“Hm. Should hypochondriacs be called pretenders, though?” asked Byrne.
Lib felt abashed, as if she’d been sneering at her employers.
“The mind can bamboozle the body,” he pointed out. “Think about itching and one feels an itch. Or yawning—” And he broke off to yawn into his hand.
“Well, but—” Lib had to stop because she was yawning too.
Byrne let out a great guffaw, then quietened and stared into space. “I suppose it’s within the bounds of possibility that a practiced mind could command the body to keep going without food, at least for a while.”
But wait. At Lib’s first encounter with Byrne, he’d called Anna a fraud; at their next, he’d accused Lib of keeping her from eating. Now, having scorned Lib’s sleep-feeding idea, he was suggesting the miraculous claims might be true after all? “Don’t say you’re going over to the O’Donnells’ camp.”
His mouth twisted. “It’s my job to keep an open mind. In India—I was sent to Lucknow to report on the rebellion—it’s not unknown for fakirs to make claims of suspended animation.”
“Fakers?”
“Fakirs, holy men,” he corrected her. “Colonel Wade, formerly agent to the governor-general of the Punjab, he told me he’d watched the digging up of a character called the Fakir of Lahore. Forty days underground—no food, drink, light, little air—and the fellow popped out hale and hearty.”
Lib snorted.
Byrne shrugged. “All I can tell you is that this battle-hardened old soldier talked my ear off with such conviction that I was almost inclined to believe him.”
“And you a cynical man of the press.”
“Am I? I name corruption when I see it,” said Byrne. “Does that make me a cynic?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Lib, thrown. “I said more than I meant.”
“A vice common among men of the press.” His smile a darting fish.
Had Byrne claimed his feelings were wounded only to put Lib in the wrong? she wondered dizzily.
“So might Anna O’Donnell be a diminutive Irish girl-yogi?”
“You wouldn’t make fun if you knew her.” The words burst out of Lib.
The man was on his feet. “I’ll accept that invitation at once.”
“No, no. The rule against visitors is strict.”
“Then how did Dr. Standish from Dublin get around it, may I ask?” His tone was still teasing, but the resentment was audible. “You didn’t mention that last night—that you’d let him in on his second try.”
“The cur!”
William Byrne dropped back into his seat. “A cur let him in?”
“Standish is the cur,” said Lib. “All this is in confidence?”
He slapped his memorandum book facedown.
“He recommended I tube-feed her by force.”
Byrne winced.
“He was granted entry at Dr. McBrearty’s insistence, against my better judgment,” Lib added, “but it won’t happen again.”
“Why, are you altered from gaoler to bodyguard, Elizabeth Wright? Will you stand in the gap and keep off all dragons?”
She didn’t answer. How did Byrne know her first name?
“Would I be right in thinking that you rather like the girl?”
“This is my job,” Lib snapped. “Your question is irrelevant.”
“It’s my job to ask questions, all of them.”
She gave him a hard look. “Why are you still here, Mr. Byrne?”
“I must say, you know the art of making a fellow traveller feel welcome.” He leaned so far back in his chair, it creaked.
“I beg your pardon. But how can this case deserve so many days of your undivided attention?”
“A fair query,” said William Byrne. “Before setting off on Monday, I put it to my editor that I could drum up a score of famished urchins on the streets of Dublin. Why trek all the way into the boglands?”
“And what did he say?” asked Lib.
“What I suspected he would: The one lost sheep, William.”
After a moment, she got the Gospel reference: the shepherd who left his flock of ninety-nine sheep to go after one stray.
“Journalistic investigations must be narrow,” he told her with a shrug. “Divide a reader’s concern among many deserving objects, and there’ll be too little left to make him shed a tear for any one.”
She nodded. “Nurses are the same. It seems to come naturally, to care more about the individual than the crowd.”
One faint auburn eyebrow went up.
“That’s why Miss—the lady who trained me,” Lib corrected herself, “wouldn’t allow us to sit down beside a particular patient and read to him and so on. She said it could lead to attachment.”
