The Wonder (11 page)

Maggie Ryan came in with more ale for Byrne.

“The chops were delicious,” he told her.

“Ah, now,” said Maggie with a touch of scorn, “hunger's the best sauce.”

“I believe I'll have a chop,” said Lib.

“They're all ate, ma'am. There's mutton.”

Lib agreed to mutton, not having a choice. Then she put her head down over
Adam Bede
immediately so William Byrne wouldn't feel invited to linger.

When she reached the cabin at nine that night she recognized the moaning chorus of the Rosary:
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death, amen.

She let herself in and waited on one of the three-legged stools the Irish called creepies. Like babies, the Catholics, babbling as they squeezed their beads. Sister Michael's head was up, at least, eyes on the little girl, but was she concentrating on her or on the prayers?

Anna was in her nightdress already. Lib watched her lips shaping the words over and over:
Now and at the hour of our death, amen
. She trained her gaze in turn on the mother, the father, the poor cousin, wondering which of them was plotting to evade her scrutiny tonight.

“Sister, you'll stay for a cup of tea with us?” asked Rosaleen O'Donnell afterwards.

“I won't, Mrs. O'Donnell, but thank you kindly.”

Anna's mother was flaunting her preference for the nun, Lib decided. Of course they'd like Sister Michael, familiar and inoffensive.

Rosaleen O'Donnell was using a little rake to tidy the embers into a circle. She set down three fresh sods like spokes in a wheel and sat back on her heels, crossing herself. Once the fresh turf flared up, she scooped ash from a bin and shook it over the flames, damping them down.

Lib had a dizzying sense that time could fall into itself like the embers. That in these dim huts nothing had changed since the age of the Druids and nothing ever would. What was that line in the hymn they'd sung at Lib's school?
The night is dark, and I am far from home.

While the nun was doing up her cloak in the bedroom, Lib asked her about the day.

Three spoonfuls of water taken, according to Sister Michael, and a short walk. No symptoms any better or worse.

“And if you'd seen the girl engage in any surreptitious behaviour,” asked Lib in a whisper, “I hope you'd consider this a relevant
fact
and mention it to me?”

The nun nodded guardedly.

It was maddening; what could they be missing? Still, the girl couldn't hold out much longer. Lib would catch her out tonight, she was almost sure of it.

She chanced saying one more thing. “Here's a fact. Manna from heaven,” she murmured in Sister Michael's ear, “that's what I heard Anna tell a visitor this morning, that she's living on manna from heaven.”

The nun gave another tiny nod. Merely acknowledging what Lib had said, or affirming that such a thing was quite possible?

“I thought you might know the scriptural reference.”

Sister Michael furrowed her forehead. “The Book of Exodus, I believe.”

“Thank you.” Lib tried to think of some more conversational note to end on. “It's always intrigued me,” she said, letting her voice rise, “why you Sisters of Mercy are called walking nuns.”

“We walk out into the world, you see, Mrs. Wright. We take the usual vows of any order—poverty, chastity, obedience—but also a fourth, service.”

Lib had never heard the nun say so much before. “What kind of service?”

Anna broke in: “To the sick, the poor, and the ignorant.”

“Well remembered, child,” said the nun. “We vow to be of use.”

As Sister Michael left the room, Rosaleen O'Donnell came in but didn't say a word. Was she refusing to speak to the Englishwoman now, after this morning's spat about the visitors? She turned her back on Lib, bending to wrap the tiny girl in her arms. Lib listened to the whispered endearments and watched Anna's thick hands, dangling at her sides, empty.

Then the woman straightened up and said, “Let you sleep well tonight, pet, and may only the sweetest of dreams come to your bed.
Angel of God, my guardian dear, to whom God's love commits me here.
” Dipping again, her forehead almost touching the child's.
“Ever this night be at my side, to light and guard, to rule and guide.”

“Amen.”
The girl joined in on the last word. “Good night, Mammy.”

“Good night, pet.”

“Good night, Mrs. O'Donnell,” Lib put in, conspicuously civil.

