The Wonder (21 page)

Anna was moving in what struck Lib as an odd way, with her chin stuck out. But the girl showed a relish for everything. Snuffed at the air as if it were attar of roses instead of cows and chickens. Stroked every mossy rock that they passed.

“What's the matter with you today, Anna?”

“Nothing. I'm happy.”

Lib looked at her askance.

“Our Lady's pouring such a great deal of light on everything, I can nearly smell it.”

Could eating little or nothing open the pores? Lib wondered. Sharpen the senses?

“I see my feet,” said Anna, “but as if they belong to somebody else.” Looking down at her brother's worn boots.

Lib tightened her grip on the girl.

A black-jacketed silhouette at the end of the path, out of sight of the cabin: William Byrne. He lifted his hat and unleashed his curls. “Mrs. Wright.”

“Ah, I believe I know this gentleman,” remarked Lib as casually as she could. Thinking, did she know him at all, really? The committee could dismiss her for arranging this interview if any of its members heard about it. “Mr. Byrne, this is Anna O'Donnell.”

“Good morning, Anna.” He shook her hand. Lib saw him eyeing the bloated fingers.

She began with bland nothings about the weather, her mind skittering along underneath. Where could the three walk to run the lowest risk of being spotted? How soon would the family come back from mass? She steered Byrne and Anna away from the village and took a cart track that looked little used.

“Is Mr. Byrne a visitor, Mrs. Lib?”

Startled by the child's question, she shook her head. She couldn't have Anna reporting to her parents that the nurse had broken her own rule.

“I'm in these parts just for a little while, to see the sights,” said Byrne.

“With your children?” asked Anna.

“Sadly, I have none, as yet.”

“Have you a wife?”

“Anna!”

“That's all right,” Byrne told Lib, and he turned back to Anna. “No, my dear. I very nearly had one once, but at the last minute, the lady changed her mind.”

Lib looked away, at a stretch of bog studded with shining puddles.

“Oh,” said Anna sorrowfully.

Byrne shrugged. “She's settled in Cork, and good riddance to her.”

Lib liked him for that.

Byrne found out that Anna loved flowers, which was a very great coincidence, he told her, because he did too. He broke off a red stem of dogwood with one last white bloom and gave it to her.

“At the mission,” she told him, “we learned that the cross was made of dogwood, so the tree only grows short and twisted now because of being sorry.”

He bent right down to hear her.

“The flowers are like a cross, see? Two long petals, two short,” said Anna. “And those brown bits are the nail prints, and that's the crown of thorns in the middle.”

“Fascinating,” said Byrne.

Lib was glad she'd risked this meeting after all. Before, he'd been able only to crack jokes about the case; now he was getting a sense of the real girl.

Byrne told a story of a Persian king who'd halted his army for days just to admire a plane tree. He broke off to point out a grouse running by, gingery body vivid against the grasses. “See its red eyebrows, like mine?”

“Redder than yours.” Anna laughed.

He'd been to Persia himself, he told her, and Egypt too.

“Mr. Byrne is quite a traveller,” said Lib.

“Oh, I've thought of going farther,” he said.

She looked sideways at him.

“Settling in Canada, perhaps, or the States, even Australia or New Zealand. Wider horizons.”

“But to sever all your connections, professional as well as personal…” Lib fumbled for words. “Wouldn't it be like a little death?”

Byrne nodded. “I believe emigration generally is that. The price of a new life.”

“Would you like to hear a riddle?” Anna asked him suddenly.

“Very much,” he told her.

She repeated the ones about the wind, paper, and flame; she turned to Lib only to confirm one or two words. Byrne failed to guess any of them and rapped himself on the skull on hearing the answer every time.

He tested Anna on birdsongs next. She correctly identified the melodic sobbing of a curlew and a drumming made by the wings of what she called a bog bleater, which turned out to be an Irishism for snipe.

Finally Anna admitted that she was a little tired. Lib gave her a searching look and felt her forehead, which was still stone cool, despite the sunshine and exertion.