“Flirting, canoodling, and so forth?”
She refused to blush. “We had no time to waste. She told us, Do what’s needed, and walk on.”
“Miss Nightingale’s an invalid herself now, of course,” said Byrne.
Lib stared at him. She hadn’t heard anything about her teacher making any public appearances in recent years, but she’d assumed Miss N. was quietly getting on with her mission of hospital reform.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, leaning across the table. “You hadn’t heard.”
Lib struggled to compose herself.
“Was she as great a lady as they say, then?”
“Greater,” said Lib, choked. “And still is, invalid or not.”
She pushed the remains of her stew aside—unable to finish her meal, for once—and got to her feet.
“Are you itching to be away?” asked William Byrne.
Lib chose to answer that as if he’d meant away from the Irish Midlands, not this cramped dining room. “Well. It does sometimes seem as if the nineteenth century hasn’t reached this part of the world yet.”
He grinned.
“Milk for the fairies, wax discs to ward off fire and flood, girls living on air… Is there nothing the Irish won’t swallow?”
“Fairies aside,” said Byrne, “the majority of my countrymen swallow whatever pap our priests feed us.”
So he too was a Catholic; that surprised Lib somehow.
He beckoned her closer. She leaned in, just a little. “That’s why my money’s on Mr. Thaddeus,” he murmured. “The O’Donnell girl may be guileless—she may even have slept through months of night-feedings, if you’re right—but what of her puppet master?”
Like a blow to the ribs. Why hadn’t Lib thought of that? The priest was indeed too glib, too smiling.
But wait. She straightened up. Proceed logically and fair-mindedly. “Mr. Thaddeus claims he’s urged Anna to eat from the start.”
“Urged, only? She’s his parishioner, and a fervently pious one. He could command her to go up a mountain on her knees. No, I say the padre’s been behind the hoax from the start.”
“But with what motive?”
Byrne rubbed his fingers and thumb together.
“The visitors’ donations have been given to the needy,” said Lib.
“That means to the Church.”
Her head was spinning. It was all horribly plausible.
“If Mr. Thaddeus gets Anna’s case acknowledged as a miracle and this dreary hamlet as a site of pilgrimage,” said Byrne, “there’ll be no limit to the profits. The fasting girl’s a shrine-building fund!”
“But how could he have managed to feed her secretly by night?”
“No idea,” admitted Byrne. “He must be in league with the maid or the O’Donnells. Whom do you suspect?”
Lib demurred. “I really couldn’t take it on myself to—”
“Ah, go on, between ourselves. You’ve been in that household night and day since Monday.”
She hesitated, then said, very low, “Rosaleen O’Donnell.”
Byrne nodded. “Who was it said that mother is a child’s word for God?”
Lib had never heard that.
He waggled his pencil between his fingers. “Mind, I can’t print a
word of this without proof or they’ll have me up for libel.”
“Of course not!”
“If you’ll let me have five minutes with the child, I bet I can weasel out the truth.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Well.” Byrne’s voice returned to its usual boom. “Sound her out yourself, then?”
Lib didn’t like the idea of acting as his snoop.
“At any rate, thanks for your company, Mrs. Wright.”
Almost three in the afternoon, and Lib’s next shift began at nine. She wanted air, but it was drizzling, and besides, she supposed she needed a nap more. So she went upstairs and took her boots off.
If the potato blight had been such a long catastrophe, ending only seven years ago, it occurred to Lib that a child now eleven must have been born into hunger. Weaned on it, reared on it; that had to shape a person. Every thrifty inch of Anna’s body had learned to make do with less. She’s never been greedy or clamoured for treats—that was how Rosaleen O’Donnell had praised her daughter. Anna must have been petted every time she said she’d had plenty. Earned a smile for every morsel she passed on to her brother or the maid.
But that didn’t begin to explain why all the other children in Ireland wanted their dinner, and Anna didn’t.
