The Wonder (10 page)

And yet Lib had seen no real evidence of craftiness in the girl yet. Except for the one vast lie, of course: the claim of living without food.

Manna from heaven,
that's what she'd forgotten to ask Sister Michael about. Lib might not have much faith in the nun's judgment, but surely the woman would know her Bible?

It was almost hot this afternoon; Lib took off her cloak and carried it over her arm. She tugged at her collar and wished her uniform were less thick and scratchy.

In the room above the spirit grocery, she changed into a plain green costume. She couldn't bear to stay in, not for a moment; she'd spent half the day shut up already.

Downstairs, two men were carrying an unmistakeable shape out of a passage. Lib recoiled.

“Beg your pardon, Mrs. Wright,” said Maggie Ryan, “they'll have him out of your way in two ticks.”

Lib watched the men steer the unvarnished coffin around the counter.

“My father's the undertaker too,” the girl explained, “on account of having the couple of gigs for hire.”

So the carriage outside the window stood in for a hearse as needed. Ryan's combination of trades struck Lib as unsavoury. “A quiet place, this.”

Maggie nodded as the door swung shut behind the coffin. “There used to be twice as many of us before the bad time.”

Us,
meaning the people in this village or in the county? Or the whole of Ireland, perhaps? The
bad time,
Lib assumed, was that terrible failure of the potato ten or fifteen years back. She tried to call up the details. All she could generally remember of old news was a flicker of headlines in grim type. When she was young, she'd never really studied the paper, only glanced at it. Folded the
Times
and laid it beside Wright's plate, every morning, the year she'd been his wife.

She thought of the beggars. “On the drive here I saw many women alone with their children,” she mentioned to Maggie Ryan.

“Ah, lots of the men are gone for the season, just, harvesting over your way,” said Maggie.

Lib took her to mean England.

“But the most part of the young folk do have their hearts set on America, and then there's no coming home.” She jerked her chin, as if to say good riddance to those
young folk
who weren't anchored to this spot.

Judging from her face, Lib thought Maggie herself couldn't have been more than twenty. “You wouldn't consider it?”

“Sure there's no hearth like your own, as they say.” Her tone more resigned than fond.

Lib asked her for directions to Dr. McBrearty's.

His house was a substantial one at the end of a lane, some way out on the Athlone road. A maid as decrepit as her master showed Lib into the study. McBrearty whipped off his octagonal glasses as he stood up.

Vanity? she wondered. Did he fancy he looked younger without them?

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Wright. How are you?”

Irked,
Lib thought of saying.
Frustrated. Thwarted on all sides.

“Anything of an urgent nature to report?” he asked as they sat.

“Urgent? Not exactly.”

“No hint of fraud, then?”

“No positive evidence,” Lib corrected him. “But I thought you might have visited your patient to see for yourself.”

His sunken cheeks flushed. “Oh, I assure you, little Anna's on my mind at all hours. In fact, I'm so very concerned for the watch that I've thought it best to absent myself so it can't be insinuated afterwards that I exerted any influence over your findings.”

Lib let out a small sigh. McBrearty still seemed to be assuming that the watch would prove the little girl a modern-day miracle. “I'm concerned that Anna's temperature seems low, especially in her extremities.”

“Interesting.” McBrearty rubbed his chin.

“Her skin's not good,” Lib went on, “nor her nails, nor her hair.” This sounded like petty stuff from a magazine of beauty. “And there's a downy fuzz growing all over her. But what worries me most is the swelling in her legs—her face and hands, too, but the lower legs are the worst. She's resorted to wearing her brother's old boots.”

“Mm, yes, Anna's been dropsical for some time. However, she doesn't complain of pain.”

“Well. She doesn't complain at all.”

The doctor nodded as if that reassured him. “Digitalis is a proven remedy for fluid retention, but of course she won't take anything by mouth. One might resort to a dry diet—”

“Limit her liquids even further?” Lib's voice shot upwards. “She has only a few spoonfuls of water a day as it is.”

Dr. McBrearty plucked at his side-whiskers. “I could reduce her legs mechanically, I suppose.”

