Over time, she grew deeply angry. It was the only emotion she allowed herself to feel. Her anger was a carapace; it protected her soft insides like the shell of a snail. From a bitter distance she watched her mother place gentle hands on the girls and women who came to see her, carrying their shame in front of them, those telltale swollen bellies. Eyes wide with terror or weary with grief, they were afraid of dying, of the child dying, of the child living. Their burdens the result of misplaced love, or drunken fumbling, or the predatory advances of men they didn’t know—or, worse, men they did. Hazel’s mother calmed their fears and soothed their pain. She treated them with a kindness and compassion she was never able to show her own daughter, watching from the shadows.

Now, faced with Evangeline’s helpless infant, Hazel wanted to turn away, to retreat into her shell. It wasn’t her responsibility; she didn’t owe the child a thing. No one would blame her if she stepped aside. She knew—didn’t she?—that it was a mistake to allow herself to have feelings. Here she was, abandoned again.

But this was Evangeline’s baby. And she was all alone. They both were.

The convict was not in her right mind, Buck told the captain. She was loony. Vindictive. She’d lunged toward him and he pushed her away in self-defense. It wasn’t his fault she pitched overboard.

Hazel was the only witness. She told the captain what she saw.

“The word of a convict against the word of a sailor,” the captain mused.

“I can corroborate,” Dunne said. “I was there just after it happened.”

“You didn’t actually witness the crime.”

Dunne gave him a thin smile. “As you are aware, Captain, Buck is a convicted criminal. With a history of violence and a motive for revenge. Miss Stokes had just given birth. She was hardly in any state, physical or emotional, to attack him. And why would she? He’d been punished for his crime. Justice was served.”

Buck was given thirty lashes, and this time Hazel and Olive stood with the surgeon at the front of the crowd, watching him writhe and whine. Most of the throng melted away as soon as the whipping ended. But the three of them watched as Buck was untied from the mast, the stripes on his back already puffing and oozing blood.

Hazel looked him in the eye. He stared at her dully. “What will happen to him?” she asked Dunne when they dragged him off.

“He’ll be kept in the hold until we land, and then a court of law will decide his fate. Port Arthur, probably, for a long time.”

It felt good to stand like a sentinel, to witness Buck’s humiliation and pain. But it didn’t lessen the heartache of losing Evangeline.

Hazel’s only task now, Dunne told her, was to care for the infant. He moved her into a small room off the infirmary, where she slept with the baby at night. She made a crib out of a drawer from a dresser and set it beside the bed. She’d almost forgotten what it was like to sleep on a real mattress with clean cotton sheets and a blanket that didn’t chafe her skin. To light an oil lamp when she pleased. To relieve herself in private.