The Wonder (18 page)

Lib stomped all the way back. The wet had slanted under her umbrella and misted her cloak. She was determined to have a word with the fellow who'd set her on that pointless course, but when she got to that bog hole, all it contained was water. Unless she'd confused it with another one? Beside the great bite out of the earth, turf sods lay on drying racks in the rain.

On the way down to Ryan's, she spotted what she thought was a tiny orchid. Perhaps she could pick it for Anna. She stepped onto an emerald patch to reach the flower and too late felt the moss give way underfoot.

Thrown headlong, Lib found herself groveling facedown in slime. Although she got up on her knees almost at once, she was soaked through. When she hauled up her skirt and set one foot down, it sank through the peat. Like a creature caught in a snare, she clawed her way out, panting.

Staggering back down the lane, Lib was just relieved that the spirit grocery was close by so she wouldn't have to walk the length of the village street in this state.

Her landlord, in the doorway, raised his bushy eyebrows.

“Treacherous, your bogs, Mr. Ryan.” Her skirt dripped. “Do many drown in them?”

He snorted, which brought on a coughing fit. “Only if they're soft in the head,” he said when he could speak again, “or loaded with drink on a moonless night.”

By the time Lib had dried herself off and put on her spare uniform, it was five past one. She strode as fast as she could to the O'Donnells'. She'd have run if it hadn't been beneath the dignity of a nurse. To be twenty minutes late for her shift, after all her insistence on high standards…

Where the laundry tub had stood this morning was an ashy puddle with a four-footed wooden dolly laid down beside it. Sheets and clothes were draped over bushes and pegged on a rope strung between the cabin and a crooked tree.

In the good room, sipping tea with a buttered scone on his plate, sat Mr. Thaddeus. Outrage swelled up in Lib.

But then, he didn't count as a visitor, she told herself, being the parish priest and a member of the committee. And at least Sister Michael was sitting right beside Anna. Undoing her cloak, Lib caught the nun's eye and mouthed an apology for her lateness.

“My dear child,” the priest was saying, “to answer your question, 'tis neither up nor down.”

“Where, then?” asked Anna. “Does it float between?”

“Purgatory should not be considered an actual place as much as time allotted for cleansing the soul.”

“How long a time, though, Mr. Thaddeus?” Anna, sitting up very straight, was as pale as milk. “I know 'tis seven years for every mortal sin we commit, because they offend against the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost, but I don't know how many Pat committed, so I can't do the sum.”

The priest sighed but didn't contradict the child.

Lib was revolted by this mathematical mumbo jumbo. Was it Anna who was suffering from religious mania or her whole nation?

Mr. Thaddeus put down his cup.

Lib watched his plate for any crumb to fall. Not that she could really imagine Anna palming and swallowing it if it did.

“'Tis a process more than a fixed period,” he told Anna. “In the eternity of the Almighty's love, there is no time.”

“But I don't think Pat's in heaven with God yet.”

Sister Michael's fingers slid over Anna's.

Watching, Lib hurt for the girl. As there'd been only two of them, the siblings must have clung together through the worst of times.

“Those in purgatory are not permitted to pray, of course,” said the priest, “but we may pray for them. To expiate their sins, to make amends—'tis like pouring water on their flames.”

“Oh, but I have, Mr. Thaddeus,” Anna assured him, eyes huge. “I've made a novena for the Holy Souls, nine days every month for nine months. I've said Saint Gertrude's Prayer in the graveyard, and read Holy Scripture, and adored the Blessed Sacrament, and prayed for the intercession of all the saints—”

He held up one palm to hush her. “Well, then. That's half a dozen acts of reparation already.”

“But that might not be enough water to put out Pat's flames.”

Lib almost pitied the flailing priest.

“Don't picture it as an actual fire,” he urged Anna, “so much as the soul's painful sense of its unworthiness to come into God's presence, its self-punishment, you see?”

The child let out one harsh sob.

Sister Michael cupped the child's left hand in both of hers. “Come,” she murmured. “Didn't Our Lord say,
Be not afraid
?”

“That's right,” said Mr. Thaddeus. “Leave Pat to Our Heavenly Father.”

