The Wonder (3 page)

The girl hurried back in, wiping her hands. “There's your tobacco now,” she told him, twisting the ends of a paper package and sliding it over the counter.

“Bless you, Maggie, and a box of matches too. Right, so, Sister?”

He was looking past Lib. She spun around and found the nun hovering; when had she crept in?

Sister Michael nodded at the priest and then at Lib with a twitch of the lips that could have been meant for a smile. Crippled by shyness, Lib supposed.

Why couldn't McBrearty have sent for two Nightingales while he was at it? It occurred to Lib now that perhaps none of the fifty-odd others—lay or religious—had been available at such short notice. Was Lib the only Crimean nurse who'd failed to find her niche half a decade on? The only one sufficiently at loose ends to take the poisoned bait of this job?

The three of them turned left down the street through a watery sunlight. Ill at ease between the priest and the nun, Lib gripped her leather bag.

Buildings turned different ways, giving one another the cold shoulder. An old woman in a window at a table stacked with baskets—a huckster peddling produce of some sort out of her front room? There was none of the Monday-morning bustle Lib would have expected in England. They passed one man laden with a sack who exchanged blessings with Mr. Thaddeus and Sister Michael.

“Mrs. Wright worked with Miss Nightingale,” the priest remarked in the nun's direction.

“So I heard.” After a moment Sister Michael said to Lib, “You must have a power of experience with surgical cases.”

Lib nodded as modestly as she could. “We also dealt with a great deal of cholera, dysentery, malaria. Frostbite in the winter, of course.” In fact the English nurses had spent much of their time stuffing mattresses, stirring gruel, and standing at washtubs, but Lib didn't want the nun to mistake her for an ignorant menial. That was what nobody understood: saving lives often came down to getting a latrine pipe unplugged.

No sign of a market square or green, as any English village would have possessed. The garish white chapel was the only new-looking building. Mr. Thaddeus cut right just before it, taking a muddy lane that led around a graveyard. The mossy, skewed tombstones seemed to have been planted not in rows but at random. “Is the O'Donnells' house outside the village?” Lib asked, curious as to why the family hadn't been courteous enough to send a driver, let alone put the nurses up themselves.

“A little way,” said the nun in her whispery voice.

“Malachy keeps shorthorns,” added the priest.

There was more power to this weak sun than Lib would have thought; she was perspiring under her cloak. “How many children have they at home?”

“Just the girl now, since Pat's gone over, God bless him,” said Mr. Thaddeus.

Gone where? America seemed most likely to Lib, or Britain, or the Colonies. Ireland, an improvident mother, seemed to ship half her skinny brood abroad. Two children only for the O'Donnells, then; that seemed a paltry total to Lib.

They passed a shabby cabin with a smoking chimney. A path slanted off the lane towards another cottage. Lib's eyes scanned the bogland ahead for any sign of the O'Donnells' estate. Was she allowed to ask the priest for more than plain facts? Each of the nurses had been hired to form her own impressions. But then it struck Lib that this walk might be the only chance she'd get to talk to this
trusted friend of the family.
“Mr. Thaddeus, if I may—can you attest to the honesty of the O'Donnells?”

A moment went by. “Sure I've no reason to doubt it.”

Lib had never had a conversation with a Roman Catholic priest before and couldn't read this one's politic tone.

The nun's eyes stayed on the green horizon.

“Malachy's a man of few words,” Mr. Thaddeus went on. “A teetotaler.”

That surprised Lib.

“Not a drop since he took the Pledge, before the children were born. His wife's a leading light of the parish, very active in the Sodality of Our Lady.”

These details meant little to Lib, but she got the drift. “And Anna O'Donnell?”

“A wonderful little girl.”

In what sense? Virtuous? Or exceptional? Clearly the chit had them all charmed. Lib looked hard at the priest's curved profile. “Have you ever advised her to refuse nourishment, perhaps as some sort of spiritual exercise?”

His hands spread in protest. “Mrs. Wright. I don't think you're of our faith?”

Picking her words, Lib said, “I was baptized in the Church of England.”

The nun seemed to be watching a passing crow. Avoiding contamination by staying out of the conversation?

“Well,” said Mr. Thaddeus, “let me assure you that Catholics are required to do without food for only a matter of hours, for instance from midnight to the taking of Holy Communion the following morning. We also abstain from meat on Wednesdays and Fridays and during Lent. Moderate fasting mortifies the cravings of the body, you see,” he added as easily as if he were speaking of the weather.

“Meaning the appetite for food?”

“Among others.”

Lib moved her eyes to the muddy ground in front of her boots.

“We also express sorrow over the agonies of Our Lord by sharing them even a little,” he continued, “so fasting can be a useful penance.”

“Meaning that if one punishes oneself, one's sins will be forgiven?” asked Lib.

“Or those of others,” said the nun under her breath.

