The tutor was a miracle, nothing less in my eyes. The housemaids whispered that M. Hugo had been expelled from a post with the Belgian royal family, because he was guilty of something referred to as “the French vice” and sent to the west of Ireland to be exiled.

He had an extraordinary gift, and I learned to read the great books of the ages, and to write with a fine hand. But the greatest gift of all was the drawing. He had been trained at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts and shared those lessons with me.

I absorbed the principles of drawing and composition, but any skill I might have, I owe to the natural world around me. In every spare moment I practiced. I drew the things of nature, leaves and berries, shore grasses and nuts and long fronds of fern. I drew a curlew perched at the end of a pier, and a cormorant with wings outstretched to catch the breeze.

Drawing is a way to make sense of the world in my heart and mind. I speak through my drawing and sometimes I discover my own feelings that were hidden from me.

Eventually I told Miss Josie of my plan to find my way to a church and beg for help.

She burst out with a big brassy laugh and said as how the church might save my eternal soul, but what I needed was food in my belly and a place to lay my head.

Natalie paused in her reading so she and her grandfather could look through the young girl’s work. “Colleen was remarkable,” Natalie said. “Her writing and her drawing. This is amazing.”

Several pages were filled with sketches, presumably of the voyage that had been a time of staggering grief for Colleen. The most sophisticated drawings showed birds in flight or hovering over the ship’s rigging, and flying fish skimming across the surface of the ocean.

Another page depicted a row of somber faces—swift-stroked line drawings of a woman in a shawl, two young boys, a man hunkered over a coil of rope.

“Her parents and brothers,” said Grandy. “Our family history seems written in loss.”

“And survival,” said Natalie, returning to the narrative.

Never have I seen the likes of this strange new place. It is both frightening and fascinating. There are people from the Orient—Celestials, they are called—in a world of their own known as Chinatown. There are people speaking Spanish and playing music in the streets. Soldiers at a military station roam the neighborhood at night, drinking and looking for women. I have taken to wearing trousers and boots, my hair clubbed like a boy’s.