A tear raced down Anna's swollen face, but she swiped it away.

“Ah, God love her, the tender dote,” whispered Rosaleen O'Donnell behind Lib in the doorway. Kitty hovered at her elbow.

Being part of this audience made Lib suddenly uneasy. Could the whole scene have been staged by the mother and the priest? And what about Sister Michael—was she comforting the girl or luring her further into the maze?

Mr. Thaddeus clasped his hands. “Will we pray, Anna?”

“Yes.” The girl flattened her hands together.
“I adore thee, O most precious cross, adorned by the tender, delicate and venerable members of Jesus my Saviour, sprinkled and stained with his precious blood. I adore thee, O my God, nailed to the cross for love of me.”

It was the Dorothy prayer!
Adore thee
and
adorned by,
not
Dorothy
—that's what Lib had been hearing over the past five days.

After the brief satisfaction of having solved the puzzle, she felt flat. Just another prayer; what was so special about it?

“Now, to the matter that's brought me here, Anna,” said Mr. Thaddeus. “Your refusal to eat.”

Was the priest trying to absolve himself of all blame in the Englishwoman's hearing?
Then make her eat that plump scone this minute,
Lib urged him silently.

Anna said something, very low.

“Speak up, my dear.”

“I don't
refuse,
Mr. Thaddeus,” she said. “I just don't eat.”

Lib watched those serious, puffy eyes.

“God sees into your heart,” said Mr. Thaddeus, “and he's moved by your good intentions. Let's pray that you'll be granted the grace to take food.”

The nun was nodding.

The grace to take food!
As if it were some miraculous power, when every dog, every caterpillar, was born with it.

The three prayed together silently for a few minutes. Then Mr. Thaddeus ate his scone, blessed the O'Donnells and Sister Michael, and took his leave.

Lib led Anna back to her bedroom. She could think of nothing to say, no way to refer to the conversation without insulting the child's faith. All across the world, she told herself, people placed their trust in amulets or idols or magic words. Anna could believe whatever she liked for all Lib cared, if only she'd eat.

She opened
All the Year Round
and tried to find any article that looked remotely interesting.

Malachy came in for a few words with his daughter. “Which are these, now?”

Anna introduced him to the flowers in her jar: bog asphodel, bog bean, cross-leaved heath, purple moor grass, butterwort.

His hand absentmindedly followed the curve of her ear.

Did he notice the thinning hair? Lib wondered. The scaly patches, the down on her face, the distended limbs? Or was Anna always the same in her father's eyes?

No knocks at the cabin door that afternoon; perhaps the constant rain kept the curious at bay. Anna seemed muted after her encounter with the priest. She sat with a hymnbook open in her lap.

Five days, thought Lib, staring so hard her eyes prickled. Could a stubborn child possibly last five days on sips of water?

Kitty brought Lib's tray in at a quarter to four. Cabbage, turnips, and the inevitable oatcakes—but Lib was hungry, so she set to as if it were the finest of spreads. The oatcakes were slightly blackened this time, and raw in the middle. But she forced them down. She'd cleared half her plate by the time she even remembered Anna, not three feet away, muttering what Lib still thought of as the Dorothy prayer. That was what hunger could do: blind you to everything else. The wad of oats rose in Lib's throat.

A nurse she'd known at Scutari had passed some time on a plantation in Mississippi and said the most dreadful thing was how quickly one stopped noticing the collars and chains. One could grow used to anything.

Lib stared at her plate now and imagined seeing it as Anna claimed she saw it:
a horseshoe, or a log, or a rock.
Impossible. She tried again, picturing the vegetables in a detached way, as if in a frame. Now this was only a photograph of a greasy plate, and after all, one wouldn't put one's tongue to an image or take a bite out of a page. Lib added a layer of glass, then another frame and another sheet of glass, boxing the thing away.
Not for eating
.

But the cabbage was an old friend; its hot, savoury scent spoke to her. She forked it into her mouth.

Anna watched the rain, face almost pressed to the smeary window.

Miss N. held passionate views on the importance of sunshine to the sick, Lib remembered. Like plants, they shrank without it. Which made her think of McBrearty and his arcane theory about living off light.

