The Wonder (12 page)

Anna slept on. There was nowhere else for Lib to look, nothing else to do except stare at the girl like some worshipper venerating an icon. Even if the child was somehow stealing the odd bite, how could it be enough to dull the pangs of hunger? Why weren't they racking her till she woke?

Lib angled the hard-backed rope chair so it faced the bed directly. Sat and squared her shoulders. She looked at her watch:
10
:
49
. No need to press the button to learn the hour, but she did anyway, just for the sensation—the dull thud against her thumb, ten times, rapid and strong at first, then getting slower and fainter.

Lib rubbed her eyes and fixed them on the girl.
Could you not watch one hour with me?
She remembered that line from the Gospels. But she wasn't watching
with
Anna. Nor watching
over
her, to keep her safe from harm. Just watching her.

Anna seemed restless at times. She rolled herself up in the blanket like a fern furling. Was she cold? There wasn't another blanket; something else Lib should have asked for while Kitty was still up. She draped a plaid shawl over the child. Anna muttered as if saying prayers, but that didn't prove she was awake. Lib didn't make a sound, just in case. (Miss N. never let her nurses wake a patient, because the jarring effect could do great mischief.)

The lamp needed trimming twice and refilling once; it was a cumbersome, stinking thing. For a while after midnight, it sounded as if the O'Donnells were talking by the fire next door in the kitchen. Refining their plots? Or just chatting in the desultory way people often did between their first sleep and their second? Lib couldn't make out Kitty's voice; perhaps the maid was exhausted enough to sleep through it all.

At five in the morning, when the nun tapped on the bedroom door, Anna was taking the long, regular breaths that meant the deepest slumber.

“Sister Michael.” Lib leapt up, stiff-legged.

The nun nodded pleasantly.

Anna stirred and rolled over. Lib held her breath, waiting to be sure the child was still asleep. “I couldn't find a Bible,” she whispered. “What was this manna, exactly?”

A small hesitation; clearly the nun was deciding whether or not this was the kind of conversation their instructions allowed. “If I remember right, it fell every day to feed the children of Israel when they were fleeing across the desert from their persecutors.” As she spoke, Sister Michael took a black volume out of her bag and leafed through the shimmering onionskin. She peered at one page, then the one before, then the one before that. She put one broad fingertip to the paper.

Lib read over her shoulder.

In the morning, a dew lay round about the camp. And when it had covered the face of the earth, it appeared in the wilderness small, and as it were beaten with a pestle, like unto the hoar frost on the ground. And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another: Manhu! which signifieth: What is this! for they knew not what it was. And Moses said to them: This is the bread, which the Lord hath given you to eat.

“A grain, then?” asked Lib. “Solid, even though it's described as a dew?”

The nun's finger shifted down the page and came to rest at another line:
And it was like coriander seed, white, and the taste thereof like to flour with honey.

It was the simplicity of it that struck Lib, the silliness: a child's dream of picking up sweet stuff from the ground. Like finding a gingerbread house in the woods. “Is that all there is?”

“And the children of Israel ate manna forty years,”
the nun read. Then she slid the book shut.

So Anna O'Donnell believed herself to be living off some kind of celestial seed flour.
Manhu,
meaning “What is this?” Lib was strongly tempted to lean in close to the other woman and say,
Admit it, Sister Michael, for once can't you suspend your prejudices and acknowledge that this is all balderdash?

But that would be exactly the kind of conferral that McBrearty had forbidden. (For fear the Englishwoman might prove too skilled at brushing away the old cobwebs of superstition with the broom of logic?) Besides, perhaps it was better not to ask. It was bad enough, to Lib's mind, that the two of them were working under the supervision of an aged quack. If she were to be confirmed in her suspicion that her fellow nurse believed a child could live off bread from the Beyond, how could she carry on working with the woman?

In the doorway stood Rosaleen O'Donnell.

“Your daughter's not awake yet,” said Lib.

The face disappeared.

“This lamp's to be kept burning all night from now on,” she told the nun.

“Very good.”

