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.
Later, Rosaleen O’Donnell came in with the Irish Times that John Flynn had left. Here was the photograph of Anna that Reilly had taken on Monday afternoon but changed into a woodcut, all the lines and shades cruder. The effect unnerved Lib, as if her days and nights in this cramped cabin were being translated into a cautionary tale. She confiscated the folded page before Anna could see it.
“There’s a long piece below.” The mother was quivering with gratification.
While Anna was brushing her hair, Lib went over to the lamp and skimmed the article. This was William Byrne’s first dispatch, she realized, the one quoting Petronius, thrown together on Wednesday morning when he didn’t have any solid information about the case at all. She couldn’t disagree about provincial ignorance.
The second paragraph was new to her.
Of course, abstention has long been a distinctly Irish art. As the old Hibernian maxim goes, Leave the bed sleepy, leave the table hungry.
This wasn’t news, Lib thought, only chat; the flippant tone left a bad taste in her mouth.
Those metropolitan sophisticates who have shed their Gaelic may need to be reminded that in our ancient tongue, Wednesday is designated by a word that means “first fast,” Friday by “second fast.” (On both these days, tradition holds that impatient infants are to be let cry three times before getting the bottle.) The word for Thursday, by delightful contrast, means “the day between fasts.”
Could that all be true? She didn’t trust this joker; Byrne had erudition enough but played it for laughs.
Our forefathers had a custom of (in the Hibernian idiom) fasting against an offender or debtor, that is, starving conspicuously outside his door. Saint Patrick himself is said to have fasted against his Maker on his namesake mountain in Mayo, with noted success: he shamed the Almighty into granting him the right to judge the Irish in the Last Days. In India, too, protest by means of doorstep fasting has become so prevalent that the Viceroy is proposing to ban it. As to whether little Miss O’Donnell is expressing some juvenile grievance by passing up four months of breakfasts, dinners, and suppers, this correspondent has not yet been able to determine.
Lib wanted to throw the paper in the fire. Had the fellow no heart? Anna was a child in trouble, not a joke for the summertime entertainment of newspaper readers.
“What does it say about me, Mrs. Lib?”
She shook her head. “It’s not about you, Anna.”
To distract herself, Lib glanced at the headlines in thick black, matters of world importance. The general election; union of Moldavia and Wallachia; Veracruz besieged; ongoing volcanic eruption in Hawaii.
No use. Lib didn’t care about any of it. Private nursing was always narrowing, and the peculiarity of this particular job had intensified the effect, shrinking her world to one small chamber.
She folded the paper into a tight stick and left it on her tea tray by the
door. Then she checked every surface again, not because she still believed there was some hidden cache that Anna crept out to eat during the nun’s shifts, but just for something to do.
In her nightdress, the child sat knitting wool stockings. Could Anna have some unvoiced grievance after all? Lib wondered.
“Time to get into bed.” She beat the pillows into shape so they’d keep the girl’s head up at the correct angle. She made her notes.
Dropsy no better.
Gums ditto.
Pulse: 98 beats per minute.
Lungs: 17 respirations per minute.
When the nun came in for her shift, Anna was already dozing.
Lib found she had to speak, even though the woman resisted her every overture. “Five days and four nights, Sister, and I’ve seen nothing. Please tell me, for our patient’s sake, have you?”
A hesitation, and then the nun shook her head. Even more quietly: “Perhaps because there’s been nothing to see.”
Meaning what—that there’d been no surreptitious feeding because Anna was indeed a living wonder who thrived on a diet of prayer alone? A fug of the ineffable filled this cabin—this whole country—and it turned Lib’s stomach.
She spoke as tactfully as she could. “I have something to say. It’s not about Anna so much as us.”
That hooked the nun. After a long moment, she said, “Us?”
“We’re here to observe, aren’t we?”
Sister Michael nodded.
“Yet to study something can mean interfering with it. If one puts a fish in a tank or a plant in a pot for purposes of observation, one changes its conditions. However it is that Anna’s been living over the past four months—everything’s different now, wouldn’t you agree?”
The nun only put her head to one side.
“Because of us,” Lib spelled out. “The watch has altered the situation that’s being watched.”
Sister Michael’s eyebrows soared, disappeared behind the band of white linen.
Lib pressed on. “If by any chance there’s been some subterfuge going on in this house over the past months, our surveillance must have put an end to it, beginning on Monday. So there’s a very real possibility that you and I are the ones preventing Anna from getting nourishment now.”
“We’re doing nothing!”
“We’re watching, every minute. Haven’t we pinned her like a butterfly?” The wrong image; too morbid.
The nun shook her head, not once but over and over.
“I hope I’m wrong,” said Lib. “But if I’m right, if the child’s had nothing for five days now…”
Sister Michael didn’t say That couldn’t be or Anna needs no food. Her only reply was “Have you noted some serious change in her condition?”
“No,” Lib admitted. “Nothing I can put my finger on.”
“Well, then.”
“Well, then, what, Sister?” Was God in his heaven and all right with the world? “What do we do?”
“What we were hired to do, Mrs. Wright. No more, no less.” And with that, the nun sat down and opened her holy book like a barricade.
This farm woman who’d ended up in the House of Mercy was no doubt a good soul, Lib thought in exasperation. And probably intelligent in her own way, if only she could let her mind roam beyond the boundaries prescribed by her superiors and their master in Rome. We vow to be of use, Sister Michael had boasted, but what real use was she here? Lib thought of what Miss N. had told a nurse she’d sent back to London after only a fortnight at Scutari: At the front, anyone who’s not useful is an impediment.
In the kitchen, the Rosary had begun. The O’Donnells, John Flynn, and their maid were on their knees already as Lib passed through, all of them chanting, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
Didn’t these people hear what they were saying? What about Anna O’Donnell’s daily bread?
