The Wonder (13 page)

“What prayers do Protestants say?” the child asked.

Lib was startled by the question. She summoned her forces to give a bland answer about the similarities between the two traditions. Instead, she found herself saying, “I don't pray.”

Anna's eyes went wide.

“Nor do I go to church, not for many years now,” Lib added. In for a penny, in for a pound.

“More happiness than a feast,”
the girl quoted.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Prayer brings more happiness than a feast.”

“I never found it did much good.” Lib felt absurdly embarrassed by her admission. “I had no sense of getting a reply.”

“Poor Mrs. Wright,” murmured Anna. “Why won't you tell me your first name?”

“Why
poor
?” asked Lib.

“Because your soul must be lonely. That silence you heard, when you tried to pray—that's the sound of God listening.” The child's face shone.

A commotion at the front door released Lib from this conversation. A man's voice, booming above Rosaleen O'Donnell's; without being able to make out more than a few words, Lib could tell that he was an English gentleman, and in a temper. Then the sound of the front door shutting.

Anna didn't even lift her eyes from the book she'd picked up,
The Garden of the Soul.

Kitty came in to check the lamp was prepared. “I heard tell of one that the vapours caught on fire,” she warned Lib, “and cinderized the family in the night!”

“The lamp glass must have been sooty, in that case, so mind you wipe this one well.”

“Right, so,” said Kitty, with one of her tremendous yawns.

Half an hour later the same angry petitioner was back.

A minute later he was stalking into Anna's room with Rosaleen O'Donnell behind him. A great domed forehead with long silver locks below. He introduced himself to Lib as Dr. Standish, chief of medicine at a Dublin hospital.

“He's brought a note from Dr. McBrearty,” said Rosaleen O'Donnell, waving it, “to say could we make an exception and let him in as a
most
distinguished visitor.”

“Given that I'm here as a matter of professional courtesy,” Standish barked, his accent very clipped and English, “I don't appreciate having my time wasted by being obliged to chase backwards and forwards along these foul boreens for permission to examine a child.” His pale blue eyes were fastened on Anna.

She was looking nervous. Afraid this doctor would find out something McBrearty and the nurses hadn't? Lib wondered. Or simply because the man was so severe?

“Can I offer you a cup of tea, Doctor?” asked Mrs. O'Donnell.

“Nothing, thank you.”

Said so curtly that she backed out and pulled the door to.

Dr. Standish sniffed the air. “When was this room last fumigated, Nurse?”

“The fresh air from the window, sir—”

“See to it. Chloride of lime, or zinc. But, first, kindly undress the child.”

“I've already taken her complete measurements, if you'd like to see them,” offered Lib.

He waved her memorandum book away and insisted she strip Anna down till she was stark naked.

The child shuddered on the woven mat, hands drooping by her sides. Angles of shoulder blades and elbows, bulges of calves and belly; Anna had flesh on her, but it had all slid downwards, as if she were slowly melting. Lib looked away. What gentleman would bare a girl of eleven like a plucked goose on a hook?

Standish carried on poking and prodding, tapping Anna with his cold instruments, keeping up a barrage of orders. “Tongue out farther.” He put his finger so far down Anna's throat, she gagged. “Does that cause pain?” he asked, pressing between her ribs. “And that? What about this?”

Anna kept shaking her head, but Lib didn't believe her.

“Can you bend over any farther? Breathe in and hold it,” said the doctor. “Cough. Again. Louder. When did you last move your bowels?”

“I don't remember,” whispered Anna.

He dug into her misshapen legs. “Does that hurt you?”

Anna gave a little shrug.

“Answer me.”

“Hurt's not the word for it.”

“Well, what word would you prefer?”

“Humming.”

“Humming?”

“It seems to hum.”

Standish snorted and lifted one of her thickened feet to scrape the sole with a fingernail.

Humming?
Lib tried to imagine being swollen up, every cell tight as if ready to burst. Would it feel like a high-pitched vibration, the whole body a tautened bow?

