Chapter 1
Crossing the Atlantic in winter wasn’t the best choice, but it was the only one.
For days, the steamship had cowered beneath a glaring sky and tossed on rough seas as if the large vessel weighed little.
Francesca gripped the railing to steady herself.
Winds tore at her clothing and punished her bare cheeks, reminding her how small she was, how insignificant her life.
It was worth it, to brave the elements for as long as she could stand them.
Being out of doors meant clean, bright air to banish the disease from her lungs and scrub away the rank odors clinging to her clothes.
Too many of the six hundred passengers belowdecks had become sick.
She tried not to focus on the desperate ones, clutching their meager belongings and praying Hail Marys in strained whispers.
She wasn’t like them, she told herself, even while her body betrayed her and she trembled more each day as they sailed farther from Napoli.
Yet despite the unknown that lay ahead, she would rather die than turn back.
As the ship slammed against wave after unruly wave, she thought she might die after all, drift to the bottom of a fathomless dark sea.
She couldn’t believe she’d done it—left Sicilia, her home, and all she’d ever known.
It had taken every ounce of her courage, but she and Maria had managed to break free.
Dear, fragile Maria. Swallowing hard, Francesca looked out at the vast tumult of water and pushed a terrible thought far from her mind.
Maria would recover. She had to. Francesca refused to imagine life without her sister.
She tucked her hands under her arms for warmth.
Everywhere she looked, her gaze met gray, a slippery color that shimmered silver and foamed with whitecaps or gathered into charcoal clouds.
Already she longed for the wide expanse of sea surrounding her island home in a perfect blue-green embrace, the rainbow of purples and oranges that streaked the sunset sky, the craggy landscape, the scent of citrus and sunshine.
She wrapped her arms around her middle, holding herself as if she might break apart.
Reminiscing about what she once cherished was foolish.
Somehow, she had to find things to like about New York.
Freedom from him, if nothing else.
She would never again meet the fists of her drunken papa.
At the memory of his bulging eyes and the way his face flowered purple, she rubbed the bruise on her arm that had not quite healed.
She would no longer spend her days stealing so he might buy another bottle of Amaro Averna or some other liquor.
Paolo Ricci could do it himself. He could tumble from his fishing boat into the sea for all she cared.
A shiver ran over her skin and rattled her teeth.
Like it or not, it was time to go belowdecks.
As she weaved through the brave souls who paid no heed to the wind despite the cost to warmth, she wondered briefly if any first- or second-class passengers had defied the cold on the upper-class decks overhead.
The ship was tiered and divided into three platforms; the two above her were smaller and set back so a curious lady or gentleman might lean over the railing and peer down at steerage.
As if they were a circus of exotic animals.
Francesca descended the ladder into the bowels of the ship.
The air thickened into a haze of stink and rot, and the clamor of hundreds of voices floated through the cramped corridors until she arrived at the large room designated for women only.
She passed row upon row of metal cots stacked atop each other, filled with strangers.
Some women lounged on the floor in their threadbare dresses and boots with heels worn to the quick.
Their eyes were haunted, their wan figures gaunt with hunger.
One woman scratched at an open sore; another smelled of urine and sweat and squatted against the wall of the ship with a rosary in hand, pausing briefly in her prayer to swipe at a rat with greasy fur, driven by hunger, the same as her. The same as they all were.
Francesca tried not to linger on their faces and moved through the room to her sister, who lay prostrate on her cot, and reached for her hand.
“You’re so cold,” Maria said through cracked lips, clutching her sister’s hand. “You’ll catch your death, Cesca. Promise me you’ll be careful.”
Heart in her throat, Francesca swept her sister’s matted curls from her face.
Death was not a word she wanted to entertain.
The terror they’d harbored since they’d sneaked away from their home in the middle of the night, that overwhelmed her each time she considered the unknown before them, was bad enough. Death had no place here.
“Nothing can catch me now. We’re too close.”
Maria smiled and a glimpse of her cheerful nature shone in her dark eyes. “That hard head serves you at last.”
