It was surprisingly easy to track down the address. Armed with his full name—Cecil Frederic Whitstone—Ruby charmed a receptive clerk at the Metropolitan Board of Works near Trafalgar Square, who, within minutes, produced a ledger of London taxpayers and located a Mr. C. F. Whitstone at 22 Blenheim Road.
“Barrister,” the clerk told her. “Lives alone, apparently. No marriage or birth certificates linked to the name. Are you staying in London for long, Miss Dunne?”
Ruby had come to England to apprentice with Dr. Elizabeth Garrett, a physician who founded St. Mary’s Dispensary in Marylebone, a place for poor women to receive medical care. It was the first of its kind, staffed entirely by women. Dr. Garrett, only four years older than Ruby, was the first female in Britain to qualify as a doctor and a surgeon. Shortly after opening the dispensary, she placed a notice in London newspapers, seeking college-educated women who wished to become doctors and nurses. In Hobart Town, five months later, Ruby opened the Saturday Review and spied it.
In her long letter to Dr. Garrett, Ruby explained that she’d grown up with a surgeon father and midwife mother in a frontier town on an island off the coast of mainland Australia. From a young age, she’d been put to work polishing instruments, cataloguing medication, and assisting in the operating room. As the town expanded, so had the family practice. Eventually her father founded Warwick Hospital, named after the town in the Midlands where he was raised. Ruby’s dream was to help her father run the practice one day.
But she had learned all she could from her parents. Her mother’s medical skills were based on folk remedies and trial and error, not scholarship. Her father had taught her anatomy and the rudiments of surgery, but now, at twenty-eight, she craved the kind of formal education he’d received at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Women were not allowed to apply to medical school in Australia, so this opportunity would be life changing. She proposed studying with Dr. Garrett for three months so that she might return to Warwick Hospital with the latest information and techniques.
Dr. Garrett wrote back: “I will find you reasonable lodgings, and you will stay for a year and earn a degree.”
A month after receiving this letter, Ruby was on a ship bound for London.
Ruby had never met a woman as frank, outspoken, and boldly revolutionary as Dr. Garrett. Determined to go to medical school, in 1862, at the age of twenty-six, she’d found a way in on a technicality. The Society of Apothecaries had not thought to forbid women from taking their exams until after Dr. Garrett passed them all. Later, as a member of the British Women’s Suffrage Committee, she presented petitions to Parliament demanding the vote for female heads of household.
“Penal transportation to Tasmania only ended fifteen years ago,” she said with characteristic bluntness when Ruby arrived in Marylebone. “I must ask: Are you related to a convict?”
Ruby blanched slightly. This still wasn’t spoken of freely where she was from. But she was determined to be as forthright as Dr. Garrett. “I am,” she said. “My mother is from Glasgow and was sent to Australia at the age of sixteen. Many people in Tasmania have similar origins, though few talk about it.”
“Ah—the ‘hated stain’ of transport. I read that they changed the name from Van Diemen’s Land to lessen the unsavory association with criminality.”
“Well, that wasn’t the official reason given, but . . . yes.”
“What was your mother’s offense, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Stealing a silver spoon.”
Dr. Garrett gave an exasperated sigh. “This is why we can’t leave the making of laws to men. They result in travesties of injustice that unfairly burden the poor. And women. Those high and mighty aristocrats, in their black robes and powdered wigs—they have no idea.”
Ruby had been to Melbourne once, on a summer holiday, but had never imagined a city as vast and sprawling as London, with its north and south banks bisected by a winding canal and linked by half a dozen bridges. (She was surprised to discover that London Bridge, familiar from the nursery rhyme, was quite intact.) She shared a room in a boarding house on Wimpole Street with another of Dr. Garrett’s protégés, a young woman from the Lake District whose family believed she was employed as a ladies’ maid. In fact, as Dr. Garrett pointed out when she arrived, Ruby was the only one of her students whose parents encouraged her desire to become a doctor. “It is my sense that, despite its hardships and limitations, living in a new world accords one certain freedoms. Social hierarchies are not as rigidly enforced. Would you agree that this is true?”
