The Wonder (25 page)

“I know Anna's too famished to get out of bed.”

“If the child's… struggling somewhat, 'tis only from the nervous strain of being watched like a prisoner.”

Lib snorted. She moved in closer to the woman, her whole body stiff. “What kind of mother would let it come to this?”

Rosaleen O'Donnell did the last thing Lib was expecting: she burst into tears.

Lib stared at her.

“Didn't I try my best?” the woman wailed, water scudding down the lines of her face. “Sure isn't she flesh of my flesh, my last hope? Didn't I bring her into the world and rear her tenderly, and didn't I feed her as long as she'd let me?”

For a moment Lib glimpsed how it must have been. That day in spring when the O'Donnells' good little girl had turned eleven—and then, with no explanation, had refused to eat another bite. For her parents, perhaps it had been a horror as overwhelming as the illness that had carried off their boy the autumn before. The only way Rosaleen O'Donnell could have made sense of these cataclysms was to convince herself that they were part of God's plan. “Mrs. O'Donnell,” she began, “let me assure you—”

But the woman fled, ducking into the little outshot behind the sack curtain.

Lib went back to the bedroom, shaking. It confused her, to feel such sympathy for a woman she loathed.

Anna showed no sign of having heard the quarrel. She lay propped up on pillows, absorbed in her holy cards.

Lib tried to collect herself. She looked over Anna's shoulder at the picture of the girl floating on a cross-shaped raft. “The sea's quite a different thing from a river, you know.”

“Bigger,” said Anna. She touched one fingertip to the card as if to feel the wet.

“Infinitely bigger,” Lib told the girl, “and while a river moves only one way, the sea seems to breathe, in and out, in and out.”

Anna inhaled, straining to fill her lungs.

Lib checked her watch: almost time.
Noon
was all she'd put on the note that she'd slipped under Byrne's door before dawn. She didn't like the look of those slate-grey clouds, but it couldn't be helped. Besides, Irish weather turned every quarter of an hour.

At exactly twelve, the clamour of the Angelus went up in the kitchen. She was counting on it as a distraction. “Shall we take a little walk, Anna?”

Rosaleen O'Donnell and the maid were on their knees—
“The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary”
—as Lib hurried by to collect the invalid chair from outside the front door.
“Now and at the hour of our death, amen.”

She pushed it through the kitchen, back wheel squeaking.

Anna had managed to clamber out of bed and kneel beside it.
“Be it done to me according to thy word,”
she was chanting. Lib covered the chair with one blanket, then helped the girl into it and added three more, tucking in her thickened feet. She wheeled her rapidly past the praying adults and out the door.

The summer was beginning to turn already; some of those yellow starry flowers on their long stalks were darkening to bronze. A mass of cloud split as if along a seam, and light spilled through. “Here's the sun,” croaked Anna, head back against the padding.

Down the track Lib hurried, bumping the chair through ruts and over stones. She turned onto the lane and there was William Byrne, just a few feet away.

He didn't smile. “Unconscious?”

Only now did Lib see that Anna had slid down in the chair and was lying with her head to one side. She flicked the girl's cheek lightly and the nearer eyelid flickered, to her relief. “Just dozing,” she told him.

Byrne had no small talk today. “Well, have your arguments done any good?”

“They roll over her like water,” she admitted, turning the chair away from the village and pushing it along to keep the girl asleep. “This fast, it's Anna's rock. Her daily task, her vocation.”

He nodded grimly. “If she keeps going downhill so quickly—”

What was coming?

Byrne's eyes were dark, almost navy blue. “Will you—would you consider forcing her?”

Lib made herself picture the procedure: holding Anna down, pushing a tube down her throat, and dosing her. She looked up, met his burning gaze. “I don't think I could. It's not a matter of squeamishness,” she assured him.

“I know what it would cost you.”

That wasn't it either, or not all of it. She couldn't explain.

They walked for a minute; two. It struck Lib that the three of them could have been mistaken for a family taking the air.