“Would you like a little rest here to fortify you for the walk back?” asked Byrne.

“Yes, please.”

He took off his coat with a flap of the tails and spread it out on a large flat rock for the child.

“Sit down,” said Lib, crouching to pat the brown lining, still warm from his back.

Anna subsided onto it and stroked the satin with one finger.

“I'll have my eye on you all the time,” Lib promised the girl. Then she and Byrne stepped away.

The two of them drifted till they reached a broken wall. They stood close enough that Lib could feel the heat coming off his shirtsleeve like a vapour. “Well?”

“Well what, Mrs. Lib?” His voice was oddly tight.

“What do you make of her?”

“She's delightful.” Byrne spoke so quietly that she had to lean in to make it out.

“Isn't she?”

“A delightful dying child.”

Lib was suddenly winded. She looked over her shoulder at Anna, a tidy figure on one edge of the man's long jacket.

“Are you blind?” asked Byrne, still as softly as if he were saying something kind. “The girl's wasting away in front of you.”

She was almost stuttering. “Mr. Byrne. How, how—”

“I suppose that's exactly it: you're too close up to see it.”

“How can you—what makes you so sure?”

“I was sent to study famine when I was only five years older than her,” he reminded her in the quietest of snarls.

“Anna isn't… her belly's round,” Lib argued weakly.

“Some starve fast, some slow,” said Byrne. “The slow kind swell up, but it's only water, there's nothing there.” He kept his eyes on the green field. “That waddle, the ghastly fuzz on her face. And have you smelled her breath lately?”

Lib tried to remember. That wasn't one of the measurements she'd been taught to record.

“It goes vinegary as the body turns on itself; eating itself up, I suppose.”

Lib looked over and saw that the child had crumpled like a leaf. She ran.

“I didn't faint,” Anna kept insisting as William Byrne carried her home, blanketed in his jacket. “I was just resting.” Eyes looking as deep as bog holes.

Lib's throat was constricted with fright.
A delightful dying child.
He was right, damn the man.

“Let me in,” Byrne told Lib outside the cabin. “You can tell the parents I happened to be passing and came to your aid.”

“Get away from here.” She wrenched Anna out of his arms.

Only when he'd turned towards the lane did Lib dip her nose to the girl's face and inhale. There it was: a faint, awful fruitiness.

When Lib woke that Monday afternoon to the rattling of rain on Ryan's roof, she was groggy. A rectangle of white at the base of the door confused her eye; she thought it was light, and only when she dragged herself out of bed did it turn into a page. Handwritten, hastily but without mistakes.

A chance and fleeting encounter with the Fasting Girl herself has at last given this correspondent an opportunity to form a personal opinion on this most heated of controversies, as to whether she is being used to perpetrate a nefarious fraud upon the public.

First, it must be said that Anna O'Donnell is an exceptional maiden. Despite having received only a limited education at the village's National School, under a teacher who is obliged to supplement his income by cobbling, Miss O'Donnell speaks with sweetness, composure and candour. As well as the piety for which she is known, she displays great feeling for nature, and a sympathy striking in one so young. The Egyptian sage wrote some five millennia ago, Wise words are rarer than emeralds, yet they come from the mouths of poor slave girls.

Second, it falls to this correspondent to give the lie to the reports of Anna O'Donnell's health. Her stoical character and elevated spirits may obscure the truth, but the lurching walk and strained posture, the chill, distended fingers, the sunken eyes, and above all the sharp-scented breath known as the odour of famine, all testify to her state of malnutrition.

Without speculating on what covert devices may have been used to keep Anna O'Donnell alive for four months until the watch commenced on the eighth of August, it may be said—rather, must be said, without equivocation—that the child is now in grave peril, and that her watchers must beware.

Lib balled up the page so tightly that it disappeared in her fist. How it bit, every word of it.