“I don’t know,” Ruby said. “I’ve never lived in any other world.”
“Well, now you will, and you can see for yourself,” Dr. Garrett said.
In her free time Ruby explored the sights, from the British Museum to St. Paul’s Cathedral, from verdant parks to bustling teahouses. She sampled strawberryade and fried fish and chips at an outdoor market in Covent Garden. She attended a performance of The Tempest at the Lyceum Theatre and a trapeze show at a pleasure garden in North Woolwich. On one such outing she found herself in front of the imposing stone fortress of Newgate Prison and remembered the stories that Olive, her mother’s friend, had told about life inside its gates—how she’d met Evangeline there and found herself sentenced to transport on the same ship. How a Quaker reformer handed out Bibles and hung tin tickets around their necks—one of which Ruby had brought with her, wrapped in an old white handkerchief, to London.
During her last week with Dr. Garrett, Ruby visited an orphanage. Stepping inside the front gate, she felt lightheaded. She’d never been able to remember much about her early years at the Queen’s Orphan School in New Town, but now she had such an overwhelming sense of panic that she thought she might faint.
Dr. Garrett gave her a curious look. “Are you all right?”
“I—I’m not sure.”
“Let’s sit for a moment.”
On the settee in the reception room, at Dr. Garrett’s insistence, Ruby tried to identify the feelings that had dredged up, seemingly out of nowhere: dread and anxiety and fear.
“It’s only natural that you’d have such a response,” Dr. Garrett said. “You were a child taken from her mother.” She patted Ruby’s hand. “Your understanding of what it’s like to feel abandoned is yet another reason we need qualified doctors like you, Miss Dunne, working with vulnerable populations in far-flung places like Australia.”
Now Ruby was scheduled to return to Tasmania two days hence. Before she departed, there was one thing left to do. Here she was, in front of the house of the man whose monogrammed handkerchief had made its way to Australia twenty-eight years earlier. She’d walked through the neighborhood half a dozen times in the past few months, trying to summon the courage to seek him out.
The creamy white paint of the residence was patchy in spots and peeling from the eaves. Its vermillion front door was chipped; the hedges on either side of the front gate were pocked with brown. Weeds sprung from between the bricks of the walkway.
Ruby pushed the bell and heard it warble inside the house.
After an uncomfortable delay, the door opened, and a man winced into the light. “Yes? Can I help you?”
It was too late to turn around. “Does a Mr. Whitstone reside here, by chance?”
“I am Mr. Whitstone.”
The man appeared to be in his early fifties. His hair was graying around the temples. He was thin, with pronounced cheekbones and slightly sunken brown eyes. It struck Ruby that he had probably been handsome once, though now he was somewhat frail, the skin on his face like a peach past its prime.
And then, as if observing an object under a microscope come into focus, she noticed his resemblance to her. The same wavy brown hair and eyes and narrow build. The shape of the lips. Even an unconscious gesture, a certain tilt of the chin.
“I am”—she put a hand to her chest—“Ruby Dunne. You don’t know me, but . . .” She reached into her purse and extracted the handkerchief. She held it out and he took it from her, examining it closely. “I believe you knew my . . .” She swallowed. She had imagined this moment many times in the past year. Contemplated every possible scenario: He might shut the door in her face or deny ever having known Evangeline. Or perhaps he’d died or moved away. “The woman who gave birth to me. Evangeline Stokes.”
Ruby felt him inhale at the mention of the name. “Evangeline.” He looked up. “I remember her, of course. She was briefly governess to my half siblings. I’ve long wondered what became of her.” He paused, his hand on the knob. Then he held the door open. “Would you like to come in?”
The house was gloomy after the afternoon brightness of the street. Mr. Whitstone hung Ruby’s cloak in the foyer and led her into a parlor room with lace curtains in the windows. It smelled musty, as if the windows hadn’t been opened in a long time.
“Shall we sit?” He gestured toward a set of well-worn upholstered chairs. “How is . . . your mother?”
She waited until they were settled, then said, “She died. Twenty-eight years ago.”
