The Wonder (28 page)

“Child,” said Mr. Thaddeus, “we hear you're under the weather.”

This was Irish euphemism at its worst.

“I'm very well,” said Anna in the smallest of voices.

Lib knew all at once that she couldn't tell them about the manna. Not here, not now. Because it was only hearsay, after all, secondhand reporting of the word of a child. Rosaleen O'Donnell would shriek that the Englishwoman had made up the whole blasphemous story out of spite. The members of the committee would turn to Anna and demand to know whether it was true. And what then? For Lib to force the girl to choose between her nurse and Rosaleen was too risky; what child wouldn't side with her own mother? Besides, it would be unconscionably cruel.

Changing tack, she nodded at the nun and walked to the wheeled chair. “Good evening, Anna.”

A slow smile from the girl.

“May I take off your blankets so these gentlemen can see you better?”

A tiny nod. Wheezing, yawning to catch a breath.

Lib unveiled the child, then pushed the chair up close to the table so the candlelight illuminated her white nightdress. So the committee could see her in all her grotesque disproportion: The hands and lower legs of a giant grafted onto the frame of an elf. The sunken eyes, the limpness, the hectic colour, the blue fingers, the weird marks on ankles and neck. Anna's wrecked body was a more articulate testament than any Lib could offer. “Gentlemen, my fellow nurse and I have found ourselves overseeing the slow execution of a child. Two weeks was an arbitrarily chosen period, was it not? I beg that the watch be called off tonight and all efforts bent to saving Anna's life.”

For a long moment, not a word. Lib watched McBrearty. His faith in his theories was shaken, she could tell; his papery lips quivered.

“We've seen enough, I believe,” said Sir Otway Blackett.

“Yes, you may take Anna home now, Sister,” said McBrearty.

Meek as ever, the nun nodded and wheeled the chair out. O'Flaherty hopped up to hold the door open for them.

“And you may leave us, Mr. and Mrs. O'Donnell.”

Rosaleen looked mutinous but went out with Malachy.

“And Mrs. Wright—” Mr. Thaddeus gestured for her to go as well.

“Not till this meeting's over,” she told him through her teeth.

The door closed behind the O'Donnells.

“I'm sure we all concur on the necessity of being quite certain before deviating from our agreed course of action and curtailing the watch?” asked the baronet.

Hemming and hawing along the table. “I suppose there's only a couple of days in it,” said Ryan.

Nods all around.

They didn't mean that Sunday was only three days away so they might as well end the watch now, Lib registered dizzily. They meant to keep it going till Sunday. Hadn't they
seen
the child?

The baronet and John Flynn maundered on about procedure and burdens of proof.

“After all, the watch is the only way to find out the truth once and for all,” McBrearty was reminding the committee. “For the sake of science, for the sake of mankind—”

Lib couldn't bear anymore. She raised her voice and pointed at the doctor. “You'll be struck off the Medical Register.” Bluffing; she had no idea what it took to get a physician banned from practicing. “All of you—your negligence could be considered
criminal.
Failure to provide the necessities of life to a child,” she said, improvising as she moved her accusing finger from one man to the next. “Conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Complicity in a suicide.”

“Ma'am,” barked the baronet, “may I remind you that you have been employed for a not ungenerous daily consideration for an agreed period of a fortnight? Your final testimony as to the matter of whether you've observed the girl take any nourishment will be required of you on Sunday.”

“Anna will be dead by Sunday!”

“Mrs. Wright, restrain yourself,” the priest urged her.

“She's in breach of the terms of her hire,” Ryan pointed out.

John Flynn nodded. “If there were more than three days left, I'd propose we replace her.”

“Quite so,” said the baronet. “Dangerously unbalanced.”

Lib stumbled to the door.

In her dream, scratching. Rats swarmed down the long ward, filling the walkway, leaping from cot to cot, lapping at fresh blood. Men cried out, but above their voices it was the scratching Lib heard, the furious friction of claws on wood—

No. The door. A scratching at her door, upstairs at Ryan's. Somebody who didn't want to wake anyone but Lib.

