The Wonder (6 page)

Anna took something large and white out of her workbag and began hemming it, standing in the corner by the window.

“Sit down, child,” Lib told her, waving her to the chair.

“I'm very well here, ma'am.”

What a paradox: Anna O'Donnell was a shammer of the deepest dye—but with nice manners. Lib found she couldn't treat her with the harshness she deserved. “Kitty,” she called, “could you bring in another chair as well as the hot water?”

No answer from the kitchen.

“Take this one for now,” she urged the girl. “I don't want it.”

Anna crossed herself, sat down on the chair, and sewed on.

Lib inched the dresser away from the wall to make sure there was nothing hollowed out behind it. Tugging out each drawer—the wood was warped from damp—she went through the girl's small stock of clothes, fingering every seam and hem.

On top of the dresser sat a drooping dandelion in a jar. Miss N. approved of flowers in sickrooms, scorning the old wives' tale about them poisoning the air; she said the brilliancy of colour and variety of form uplifted not only the mind but the body. (In Lib's first week at the hospital, she'd tried to explain that to Matron, who'd called her
la-di-da
.)

It occurred to Lib that the flower might be a source of nourishment hiding in plain sight. What about the liquid—was it really water or some kind of clear broth or syrup? Lib sniffed at the jar, but all her nose registered was the familiar tang of dandelion. She dipped her finger in the liquid, then put it to her lips. As tasteless as it was colourless. But might there be some kind of nutritive element that had those qualities?

Lib could tell without looking that the girl was watching her. Oh, come now, Lib was falling into the trap of the old doctor's delusions. This was just water. She wiped her hand on her apron.

Beside the jar, nothing but a small wooden chest. Not even a mirror, it struck Lib now; did Anna never want to look at herself? She opened the box.

“Those are my treasures,” said the girl, jumping up.

“Lovely. May I see?” Lib's hands already busy inside the chest, in case Anna was going to claim that these were
private
too.

“Certainly.”

Pious gimcrackery: a set of rosary beads made of—seeds, was it?—with a plain cross on the end, and a painted candlestick in the shape of the Virgin and Child.

“Isn't it beautiful?” Anna reached out for the candlestick. “Mammy and Dadda gave it to me on my confirmation.”

“An important day,” murmured Lib. The statuette was too sickly-sweet for her taste. She felt it all over to make sure it was really porcelain, not something edible. Only then did she let the girl take it.

Anna held it to her chest. “Confirmation's the
most
important day.”

“Why's that?”

“'Tis the end of being a child.”

Darkly comic, Lib found it, this slip of a thing thinking of herself as a grown woman. Next she peered at the writing on a tiny silvery oval, no bigger than the top of her finger.

“That's my Miraculous Medal,” said Anna, lifting it out of Lib's hand.

“What miracles has it done?”

That came out too flippant, but the girl didn't take offence. “Ever so many,” she assured Lib, rubbing it. “Not
this
one, I mean, but all the Miraculous Medals in Christendom together.”

Lib didn't comment. At the bottom of the box, in a glass case, she found a tiny disc. Not metal but white, this one, stamped with a lamb carrying a flag and a coat of arms. It couldn't be the bread from Holy Communion, could it? Surely that would be sacrilege, to keep the Host in a toy box? “What's this, Anna?”

“My Agnus Dei.”

Lamb of God;
Lib knew that much Latin. She flipped up the lid of the case and grated the disc with her nail.

“Don't break it!”

“I won't.” It wasn't bread, she realized, but wax. She laid the box in Anna's cupped hand.

“Each one's been blessed by His Holiness,” the child assured her, clicking the lid shut. “Agnus Deis make floods go down and put out fires.”

Lib puzzled over the origin of this legend. Considering how fast wax melted, who could imagine it any use against fire?

Nothing left in the chest but a few books. She inspected the titles: all devotional.
A Missal for the Use of the Laity; The Imitation of Christ.
She plucked an ornamented rectangle about the size of a playing card out of the black Book of Psalms.

“Put it back where it lives,” said Anna, agitated.

Ah, could there be food hidden in the book? “Just a moment.” Lib riffled through the pages. Nothing but more little rectangles.