Francesca forced a smile, desperate to hide the concern from her face.
Maria had always been frail, easily ill and quickly bruised, yet still she glowed with some internal light.
Often, Francesca imagined her as a fairy, an angelic creature not of this earth.
She laid a hand on Maria’s brow. Her skin burned with fever, and sweat soaked through her gown.
Maria had fallen ill on the first leg of their voyage from Palermo to Napoli and had worsened each day since.
Francesca had worried the captain wouldn’t allow them to board, but she and Maria had passed the inspection rapidly—after Francesca paid an unspoken price in a back room on a narrow cot.
But they were on their way, and that was what mattered now.
“Another few days, Maria,” she whispered. After five days at sea, New York Harbor must be close. Once they arrived, they would need to find a doctor to tend to the fever immediately.
Maria moaned and turned on her side, her shoulder nearly scraping the underside of the woman’s cot suspended above hers. “I’m so thirsty.”
Francesca was thirsty, too. Their water rations had scarcely been sufficient, or their food for that matter. What did the crew care about a pack of hungry, dirty foreigners? They saw so many, week after week. Desperation was nothing new to them.
Francesca turned over her water canister in her hands.
No one would part with their rations; she’d asked passengers in steerage all day yesterday and had finally given up.
Poverty didn’t move them or the story of her very ill sister.
Each had their own story of woe. And it was out of the question to approach second- or third-class passengers.
A guard stood at each of the doors connected to the upper levels to keep the wanderers out.
Unless… An idea sparked suddenly in the back of her mind.
“I’m going to find more water.” She pulled the blanket around Maria’s shoulders. “Don’t try to get up again. You need to rest.”
Francesca rummaged through their small travel case for the only nice things she owned.
She pulled on her mother’s finest dress, fastened on a pair of earbobs, slipped a set of combs into her hair, and kissed the medallion of the Virgin Mary around her neck.
The medallion she had stolen two years ago.
For months, she had admired the shiny golden trinket as it winked from the hollow at the base of Sister Alberta’s neck.
It was the first time Francesca had felt the sharp edge of envy.
A rush of shame soon followed. She loved the nun like family, and Francesca knew it was a sin to want what wasn’t hers.
One day when Sister sent her to fetch a book, Francesca found the necklace gleaming in a bright ray of sunlight that streaked across Sister’s dressing table.
She’d held it a moment, stroking the outline of the Virgin Mother with her thumb, wishing she’d had the medallion’s protection.
She’d been unable to resist it and slipped it inside the folds of her dress.
It wasn’t until the following day that she wondered why Sister had sent her to look for a book that wasn’t there.
Perhaps it had been a test—a test Francesca had failed.
Francesca’s chest tightened as she thought of the nun.
Sister Alberta was a Catholic in exile, though she’d never explained why, and had lived two lanes away from Francesca and Maria in their little village.
The nun had befriended them when their mother disappeared, taught Francesca to cook and both sisters to read and even speak a little English. Sister had loved them.
“You putting on airs for someone?” said Adriana, an Italian woman from Roma. She wore thick rouge, and though she was traveling in steerage, her dress looked finer than those of the other women with its lace trim and shiny beading. It was also vivid purple. All the better to attract male attention.
“I need more water.” Francesca’s gaze flicked to her sister and back to the woman she was certain traded lire for sex.
Not that Francesca minded. She wasn’t bothered by other people’s choices, especially when it came to survival.
God must understand need when he saw it, if he was truly a benevolent God.
Adriana crossed her arms beneath her bosom. “Plan on flirting with the captain for it?”
Francesca snapped the compact closed. “I’m going to the upper decks, see if someone will spare some.”
Or perhaps she would just take their water. She was good at that, taking things.
“Better work it harder, amore, if you want to fit in with that lot.” A woman with no front teeth rose from her bed and dug through a handbag tucked beneath her pillow. “Here. Have some of this.” She held out an elegant bottle of perfume.
Francesca felt a rush of gratitude. She reached for the bottle and dabbed her neck and wrists.