She clambered out of bed, fumbled for her dressing gown. Opened the door a crack. “Mr. Byrne!”

He didn't apologize for disturbing her. They considered each other in the shaky light of his candle. Lib shot a look at the dark hollow of the staircase; someone could come up at any time. She beckoned him into her room.

Byrne stepped in without hesitation. He smelled warm, as if he'd been riding today. Lib gestured at the single chair, and he took it. She chose a perch on her rumpled bed far enough from the man's legs but near enough so they'd be able to talk in low voices.

“I heard about the meeting,” he began.

“From which of them?”

He shook his head. “Maggie Ryan.”

Lib felt a ridiculous pang that he was on such intimate terms with the maid.

“She caught only the odd snatch of what was said, but her sense of it was that they all came down on you like a wolf pack.”

Lib almost laughed.

She told him everything: Anna's perverse hope to expiate her brother's juvenile sins by making a burnt offering of herself. Lib's guess that the priest had brought her to this country in hopes that the watch would expose the fact that there was no miracle and save his precious Church from the embarrassment of a false saint. The committee members and their pigheaded refusal to deviate from their plan.

“Forget them,” said Byrne.

Lib stared at him.

“I doubt any of them can talk the girl out of her madness now. But you—she likes you. You have influence.”

“Not enough,” protested Lib.

“If you don't want to see her stretched out in a box, use that influence.”

For a moment Lib pictured the child's treasure chest, and then she realized that he meant a coffin.
Forty-six inches,
she remembered from her first measurements of Anna. Barely more than four inches of growth for each year on earth.

“I've been lying on my bed in there wondering about you, Lib Wright.”

Lib bristled. “What about me?”

“How far will you go to save this girl?”

Only when he asked it did she find she knew the answer. “I'll stop at nothing.”

One eyebrow went up, sceptical.

“I'm not what you think me, Mr. Byrne.”

“What do you believe I think you?”

“A stickler, a fusspot, a prudish widow. When the truth is, I'm not a widow at all.” The words came out of Lib's mouth with no warning.

That made the Irishman sit up straight. “You weren't married?” His face alight with curiosity, or was it disgust?

“I was. I still am, for all I know.” Lib could hardly believe she was telling her worst secret, and to a newspaperman of all people. But there was a glory in it too, that rare sensation of risking all. “Wright didn't die, he…” Absconded? Cut and run? Left? “He took his leave.”

“Why?” The syllable erupted from Byrne.

Lib shrugged so sharply that a pain went through her shoulder. “You assume he had cause, then.” She could have told him about the baby, but she didn't want to, not now.

“No! You're taking me up wrong, you're—”

She tried to recall whether she'd ever seen this man lost for words.

He asked, “Whatever could possess a man to leave
you?
”

Now her tears brimmed. It was the note of indignation on her behalf that took her unawares.

Her parents hadn't been sympathetic. Appalled, rather, that Lib had been so unlucky as to lose a husband less than a year after catching him. (Thinking that she'd been negligent, perhaps, to some degree, though they never said that aloud.) They'd been loyal enough to help her move to London and pass herself off as a widow. This conspiracy had shocked Lib's sister so much, she'd never spoken to any of the three of them again. But the one question her mother and father hadn't asked Lib was,
How could he?

She blinked hard, because she couldn't bear the idea that Byrne might think she was weeping for her husband, who was really not worth a single tear. She smiled a little instead.

“And Englishmen call Irishmen stupid!” he added.

That made her laugh out loud. She stifled it with her hand.

William Byrne kissed her, so fast and so hard that she almost tipped over. Not a word, only that single kiss, and then he walked out of her room.

Strangely enough, Lib did sleep then, despite all the clamour in her head.

When she woke, she fumbled for her watch on the table and pressed the button. It beat out the hours inside her fist: one, two, three, four. Friday morning. Only then did she remember how Byrne had kissed her. No, how the two of them had kissed.

Guilt brought her bolt upright. How could she be sure that Anna hadn't worsened in the night, hadn't taken her last ragged breath?
Ever this night be at my side, to light and guard.
She longed to be back in that small airless room. Would the O'Donnells even let her in this morning, after what she'd said at the meeting?