“Oh, dear. I’m sorry to hear it,” he said. “Though I suppose . . . I suppose it was quite a long time ago.” He narrowed his eyes, as if calculating something in his head. “I thought she left here around then, but maybe I’m mistaken. My memory isn’t what it used to be.”
Ruby felt a prickle on the back of her neck. Was it possible that he didn’t know?
“Your accent is unusual,” he said. “I’ve never heard anything like it.”
She smiled. All right, then, they would change the subject. “I’m from an island off the coast of mainland Australia—Tasmania, it’s called now. Settled by the British. My accent is a hotchpotch of dialects, I suppose, English and Irish and Scottish and Welsh. I didn’t realize how strange that was until I came to London.”
He laughed a little. “Yes, in this hemisphere we generally stick to our own kind. Do you live here now?”
“Only temporarily.”
A plump, gray-haired housemaid in a blue dress and white apron materialized in the doorway. “Afternoon tea, Mr. Whitstone?”
“That would be lovely, Agnes,” he said.
When the housemaid left, they talked about the weather for a few minutes—how it had been miserably wet until a week ago, but now it was all sunshine and daffodils, and wisteria, even. The summer would probably be hot, given what a long, cold winter they’d endured. Ruby had grown accustomed to this English style of throat-clearing, but still found it mystifying. In Tasmania, conversation tended to be more straightforward.
“When do you return to Australia?” he asked.
“The ship leaves Friday.”
“Pity. You’ll miss the roses. We’re rather known for them.”
“We have lovely roses too.”
Agnes reappeared, bearing a silver tray with a teapot and two bone china cups, a platter with slices of currant cake, and a small bowl of jam.
“This household is quite diminished,” Mr. Whitstone said as the housemaid poured the tea into the cups and went through the motions of parceling out cake. “It’s only the two of us now, isn’t it, Agnes?”
“We get on all right,” Agnes said. “But don’t forget Mrs. Grimsby. Ye don’t want me messing around in the kitchen.”
“No, we can’t forget Mrs. Grimsby. Though I’m not sure how much longer she’ll be with us. I found her putting the eggs in the post box the other morning.”
“She has got a bit barmy.”
“Well, I don’t really care what I eat. And we certainly don’t entertain like we used to. It’s quiet around here these days. Wouldn’t you agree, Agnes?”
She nodded. “Quiet as a fly on a feather duster.”
The two of them sat in silence for a moment after Agnes left. Ruby looked around the room at the gilt-faced grandfather clock in the corner, the faded brocade sofa, the filigreed bookshelves. To the right of their chairs was a curio chest filled with figurines: porcelain ladies in pastoral settings stepping over turnstiles, leaning against trees, swooning over pastel-painted flowers. “My stepmother’s collection,” he said, following her gaze.
Twee tributes to a mythical past, Ruby thought but did not say.
His father and stepmother retired to the country a few years ago, he told her. Beatrice, his half sister, had gone off to New York City to become an actress but ended up in Schenectady. His half brother, Ned, married an older heiress and moved to Piccadilly, where he dabbled in . . . something. Real estate? “I regret to say that we’ve fallen lamentably out of touch,” he said, pouring more tea through the strainer into Ruby’s cup. “So. Perhaps you might tell me what happened to Evangeline.”
She took a sip. Lukewarm. She put it down. “I’m not sure where to start. How much do you know?”
“Very little. She worked here only for a few months, as I recall. I went off to Venice on holiday, and when I returned, she was gone.”
Ruby gave him a sidelong look. “She was accused of stealing the ring you gave her.”
“Yes, I do know that.”
She felt a pit of anger in her stomach. “You never . . .” She pressed her bottom lip with her teeth. “You never told the authorities that you gave it to her?”
Sighing, he rubbed the back of his neck. “My stepmother knew. Of course she knew. Before I left for Italy, she’d warned me to stay away from the governess. But then . . . apparently Evangeline flew into a rage and pushed Agnes down the stairs. So it wasn’t even about the supposed theft, in fact; it was a charge of attempted murder.”
“Agnes. Your housemaid?”
“Yes. Still here, after all these years.”
Still here. Alive and well. Ruby shook her head. “Did you ever try to find Evangeline, to hear her side of the story?”
