, fog clung to the water like cotton batting. The air was cool and fresh after the stench of the orlop deck, and smelled of pine tar. Women jostled and bartered for places in line; if you were sick, unlucky, or lazy enough to come last, you got the gruel that was burned and congealed at the bottom of the pot. The water they drank, stored in a wine cask, was muddy and tasted as if it had been drawn from a ditch. Evangeline learned to wait a few minutes after it was poured in her cup for the sediment to sink to the bottom.

The gruel was supposed to hold them until midafternoon, when the women lined up once more, for their final meal of the day: a watery broth of cabbage and turnip and, if they were lucky, tough, salty beef or dried cod, with a hardtack biscuit and another cup of muddy water.