Finally, a small humiliation: Lib opened the little chest and pointed to the broken candlestick. “I'm afraid this was knocked over. Could you pass on my apologies to Anna?”

Sister Michael pursed her lips as she fitted Mother and Child back together.

Lib picked up her cloak and bag.

She shivered on the walk to the village. Something was kinked in her spine. She was hungry, she supposed; she hadn't had a bite since supper at the inn yesterday before her night shift. Her mind was foggy. She was tired. This was Wednesday morning, and she hadn't slept since Monday. What was worse, she was being outwitted by a little girl.

By ten Lib was up again. Hard to keep her eyes shut with all the clattering in the grocery below.

Mr. Ryan, her red-faced host, was directing a pair of boys as they hauled barrels into his cellar. He coughed over his shoulder with a sound like cardboard tearing and said it was too late for any breakfast because didn't his daughter Maggie have the sheets to boil, so Mrs. Wright would just have to wait till noon.

Lib had been going to ask if her boots could be cleaned, but instead she requested rags, polish, and brush so she could do it herself. If they'd thought the Englishwoman too high-and-mighty to get her hands dirty, they couldn't have been more wrong.

When her boots were gleaming again, she sat reading
Adam Bede
in her room, but Mr. Eliot's moralizing was getting tedious, and her stomach kept growling. The Angelus bells rang out across the street. Lib checked her watch, which said two minutes past noon already.

When she went down to the dining room there was no one else there; the journalist must have gone back to Dublin. She chewed her ham in silence.

“Good day, Mrs. Wright,” said Anna when Lib came in that afternoon. The room smelled close. The child was as alert as ever, knitting a pair of stockings in creamy wool.

Lib raised her eyebrows interrogatively at Sister Michael.

“Nothing new,” murmured the nun. “Two spoons of water taken.” She closed the door behind her on her way out.

Anna didn't say a word about the broken candlestick. “Maybe you might tell me your Christian name today?” she asked.

“I'll tell you a riddle instead,” offered Lib.

“Do.”

“‘No legs have I, yet I dance,'” she recited.

I'm like a leaf, yet I grow on no tree.

I'm like a fish, but water kills me.

I'm your friend, but don't come too close!

“‘Don't come too close,'” murmured Anna. “Why, what would happen if I did?”

Lib waited.

“No water. No touching. Only let it dance…” Then her smile burst out. “A flame!”

“Very good,” said Lib.

This afternoon felt long. Not in the silent, stretching way of the night shift; this was tedium broken by jarring interruptions. Twice there came knocks at the front of the house, and Lib steeled herself. A loud conversation on the doorstep, and then Rosaleen O'Donnell would bustle into Anna's room to announce that—as per Dr. McBrearty's orders—she'd had to turn away visitors. Half a dozen important personages from France the first time, and then a group from the Cape; imagine! These good folk had heard of Anna as they passed through Cork or Belfast and come all this way by train and carriage because they couldn't think of leaving the country without making her acquaintance. They'd insisted Mrs. O'Donnell pass on this bouquet, these edifying books, their fervent regret at being denied even a glimpse of the marvellous little girl.

The third time, Lib was ready with a notice that she suggested the mother paste on the front door.

PLEASE REFRAIN FROM KNOCKING. THE O'DONNELL FAMILY ARE NOT TO BE DISTURBED. THEY ARE GRATEFUL TO BE KEPT IN YOUR THOUGHTS.

Rosaleen took it with a barely audible sniff.

Anna seemed to pay no attention to any of this as she formed her stitches. She went about her day like any girl, Lib thought—reading, doing needlework, arranging the visitors' flowers in a tall jug—except that she didn't eat.

Didn't
seem
to eat, Lib corrected herself, annoyed that she'd lapsed into accepting the sham even for a moment. But one thing was true: The girl wasn't getting so much as a crumb on Lib's watch. Even if by any chance the nun had dozed off on Monday night and Anna had snatched a few mouthfuls then, this was Wednesday afternoon, Anna's third full day without a meal.