Perhaps what was different was the mother, Lib thought. Like the boastful one in the old tale who’d vaunted her daughter to the world as a spinner of gold. Had Rosaleen O’Donnell noticed her younger child’s talent for abstinence and dreamt up a way to turn it into pounds and pence, fame and glory?
Lib lay very still, eyes closed, but light prickled through the lids. Being tired didn’t mean one was capable of sleep, just as the need for food wasn’t the same as a relish for it. Which brought her back, as everything did, to Anna.
As the last of the evening light drained over the village street, Lib took a right turn down the lane. Rising over the graveyard was a waxing gibbous moon. She thought of the O’Donnell boy in his coffin. Nine months; rotting but not a skeleton yet. Were those his brown trousers the scarecrow wore?
The notice Lib had made for the cabin door was streaked with rain.
Sister Michael was waiting in the bedroom. “Out like a light already,” she whispered.
At midday, they’d had only a moment for Lib to report on her shift. This was a rare time when they might talk in private. “Sister Michael—” But Lib realized she couldn’t mention her speculations about sleep-feedings because the nun would close up like a box again. No, she’d much better stick to the common ground of their concern for this girl asleep in the narrow bed. “Did you know the child’s brother was dead?”
“God rest him,” said the nun with a nod, crossing herself.
So why had nobody told Lib? Or, rather, why did she seem to get hold of the wrong end of the stick all the time?
“Anna seems to be fretting over him,” she said.
“Naturally.”
“No, but—inordinately so.” She hesitated. This woman might be riddled with superstition, seeing angels dancing across every bog, but Lib had no one else to talk to who saw the girl at such close quarters. “I think there’s something wrong with Anna’s mind,” she pressed on in a whisper.
The whites of Sister Michael’s eyes caught the lamplight. “We weren’t asked to look into her mind.”
“I’m charting symptoms,” Lib insisted. “This brooding over her brother is one.”
“You’re drawing an inference, Mrs. Wright.” The nun held up one rigid finger. “We’re not to engage in this kind of discussion.”
“That’s impossible. Every word we say is about Anna, and how could it not be?”
The nun shook her head violently. “Is she eating or not? That’s the only question.”
“It’s not my only question. And if you call yourself a nurse, it can’t be yours either.”
The nun’s cheeks tightened. “My superiors sent me here to serve under Dr. McBrearty. Good night to you.” She folded her cloak over her arm and was gone.
Sitting watching Anna’s eyelids flicker some hours later, Lib found herself longing for the sleep she should have had that afternoon. But this was an old battle, and like any nurse, she knew she could win if she spoke to herself severely enough.
The body had to be granted something; if not slumber, then food, and if that was unavailable, then stimulus of some sort. Lib set aside her shawl and the hot brick that kept her feet off the floor and walked back and forward across the room, three paces each way.
It struck her that William Byrne must have made inquiries about her, because he knew her full name and who’d trained her. What did Lib know about him? Only that he wrote for a paper she’d never read, had been posted to India, and was a Catholic, if a rather sceptical one. So frank and bluff, yet he’d given away little other than his theory about Mr. Thaddeus—an audacious piece of deduction that now struck Lib as entirely unconvincing. The priest hadn’t even been near the cabin since Monday morning. How could she possibly ask Anna, Is it Mr. Thaddeus who’s stopping you from eating?
She found herself counting the sleeping breaths. Nineteen in one minute, but the count would be different, and the rhythm less regular, if Anna were awake.
Something baking in the crock. Turnips? They’d cook slowly all night, filling the cabin with their starchy aroma. It was enough to make Lib peckish, even though she’d had a good supper at Ryan’s.
What prompted her to look back at the bed? Dark shiny eyes met hers. “How long have you been awake?”
A little shrug from Anna.
“Do you need anything? The pot? Water?”
“No, thank you, Mrs. Elizabeth.”
Something about the way Anna formed the words, so politely, almost stiffly. “Is anything hurting you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What is it?” Lib moved closer, hovering over the bed.
“Nothing,” breathed Anna.
