The Wonder (14 page)

“One woman suggested the girl might be bathing in oil so that some of it soaks in through her pores and cuticles,” said Byrne, “and a fellow assured me that his cousin in Philadelphia's achieved remarkable effects with magnets.”

Lib laughed under her breath.

“Well, you've obliged me to scrape the barrel,” said Byrne, uncapping his pen. “So why all the secrecy? What are you helping the O'Donnells to hide?”

“On the contrary, this watch is being conducted as scrupulously as possible to uncover any deception,” she told him. “Nothing can be allowed to distract us from observing the girl's every move to make sure no food reaches her mouth.”

He'd stopped writing and was leaning back against the settle. “Rather a barbaric experiment, no?”

Lib chewed her lip.

“Let's assume the minx has been getting hold of food on the sly somehow ever since the spring, shall we?”

In this village of zealots, Byrne's realistic attitude was a relief.

“But if your watch is so perfect, that means Anna O'Donnell has had nothing to eat for three days now.”

Lib swallowed painfully. That was exactly what she'd begun to fear today, but she didn't want to admit it to this fellow. “It's not necessarily perfect yet. I suspect that during the nun's shifts…” Was she really going to accuse her fellow nurse, on no evidence? She changed tack. “This watch is for Anna's own good, to disentangle her from her web of deceit.” Surely Anna longed to go back to being an ordinary child again?

“By famishing her?” The fellow's mind was as analytical as Lib's.

“I must be cruel, only to be kind,”
Lib quoted.

He caught the reference. “Hamlet killed three people, or five if you count Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.”

Impossible to match wits with a journalist. “They'll speak up if she starts to weaken,” she insisted, “one or both of the parents, the maid, whoever's behind this. Especially since I've put a stop to the milking of visitors for cash.”

Byrne's eyebrows soared. “They'll speak up, take the blame, and let themselves be hauled before a judge for fraud?”

Lib realized she hadn't thought through the criminal side of the matter. “Well. A hungry child will break down and confess, sooner or later.”

But as she said it, she realized with a chill that she didn't believe it. Anna O'Donnell had somehow passed beyond hunger.

Lib lurched to her feet. “I must sleep now, Mr. Byrne.”

He raked back his hair. “If you really have nothing to hide, Mrs. Wright, then let me in to see the girl for myself for ten minutes, and I'll sing your praises in my next dispatch.”

“I don't like your bargains, sir.”

This time he let her go.

Back in her room, Lib tried to sleep. These eight-hour shifts played havoc with the body's rhythms. She heaved herself out of the hollow in her mattress and beat her pillow flat.

It was then, sitting up in the dark, that it occurred to her for the first time: What if Anna wasn't lying?

For a long moment, she set all facts aside. To understand sickness was the beginning of real nursing, Miss N. had taught her; one must grasp the sufferer's mental as well as physical state. So the question was, did the girl believe her own story?

The answer was clear. Conviction shone out of Anna O'Donnell. A
case of hysteria
she might possibly be, but utterly sincere.

Lib felt her shoulders drop. No enemy, then, this soft-faced child; no hardened prisoner. Only a girl caught up in a sort of waking dream, walking towards the edge of a cliff without knowing it. Only a patient who needed her nurse's help, and fast.

fast

to abstain from food

a period of fasting

fixed, enclosed, secure, fortified

constant, steadfast, obstinate

Five a.m., Thursday, when Lib entered the bedroom. By the light of the reeking lamp, she watched Anna O'Donnell sleep. “No change?” she murmured to the nun.

A shake of the coif-covered head.

How could Lib bring up Dr. Standish's visit without expressing her opinions? And what would a nun who believed a little girl could live off
manna from heaven
make of his theory that Anna was a self-starving hysteric?

Sister Michael took up her cloak and bag and left.

The child's face on the pillow was a fallen fruit. Puffier around the eyes this morning, Lib noticed, perhaps from lying flat all night. One cheek scored red by a pillow crease. Anna's body was a blank page that recorded everything that happened to it.

She pulled up one of the chairs and sat staring at Anna from no more than two feet away. The rounded cheek; the rise and fall of the rib cage and belly.

So the girl truly believed herself not to have eaten for four months. But her body told another story. Which had to mean that until Sunday night, someone had been feeding Anna, and she'd then somehow… forgotten the fact? Or perhaps never registered it at all. Could the feeding have been done with Anna in a kind of trance? In a deep slumber, could a child swallow food without choking, the way a sleepwalker might fumble through a house, eyes shut? Perhaps when she woke, Anna knew only that she felt sated, as if she'd been fed celestial dew.

But that didn't explain why, by day, four days into this watch, the child showed no interest in food. More than that: despite all the peculiar symptoms that plagued Anna, she remained convinced that she could live without it.

An obsession, a mania, Lib supposed it could be called. A sickness of the mind. Hysteria, as that awful doctor had named it? Anna reminded Lib of a princess under a spell in a fairy tale. What could restore the girl to ordinary life? Not a prince. A magical herb from the world's end? Some shock to jolt a poisoned bite of apple out of her throat? No, something simple as a breath of air: reason. What if Lib shook the girl awake this very minute and said,
Come to your senses!