Lib shoved the door open and went out into the night.
Sleep led her, over and over, back to the base of that cliff pictured on the holy card, the one with the cross looming at its highest point and the gigantic red heart beneath it, pulsing. Lib had to mount the staircase hacked into the rock face. Her legs strained and shook under her, and no matter how many steps she climbed, she never got any nearer the top.
This was Saturday morning, she realized when she woke in the dark.
When she reached the cabin, she saw the washing stretched on the bushes, looking wetter than ever after yesterday’s rain.
Sister Michael was by the bedside watching the rise and fall of the small chest under the tangled blanket. Lib’s eyebrows lifted in a silent question.
The nun shook her head.
“How much water has she taken?”
“Three spoons,” whispered Sister Michael.
Not that it mattered; it was only water.
The nun collected her things and went out without another word.
A square of light moved slowly across Anna: right hand, chest, left hand. Did children of eleven generally sleep so long? Lib wondered. Or was it because Anna’s system was running on no fuel?
Just then Rosaleen O’Donnell came in from the kitchen, and Anna blinked awake. Lib moved away to the dresser to allow the morning greeting.
The woman stood between her daughter and the pale lemony sun. As Rosaleen leaned over to engulf the child in her usual embrace, Anna put her hand up flat against her mother’s expanse of bony chest.
Rosaleen O’Donnell froze.
Anna shook her head, wordless.
Rosaleen O’Donnell straightened up and put her fingers to the girl’s cheek. On the way out, she gave Lib a venomous look.
Lib felt shaken; she’d done nothing. Was it her fault if the girl had finally had enough of being fawned over by her hypocrite of a mother? Whether Rosaleen O’Donnell was behind the hoax or had merely turned a blind eye to it, at the very least she was standing by now while her daughter began her sixth day of fasting.
Refused mother’s greeting, Lib noted in her memorandum book. Then wished she hadn’t, because this record was supposed to be limited to medical facts.
On her way back to the village that afternoon, Lib pushed open the rusty gate of the cemetery. She was curious to see Pat O’Donnell’s grave.
The headstones were not as ancient as she’d expected; she could find no inscriptions earlier than 1850. She supposed it had to be the soft ground that made so many of them list, and the damp air that furred them with moss.
Have mercy on… In fond memory… In affectionate remembrance of… Here lies the body… Sacred to… In memory of his first wife, who departed this life… Erected for the posterity of… Also of his second wife… Pray for the soul of… Who died exulting in her Saviour in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection. (Really, thought Lib, who ever died exultingly? Whatever fool penned that phrase had never sat by a bed with his ears pricked for the last rasp.)
Aged fifty-six years… Twenty-three years… Ninety-two years… Thirty-nine years. Thanks be to God, who gave her the victory. Lib noticed a little carving on almost every grave: IHS, in a sort of sunburst. She had a vague memory that this stood for I Have Suffered. There was one incongruous plot with no headstone, wide enough for twenty coffins side by side; who lay in there? Then she realized it must be a mass grave, full of the nameless.
Lib shivered. By trade, she was on intimate terms with death, but this was like walking into her enemy’s house.
Whenever she saw a reference to a young child, she averted her eyes. Also a son and two daughters… Also three children… Also their children who died young… Aged eight years… Aged two years and ten months. (Those broken parents, counting every month.)
The angels saw the opening flower,
And swift with joy and love,
They bore her to a fairer home,
To bloom in fields above.
Lib found her nails digging into the flesh of her palms. If Earth was such unworthy soil for God’s best specimens, why did he perversely plant them
there? What could possibly be the point of these short, blighted lives?
Just as she was about to abandon the search, she found the boy.
PATRICK MARY O’DONNELL
3 DECEMBER 1843–21 NOVEMBER 1858
ASLEEP IN JESUS
She stared at the plainly chiselled words, trying to feel what they meant to Anna. Pictured a warm-fleshed, lanky boy in his cracked boots and muddy trousers, all the restless energy of fourteen.
Pat’s was the sole O’Donnell grave, which suggested that he’d been the one hope of passing on Malachy’s surname, in this village at least. And also that if Mrs. O’Donnell had had other pregnancies since Anna, they hadn’t made it to birth. Lib suspended her dislike of the woman for a moment and considered what Rosaleen O’Donnell had been through; what had hardened her. Seven years of dearth and pestilence, as Byrne had put it with a biblical ring. A boy and his little sister, and little or nothing to feed them during the bad time. Then, after Rosaleen had come through those terrible years, to lose her almost-grown son overnight… Such a wrench might have worked a strange alteration. Instead of clinging to her last child all the more, perhaps Rosaleen had found her heart frost-burnt. Lib could understand that, a sensation of having no more left to give. Was that why the woman made an uncanny cult of Anna now, apparently preferring her daughter to be more saint than human?
A breeze cut through the churchyard, and Lib wrapped her cloak around her. Shutting the squealing gate, she turned right, past the chapel. Apart from the small stone cross above the slates, the chapel struck her as little different from any of the neighbouring houses, and yet what power Mr. Thaddeus wielded from its altar.
By the time she reached the village, the sun was out again and everything sparkled. A ruddy-faced woman caught her by the sleeve as she turned onto the street.
Lib recoiled.
“Beg pardon, missus. I just wondered, how’s the little girl?”
“I can’t say.” In case she hadn’t made herself understood, she added, “It’s a matter of confidentiality.”
Did the woman know the word? It wasn’t clear from her stare.
This time Lib went right, in the direction of Mullingar, merely because she hadn’t walked that way before. She had no appetite and couldn’t bear to enclose herself in her room at Ryan’s yet.
The Wonder Page 15