Byrne began again, in a brisker tone. “Well, it turns out the padre's not behind the hoax after all.”

“Mr. Thaddeus? How can you be sure?”

“O'Flaherty the schoolteacher says it may have been McBrearty who talked them all into forming this committee, but it was the priest who insisted they mount a formal guard on the girl, with seasoned nurses.”

Lib puzzled over that. Byrne was right; why would a guilty man have wanted Anna watched? Perhaps she'd been too quick to go along with Byrne's suspicions of Mr. Thaddeus because of her wariness of priests.

“Also I found out more about this mission Anna mentioned,” said Byrne. “Last spring, Redemptorists from Belgium swooped down—”

“Redemptorists?”

“Missionary priests. The pope sends them out all over Christendom, like bloodhounds, to round up the faithful and sniff out unorthodoxy. They hammer the rules into the heads of country folk, put the fear of God back into their souls,” he told her. “So. For three weeks, thrice daily, these Redemptorists harrowed the bog men in these parts.” His finger swung across the motley-coloured land. “According to Maggie Ryan, one sermon was a real barnstormer: hellfire and brimstone raining down, children screeching, and such urgent queues for confession afterwards that a fellow fell under the crowd and got his ribs stove in. The mission wound up with a massive Quarantore—”

“A what?” asked Lib, lost again.

“Forty hours, it means—the length of time Our Lord spent in the tomb.” Byrne put on a heavy brogue. “Do you know nothing, you heathen?”

That made her smile.

“For forty hours the Blessed Sacrament was exposed in all the chapels within walking distance, with a mob of the faithful shoving along the lanes to prostrate themselves before it. The whole hullabaloo culminated in the confirmation of all eligible boys and girls.”

“Including Anna,” Lib guessed.

“The day before her eleventh birthday.”

Confirmation:
the moment of decision.
The end of being a child
was how Anna had described it. Placed on her tongue, the sacred Host—her God in the guise of a little disc of bread. But how could she have formed the dire resolution to make that her last meal? Could she have misunderstood something the foreign priests had said as they wound the crowd up to a fever pitch?

Lib felt so nauseated, she had to stop for a moment and lean on the bath chair's leather handles. “What was it about, the sermon that caused such a riot, did you learn?”

“Oh, fornication, what else?”

The word made Lib angle her face away.

“Is that an eagle?” The thin voice startled them.

“Where?” Byrne asked Anna.

“Away up there, over the green road.”

“I think not,” he told the child, “just the king of all crows.”

“I walked that so-called green road the other day,” said Lib, making conversation. “A long and rambling waste of time.”

“An English invention, as it happens,” said Byrne.

She looked sideways at him. Was this one of his jokes?

“It was the winter of '
47
, when Ireland was chest-deep in snow for the first time in her history. Because charity was considered
corrupting,
” he said ironically, “the starving were invited to go on the Public Works instead. In these parts, that meant building a road from nowhere to nowhere.”

Lib frowned at him, jerking her head towards the girl.

“Oh, I'm sure she's heard all the stories.” But he bent to look at Anna.

Asleep again, head limp in the corner of the chair. Lib tucked the loosening blankets around her.

“So the men picked stones out of the ground and hammered them apart for a pittance a basket,” he went on in a low voice, “while the women toted the baskets and fitted the pieces together. The children—”

“Mr. Byrne,” Lib protested.

“You wanted to know about the road,” he reminded her.

Did he resent her for the mere fact of her being English? she wondered. If he knew the feelings she was harbouring for him, would he respond with contempt? Pity, even? Pity would be worse.

“But I'll be brief. Whoever was struck down by cold or hunger or fever and didn't get up was buried by the verge, in a sack, just a couple of inches under.”

Lib thought of her boots going along the soft, flowered edge of the green road. Bog never forgot; it kept things
in a remarkable state of preservation.
“No more,” she begged, “please.”

A merciful silence between them, at last.