But that was part of the definition of madness, Lib supposed, the refusal to accept that one was mad. Standish's wards were full of such people.

Besides, could children ever be considered quite of sound mind? Seven was counted the age of reason, but Lib's sense of seven-year-olds was that they still brimmed over with imagination. Children lived to play. Of course they could be put to work, but in spare moments they took their games as seriously as lunatics did their delusions. Like small gods, children formed their miniature worlds out of clay, or even just words. To them, the truth was never simple.

But Anna was eleven, which was a far cry from seven, Lib argued with herself. Other eleven-year-olds knew when they'd eaten and when they hadn't; they were old enough to tell make-believe from fact. There was something very different about—very wrong with—Anna O'Donnell.

Who was still fast asleep. Framed in the small pane behind her, the horizon was spilling liquid gold. The very idea of terrorizing a delicate child with tubes, pumping food into her body
above or below
—

To shake off these thoughts, Lib picked up
Notes on Nursing.
She noticed a sentence she'd marked on first reading:
She must be no gossip, no vain talker; she should never answer questions about her sick except to those who have a right to ask them.

Did William Byrne have any such right? Lib shouldn't have been talking to him so frankly in the dining room last night—or at all, probably.

She glanced up and jumped, because the child was looking right at her. “Good morning, Anna.” It came out too fast, like an admission of guilt.

“Good morning, Mrs. Whatever-Your-Name-Is.”

That was impudence, but Lib found herself laughing. “Elizabeth, if you must know.” It had a strange ring to it. Lib's husband of eleven months had been the last to use that name, and at the hospital she was Mrs. Wright.

“Good morning, Mrs. Elizabeth,” said Anna, trying it out.

That sounded like some other woman entirely. “No one calls me that.”

“Then what do they call you?” asked Anna, getting up on her elbows and rubbing sleep out of one eye.

Lib was already regretting having given her first name, but then, she wouldn't be here for long, so really, what did it matter? “Mrs. Wright, or Nurse, or ma'am. Did you sleep well?”

The girl struggled into a sitting position.
“I have slept and have taken my rest,”
she murmured. “So what do your family call you?”

Lib was disconcerted by this rapid switching between Scripture and ordinary conversation. “I have none left.” It was technically true; her sister, if still living, had chosen to go beyond Lib's reach.

Anna's eyes grew huge.

In childhood, Lib remembered, family seemed as necessary and inescapable as a ring of mountains. One never imagined that as the decades went by, one might drift into an unbounded country. It struck Lib now how alone in the world she was.

“But when you were little,” said Anna. “Were you Eliza? Elsie? Effie?”

Lib made a joke of it. “What's this, the tale of Rumpelstiltskin?”

“Who's that?”

“A little goblin man who—”

But Rosaleen O'Donnell was hurrying in now to greet her daughter, not so much as glancing at the nurse. That broad back like a shield thrown in front of the child, that dark head bent over the smaller one. Doting syllables; Gaelic, no doubt. The whole performance set Lib's teeth on edge.

She supposed that when a mother had only a solitary child left at home, all her passion was funnelled into that one. Had Pat and Anna had other brothers or sisters? she wondered.

Anna was kneeling beside her mother now, hands pressed together, eyes shut.
“I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word, and deed, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.”
On each
fault,
the child's closed fist rapped her chest.

“Amen,”
intoned Mrs. O'Donnell.

Anna began another prayer:
“Maiden mother, meek and mild, take oh take me for thy child.”

Lib considered the long morning ahead. Later on she'd have to keep the girl out of sight in case of would-be visitors. “Anna,” she said the moment the mother had gone back into the kitchen, “shall we go out for an early walk?”

“'Tis barely day.”

Lib hadn't even taken Anna's pulse yet, but that would wait. “Why not? Get dressed and put on your cloak.”

The girl crossed herself and whispered the Dorothy prayer as she pulled her nightdress over her head. Was that a new bruise on her shoulder blade, greenish brown? Lib made a memorandum of it.

In the kitchen, Rosaleen O'Donnell said it was still dim out and they'd fall into cowpats or break their ankles.

“I'll take perfectly good care of your daughter,” said Lib, and pushed the half-door open.

She stepped out, with Anna behind her, and the chickens clucked and scattered. The moist breeze was delicious.

They set off behind the cabin this time, on a faint path between two fields. Anna walked slowly and unevenly, remarking on everything. Wasn't it funny that skylarks were never to be spotted on the ground, only when they shot high up into the sky to sing? Oh, look, that mountain over there with the sun coming up behind it was the one she called her whale.

Lib saw no mountains in this flattened landscape. Anna was pointing to a low ridge; no doubt the inhabitants of the
dead centre
of Ireland saw every ripple as a peak.

Anna sometimes fancied she could actually glimpse the wind; did Mrs. Something-Like-Elizabeth ever think that?

“Call me Mrs. Wright—”

“Or Nurse, or ma'am,” said Anna with a giggle.

Full of vitality, Lib thought; how on earth could this child be
half starving?
Someone was still sustaining Anna.

