Christina Kline - The Exiles

Evangeline looked down into the water, as blackly iridescent as a raven’s wing. A life extinguished. No one who loved this girl, or even knew her, to witness it. How many convicts had died on these ships, far from home and family, with none to mourn their loss?

She watched a shark, its fin dipping in and out of the water, following in the wake of the ship. “It smells death,” Olive said.

Washing day.

Evangeline was still amidships when the sun sank below the horizon. With all the seasickness and dysentery, the task of scrubbing and rinsing clothes and bedding was taking longer than usual, and she finished her task—wringing out the wet cotton, stretching it over the line, clipping it with wooden pegs—in the gray twilight, the pale moon hovering overhead. Her back ached; her feet were sore. In her third trimester now, she was large and slow.

All at once she was aware of a strange noise. A cry. She stood, alert, straining to hear. The mainsail flapped loudly above her head. Water lapped at the bow.

And then a woman’s voice: Stop! Get off me!

Hazel. She was sure of it.

Evangeline slung the laundry over the line, wiped her hands on her skirt, and looked around. No one was near. There it was again: that cry. She hurried as fast as she could toward the starboard bow, from where the sound seemed to emanate, only to be blocked by a stack of crates. Turning back, she rounded the port bow, hugging the railing, and saw two figures ahead in the grainy darkness.

As she came closer, Evangeline realized with horror what she was seeing: Hazel, bent awkwardly over a barrel, her dress open to the waist and bunched around her thighs, her head twisted to the side—and a man behind her. It took a moment to realize that the man’s fist grasped the red cord around Hazel’s neck and was pulling it tight.

Glancing around her, Evangeline spied a wooden pole with a brass hook at the end, used for attaching sails. She grabbed it. “Get off!”

The man turned toward her. It was Buck. “Don’t be stupid,” he snarled. “You’re in no shape.”

Evangeline hoisted the pole above her head.

Buck let go of Hazel, who slid to the ground, gasping. As he advanced toward Evangeline, she saw the flash of a knife blade, the iridescent handle. Hazel’s knife. He must’ve wrested it from her.

Evangeline moved toward him blindly, swinging the pole. With his free hand, Buck reached for it, missing several times before grabbing the end and yanking it toward him, knocking her off her feet. As he came toward her she was aware of Hazel, behind him, pushing the barrel onto its side and rolling it forward with both hands. It hit him behind his knees. He lost his balance, the knife flying from his hand, skittering across the deck. Without thinking, Evangeline lunged for it, wrapping her fingers around the handle.

Buck scrambled to his feet.

Holding the knife out in front of her, Evangeline turned to face him.

“Gimme that.” He rushed toward her and she stabbed blindly in his direction, slashing his wrist and forearm as he reached for the knife. “ Whore! ” he spit, hunched over his bleeding arm. Blood gushed from the wound. Buck stumbled around like a wounded animal, cursing and whining, trying to stanch the flow.

“Go!” Evangeline yelled to Hazel, behind her. “Get help.”

Hazel tugged her dress down and disappeared around the bow.

Buck sank to his knees. His white shirt was soaked with blood. As Evangeline stood over him, holding the knife, it took every ounce of self-restraint she possessed to keep from attacking him again. She trembled with adrenaline-fueled rage. She wasn’t just furious at Buck; she was livid at all of the sailors and guards who treated the convicts worse than chattel. The crude catcalls and vulgar groping, the casual brutality, the arrogant assumptions of privilege—she was sick of it. And she was also, she realized, enraged at Cecil. He had merely been toying with her, using her for his own selfish ends. His delight in seeing his grandmother’s ruby on her finger had been nothing more than egotistical self-gratification, an occasion to admire his two shiny ornaments—her and the ring.

Buck was moaning now, pressing his good hand against the wound. She watched with disinterest as he nursed his arm like a little boy. Presently she heard the clatter of footsteps; the surgeon came around the corner, followed by two crewmen with muskets. They stopped, mouths agape, at the sight of this heavily pregnant woman holding a knife, standing over a blood-soaked sailor on a bloody deck.

“I’ll take that, Miss Stokes,” Dr. Dunne said, holding out his hand.

Evangeline gave him the knife, and he passed it to one of the sailors. “Take your shirt off and tear it into strips,” he ordered the other, who quickly complied. They watched in silence as he knelt in front of Buck and made a tourniquet to bind the wound. When he was finished, he sat back on his heels and turned to a crewman. “Is anyone in the hold?”

“Not at the moment.”

“Shackle him and take him down.”

Holding out his bandaged arm, Buck protested, “She stabbed me .”

“Thwarting an attack, I understand.”

Buck shrugged. “C’mon, officer. Just a bit o’ harmless fun.”

“Hardly harmless. Look at you,” said Dr. Dunne.

“I’m surprised you’re not dead,” Olive said, helping Hazel onto her berth an hour later.

“I would be, but for her.” Hazel nodded at Evangeline, propped on an elbow in her bunk.

Olive tucked the blanket around her. “Not so long ago this kind of thing was just the way it was, and nobody batted an eye.”

“Yes, it’s so civilized now,” Evangeline said.

“He’s in the hold, at least,” Olive said. “He won’t be botherin’ ye anytime soon.”

Even days later, it was hard to deny the evidence of Buck’s assault: the slight girl hobbling through her chores with the deep purple line of a bruise on her neck, one eye red and swollen, her split lip blown up like a sausage.

A sailor stepped forward to claim the pearl-handled knife, which, he said, had gone missing weeks earlier. Buck had threatened her with it, Hazel told Dr. Dunne. She’d only picked it up.

The captain sentenced Buck to twenty lashes and twenty-one days in the hold.

Some of the convicts stood on the deck with the sailors to watch the flogging. When he was brought up from the hold, Buck caught Evangeline’s eye and stared at her until she looked away.

After he was tied to the mast, she slipped from the crowd and went to the other side of the ship, trying to ignore the whistle of the whip and Buck’s anguished grunts. One day soon she would give birth to this baby, and the ship would land, and she’d serve her time, and then perhaps she could put all of this behind her. She wouldn’t be too old. She had some skills: she knew how to sew and how to read. She possessed within herself a cache of poetry, a vault of her father’s sermons. She could translate Latin and recall, at a moment’s notice, the Greek myths she’d studied as a girl . That must count for something.

She thought of those two fine ladies she’d seen strolling down Bailey Street in front of Newgate Prison, encased in corsets and silks, tethered to convention, alarmed by everything beyond the bounds of their own narrow sphere. She knew more about life than they ever would. She’d learned that she could withstand contempt and humiliation—and that she could find moments of grace in the midst of bedlam. She’d learned that she was strong. And now here she was, halfway around the world. The sheltered, unworldly governess who’d entered the gates of Newgate was gone, and in her place was someone new. She barely recognized herself.

She felt as flinty as an arrowhead. As strong as stone.