“I . . . didn’t.”
Ruby remembered how Olive had described Evangeline in prison, holding out hope that this man would come, and felt close to tears. “She was in Newgate for months. And then sentenced to transportation for fourteen years and locked inside a slave ship. She was murdered by a sailor on the voyage over, an ex-convict.”
He breathed in quietly through his nose. “I did not know. That is truly . . . unfathomable.”
“She was a woman alone, with no means and no one to speak for her. You might’ve at least vouched for her character.”
He seemed a little startled at her nerve. She was surprised, herself. It occurred to her that Dr. Garrett’s bluntness may have worn off on her.
He sighed. “Look,” he said, “I was told in no uncertain terms to let it be. That it was not appropriate to get involved. That I had narrowly avoided bringing scandal to the family, and they had taken care of it, and I was not allowed to make a mess of it again. If it’s any consolation, I felt wretched about it.”
“Not wretched enough to defy your stepmother. You were an adult, were you not?”
He gave her a faint smile. “You are quite . . . direct, Miss Dunne.”
All at once Ruby felt an almost physical aversion to this man sitting across from her. Opening the clasp of her purse, she pulled out a small disk on a faded red cord. Holding it up, she said, “The prisoners were required to wear these around their necks on the ship. This was Evangeline’s. It is all that I have of her.” She dropped it into his open palm. “Except your handkerchief, I suppose.”
He rubbed it with his finger, and turned it over, squinting to see the number, 171, etched faintly on the back. Then he looked up. “What do you want from me?” His voice was almost a whisper.
Ruby listened to the tock tock tock of the grandfather clock in the corner. She felt the metronomic beating of her own heart. “You are my biological father. You must realize that by now.”
He gazed at her in the honeyed lamplight, his hands on his knees, rubbing the fabric of his trousers.
“You knew she was pregnant,” she said. “And you did nothing.”
“I didn’t really know. No one ever said it. But I suppose if I’m honest I must admit I . . . suspected.” He took a deep breath. “There’s a deep moral cowardice at the root of the Whitstone family character, I’m afraid. I hope you haven’t inherited it.”
“I have not.”
Silence spiked the air between them.
“I was lucky enough to be taken in,” she said finally. “I have parents who love me, who fought for me. I don’t want anything from you.”
He nodded slowly.
“Except one thing, perhaps. I would like to see the room where Evangeline lived when she was here.”
“It’s been closed up for years.” He tapped his lips. “But I suppose there’s no harm.”
He handed her the ticket and she wrapped it in the threadbare handkerchief and tucked it back inside her purse. Then she followed him down a long hallway wallpapered in green-and-pink stripes and around the corner to a door that opened onto a set of narrow stairs. Down they went past a large kitchen and into a humble dining room, where a small, white-haired lady sat at a table snapping beans.
She squinted up at them behind thick round glasses. “Mr. Whitstone!” she cried. “Where did you find Miss Stokes? She is not allowed here, after what she’s done!”
“Oh—no, no,” he stammered, putting out his hand. “You are mistaken, Mrs. Grimsby. This is Miss Dunne.”
“I think I’ve seen a ghost,” she murmured, shaking her head.
Mr. Whitstone gave Ruby an embarrassed glance and they continued past the dining room and turned down a hallway. He opened the door on the right and she followed him into a small room.
The only window, high on the wall, was shuttered. In the weak light from the hall Ruby could make out a narrow bed stripped of bedding, a side table, and a chest of drawers, all coated with a film of dust. She went and sat on the mattress. The ticking was lumpy.
Evangeline had lain here, in this bed. Paced this floor. She’d been younger than Ruby when she came to this house, trying to find her way in the world, and she left it pregnant and scared, with no one to help her. Ruby thought of all the women who came into Warwick Hospital and St. Mary’s Dispensary, seeking treatment. Heavy with child, or writhing in pain from venereal diseases, or carrying newborns and toddlers. All the burdens of being poor and female, as Dr. Garrett put it. No one to catch you if you fell.
Looking down at the worn pine floor, Ruby was struck by a realization: she’d been in this room before, when she was barely more than a whispered thought.