Bleeding, did he mean? Leeching? Lib wished she hadn't said a word to this antediluvian.

“But that has its own risks. No, no, on the whole, safer to watch and wait.”

Lib was still uneasy. Then again, if Anna was imperiling her own health, whose fault was it but her own? Or the fault of whoever was putting her up to this, Lib supposed.

“She doesn't look like a child who hasn't eaten in four months, does she?” the doctor asked.

“Far from it.”

“My sense of it exactly! A wonderful anomaly.”

The old man had misunderstood her. He was wilfully blind to the obvious conclusion: the child was getting fed somehow. “Doctor, if Anna were really taking no nourishment at all, don't you think she'd be prostrated by now? Of course you must have seen many famished patients during the potato blight, far more than I,” Lib added, as a sop to his expertise.

McBrearty shook his head. “As it happens I was still in Gloucestershire then. I inherited this estate only five years ago and couldn't rent it out, so I thought I'd return and practice here.” He rose to his feet as if to say their interview was over.

“Also,” she went on in a rush, “I can't say I have the utmost confidence in my fellow nurse. It will be no easy task to maintain complete alertness during night shifts in particular.”

“But Sister Michael should be an old hand at that,” said McBrearty. “She nursed at the Charitable Infirmary in Dublin for twelve years.”

Oh. Why had nobody thought to tell Lib this?

“And at the House of Mercy, they rise for Night Office at midnight, I believe, and again for Lauds at dawn.”

“I see,” said Lib, mortified. “Well. The real problem is that the conditions at the cabin are most unscientific. I have no way to weigh the child, and there are no lamps to provide adequate light. Anna's room can easily be accessed from the kitchen, so anyone might go in when I take her out walking. Without your authority, Mrs. O'Donnell won't even let me shut the door to oglers, which makes it impossible to watch the child rigourously enough. Could I have it in your hand that there are to be no visitors admitted?”

“Quite, yes.” McBrearty wiped his pen on a cloth and took up a fresh page. He fumbled in his breast pocket.

“The mother may resist turning away the mob, of course, on account of the loss of money.”

The old man blinked his rheumy eyes and kept digging in his pocket. “Oh, but the donations all go into the poor box that Mr. Thaddeus gave the O'Donnells. You don't understand these people if you think they'd keep a farthing.”

Lib's mouth set. “Are you by any chance looking for your spectacles?” She pointed to where they lay among his papers.

“Ah, very good.” He jammed the side arms over his ears and began to write. “How do you find Anna otherwise, may I ask?”

Otherwise? “In spirits, you mean?”

“In, well, in character, I suppose.”

Lib was at a loss.
A nice girl. But a cheat of the deepest dye.
Anna had to be. Didn't she? “Generally calm,” she said instead. “What Miss Nightingale used to describe as an accumulative temperament, the kind that gathers in impressions gradually.”

McBrearty brightened up at the name, so much so that Lib wished she hadn't used it. He signed the note, folded it, and held it out.

“Could you have it sent over to the O'Donnells', please, to put a stop to these visits this very afternoon?”

“Oh, certainly.” He tugged off his glasses again, folded them in half with tremulous fingers. “Fascinating letter in the latest
Telegraph
, by the by.” McBrearty stirred the papers on his desk without finding what he was looking for. “It mentions a number of previous cases of ‘fasting girls' who've lived without food—have been said to do so, at least,” he corrected himself, “in Britain and abroad over the centuries.”

Really? Lib had never heard of the phenomenon.

“The writer suggests that they might possibly have been, ah—well, not to put too fine a point on it—reabsorbing, subsisting on their own menses.”

What a revolting theory. Besides, this child was only eleven. “In my view, Anna is a long way from being pubescent.”

“Mm, true.” McBrearty looked dashed. Then the corners of his mouth turned up. “To think I might have stayed in England and never had the luck to encounter such a case!”

After leaving the doctor's house, Lib strode away, trying to loosen her stiff legs and shake off the atmosphere of that fusty study.