“Those are my holy cards. Each one has its own place.”

The one Lib held was a printed prayer with a fancy-cut border, like lace, and it had another of those tiny medals tied onto it with a ribbon. On the back, in saccharine pastels, a woman cuddled a sheep.
Divine Bergère,
it said at the top. Divine something?

“See, this one matches Psalm One Hundred and Eighteen:
I have gone astray like a sheep that is lost,
” Anna recited, tapping the page without needing to check what it said.

Very “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” Lib thought. She saw now that all the books in the chest were studded with these rectangles. “Who gave you these cards?”

“Some were prizes at school or at the mission. Or presents from visitors.”

“Where's this mission?”

“It's gone now. My brother left me some of the loveliest ones,” said Anna, kissing the sheep card before tucking it into its place and closing the book.

What a curious child. “Do you have a favourite saint?”

Anna shook her head. “They all have different things to teach us. Some of them were born good, but others were very wicked until God cleaned their hearts.”

“Oh yes?”

“He can pick anyone to be holy,” Anna assured her.

When the door burst open, Lib jumped.

Kitty, with the basin of hot water. “Sorry to keep you. I'm after bringing himself his meal,” the young woman said, panting.

Malachy O'Donnell, presumably. Off cutting turf for a neighbour, wasn't he—as a favour? Lib wondered. Or a job of work to supplement the pittance the farm made? It struck her that perhaps only the men got food at midday here.

“What'll I be scrubbing for you?” asked the slavey.

“I'll do that,” Lib told her, taking the basin. She couldn't allow any of the family access to this room. Kitty might have food for the child tucked in her apron right now, for all Lib knew.

The maid frowned; confusion or resentment?

“You must be busy,” said Lib. “Oh, and could I trouble you for another chair, as well as fresh bedding?”

“A sheet?” asked Kitty.

“A pair of them,” Lib corrected her, “and a clean blanket.”

“We've none,” said the maid, shaking her head.

Such a vacant expression on the broad face; Lib wondered if Kitty was quite all there.

“No clean sheets yet, she means,” Anna put in. “Wash day's Monday next, unless 'tis too wet.”

“I see,” said Lib, suppressing her irritation. “Well, just the chair, then, Kitty.”

She added chlorinated soda from a bottle in her bag to the basin of water and wiped every surface; the smell was harsh, but clean. She made the child's bed again, with the same tired sheets and grey blanket. Straightening up, she wondered where else a mouthful of food could possibly be stashed.

This was nothing like the cluttered sickrooms of the upper classes. Apart from the bed, dresser, and chair, there was only a woven mat on the floor, with a pattern of darker lines. Lib lifted it up; nothing underneath. The room would be very cheerless if she took the mat away, as well as chill underfoot. Besides, the most likely place to hide a crust or an apple was in the bed, and surely the committee didn't mean to make the girl sleep on bare boards like a prisoner? No, Lib would just have to inspect the room at frequent and unpredictable intervals to make sure no food had been sneaked in.

Kitty brought in the chair at last, and thumped it down.

“You might take this mat and beat the dust out when you have a moment,” said Lib. “Tell me, where would I find a scales to weigh Anna?”

Kitty shook her head.

“In the village, perhaps?”

“We use fists,” said Kitty.

Lib frowned.

“Fistfuls of flour, like, and pinches of salt.” The slavey mimed them in the air.

“I don't mean household scales,” Lib told her. “Something big enough to weigh a person, or an animal. Perhaps on one of the neighbouring farms?”

Kitty shrugged tiredly.

Anna, watching the curling dandelion, gave no sign of hearing any of this, as if it were some other girl's weight that was in question.

Lib sighed. “A jug of cold water, please, then, and a teaspoon.”

“Did you want a bit of something?” Kitty asked on her way out.

The phrase confused Lib.

“Or can you wait for your dinner?”

“I can wait.”

Lib regretted her words the moment the maid was gone, because she was hungry. But somehow, in front of Anna, she couldn't declare that she was desperate for food. Which was absurd, she reminded herself, since the girl was nothing but a shammer.

