So many losses piled up, one on top of the other, each tamping down the last. Her chest heavy with the weight of them.

“Maybe it was for the best,” Lady Franklin told her. “A wild animal like that isn’t meant to be domesticated.”

Well, maybe Lady Jane was right. Maybe it was for the best. Without him, perhaps she could finally leave Flinders behind, tuck away her few remaining memories and embrace her role as the girl in the portrait in the red satin dress. It would be a relief, she thought, to let it go. She’d become accustomed to stiff shoes; she ate aspic without complaint. She conversed in French and kept track of dates on a calendar. She was tired of feeling as if she lived between worlds. This was the world she lived in now.

Hazel

As to the females, it is a melancholy fact, but not the less true, that far the greater proportion are utterly irreclaimable, being the most worthless and abandoned of human beings! No kindness can conciliate them, nor any indulgence render them grateful; and it is admitted by everyone, that they are, taken as a body, infinitely worse than males!

—Lieutenant Breton, Excursions in New South Wales, Western Australia and Van Diemen’s Land During the Years 1830, 1831, 1832, and 1833

Medea, 1840

What Hazel remembered most vividly—what she would always remember—was the hem of Evangeline’s gown as she hovered on the railing, her arms flailing in the air. Her disbelieving shriek as she tumbled overboard. The cold rage on Buck’s face when he turned, startled by Hazel’s scream. The quickening in her chest, the disorienting horror.

After that, all was chaos. The surgeon yelling behind her, two crewmen rushing to apprehend Buck, two others peering over the side. Dunne stripping off his jacket, preparing to jump, and the captain’s shouted reprimand: “Dr. Dunne! Stand down, sir.”

“One of the crew, then,” Dunne said. “An experienced swimmer—”

“I will require no man to risk his life for a convict.”

Hazel and Dunne stayed on the deck for what felt like hours after everyone else had left, standing wordless, helpless, at the railing, scanning the glittery water. Was that a floating cloth, just under the surface? A glimpse of hair?

The sea, blackly silent, gave up nothing. No sign of her. Evangeline was gone.

For months, years, afterward, Hazel would dream of Evangeline underwater. The fathomless silence. The absence of sound.

A tinny wail rose from the tween deck.

Hazel and Dunne looked at each other. The baby. They’d forgotten about the baby.

In the surgeon’s quarters, Hazel held the swaddled infant close to her chest, trying to soothe her. “She needs to be fed.”

“Goats’ milk will do. We can mix it with water and a little sugar.”

“Mothers’ milk is better.”

“Of course it is, but . . .”

Wet nurses were common in Glasgow, where the infant mortality rate was high and mothers of dead children learned that they could at least earn money from their misery. But there were no wet nurses on the ship.