“Will you excuse me?” Mr. Whitstone said. “I’ll just be a minute.”
She nodded. It was late in the afternoon. She wanted to get back to her lodgings before dark. Though she wasn’t looking forward to the long voyage back to Tasmania, she was eager to share what she’d learned during her year abroad.
This moment in Evangeline’s room, she knew, had nothing to do with the rest of her life and everything to do with it. She would leave this house changed, but no one would ever know she’d been here.
When Mr. Whitstone returned, he was carrying a small blue velvet box. He gave it to her, and she opened it. There, couched on yellowed ivory satin, was a ruby ring in a baroque gold setting. “A bit tarnished, I’m afraid,” he said. “It’s been in a drawer all these years. My stepmother insisted that it would go to my wife someday, but as it turned out, I never married.”
Ruby extracted the ring and studied it carefully. The stone was larger than she’d imagined. It shimmered wetly in its setting. The color of velvet drapes, a lady’s dress at Christmastime.
“You should be the one to rescue it from ignominy,” he said. “You are . . . my . . . daughter, after all. I would like for you to have it.”
She turned the ring in her hand, observing how the gem caught and refracted the light. She imagined Evangeline holding it in this room nearly three decades ago. She thought of the lies told and promises broken. How desperate Evangeline must’ve felt—how miserable. Ruby put the ring back in its blue velvet box and snapped it shut. “I can’t take this,” she said, handing it back. “It is your burden to bear, not mine.”
He nodded a little sadly and slipped the ring box into his pocket.
Standing in the doorway, a few minutes later, he pulled a collection of coins out of his pocket. “Let me pay for your cab.”
“That’s not necessary.”
“It’s the least I can do, after you’ve come all this way.” He dropped several shillings into her hand.
“Well. All right.”
He seemed to be stalling, trying to keep her there. “I want to tell you that . . . that she was a lovely girl, your mother. And very intelligent. Always with her nose in a book. She had a gentleness about her, a kind of . . . innocence, I suppose.”
“You took that from her. But you know that, don’t you?”
Ruby didn’t wait for his reply. As she walked down the front steps, the air was cool and smelled of rain. Soft early evening light washed over the brick walkway, the ancient cobblestones, the purple wisteria climbing a trellis. When she reached the gate, she piled the coins on the flat top of a fence post.
She would leave London behind now and return to the place and the people she loved. She would live the rest of her life in Australia, and her days would be busy and full. She would help her father run his practice, as he had done, long ago, with his own father. She would meet a man and marry him, and they would have two daughters, Elizabeth and Evangeline, both of whom would attend the first medical school in Australia that opened its doors to women, in 1890. In the last year of the nineteenth century, with nine other female physicians, they would establish the Queen Victoria Hospital for Women in Melbourne.
Ruby was under no illusions about the place she was returning to—that fledgling colony on the other side of the world that had taken root in stolen soil, choking out the life that already existed and flourishing under the free labor of convicts. She thought of the native girl, Mathinna, wandering through Hobart Town like an apparition, trying in vain to find a place to call home. She thought of the convict women shamed into silence as they struggled to erase the stain of their experience—a stain woven into the very fabric of their society. But she also thought of Dr. Garrett’s observation about social hierarchies. The truth was, Hazel had made a life for herself that would not have been possible in Great Britain, where the circumstances of her birth would’ve almost certainly determined the story of her future.
Ruby turned and looked back. It was the last time she would ever see this man, Cecil Whitstone, without whom she would not exist. This was how she would remember him: hovering on the threshold, one foot out and one foot in. He’d been given so much, and yet he’d done so little. If she came back in five years, or ten, or twenty, she would know where to find him.
She thought of all the women she knew who’d been given nothing, who’d been scorned and misjudged, who’d had to fight for every scrap. They were her many mothers: Evangeline, who gave her life, and Hazel, who saved it. Olive and Maeve, who fed and nurtured her. Even Dr. Garrett. Each of them lived inside her, and always would. They were the rings of the tree that Hazel was always going on about, the shells on her thread.
Ruby tilted her chin at Cecil. He went inside and shut the door.
And she was on her way.