The Wonder (17 page)

“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.

But the one that troubled Lib most showed a little girl floating on a raft in the shape of a broad cross, stretched out asleep, unaware of the wild waves rising around her.
Je voguerai en paix sous la garde de Marie,
it said. I something in something under the guard of Mary? Only then did Lib notice a sorrowful woman's face in the clouds, watching the little girl.

She closed the book and put it back. Then thought to look at the card again, to see what passage it was marking. She couldn't find anything about Mary, or the sea.
Vessels
was the only word that caught her eye:
For the Lord bestoweth his blessings there, where he findeth the vessels empty.
Empty of what, exactly? Lib wondered. Food? Thought? Individuality? On the next page, near a picture of a bilious-looking angel,
Thou art willing to give me heavenly food and bread of angels to eat.
A few pages farther on, marked with a picture of the Last Supper:
How sweet and pleasant the banquet, when thou gavest thyself to be our food!
Or perhaps that card went with
thou alone art my meat and drink, my love
.

Lib could see how a child could misread such flowery phrases. If these were Anna's only books, and she'd been kept home from school ever since her illness, mulling over them without proper guidance…

Of course some children couldn't grasp what metaphor was. She remembered a girl at school, a stony character with no small talk who for all her scholarliness was idiotic about everyday things. Anna didn't seem like that. What else could you call it but stupidity, though, to take poetic language at face value? Lib felt like shaking the child awake again:
Jesus is not
actual
meat, you dunderhead!

No, not a dunderhead. Anna had excellent wits; they'd just gone astray.

One of the nurses at the hospital had a cousin, Lib remembered now, who'd become convinced that the commas and full stops of the
Daily Telegraph
contained coded messages for him.

Almost five in the morning when Kitty put her head in and watched the sleeping girl for a long moment.

Perhaps Anna was Kitty's last surviving cousin, it struck Lib now. The O'Donnells never mentioned any other relations. Did Anna ever confide in her cousin?

“Sister Michael's here,” said the slavey.

“Thank you, Kitty.”

But it was Rosaleen O'Donnell who came in next.

Leave her be,
Lib wanted to say. But she held her tongue while Rosaleen bent down to rouse her daughter with a long embrace and murmured prayers. Like something out of grand opera, the way she barged in to make a show of her maternal feelings twice a day.

The nun came in and nodded a greeting, her mouth sealed shut. Lib picked up her things and left.

Outside the cabin, the slavey was pouring an iron bucket of water into a gigantic tub that stood over a fire.

“What are you doing, Kitty?”

“Wash day.”

The laundry tub was set too near the dung heap for Lib's liking.

“It'd be Monday, usually, not Friday,” said Kitty, “only 'tisn't Monday Lá Fhéile Muire Mór?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“The Blessed Virgin Mary's feast.”

“Ah, really?”

Kitty rested her hands on her hips, staring at Lib. “'Twas on the fifteenth of August that Our Lady was taken up.”

Lib couldn't bring herself to ask what that meant.

“Lifted up bodily to heaven.” Miming it with the bucket.

“She died?”

“She did not,” Kitty scoffed. “Didn't her loving son spare her that?”

There was no talking to this creature. With a nod, Lib turned towards the village.

Lib walked back to the spirit grocery in the dregs of the darkness, a nibbled-looking moon low on the horizon. Before she lurched up the stairs to her bed above the grocery, she remembered to beg Maggie Ryan to keep some breakfast for her.

She woke at nine, having slept just enough to befuddle herself but not enough to clear her head. Rain was tapping the roof like the fingers of a blind man.

No sign of William Byrne in the dining room. Could he have gone back to Dublin already, even though he'd urged Lib to find out more about the possible involvement of the priest in the hoax?

The girl served her cold griddle cakes. Cooked—Lib deduced from the faint crunch—directly on the embers. Did the Irish hate food? She was about to ask after the journalist, then was struck by how such a question might sound.

Lib thought of Anna O'Donnell, waking up even emptier on the fifth day. Suddenly sickened, she pushed her plate away and went up to her room.