After a few minutes, the slavey came in with an unshaded lamp and set it down. She struck a match and lit the wick till it flared, then crossed herself. “There you go, ma'am.”

“That's a great help, Kitty,” said Lib. The lamp was an old-fashioned thing with a burner like a forked stick inside a conical glass chimney, but its light was snowy white. She sniffed. “Not whale oil?”

“'Tis burning fluid.”

“What's that?”

“I couldn't tell you.”

This mysterious burning fluid smelled something like turpentine; alcohol in the mix, perhaps.

We must be scavengers in a time of calamity;
that line of Miss N.'s came back to Lib now. At Scutari the nurses had had to root through storerooms for chloride of lime, tincture of opium, blankets, socks, firewood, flour, lice combs… What they couldn't find—or couldn't persuade the purveyor to release—they had to improvise. Torn-up sheets became slings, sacks were stuffed to make tiny mattresses; desperation was the mother of the makeshift.

“Here's the can, and the lamp scissors,” said Kitty. “After six hours you snuff it and trim off the charred bit and top it up and light the yoke again. And watch out for draughts, the fellow said, or they can shoot soot through the room like a black rain!”

The child was on her knees by the bed, pressing her hands flat together in prayer.

“Good night, pet,” Kitty told her with a wide yawn, and she trudged back to the kitchen.

Lib opened to a new page and took up her metallic pencil.

Tuesday, August 9, 9:27 p.m.

Pulse: 93 beats per minute.

Lungs: 14 respirations per minute.

Tongue: no change.

Her first night shift. She'd never minded working these hours; there was something steadying about the quiet. She made a last pass over the sheets with the flat of her hand. Searching for hidden crumbs had already become routine.

Lib's eyes fell on the whitewashed wall, and she thought of the dung, hair, blood, and buttermilk mixed into it. How could such a surface ever be clean? She imagined Anna sucking it for a trace of nourishment, like those wayward babies who ate fistfuls of earth. But no, that would stain her mouth, surely. Besides, Anna was never alone anymore, not since the watch had begun. Candles, the girl's own clothes, pages out of her books, fragments of her own skin—she had no chance to nibble on any of these things unobserved.

Anna finished her prayers by whispering the Dorothy one. Then she made the sign of the cross and climbed under the sheet and the grey blanket. Her head nestled into the thin bolster.

“Have you no other pillow?” asked Lib.

A tiny smile. “I didn't have one at all till the whooping cough.”

It was a paradox: Lib meant to expose the girl's stratagems to the world, but she wanted her to get a good night's sleep in the meantime. Old nursing habits died hard.

“Kitty,” she called at the door. The O'Donnells had disappeared already, but the maid was setting up an old tick on the base of the settle. “Could I have a second pillow for Anna?”

“Sure take mine,” said the maid, holding out a lumpen shape in a cotton slip.

“No, no—”

“Go on, I'll hardly notice, I'm that ready to drop.”

“What's the matter, Kitty?” Rosaleen O'Donnell's voice from the alcove; the outshot, that was what they called it.

“She's wanting another pillow for the child.”

The mother pushed aside the flour-sack curtain. “Is Anna not well?”

“I simply wondered if there might be a spare pillow,” said Lib, awkward.

“Have the both of them,” said Rosaleen O'Donnell, carrying her pillow across the floor and piling it on the maid's. “Lovey, are you all right?” she demanded, poking her head into the bedroom.

“I'm grand,” said Anna.

“One will do,” said Lib, taking Kitty's pillow.

Mrs. O'Donnell sniffed. “The smell of that lamp's not making you sick, is it? Or stinging your eyes?”

“No, Mammy.”

The woman was parading her concern, that was it, making it seem as if the hardhearted nurse was doing the child damage by insisting on a brutally bright light.

Finally the door was shut, and nurse and child were alone. “You must be tired,” Lib said to Anna.

A long moment. “I don't know.”

“It may be hard to drop off, as you're not used to the lamp. Would you like to read? Or have me read you something?”

No answer.

Lib went closer to the girl, who turned out to be asleep already. Snowy cheeks as round as peaches.