Lib dressed herself by feel, not even lighting her candle. She patted her way down the stairs and struggled with the front door until the bar heaved up and let her out.

Still dark; a cloud loosely bandaged the waning moon. So quiet, so lone, as if some disaster had laid waste the whole country and Lib was the last to walk its muddy paths.

There was one light in the small window of the O'Donnells' cabin that had not stopped blazing for eleven days and nights now, like some awful eye that had forgotten how to blink. Lib walked up to the burning square and peeped in at the scene.

Sister Michael sitting beside the bed, her eyes on Anna's profile. The tiny face transfigured by light. Sleeping beauty; innocence preserved; a child who looked perfect, perhaps because she wasn't moving, wasn't asking for anything, wasn't causing any trouble. An illustration out of a cheap paper:
The Final Vigil.
Or
The Little Angel's Last Rest.

Lib must have moved or else Sister Michael had that uncanny ability to feel herself being watched, because the nun looked up and nodded a wan greeting.

Lib went to the front door and let herself in, braced for a rebuff.

Malachy O'Donnell was drinking tea by the fire. Rosaleen and Kitty were scraping something from one pot into another. The slavey kept her head down. The mistress glanced Lib's way, but only briefly, as if she'd felt a draught. So the O'Donnells weren't going to defy the committee by barring Lib from the cabin, at least not today.

In the bedroom, Anna was so deeply asleep that she looked like a waxwork.

Lib took Sister Michael's cool hand and squeezed it, which startled the nun. “Thank you for coming last night.”

“But it did no good, did it?” asked Sister Michael.

“Still.”

The sun came up at a quarter past six. As if summoned by the light, Anna lurched off the pillow and put her hand out towards the empty chamber pot. Lib rushed to give it to her.

What the girl retched up was sunshine yellow but transparent. How could this hollowed-out stomach make such a gaudy shade out of nothing but water? Anna shuddered, contracting her lips as if to shake the drops off.

“Are you in pain?” asked Lib. These were the last days, surely.

Anna spat, and spat again, then settled back on the pillow, head turned towards the dresser.

Lib filled in her memorandum book.

Brought up bile; half a pint?

Pulse: 128 beats per minute.

Lungs: 30 respirations per minute; moist crackling bilaterally.

Neck veins distended.

Temperature very cool.

Eyes glassy.

Anna was ageing as if time itself were speeding up. Her skin was wrinkled parchment, blemished as if messages had been inked on it then scratched out. When the child rubbed her collarbone, Lib noticed that the skin stayed ruched. Dark red strands were strewn across the upper pillow, and Lib scraped them up and tucked them into the pocket of her apron. “Is your neck stiff, child?”

“No.”

“Why do you turn it that way, then?”

“The window's too bright,” said Anna.

Use your influence,
Byrne had said. But what new arguments could Lib muster?

“Tell me,” she said, “what kind of God would take your life in exchange for your brother's soul?”

“He wants me,” whispered Anna.

Kitty brought in breakfast on a tray and spoke in an uneven voice about the extraordinarily fine weather. “And how are you today, pet?”

“Very well,” Anna told her cousin wheezily.

The slavey pressed her reddened hand to her own mouth. Then went back to the kitchen.

Breakfast was griddle cakes with sweet butter. Lib thought of Saint Peter standing at the gate,
waiting for a buttered cake.
She tasted ash.
Now and at the hour of our death, amen.
Sickened, she set the griddle cake back on the plate and put the tray by the door.

“Everything's stretching, Mrs. Lib,” said Anna in a catarrhal murmur.

“Stretching?”

“The room. The outside fits in the inside.”

Was this the start of delirium? “Are you cold?” Lib asked, sitting next to the bed.

Anna shook her head.

“Hot?” asked Lib.

“Not anything. No difference.”

Those glazed eyes were reminding her of Pat O'Donnell's painted gaze in the daguerreotype. Every now and then they seemed to twitch. Troubles of vision, perhaps. “Can you see what's right in front of you?”