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determination.
    Her mother had not paused to change clothes; the sight of her simple tea dress brought Sally a faint hope. “Hullo, Mama.”
    “What are you doing here?” At the frigid disapproval, hope died.
    “I came to give you something, Mama.” Sally pulled open her little bag and took out a cheap brooch. She worked the clasp, and opened it to show her mother what lay pressed behind the glass: the tiniest wisp of light brown hair, snipped from the back of Clarissa’s head that morning. “You have a granddaughter. Her name is Clarissa, after Grandmamma. Clarissa Huds—”
    “You need to go, before your father comes home.”
    Sally froze. Slowly, her hand curled around the locket. Her daughter’s precious hair, for this.
    “Leave, now.”
    “Yes, Mama.” The little locket shut with a faint snap. She laid it onto the polished surface of the table at the end of the sofa, and said, “I am going away for a time, to be with my husb—yes, Mama, we are married, and I love him. Clarissa and I will be at Alice’s house this evening, if you wish to meet your granddaughter.”
    And she left.
    Three hours later, the police came to her sister’s house. They arrested Sally for stealing two expensive necklaces from the safe in her father’s office. Necklaces her grandmother had bequeathed to Sally, many years before.
    They could not find the necklaces themselves: not on her, nor in Alice’s house, and not in the room Sally had been living in, over in the bad part of town. No trace of either necklace was found—but she did not deny she had taken them. Sally Hudson stood before the judge and admitted her guilt—boasted about it, even, in an accent considerably lower class than her natural voice. She was condemned to seven years’ transportation to Australia, her father’s courtroom curses ringing in her ears.
    When the ship sailed, the third week of November, little Clarissa sat on her mother’s hip. Tied firmly to the child’s pudgy wrist was a crude dolly made out of knotted string. A curiously heavy dolly, for beneath its stubby exterior nestled ten gold guinea coins, proceeds from a hasty visit to a pawn shop. In her valise, Sally had two additional pieces of treasure, a going-away present from her sister: a matched pair of French porcelain tea-cups that, like the necklaces, had belonged to their grandmother.
    On a blistering February day in 1856, the ship dropped anchor in Fremantle. It had not been a bad trip, as these things went. Once free of Edinburgh, Sally had let surface her native demeanour and superior accents, confusing the ship’s warders enough that they moved her into “general” class, allowing her to avoid the worst food and the hair-shaving shame of those marked with “crime.” Still, she had heard terrible things of the conditions that awaited female transportees, and she joined the jostling queue coming onto the docks with her heart in her throat.
    Sally was doubly cursed—or perhaps, in this case, blessed—by a plain face and a babe in arms. She passed safely through the gauntlet of officials gathered to pluck up the prettiest girls as “servants,” only to find herself beneath the probing eyes of the next rank of would-be “employers”: working men with fewer resources, yet similarly interested in slaveys and wives. At the end of the process lay a wing of the prison to which transportees were theoretically bound, but before she reached that, her husband’s face appeared, looking older and gone dark with the Australian sun, but as charming as ever.
    She drew her first deep and unimpeded breath in what felt like years. He
had
received her letter, sent by fast clipper before she left Edinburgh, and he had managed to get from Sydney across a continent to the last remaining dumping-ground of Britain’s convicts.
    She ran the last steps to fling one arm around him, startling a wail of protest out of the child she carried in the other. She was laughing through tears of joy as she