Two and a half months after leaving London, the Medea rounded the jagged cliffs and pristine sands of the Cape of Good Hope near the southernmost tip of Africa and headed due east into the Indian Ocean. Ann Darter, the sickly girl whose baby died in Newgate, took a turn for the worse. When she died, Evangeline felt compelled to attend the makeshift service. Ann’s body, in a weighted burlap sack, lay on a plank draped with a Union Jack. As two sailors held the plank on the railing, the surgeon said a few words—“We commit this prisoner to the deep, looking for the resurrection of the body when the sea shall give up her dead”—and tilted his chin at the sailors, who tipped the plank. The body slid from under the flag and splashed into the sea, floating on the surface for a moment before sinking beneath the waves.

Evangeline looked down into the water, as blackly iridescent as a raven’s wing. A life extinguished. No one who loved this girl, or even knew her, to witness it. How many convicts had died on these ships, far from home and family, with none to mourn their loss?

She watched a shark, its fin dipping in and out of the water, following in the wake of the ship. “It smells death,” Olive said.

Washing day.

Evangeline was still amidships when the sun sank below the horizon. With all the seasickness and dysentery, the task of scrubbing and rinsing clothes and bedding was taking longer than usual, and she finished her task—wringing out the wet cotton, stretching it over the line, clipping it with wooden pegs—in the gray twilight, the pale moon hovering overhead. Her back ached; her feet were sore. In her third trimester now, she was large and slow.

All at once she was aware of a strange noise. A cry. She stood, alert, straining to hear. The mainsail flapped loudly above her head. Water lapped at the bow.

And then a woman’s voice: Stop! Get off me!

Hazel. She was sure of it.

Evangeline slung the laundry over the line, wiped her hands on her skirt, and looked around. No one was near. There it was again: that cry. She hurried as fast as she could toward the starboard bow, from where the sound seemed to emanate, only to be blocked by a stack of crates. Turning back, she rounded the port bow, hugging the railing, and saw two figures ahead in the grainy darkness.

As she came closer, Evangeline realized with horror what she was seeing: Hazel, bent awkwardly over a barrel, her dress open to the waist and bunched around her thighs, her head twisted to the side—and a man behind her. It took a moment to realize that the man’s fist grasped the red cord around Hazel’s neck and was pulling it tight.

Glancing around her, Evangeline spied a wooden pole with a brass hook at the end, used for attaching sails. She grabbed it. “Get off!”