The skies finally cleared around six, and Lib decided there was little risk of visitors this late, so she took Anna out for a turn around the farmyard, wrapped up well in two shawls.

The girl held out her swollen hand to a brown butterfly that jerked about and wouldn't light on it. “Isn't that cloud over there exactly like a seal?”

Lib squinted at it. “You've never seen a real seal, I think, Anna.”

“Real in a picture, I have.”

Children would like clouds, of course: formless, or, rather, ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic. This little girl's inchoate mind had never been put in order. No wonder she'd fallen prey to an ambition as fantastical as a life free of appetite.

When they came back in, a tall, bearded man was smoking on a stool in the best chair. He turned to beam at Anna.

“You let a stranger in the minute my back was turned?” Lib asked Rosaleen O'Donnell in a sharp whisper.

“Sure John Flynn's no stranger.” The mother didn't lower her voice. “He has a fine big farm up the road, and doesn't he often stop in of an evening to bring Malachy the paper?”

“No visitors,”
Lib reminded her.

The voice that emerged from that beard was very deep. “I'm a member of the committee that's paying your wages, Mrs. Wright.”

Wrong-footed again. “I beg your pardon, sir. I didn't realize.”

“Will you have a drop of whiskey, John?” Mrs. O'Donnell went for the little bottle kept for visitors in the nook beside the fire.

“I won't, not at the minute. Anna, how are you this evening?” asked Flynn in a soft voice, beckoning the child closer.

“Very well,” Anna assured him.

“Aren't you marvellous?” The farmer's eyes looked glassy, as if he were seeing a vision. One massive hand stretched out as if he wanted to stroke the child's head. “You give us all hope. The very thing we need in these depressed times,” he told her. “A beacon shining across these fields. Across the whole benighted island!”

Anna stood on one leg, squirming.

“Would you say a prayer with me?” he asked.

“She needs to get out of these damp things,” said Lib.

“Whisper one for me, then, when you're going to sleep,” he called as Lib hurried the child towards the bedroom.

“I will of course, Mr. Flynn,” said Anna over her shoulder.

“Bless you!”

So poky and dim in there without the lamp. “It'll be dark soon,” said Lib.

“He that followeth me walketh not in darkness,”
quoted Anna, undoing her cuffs.

“You may as well put your nightclothes on now.”

“All right, Mrs. Elizabeth. Or is it Eliza, maybe?” Fatigue made the girl's grin lopsided.

Lib concentrated on Anna's tiny buttons.

“Or is it Lizzy? I like Lizzy.”

“It's not Lizzy,” said Lib.

“Izzy? Ibby?”

“Iddly-diddly!”

Anna spilled over with laughter. “I'll call you that, then, Mrs. Iddly-Diddly.”

“You will not, you goblin girl,” said Lib. Were the O'Donnells and their friend Flynn wondering at all this mirth coming through the wall?

“I will so,” said Anna.

“Lib.” The word came out of her on its own, like a cough. “Lib's what I was called.” Rather regretting telling her already.

“Lib,” said Anna with a satisfied nod.

It was sweet to hear it. Like childhood days, when Lib's sister still looked up to her, when they'd thought they'd always have each other.

She pushed the memories to arm's length. “What about you, have you ever had a nickname?”

Anna shook her head.

“You could be Annie, perhaps. Hanna, Nancy, Nan…”

“Nan,” said the girl, sounding out the syllable.

“You like Nan best?”

“But she wouldn't be me.”

Lib shrugged. “A woman can change her name. On marriage, for instance.”

“You were married, Mrs. Lib.”

She nodded, wary. “I'm a widow.”

“Are you sad all the time?”

Lib was disconcerted. “I knew my husband less than a year.” Did that sound cold?

“You must have loved him,” said Anna.

She couldn't answer that. She called up Wright in her mind; his face was a blur. “Sometimes, when disaster strikes, there's nothing to be done but begin all over again.”

“Begin what?”

“Everything. A whole new life.”

The girl absorbed that notion in silence.

They were half blinded when Kitty carried in the flaring lamp.