Lib's pulse began to thump because it struck her that if the strict surveillance was preventing Anna from getting food by her previous methods, the girl might be starting to suffer in earnest. Could the watch be having the perverse effect of turning the O'Donnells' lie to truth?

From the kitchen, on and off, came the swish and bump of the slavey working an old-fashioned plunge churn. She sang in a low drone.

“Is that a hymn?” Lib asked the child.

Anna shook her head. “Kitty has to charm the butter for it to come.” She half sang the rhyme.

Come, butter, come,

Come, butter, come,

Peter stands at the gate,

Waiting for a buttered cake.

What went through the child's mind when she thought of butter or cake? Lib wondered.

She stared at a blue vein on the back of Anna's hand and thought of the weird theory McBrearty had mentioned about the reabsorption of blood. “I don't suppose you have your courses yet, do you?” she asked in a low voice.

Anna looked blank.

What did Irishwomen call it? “Your monthlies? Have you ever bled?”

“A few times,” said Anna, her face clearing.

“Really?” Lib was taken aback.

“In my mouth.”

“Oh.” Could an eleven-year-old farm child really be so innocent that she didn't know about becoming a woman?

Obligingly, Anna put her finger in her mouth; she brought it out tipped with red.

Lib was abashed that she hadn't examined the girl's gums carefully enough on the first day. “Open wide for a minute.” Yes, the tissue was spongy, mauve in patches. She gripped an incisor and wriggled it; slightly loose in its socket? “Here's another riddle for you,” she said, to lighten the moment.

A flock of white sheep,

On a red hill.

Here they go, there they go,

Now they stand still.

“Teeth,” cried Anna indistinctly.

“Quite right.” Lib wiped her hand on her apron.

She realized all at once that she was going to have to warn the girl, even if it was no part of what she'd been hired to do. “Anna, I believe you're suffering from a complaint typical of long ocean voyages, caused by poor diet.”

The girl listened, head tilted, as if to a story. “I'm all right.”

Lib crossed her arms. “In my educated opinion, you're nothing of the sort.”

Anna only smiled.

A surge of anger shook Lib. For a girl blessed with health to embark on this dreadful game—

Kitty brought in the nurse's dinner tray just then, letting in a gust of smoky air from the kitchen.

“Does the fire always have to be kept so high,” asked Lib, “even on such a warm day?”

“The smoke does dry the thatch and preserve the timbers,” said the maid, gesturing at the low ceiling. “If we were ever to let the fire go out, sure the house would fall down.”

Lib didn't bother correcting her. Was there a single aspect of life that this creature didn't see through the dark lens of superstition?

Dinner today consisted of three minuscule fish called roach that the master had netted in the lough. No particular flavour, but a change from oats, at least. Lib took the delicate bones from her mouth and set them on the side of her plate.

The hours passed. She read her novel but kept losing track of the plot. Anna drank two spoonfuls of water and produced a little urine. Nothing that amounted to evidence so far. It rained for a few minutes, drops trickling down the small windowpane. When it cleared, Lib would have liked to go out for a walk, but it struck her: What if eager petitioners were hanging around in the lane in hopes of a glimpse of Anna?

The child lifted her holy cards out of their books and whispered sweet nothings to them.

“I'm very sorry about your candlestick,” Lib found herself saying. “I shouldn't have been so clumsy, or taken it out in the first place.”

“I forgive you,” said Anna.

Lib tried to remember if anyone had ever said that to her so formally. “I know you were fond of it. Wasn't it a gift to mark your confirmation?”

The girl lifted the candlestick out of the chest and stroked the crack where the porcelain pieces rested together. “Better not to get too fond of things.”

This tone of renunciation chilled Lib. Wasn't it in the nature of children to be graspers, greedy for all of life's pleasures? She remembered the words of the Rosary:
Poor banished children of Eve.
Munchers of any windfalls they could find.

Anna took up the little packet of hair and pushed it back inside the Virgin.

Too dark to be her own. A friend's? Or the brother's? Yes, Anna might very well have asked Pat for a lock of hair before the ship carried him away.