In her memorandum book, she'd logged so many warning signs—why had she resisted the obvious conclusion that the girl's health was in decline? Arrogance, Lib supposed; she'd held firmly to her own judgment and overestimated her knowledge. Wishful thinking, too, as bad as what she'd seen in the families of those she'd nursed. Because Lib wanted the girl kept from harm, all week she'd indulged in fantasies about unconscious night-feedings or inexplicable powers of mind that bore the girl up. But to an outsider such as William Byrne, it was clear as day that Anna was just starving.

Her watchers must beware.

Lib's guilt should have made her grateful to the man. So why, picturing his handsome face, did she feel incensed?

She pulled the pot out from underneath the bed and retched up the boiled ham she'd had for dinner.

The sun went down just before she reached the cabin that evening, and the moon came up full, a swollen white globe.

Lib hurried in past the O'Donnells and Kitty, who were sitting over cups of tea, with barely a word of greeting. She had to alert the nun. It struck her that Dr. McBrearty might perhaps hear the truth better from Sister Michael if the nun could possibly be persuaded to tackle him.

But for once, she found Anna lying flat in the bed and the Sister of Mercy sitting on the edge, the child so engrossed in a story the nun was telling that she didn't even look over at Lib.

“A hundred years old, and in awful pain all the time,” Sister Michael was saying. Her eyes slid to Lib and then back to Anna. “The old woman confessed that when she was a little girl at mass, she'd taken Holy Communion but hadn't closed her mouth in time, and the Host had slipped out onto the floor. She'd been too ashamed to tell a soul, you see, so she'd left it there.”

Anna sucked in her breath.

Lib had never heard her fellow nurse so voluble.

“Now, do you know what he did, that priest?”

“When it fell out of her mouth?” asked Anna.

“No, the priest to whom the woman was making her confession, when she was a hundred years old. He went back to that same church, and it was in ruins,” said Sister Michael, “but there was a bush blooming right out of the broken stones of the floor. He searched among the roots, and what did he find but the Host itself, as fresh as the day it fell from the little girl's mouth nearly a century before.”

Anna made a small marvelling sound.

Lib was hard-pressed not to grab the nun by the elbow and yank her out of the room. What kind of story was this to tell Anna?

“He carried it back and put it on the old woman's tongue, and the curse was broken, and she was released from her pain.”

The child fumbled the sign of the cross.
“Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her, may she rest in peace.”

Released from her pain
meant she'd died, Lib realized. Only in Ireland would this count as a happy ending.

Anna blinked up at her. “Good evening, Mrs. Lib. I didn't see you there.”

“Good evening, Anna.”

Sister Michael stood up and gathered her things. She came over and murmured in Lib's ear, “Highly excited all afternoon, singing one hymn after another.”

“And you thought such a lurid tale would calm her?”

The nun's face closed up inside its frame of linen. “I don't think you understand our stories, ma'am.”

That was fighting talk for Sister Michael. And the nun glided from the room before Lib could say what she'd been waiting to say all afternoon: that in her view—she couldn't mention Byrne, obviously—Anna was in real danger.

She busied herself arranging the lamp, the can of burning fluid, the wick scissors, the water glass, the blankets, everything ready for the night. She got out her memorandum book and lifted Anna's wrist.
A delightful dying child.
“How are you feeling?”

“Quite content, Mrs. Lib.”

Anna's eyes were sunken, Lib could see now, engulfed by the swollen tissue. “But in your body, I mean.”

“Floating,” said the girl after a long moment.

Dizziness?
wrote Lib. “Anything else troubling you?”

“The floating doesn't trouble me.”

“Is there anything else that's different today, then?” Metallic pencil ready.

Anna leaned forward as if confiding a great secret. “Like bells, far off.”

Ringing in ears,
Lib wrote.

Pulse: 104 beats per minute.

Lungs: 21 respirations per minute.

The girl's movements were definitely slower, Lib saw, now that she was looking for evidence; her hands and feet a little colder and bluer than a week ago. But her heart was going faster, like the wings of a small bird. The blood was hectic in Anna's cheeks tonight. Her skin was as rough as a nutmeg grater in places. She smelled a little sour, and Lib would have liked to give her a sponge bath, but she feared to chill her even more.