The hedgerows sparkled now. “‘Which is the broadest water,'” Lib asked, “‘and the least jeopardy to pass over?'”

“Is this a riddle?”

“Of course, one I learned when I was a little girl.”

“Hm. ‘The broadest water,'” Anna repeated.

“You're imagining it like the sea, aren't you? Don't.”

“I've seen the sea in pictures.”

To grow up on this small island and yet never to have been to its edge, even…

“But great rivers with my own eyes,” said Anna, boasting.

“Oh yes?” said Lib.

“The Tullamore, and the Brosna too, the time we went to the fair at Mullingar.”

Lib recognized the name of the Midlands town where William Byrne's horse had been lamed. Had he stayed on today at Ryan's, in the room across the passage from hers, in hopes of learning more about Anna's case? Or had his satirical dispatches from the scene been enough for the
Irish Times
? “The water in my riddle doesn't look like the widest of rivers, even. Imagine it spread all over the ground, but no danger in crossing it.”

Anna wrestled with the thought, and finally shook her head.

“The dew,” said Lib.

“Oh! I should have known.”

“It's so small, nobody remembers it.” She thought of the manna story:
a dew lay round about the camp
and
covered the face of the earth.

“Another,” begged Anna.

“I can't recall another just now,” said Lib.

The girl walked in silence for a minute, almost limping. Was she in pain?

Lib was tempted to take her elbow to help her over a rough patch, but no.
Simply to observe,
she reminded herself.

Up ahead was someone she took for Malachy O'Donnell, but as they neared he turned out to be a bent-looking older man. He was cutting black rectangles out of the ground and making a stack; turf for burning, she assumed.

“God bless the work,” Anna called to him.

He nodded back. His spade was a shape Lib had never seen before, the blade bent into wings.

“Is that another prayer you're obliged to say?” she asked the child when they'd passed.

“Blessing the work? Yes, otherwise he might be hurt.”

“What, he'd be wounded that you didn't think of him?” asked Lib with a touch of mockery.

Anna looked puzzled. “No, he might cut a toe off with the foot slane.”

Ah, so it was a sort of protective magic.

The girl was singing now, in her breathy voice.

Deep in thy wounds, Lord,

Hide and shelter me,

So shall I never,

Never part from thee.

The stirring tune didn't fit the morbid words, in Lib's view. The very idea of hiding deep inside a wound, like a maggot—

“There's Dr. McBrearty,” said Anna.

The old man was scuttling towards them from the cabin, lapels askew. He took off his hat to Lib, then turned to the child. “Your mother told me I'd find you out taking the air, Anna. Delighted to see you with roses in your cheeks.”

She was rather red in the face, but from the exertion of walking, Lib thought;
roses
was stretching a point.

“Still generally well?” McBrearty murmured to Lib.

Miss N. was very stern on the subject of discussing the ill in their hearing. “You go on ahead of us,” Lib suggested to Anna. “Why don't you pick some flowers for your room?”

The child obeyed. Lib kept her eyes on her, though. It occurred to her that there might be berries around, unripe nuts, even… Might a hysteric—if that's what Anna was—snatch mouthfuls of food without being conscious of what she did?

“I don't quite know how to answer your question,” she told the doctor. Thinking of Standish's phrase
half starving.

McBrearty poked the soft ground with his cane.

Lib hesitated, then made herself say the name. “Did Dr. Standish get a chance to speak to you last night after he left Anna?” She was ready with her best arguments against forcible feeding.

The old man's face screwed up as if he'd bitten into something sour. “His tone was most ungentlemanly. After I did him the politeness of letting him, of all the petitioners, into the cabin to see the girl!”

She waited.

But clearly McBrearty was not going to report the scolding he'd received. “Is her respiration still healthy?” he asked instead.

Lib nodded.

“Heart sounds, pulse?”

“Yes,” she conceded.

“Sleeping well?”

Another nod.

“She seems cheerful,” he noted, “and her voice is still strong. No vomiting or diarrhoea?”

“Well, I'd hardly expect that in someone who's not eating.”

The old man's watery eyes lit up. “So you believe she is indeed living without—”

Lib interrupted him. “I mean, not taking in enough to lead to any kind of voiding. Anna produces no excrement, and very little urine,” she pointed out. “This suggests to me that she's getting
some
food—or was until the watch began, more likely—but not sufficient for there to be any waste.” Should Lib mention her notion about night-feedings to which Anna had been oblivious all these months? She quailed; it suddenly sounded as implausible as any of the old man's own theories. “Don't you think her eyes are beginning to bulge even more?” she asked. “Her skin's covered with bruises and crusty patches, and her gums bleed. Scurvy, perhaps, I was thinking. Or pellagra, even. Certainly she seems anaemic.”

“Good Mrs. Wright.” McBrearty gouged the soft grass with his cane. “Are we beginning to stray beyond our remit?” An indulgent father reproving a child.

“I beg your pardon, Doctor,” she said stiffly.

“Leave such mysteries to those who've been trained for them.”

Lib would have given a lot to know where McBrearty had been trained, and how thoroughly, and whether it had been in this century or the last.