Lib risked it. “Are you hungry at all? Was it the scent of those turnips that roused you?”
A faint, almost pitying smile.
Lib’s stomach growled. Hunger was the common ground on which everyone woke. The body an infant stirring to mew, each morning, Feed me. But not Anna O’Donnell’s, not anymore. Hysteric, lunatic, maniac; the words didn’t fit her. She was like nothing so much as a little girl who didn’t need to eat.
Oh, come, Lib scolded herself. If Anna believed she was one of the queen’s five daughters, would that make it so? The child might not feel hunger, but it was still eating away at her flesh, her hair, her skin.
After a stretch of silence so long that she thought perhaps the child was sleeping with her eyes open, Anna said, “Tell me about the little man.”
“What little man?” asked Lib.
“The rumpled one.”
“Ah, Rumpelstiltskin.” She recounted the old tale just to pass the time. Having to call up the details made her realize how bizarre it was. The girl charged with the impossible task of spinning straw into gold because of her mother’s boast. The goblin who helped her. His offer to let her keep her firstborn after all if only she could guess the goblin’s outlandish name…
Anna lay still for a while afterwards. It occurred to Lib that the child might be taking the legend as fact. Were all manifestations of the supernatural equally real to her?
“Bet.”
“You bet what?” asked Lib.
“Is it Bet, what your family used to call you?”
She chuckled. “Not this foolishness again.”
“They couldn’t have called you Elizabeth every born day. Betsy? Betty? Bessie?”
“No, no, and no.”
“But it comes from Elizabeth, doesn’t it?” asked Anna. “’Tisn’t quite another name, like Jane?”
“No, that would be cheating,” agreed Lib.
Lib had been her pet name back in the days when she was anyone’s pet, the name her younger sister had given her because Elizabeth had been too long for her to pronounce.
Lib was what her whole family had called her, when she’d still had a family, while their parents were still alive and before her sister had said Lib was dead to her.
She laid her hand over Anna’s on the grey blanket. The swollen fingers were freezing, so she tucked them in. “Are you glad to have someone with you at night?”
The girl looked confused.
“Not to be alone, I suppose I mean.”
“But I’m not alone,” said Anna.
“Well, not now.” Not since the watch.
“I’m never alone.”
“No,” agreed Lib. Two gaolers, turn and turnabout, for constant company.
“He comes in to me as soon as I’m asleep.”
The bluish lids were fluttering shut already, so Lib didn’t ask who he was. The answer was obvious.
Anna’s breathing was deep again. Lib wondered whether the child dreamt of her Saviour every night. Did he come in the form of a long-haired man, a haloed boy, a baby? What consolations did he bring, what feasts that were so much more ambrosial than the earthly kind?
Watching a slumberer was a powerful inducer of sleep; Lib’s eyelids were getting heavy again. She stood up, turning her head from side to side to loosen her neck.
He comes in to me as soon as I’m asleep. A strange construction. Perhaps Anna didn’t mean Christ after all but some ordinary he, a man—Malachy O’Donnell? Mr. Thaddeus, even?—who funnelled liquid into her mouth when she was in an in-between state of drowsy oblivion. Was Anna trying to tell Lib the truth she barely understood herself?
For something to do, Lib looked through the girl’s treasure chest. Opened The Imitation of Christ carefully, so as not to dislodge the holy cards. If we were perfectly dead unto ourselves, and not entangled within our own breasts, she read at the top of a page, then should we be able to taste divine things.
The words made her shake. Who’d teach a child to be dead to herself? How many of Anna’s most dearly held, mad notions came from these books?
Or from the bright pastel pictures on the cards. So many plants: sunflowers with faces turned towards the light; Jesus perched on the canopy of a tree under which people huddled. Sententious mottoes in Gothic type, describing him as a brother or as a bridegroom. One card showed a steep staircase cut into a cliff face with a looming heart like a setting sun and a cross at the top. The next was even odder: The Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine. A beautiful young woman appeared to be accepting a bridal ring from an infant Jesus perched on his mother’s lap.
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