She read for several hours—a volume of miscellaneous essays—but found she was retaining nothing.

Lib set off down a lane behind the spirit grocery despite the rain pattering on her umbrella; anything to be outside. A few disconsolate cows in a field. The soil seemed to be getting poorer as she walked towards the only elevated land, Anna's whale, a long ridge with one thick end and one pointed one. She followed a path until it petered out in bogland. She tried to stick to the higher, drier-looking areas, purpled with heather. She saw something move out of the corner of her eye; a hare? There were depressions full of what looked like hot cocoa and others glinting with dirty water.

To avoid soaking her boots, Lib jumped from one mushroom-shaped hummock to the next. Occasionally she swung her umbrella point downwards and poked the ground to check its firmness. She picked her way along a wide ribbon of sedge grass for a while, though it made her nervous to hear a trickling below, an underground stream, perhaps; was the whole landscape honeycombed?

A bird with a curved bill stalked past and sent up a high-pitched complaint. Small white tufts nodded in ones and twos across the wet ground. When Lib bent down to look at a curious lichen, it proved to have horns, like those of a minuscule deer.

A chopping sound came from a great gouge in the ground. When Lib approached and peered in, she saw the hole was half full of brown water, and there was a man in it up to his chest, clinging by one hooked elbow to a sort of rudimentary ladder. “Wait!” she cried.

He gawked up at Lib.

“I'll be back with help as soon as I can,” she told him.

“I'm grand, missus.”

“But—” She gestured at the engulfing water.

“Just taking a bit of a rest.”

Lib had misunderstood again. Her cheeks scorched.

He swung his weight and gripped the ladder with his other arm now. “You'll be the English nurse.”

“That's right.”

“Don't they cut turf over there?”

Only then did she recognize the winged spade hanging from his ladder. “Not in my part of the country. May I ask, why do you go down so low?”

“Ah, the scraw at the top's no good.” He gestured at the rim of the hole. “Just moss for bedding animals and dressing wounds, like.”

Lib couldn't imagine inserting this rotting matter into any wound, even on a battlefield.

“For turves for burning, you have to dig down the length of a man or two.”

“How interesting.” Lib was trying to seem practical, but she sounded more like a silly lady at a party.

“Are you lost, missus?”

“Not at all. Just getting my constitutional. Exercise,” she added, in case the turf cutter was unfamiliar with the word.

He nodded. “Have you a slice of bread in your pocket?”

She stepped back, discomfited. Was the fellow a beggar? “I do not. Nor any money either.”

“Ah, money's no good. You want a bit of bread to keep off the other crowd when you're out walking.”

“The other crowd?”

“The little folk,” he said.

More fairy nonsense, evidently. Lib turned to go.

“You'll have been up the green road?”

Another supernatural reference? She turned back. “I'm afraid I don't know what that means.”

“Sure you're on it, nearly.”

Looking the way the turf cutter pointed, Lib was startled to spot a path. “Thank you.”

“How's the girleen doing?”

She almost answered with an automatic
Well enough
but stopped herself in time. “I'm not at liberty to discuss the case. Good day.”

Up close, the
green road
was a proper cart track paved with crushed rock that began all at once in the middle of the bog. Perhaps it led here from the next village, and the final section—the one that would bring it all the way down to the O'Donnells' village—hadn't been built yet? Nothing particularly green about it, yet the name promised something. Lib set out at a brisk pace on the soft verge where occasional flowers bloomed.

Half an hour later, the track had zigzagged up the side of the low rise and down again without any obvious reason. Lib clicked her tongue with irritation. Was a straight path to walk too much to ask? Finally it seemed to turn back on itself, disheartened, and the surface began to break up. The so-called road petered out as arbitrarily as it had begun, its stones swallowed up by weeds.

What a rabble, the Irish. Shiftless, thriftless, hopeless, hapless, always brooding over past wrongs. Their tracks going nowhere, their trees hung with putrid rags.