Finally Standish told the child to dress and shoved his instruments back into his bag. “As I suspected, a simple case of hysteria,” he threw in Lib's direction.

She was disconcerted. Anna wasn't like any hysteric she'd ever encountered at the hospital: no tics, faints, paralyses, convulsions; no fixed stares or shrieks.

“I've had night-feeders in my wards before, patients who won't eat except when no one's watching,” he added. “Nothing to distinguish this one except that she's been indulged to the extremity of half starving herself.”

Half starving
. So Standish believed Anna was sneaking food but far less than she needed? Or perhaps she'd been getting almost enough until the watch had begun, on Monday morning, but since then, nothing at all? Lib was horribly afraid he might be right about that. But was Anna nearer to starved or nearer to well? How to quantify the quality of being alive?

Tying her drawers at the waist, Anna showed no sign of having heard a word.

“My prescription's very simple,” said Standish. “A quart of arrowroot in milk, three times a day.”

Lib stared at him, then spelled out the obvious. “She won't take anything by mouth.”

“Then drench her like a sheep, woman!”

A slight quiver from Anna.

“Dr. Standish,” protested Lib. She knew the staff of asylums and prisons often resorted to force, but—

“If a patient of mine refuses a second meal, my nurses have standing orders to use a rubber tube, above or below.”

It took Lib a second to understand what the doctor meant by
below
. She found herself stepping forward, between him and Anna. “Only Dr. McBrearty could give such an order, with the permission of the parents.”

“It's just as I suspected when I read about the case in the paper.” The words sprayed from Standish's mouth. “In taking up this chit of a girl—and dignifying this charade by setting a formal watch—McBrearty's made himself a laughingstock. No, made his whole unfortunate nation a laughingstock!”

Lib couldn't disagree with that. Her eyes rested on Anna's bent head. “But such unnecessary harshness, Doctor—”

“Unnecessary?” he scoffed. “Look at the state of her: scabby, hairy, and gross with dropsy.”

The bedroom door banged behind Standish. A strained silence in the room. Lib heard him bark something at the O'Donnells in the kitchen, then march out to his carriage.

Rosaleen O'Donnell put her head in. “What's happened, in the name of God?”

“Nothing,” Lib told her. And held the woman's gaze till she withdrew.

Lib thought Anna might be weeping, but no, the child looked more thoughtful than ever, adjusting her tiny cuffs.

Standish had years, no, decades of study and experience that Lib lacked, that no woman could ever obtain. Anna's downy, scaly skin, the puffy flesh—small matters in themselves, but was he right that they meant she was in actual danger from eating so little? Lib felt an impulse to put her arms around the child.

She restrained it, of course.

She remembered a freckled nurse at Scutari complaining that they weren't allowed to follow
the prompts of the heart
—to take a quarter of an hour, for instance, to sit with a dying man and offer a word of comfort.

Miss N.'s nostrils had flared.
You know what would comfort that man, if anything could? A stump pillow to rest his mangled knee on. So don't listen to your heart, listen to me and get on with your work.

“What is
fumigated?
” asked Anna.

Lib blinked. “The air can be purified by burning certain disinfectant substances. My teacher didn't believe in it.” She took two steps to Anna's bed and began to smoothen the sheets, making every line straight.

“Why not?”

“Because it's the harmful thing that must be taken out of the room, not merely its smell,” said Lib. “My teacher even made a joke about it.”

“I like jokes,” said Anna.

“Well, she said that fumigations are of essential importance to medicine—because they make such an abominable smell, they compel you to open the window.”

Anna mustered a tiny laugh. “Did she make lots of jokes?”

“That's the only one I can recall.”

“What's the harmful thing in this room?” The child looked from wall to wall as if a bogey might jump out at her.

“All that's doing you harm is this fast.” Lib's words were like stones thrown down in the quiet room. “Your body needs nourishment.”

The girl shook her head. “Not earthly food.”

“Every body—”

“Not mine.”

“Anna O'Donnell! You heard what the doctor said:
half starving.
You may be doing yourself grievous harm.”