Anna twitched, and turned her face against the threadbare velvet. One drop of rain, then another. Lib clawed at the black canopy of the bath chair with its rusty hinges, and Byrne helped her unfold it over the sleeping child a moment before the rain slammed down.

She couldn't sleep in her room at Ryan's, couldn't read, couldn't do anything but fret. She knew she should have some supper, but her throat felt sealed up.

At midnight the lamp was burning low on Anna's dresser, and the child was a handful of dark hair across the pillow, her body hardly interrupting the plane of the blankets. All evening Lib had talked to the child—
at
the child—until she was hoarse.

Now she sat close to the bed making herself think of a tube. A very narrow, flexible, greased one, no wider than a straw, snaking between the girl's lips, so slowly, so very gently that Anna might possibly even sleep on. Lib imagined trickling fresh milk down that tube into the child's stomach, just a little at a time.

Because what if Anna's obsession was the
result
of her fast as much as its cause? After all, who could think straight on an empty stomach? Perhaps, paradoxically, the child could learn to feel normal hunger again only once she had some food in her. If Lib tube-fed Anna, really, she'd be fortifying the girl. Tugging Anna back from the brink, giving her time to come to her senses. It wouldn't be using force so much as taking responsibility; Nurse Wright, alone out of all the grown-ups, brave enough to do what was needed to save Anna O'Donnell from herself.

Lib's teeth pressed together so hard they ached.

Didn't adults often do painful things to children for their own good? Or nurses to patients? Hadn't Lib debrided burns and picked shrapnel out of wounds, dragging more than a few patients back into the land of the living by rough means? And after all, lunatics and prisoners survived force-feeding several times a day.

She pictured Anna waking, beginning to struggle, choking, retching, her eyes wet with betrayal. Lib holding the girl's small nose, pressing her head down on the pillow.
Lie still, my dear. Let me. You must.
Pushing in the tube, inexorable.

No!
So loud in her head, Lib thought for a moment she'd shouted it.

It wouldn't work.
That was what she should have told Byrne this afternoon. Physiologically, yes, she supposed slop forced down Anna's throat would supply her with energy, but it wouldn't keep her alive. If anything, it would speed her withdrawal from the world. Crack her spirit.

Lib counted the breaths for a full minute on her watch. Twenty-five, too many, dangerously fast. But still so perfectly regular. For all the thinning hair, the dun patches, the sore at the corner of the mouth, Anna was beautiful as any sleeping child.

For months I was fed on manna from heaven.
That's what she'd said this morning.
I live on manna from heaven,
she'd told her Spiritualist visitors last week. But today, Lib noticed, it had come out differently, in a wistful past tense:
For months I was fed on manna from heaven.

Unless Lib had heard it wrong? Not
for
months.
Four
months, was that it?
Four months I was fed on manna from heaven.
Anna had started her fast four months ago, in April, and subsisted on manna—whatever secret means of nourishment she meant by that—until the arrival of the nurses.

But no, this made no sense, because then she should have begun to show the effects of a complete fast no more than a couple of days later. Lib hadn't noticed any such deterioration until Byrne had alerted her to it on Monday of this second week. Could a child really have gone seven days before flagging?

Lib flicked back through her memorandum book now, a series of telegraphic dispatches from a distant battlefront. Every day during the first week had been much the same until—

Refused mother's greeting.

She stared at the neat words. Saturday morning, six days into the watch. Not a medical notation at all; Lib had jotted it down simply because it was an unexplained change in the child's behaviour.

How could she have been so blind?

Not just a greeting twice a day; an embrace in which the big bony woman's frame had blocked the child's face from view. A kiss like that of a great bird feeding her nestling.

Lib broke Miss N.'s rule and shook the girl awake.

Anna blinked, cringing away from the harsh light of the lamp.

Lib whispered, “When you were fed on manna, who—” Not
who gave it to you,
because Anna would say that manna came from God. “Who brought it to you?”

She was expecting resistance, denial. Some elaborate cover story about angels.

“Mammy,” murmured Anna.