Anna was whispering her Dorothy prayer again. Lib did her best to ignore it. She'd put up with far more irksome habits before. There was that boy she'd nursed through scarlet fever who kept hawking up on the floor, and that demented old lady who'd been convinced her medicine was poison and had shoved it away, spilling it all down Lib.

The girl was singing under her breath now, hands folded on her finished needlework. Nothing furtive about this hymn; the Dorothy prayer was the only secret Anna seemed to be keeping. The high notes were a little cracked, but sweet.

Hark! the loud celestial hymn,

Angel choirs above are raising,

Cherubim and seraphim,

In unceasing chorus praising.

When Kitty brought in the jug of water, Lib said, “What's this, may I ask?” Patting the flaking whitewash.

“A wall,” said Kitty.

A tiny giggle escaped from the child.

“I mean, of what is it made?” asked Lib.

The slavey's face cleared. “Mud.”

“Just mud? Really?”

“'Tis stone at the base, anyways, for keeping the rats out.”

When Kitty was gone, Lib used the tiny bone spoon to taste the water in the jug. No hint of any flavour. “Are you thirsty, child?”

Anna shook her head.

“Hadn't you better take a sip?”

Overstepping her mark; the habits of a nurse died hard. Lib reminded herself that it was nothing to her whether the little fraud drank or not.

But Anna opened her mouth for the spoon and swallowed without difficulty.
“O forgive me, that I may be refreshed,”
she murmured.

Talking not to Lib, of course, but to God.

“Another?”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Wright.”

Lib wrote down,
1:13 p.m., 1 tsp. water.
Not that the quantity mattered, she supposed, except that she wanted to be able to give a full account of anything the child ingested on her watch.

Now there really was nothing left to do. Lib took the second chair. It was so close to Anna's that their skirts were almost touching, but there was nowhere else to place it. She considered the long hours ahead with a sense of awkwardness. She'd spent months on end with other private patients, but this was different, because she was eyeing this child like a bird of prey, and Anna knew it.

A soft knock at the door made her leap up.

“Malachy O'Donnell, ma'am.” The farmer tapped his faded waistcoat where it buttoned.

“Mr. O'Donnell,” said Lib, putting her hand into his leathery one. She would have thanked him for his hospitality except that she was here as a sort of spy on his whole household, so it hardly seemed fitting.

He was short and wiry, as lean as his wife, but with a far narrower frame. Anna took after her father's side. But no spare flesh on any of this family; a troupe of marionettes.

He bent down to kiss his daughter somewhere near the ear. “How are you, pet?”

“Very well, Dadda.” Beaming up at him.

Malachy O'Donnell stood there, nodding.

Disappointment weighed on Lib. She'd been expecting something more from the father. The grand showman behind the scenes—or at least a coconspirator, as prickly as his wife. But this yokel… “You keep, ah, shorthorns, Mr. O'Donnell?”

“Well. A few now,” he said. “I have the lease on a couple of water meadows for the grazing. I sell the, you know, for fertilizer.”

Lib realized he meant manure.

“Cattle, now, sometimes…” Malachy trailed off. “With their straying and breaking legs and getting stuck when they come out wrong, see—you might say they do be more trouble than they're worth.”

What else had Lib seen outside the farmhouse? “You also have poultry, yes?”

“Ah, they'd be Rosaleen's, now. Mrs. O'Donnell's.” The man gave one last nod, as if something had been settled, and stroked his daughter's hairline. He headed out, then doubled back. “Meant to say. That fellow from the paper's here.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He gestured towards the window. Through the smeary glass Lib saw an enclosed wagon. “To take Anna.”

“Take her where?” she snapped. Really, what did the committee men think they were doing, setting up the watch in this cramped and unhygienic cabin and then changing their minds and shipping the child off somewhere else?

“Take her face, just,” said her father. “Her likeness.”

REILLY & SONS, PHOTOGRAPHISTS,
the van said on the side in pompous type. Lib could hear a stranger's voice in the kitchen. Oh, this was too much. She took a few steps before remembering that she wasn't allowed to leave the child's side. She roped her arms around herself instead.