As the days passed, Olive, too, settled into her role. When the two women sat together in the afternoons, Dunne brought them stewed plums and mincemeat pies and fresh mutton, delicacies forbidden the prisoners and most of the sailors, available only to the top brass.

“Does the captain know you’re feeding the animals?” Olive asked as they sipped tea with milk and sugar and ate toast with blackberry jam.

Dunne gave a small laugh. “He has no say in the matter.”

Olive slathered butter on her toast. “I suppose it’ll be different when we land.”

“No doubt. Enjoy it while you can.”

At first Hazel and Dunne were wary around each other, carefully formal. She still found him high-handed and arrogant, and reluctant to take her seriously. But as the days passed he began talking with her about his patients’ cases, and even asked her opinion on their treatment. She didn’t know whether it was that she’d earned his respect during the breech birth or simply that he liked having someone to talk to, but she enjoyed sharing what she knew. Many convicts had vague symptoms of anxiety—hysteria, Dunne called it—for which he had no cure. Hazel suggested a tea of motherwort. For menstruation cramps, powdered red raspberry leaves. For fainting, a tumbler of vinegar down the throat. For cuts and sores, a sticky bandage of cobwebs.

Dunne began inviting her to sit with him in front of the small fire in the grate in his quarters before turning in for the night.

“The child needs a name,” he said one evening. “Shall we call her Evangeline?”

The infant in Hazel’s arms was gazing up at her. She lifted her up and kissed her nose. She saw the slope of Evangeline’s nose, her large expressive eyes. The father, she thought, must’ve been handsome too. She shook her head. “No. There’s only one of her.”

Early the next morning, she took Evangeline’s tin ticket on its red cord from the shelf in the surgeon’s quarters and made her way down to the orlop deck. Confronted by the now-unfamiliar stench, the sounds of women hacking and moaning, the overwhelming malaise and disquiet, Hazel nearly turned around. While living in it, she’d acclimated to it. But now, from the distance of only a rope ladder, she felt so far removed from it that even a brief exposure made her heart palpitate.

The women in the bunks stared at her as she passed.

“Look at ’er, so fancy now, in the surgeon’s quarters and all,” one singsonged.

“Ye have to wonder if she shoved the poor girl over the side herself,” said another.

When she reached her berth, Hazel felt for the loose floorboard and pried it open with her fingertips. Finding the sack, she sifted through the items: a few spoons, a dented cup, a pair of stockings . . . Ah—here it was. Evangeline’s handkerchief. Tucking it in her pocket, she made her way back up the ladder.

In her room on the tween deck, she spread the small white square on the bed and ran a finger along the scalloped border, the initials embroidered in the corner, C. F. W. Cecil Frederic Whitstone. This flimsy cloth had been the locus of Evangeline’s hopes and dreams, unrealistic as they may have been. Now it was all her daughter would ever have of her. Hazel placed the ticket on the handkerchief, thinking of the ruby ring that Evangeline had hidden in it—the ring that became the catalyst for her journey. She’d once told Hazel that her vicar father considered jewelry a vice; the only ornaments she’d ever worn were the ruby ring and this ticket on a red cord around her neck.