Living on
manna from heaven
. What hogwash. What exactly was manna, some sort of bread?

The Book of Exodus, that was in the Old Testament. But the only volume of Scripture Lib could find in Anna's treasure box was the Psalms. She riffled through it, careful not to disturb the little cards. No mention of manna that she could see. One passage caught her eye.
The children that are strangers have lied to me, strange children have faded away, and have halted from their paths.
What on earth did that mean? Anna was a
strange child,
certainly. She'd
halted
from the ordinary
path
of girlhood when she'd decided to lie to the whole world.

It came to Lib then that the question to ask was not
how
a child might commit such a fraud, but
why?
Children told fibs, yes, but surely only one with a perverse nature would invent this particular story. Anna showed not the slightest interest in making her fortune. The young craved attention, perhaps even fame—but at the price of an empty belly, an aching body, the constant fretting about how to carry on the hoax?

Unless the O'Donnells had come up with the monstrous scheme, of course, and bullied Anna into it so they could profit from the visitors beating a path to their door. But she didn't seem like a child under compulsion. She had a quiet firmness about her, an air of self-command unusual in one so young.

Adults could be barefaced liars too, of course, and about no subject so much as their own bodies. In Lib's experience, those who wouldn't cheat a shopkeeper by a farthing would lie about how much brandy they drank or whose room they'd entered and what they'd done there. Girls bursting out of their stays denied their condition till the pangs gripped them. Husbands swore blind that their wives' smashed faces were none of their doing. Everybody was a repository of secrets.

The holy cards were distracting her, with their fancy details—edges like filigree lace, some of them—and exotic names. Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Philip Neri, Saint Margaret of Scotland, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary; like a set of dolls in national dress.
He can pick anyone,
Anna had said, any sinner or unbeliever. A whole series about the final sufferings of Christ,
Our Lord Stripped of his Garments.
Who could think it a good idea to put such grim images in the hands of a child, and a sensitive one at that?

One card showed a little girl in a boat with a dove over her head:
Le Divin Pilote.
Did the title mean that Christ was piloting her boat invisibly? Or perhaps the pilot was the dove. Wasn't the Holy Ghost often shown as a bird? Or was the figure Lib had taken for a girl actually Jesus, with childish proportions and long hair?

Next, a woman in purple—the Virgin Mary, Lib guessed—bringing a flock of sheep to drink at a pool with a marble rim. What a curious mixture of elegance and rusticity. In the next card, the same woman was bandaging a round-bellied sheep. That dressing would never stay on, in Lib's view.
Mes brebis ne périssent jamais et personne ne les ravira de ma main.
She struggled to make sense of the French. Her somethings never perished and no person could ravish them from her hand?

Anna stirred, her head rolling off the two pillows to lie crooked against her shoulder. Lib quickly closed the cards up in their book.

But Anna slept on. Angelic, as all children looked in that rapt state. The creamy lines of her face proved nothing, Lib reminded herself; sleep could make even adults look innocent.
Whited sepulchres.

Which reminded her of something: the Madonna and Child. She reached past the books in the little chest and took out the candlestick. What might Anna have entrusted to this pastel-painted figurine? Lib shook it; no sound. It was a hollow tube, open at the bottom. She peered up into the shadowy head of the Virgin, looking for a tiny store of some richly sustaining food. When she put the candlestick to her nose, she smelled nothing. Her probing finger felt… something she could barely brush with her short nail. A miniature packet?

The scissors in her bag. Lib slid the blades down the rough inside of the statuette, digging. A hook was what she needed, really, but how to find one in the middle of the night? She gouged harder—

And hissed as the whole thing cracked in two. China child broke away from china mother in her hands.

The packet—insubstantial, after all that—peeled away from its hiding place. When Lib undid the paper, all she found was a lock of hair; dark, but not red like Anna's. The yellowing paper had been torn, apparently at random, out of something called the
Freeman's Journal
towards the end of the preceding year.

She'd broken one of the child's treasures for nothing, like some clumsy novice on her first shift. Lib set the pieces back in the box with the hair packet between them.