“I have a baby.”

“I would not have guessed.” The matron shook her head. “Pity. A young girl like you.”

At seven thirty, when the supper bell clanged, Hazel was so ravenous that the foul-smelling oxtail soup was almost appealing. She gulped it down and hurried to the chapel for the eight o’clock service, where she huddled on a crowded pew with the other convicts in the near darkness, listening to the chaplain harangue them as he banged his fist on the lectern. “Servants, you must obey in all things your masters; not with eye service, as men pleasers; but in singleness of heart, fearing God!” he shouted, spittle flying from his lips. “You of depraved and vicious habits, given up to debauchery and idleness, must be brought into habits of decency and industry!”

As the words washed over her, Hazel was reminded of the few times she’d dipped into St. Andrews Cathedral in Glasgow to get warm during Sunday morning services. Even at a young age, she’d bridled against all the talk of sin and depravity. It seemed there were different rules for rich and poor, and the poor were always blamed. They were told that only by confessing their sins would they triumph over illnesses, like typhoid, but the streets and water were filthy. And girls and women had it worst, she’d always thought. Mired in the mud, no way to get out.

When the sermon finally ended, the convicts were divided into groups of twelve and herded into cells filled with four rows of three hammocks. There was barely room to move. “You’ll notice two buckets,” the guard said. “One’s drinking water and one’s a chamber pot. You’ll be smart to remember which is which.”

The bare canvas hammocks crawled with fleas. The floor was sticky. The room smelled sharply of urine and blood and feces. When the door clanked shut, the women were in total darkness. Sitting on a moldy hammock, listening to the moans and coughs and sobs around her, Hazel thought only of Ruby, alone in the nursery. Was she wet? Was she crying? Hungry? It was the first night they’d spent apart. She felt bereft without the warm weight of her in the crook of her arm.

After changing into her nightshirt in the dark, Hazel pulled the white handkerchief from the pocket of her apron and unfolded it. She tied the red cord around her neck and tucked the tin ticket under her nightshirt, tracing the number with her finger: 171. If she couldn’t be with Ruby at night, she would at least wear Evangeline’s ticket. How strange that this visual marker of their incarceration had come to feel like something else: a memento. A talisman.

The Cascades, 1840–1841

Roused from sleep by the clanging of a bell, the women dressed hurriedly in the dark and lined up in the chilly kitchen yard for gruel before sitting through another interminable sermon. By the time they emerged from the chapel, a queue of free settlers was filing in to the first yard to choose convicts for assignment. Hazel joined the group of new mothers and wet nurses waiting by the gate to walk to the nursery. It was on Liverpool Street, they were told, near the wharf.