A lane led towards a clump of woodland. She noticed leaves lobed like oak but on straighter branches than English oaks. The hedges were spiky with furze, and she breathed in the bouquet of the tiny yellow blooms. There were drooping pink flowers that no doubt Anna O'Donnell could have named. Lib tried to identify some of the birds twittering in the bushes, but the low boom of the bittern was the only one she knew for sure—the foghorn of some unseen ship.

One tree stood out at the back of a field; something odd about its dangling branches. Lib picked her way along the outside furrow—although her boots were so muddy already, she wasn't sure why she was bothering to be careful. The tree was farther away than it seemed, a good stretch beyond where the cultivated strips ran out, past an outcropping of grey limestone cracked by sun and rain. Nearing, Lib saw that it was a hawthorn, new twigs coming in red against the glossy leaves. But what was that dangling in strips from the pinkish branches? Moss?

No, not moss. Wool?

Lib almost stumbled into a tiny pool in a cleft rock. Two azure dragonflies clung together a few inches above the water. Could it be a spring? Something like bladderwort fringed the edge of the pool. She was suddenly terribly thirsty, but when she crouched down, the dragonflies disappeared, and the water looked as black as the peaty soil. She cupped some in her palm. It had a whiff like creosote, so she swallowed her thirst and let it spill again.

Not wool hanging from the hawthorn branches above her; something man-made, in strips. How peculiar. Ribbons, scarves? They'd been knotted onto the tree for so long, they were grey and vegetal.

Back at Ryan's, in the tiny dining room, she found a red-haired man finishing a chop and filling in a memorandum book much like hers with a rapid hand. He jumped to his feet. “You're not from hereabouts, ma'am.”

How could he tell? Her plain green dress, her bearing?

The man was about her height, a few years younger, with that unmistakeably Irish milky skin under garish curls, and an accent, but an educated one. “William Byrne, of the
Irish Times.
”

Ah, the
scribbler
the photographist had mentioned. Lib accepted his handshake. “Mrs. Wright.”

“Touring the sights of the Midlands?”

He didn't guess why she was here, then; he took her for a lady tourist. “Are there any?” That came out too sardonic.

Byrne chuckled. “Well, now, it depends how much your soul is stirred by the enigmatic atmosphere of stone circles, ring forts, or round barrows.”

“I'm not familiar with the second or the third.”

He made a face. “Variations on the stone circle, I suppose.”

“So all the sights hereabouts are rocky and circular?”

“Apart from the latest one,” said William Byrne, “a magical girl who lives on air.”

Lib stiffened.

“Not what I'd call hard news, but my editor in Dublin thought it'd do for August. However, I lamed my mare in a pothole outside Mullingar, had to tend her two nights till she was mended, and now that I'm here, I've been turned away from the girl's humble cot!”

A quiver of embarrassment; he must have arrived just after the note she'd made McBrearty send the O'Donnells. But, really, more publicity for this case would fan the flames of delusion, and the watch could only be hindered by the prying of a newspaper reporter.

Lib would have liked to excuse herself and go upstairs before Byrne could say anything else about Anna O'Donnell, but she needed her dinner. “Could you not have left your horse and hired another?”

“I suspected they'd have shot Polly instead of feeding her hot mash as I did.”

She smiled at the image of the journalist curled up in the horse stall.

“My cold welcome at the prodigy's cabin is the real catastrophe,” complained Byrne. “I've shot off a caustic paragraph to the paper by telegraph, but now I have to conjure up a full report to send by tonight's mail coach.”

Was he always so free-spoken with strangers? Lib couldn't think of anything to say except “Why
caustic
?”

“Well, it speaks ill of the family's honesty, doesn't it, if they won't even let me in the door for fear I'll see through their wunderkind at first glance?”

That wasn't fair to the O'Donnells, but Lib could hardly tell him that he was talking to the very person who'd insisted on banning visitors. Her eyes fell and slid to his notes.

How illimitable is the gullibility of mankind, especially, it must be said, when combined with provincial ignorance. But
Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur;
that is to say, “If the world will be gulled, let it be gulled.” Thus quoth Petronius, in the days of Our Lord, an aphorism just as pertinent to our own time.