Christina Kline - The Exiles

“No.” Olive placed a hand to her forehead.

“She went under and never came up.” He swallowed. “I wanted to go after her, but . . .”

Tears glinted in Olive’s eyes. “No need to explain.”

For a moment all of them were quiet, trying to absorb the enormity of it. Evangeline had been here, and now she was gone. Her life had such little value that the ship wouldn’t even attempt a rescue.

Olive sniffed. Wiping a tear with the back of her hand, she said, “To hell with all of ’em.”

The baby, in the surgeon’s arms, gave a lamblike bleat.

Dunne glanced at Hazel, then back at Olive. “The child is hungry. She needs a wet nurse.”

She squinted at him.

“I thought—well, Hazel and I wondered—”

“It’s a girl,” Olive said.

“Yes.”

“Ye want me to feed it. Her.”

“Yes.”

With a hard look at Dunne, Olive said, “Ye couldn’t save my baby but now ye want me to save Evangeline’s?”

He pressed his lips together. There was no answer to that.

“It’s all terrible, Olive,” Hazel said.

Slowly she shook her head. “I don’t think I can.”

“But—”

“Ye shouldn’t ask me to. Babies survive without mothers’ milk, don’t they?”

“Some do,” Dunne said. “Many don’t.”

Hazel knew that Olive genuinely cared for Evangeline. And yet, like Hazel’s mother, her top priority was her own survival. “I know it won’t be easy. But . . . you’d get extra perks,” Hazel said, glancing at Dunne.

He nodded. “Better rations.”

“Me sailor gets me those.”

“You’d never scrub the deck again.”

Olive gave a short laugh. “I weasel out of chores as it is.” She cleared her throat. “Look. I would help. I would. But me sailor wants me back. And he would not take kindly to an infant in his bed.”

“Ye don’t need to keep the baby,” Hazel said. “Just feed her now and then.”

“Where will she sleep?”

It was a good question. The baby would need to be fed at night. If Hazel slept with her on the orlop deck, they’d be locked in until morning.

Dunne pursed his lips. Then he said, “Miss Ferguson can stay with the infant in a room on this floor and bring her to Mr. Grunwald’s quarters when she needs feeding.”

Silence stretched across the space between them.

“Her baby will probably die, Olive,” Hazel blurted. “Both of ’em dead, and for no reason. You’d be giving her a chance.”

“I don’t even know if I still have milk.”

Dunne handed her the small bundle.

Sighing heavily, Olive sat on the bed. After a few moments she pulled open her nightshirt and Hazel coaxed her forward, helping her to position the infant at a slight angle. The child fretted and squirmed.

“It’s no good,” Olive said.

“Shh,” Hazel said. “Give it time.” Reaching over, she swiped a droplet of milk and wiped it onto her finger. When she rubbed it on the infant’s lips, the baby rooted in the air, craning her neck, and Hazel gently guided her mouth to Olive’s breast. “Feels strange at first, I know. But she’ll get the hang of it, and so will ye.”

Olive gazed down at the child as she suckled. “Poor Leenie,” she said. “She was never meant for this kind of life, was she?”

It surprised Hazel that she felt so bereft. She’d never been a crier, but here she was, sobbing into her apron, wiping away tears before anyone could see. She was fine, she told herself. She hardly knew Evangeline, after all. It was her own fault she’d allowed herself to feel for her.

Even so, her true heart whispered: you are not fine. Evangeline was the only person in her life who had been wholly kind. She was gutted.

Before meeting Evangeline, Hazel had wondered if she’d ever feel a real connection to another human being. Because she never had, not really. As a child, she’d yearned to feel the warmth of her mother’s love. She searched her eyes, desperate to see herself reflected back, but all she saw was her mother’s own need, her unquenchable desire. When Hazel sought affection, her mother pulled away. When she cried, her mother was annoyed. Her mother ignored Hazel until she needed something, and even then, it was rare that her gaze settled on Hazel’s face.

In time Hazel had come to feel insubstantial—not invisible, exactly, but not quite seen.

Her mother bought rum instead of food. She went out for hours, leaving Hazel alone in the cold, dark room they lived in on that narrow Glasgow street as the fire died out. Hazel learned to fend for herself, combing Kelvingrove Park for branches to feed the woodstove, stealing clothes from backyard lines and food from neighbors’ tables. On the way home she’d pass the glow of candlelight through thick windowpanes and imagine the happy lives within, so remote from her own.

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.