“Not at the moment.”

“Shackle him and take him down.”

Holding out his bandaged arm, Buck protested, “She stabbed me.”

“Thwarting an attack, I understand.”

Buck shrugged. “C’mon, officer. Just a bit o’ harmless fun.”

“Hardly harmless. Look at you,” said Dr. Dunne.

“I’m surprised you’re not dead,” Olive said, helping Hazel onto her berth an hour later.

“I would be, but for her.” Hazel nodded at Evangeline, propped on an elbow in her bunk.

Olive tucked the blanket around her. “Not so long ago this kind of thing was just the way it was, and nobody batted an eye.”

“Yes, it’s so civilized now,” Evangeline said.

“He’s in the hold, at least,” Olive said. “He won’t be botherin’ ye anytime soon.”

Even days later, it was hard to deny the evidence of Buck’s assault: the slight girl hobbling through her chores with the deep purple line of a bruise on her neck, one eye red and swollen, her split lip blown up like a sausage.

A sailor stepped forward to claim the pearl-handled knife, which, he said, had gone missing weeks earlier. Buck had threatened her with it, Hazel told Dr. Dunne. She’d only picked it up.

The captain sentenced Buck to twenty lashes and twenty-one days in the hold.

Some of the convicts stood on the deck with the sailors to watch the flogging. When he was brought up from the hold, Buck caught Evangeline’s eye and stared at her until she looked away.

After he was tied to the mast, she slipped from the crowd and went to the other side of the ship, trying to ignore the whistle of the whip and Buck’s anguished grunts. One day soon she would give birth to this baby, and the ship would land, and she’d serve her time, and then perhaps she could put all of this behind her. She wouldn’t be too old. She had some skills: she knew how to sew and how to read. She possessed within herself a cache of poetry, a vault of her father’s sermons. She could translate Latin and recall, at a moment’s notice, the Greek myths she’d studied as a girl. That must count for something.

She thought of those two fine ladies she’d seen strolling down Bailey Street in front of Newgate Prison, encased in corsets and silks, tethered to convention, alarmed by everything beyond the bounds of their own narrow sphere. She knew more about life than they ever would. She’d learned that she could withstand contempt and humiliation—and that she could find moments of grace in the midst of bedlam. She’d learned that she was strong. And now here she was, halfway around the world. The sheltered, unworldly governess who’d entered the gates of Newgate was gone, and in her place was someone new. She barely recognized herself.

She felt as flinty as an arrowhead. As strong as stone.

Medea, 1840

Deep in the Indian Ocean, far from land, Evangeline saw creatures she’d only read about in legends: dolphins and porpoises leaping around the prow, bottlenose whales plunging in and out of the spray in the distance. One afternoon she noticed that the water was undulating with dozens of strange, translucent beings, some resembling cut lemons, others parasols that became luminous as light faded from the sky. It was as if the ship were gliding through molten fire.