“He's looking wrongly.”

“No,
you
are. When you see a piece of bacon, say—don't you feel anything?” asked Lib.

The small forehead wrinkled.

“Not the impulse to put it in your mouth and chew, as you did for eleven years?”

“Not anymore.”

“Why, what could possibly have changed?”

A long pause. Then Anna said, “'Tis like a horseshoe.”

“A horseshoe?”

“As if the bacon's a horseshoe, or a log, or a rock,” she explained. “There's nothing wrong with a rock, but you wouldn't chew it, would you?”

Lib stared at her.

“Your supper, ma'am,” said Kitty, walking in with a tray and setting it down on the bed.

Lib's hands shook as she pushed open the door of the spirit grocery that evening. She'd meant to snatch a few words with the nun at the changeover, but her nerves were still jangling too much from her encounter with Dr. Standish.

No carousing farmers in the bar tonight. Lib had made it almost to the staircase when a figure reared up in the doorway. “You didn't tell me who you really were, Nurse Wright.”

The scribbler. Lib groaned inwardly. “Still here, Mr.… Burke, was it?”

“Byrne,” he corrected her. “William Byrne.”

Pretending to misremember a name was such a reliable way to annoy. “Good night, Mr. Byrne.” She headed up the stairs.

“You might do me the courtesy of staying one minute. I had to hear from Maggie Ryan that it's you who's barred me from the cabin!”

Lib turned. “I don't believe I said anything to mislead you about my presence here. If you jumped to unwarranted conclusions—”

“You don't look or speak like any nurse I've ever met,” he protested.

She hid a smile. “Then your experience must have been limited to the old breed.”

“Granted,” said Byrne. “So when may I talk to your charge?”

“I'm simply protecting Anna O'Donnell from the intrusions of the outside world, including—perhaps above all,” Lib added— “Grub Street.”

Byrne stepped closer. “Wouldn't you say she's courting the attention of that world by claiming to be a freak of nature as much as any Feejee mermaid at a raree-show?”

Lib flinched at the image. “She's just a little girl.”

The taper in William Byrne's hand lit up his copper curls. “I warn you, ma'am, I'll camp outside her window. I'll caper like a monkey, press my nose to the glass, and pull faces till the child begs for me to be let in.”

“You will not.”

“How do you propose to stop me?”

Lib sighed. How she longed for her bed. “I'll answer your questions myself, will that do?”

The man pursed his lips. “All of them?”

“Of course not.”

He grinned. “Then my answer's no.”

“Caper all you like,” Lib told him. “I'll draw the curtain.” She went up another two steps, then added, “Making a nuisance of yourself to interfere with the course of this watch will earn you and your newspaper nothing but disrepute. And, no doubt, the wrath of the entire committee.”

The fellow's laughter filled the low room. “Haven't you met your employers? They're no pantheon armed with thunderbolts. The quack, the padre, our publican host, and a few of their friends—that's your
entire committee.
”

Lib was disconcerted. McBrearty had implied that it was full of
important men.
“My point remains, you'll get more from me than from badgering the O'Donnells.”

Byrne's light eyes measured her. “Very well.”

“Tomorrow afternoon, perhaps?”

“This minute, Nurse Wright.” He beckoned her down with one large hand.

“It's almost ten o'clock,” said Lib.

“My editor will have my hide if I don't send something of substance by the next mail. Please!” His voice almost boyish.

To get it over with, Lib came back down and sat at the table. She nodded at his inky notebook. “What have you got so far? Homer and Plato?”

Byrne's smile was lopsided. “Miscellaneous opinions of fellow travellers denied entrance today. A faith healer from Manchester who wants to restore the girl's appetite by the laying-on of hands. Some medical bigwig twice as outraged as I at being turned away.”

Lib winced. The last thing she wanted to discuss was Standish and his recommendations. It occurred to her that if the journalist hadn't seen the Dublin doctor at Ryan's again tonight, that meant Standish must have rattled straight back to the capital after examining Anna.