“Just as Sister says,” the priest answered, “if we offer up our suffering in a generous spirit to be set to another's account.”

Lib pictured a gigantic ledger filled with inky debits and credits.

“But the key is, fasting is never to be carried to an extreme or to the point of harming the health.”

Hard to spear this slippery fish. “Then why do you think Anna O'Donnell has gone against the rules of her own church?”

The priest's broad shoulders heaved into a shrug. “Many's the time I've reasoned with her over the past months, pleaded with her to take a bite of something. But she's deaf to all persuasion.”

What was it about this spoiled miss that she'd managed to enrol all the grown-ups around her in this charade?

“Here we are,” murmured Sister Michael, gesturing towards the end of a faint track.

This couldn't be their destination, surely? The cabin was in need of a fresh coat of whitewash; pitched thatch brooded over three small squares of glass. At the far end, a cow byre stooped under the same roof.

Lib saw all at once the foolishness of her assumptions. If the committee had hired the nurses, then Malachy O'Donnell was not necessarily prosperous. It seemed that all that marked the family out from the other peasants scratching a living around here was their claim that their little girl could live on air.

She stared at the O'Donnells' low roofline. If Dr. McBrearty hadn't been so rash as to write to the
Irish Times,
she saw now, word would never have spread beyond these sodden fields. How many
important
friends of his were investing their hard cash, as well as their names, in this bizarre enterprise? Were they betting that after the fortnight, both nurses would obediently swear to the miracle and make this puny hamlet a marvel of Christendom? Did they think to buy the endorsement, the combined reputability, of a Sister of Mercy and a Nightingale?

The three walked up the path—right past a dung heap, Lib noticed with a quiver of disapproval. The thick walls of the cabin sloped outwards to the ground. A broken pane in the nearest window was stopped up with a rag. There was a half-door, gaping at the top like a horse's stall. Mr. Thaddeus pushed the bottom open with a dull scrape and gestured for Lib to go first.

She stepped into darkness. A woman cried out in a language Lib didn't know.

Her eyes started to adjust. A floor of beaten earth under her boots. Two females in the frilled caps that Irishwomen always seemed to wear were clearing away a drying rack that stood before the fire. After piling the clothes into the younger, slighter woman's arms, the elder ran forward to shake hands with the priest.

He answered her in the same tongue—Gaelic, it had to be—then moved into English. “Rosaleen O'Donnell, I know you met Sister Michael yesterday.”

“Sister, good morning to you.” The woman squeezed the nun's hands.

“And this is Mrs. Wright, one of the famous nurses from the Crimea.”

“My!” Mrs. O'Donnell had broad, bony shoulders, stone-grey eyes, and a smile holed with dark. “Heaven bless you for coming such a distance, ma'am.”

Could she really be ignorant enough to think that war still raged in that peninsula and that Lib had just arrived, bloody from the battlefront?

“'Tis in the good room I'd have ye this minute”—Rosaleen O'Donnell nodded towards a door to the right of the fire—“if it wasn't for the visitors.”

Now Lib was listening, she could make out the faint sound of singing.

“We're grand here,” Mr. Thaddeus assured her.

“Let ye sit down till we have a cup of tea, at least,” Mrs. O'Donnell insisted. “The chairs are all within, so I've nothing but creepies for you. Mister's off digging turf for Séamus O'Lalor.”

Creepies
had to mean the log stools the woman was shoving practically into the flames for her guests. Lib chose one and tried to inch it farther away from the hearth. But the mother looked offended; clearly, right by the fire was the position of honour. So Lib sat, putting down her bag on the cooler side so her ointments wouldn't melt into puddles.

Rosaleen O'Donnell crossed herself as she sat down and so did the priest and the nun. Lib thought of following suit. But no, it would be ridiculous to start aping the locals.

The singing from the so-called good room seemed to swell. The fireplace opened into both parts of the cabin, Lib realized, so sounds leaked through.

While the maid winched the hissing kettle off the fire, Mrs. O'Donnell and the priest chatted about yesterday's drop of rain and how unusually warm the summer was proving on the whole. The nun listened and occasionally murmured assent. Not a word about the daughter.

Lib's uniform was sticking to her sides. For an observant nurse, she reminded herself, time need never be wasted. She noted a plain table, pushed against the windowless back wall. A painted dresser, the lower section barred, like a cage. Some tiny doors set into the walls; recessed cupboards? A curtain of old flour sacks nailed up. All rather primitive, but neat, at least; not quite squalid. The blackened chimney hood was woven of wattle. There was a square hollow on either side of the fire, and what Lib guessed was a salt box nailed high up. A shelf over the fire held a pair of brass candlesticks, a crucifix, and what looked like a small daguerreotype behind glass in a black lacquer case.

“And how's Anna today?” Mr. Thaddeus finally asked when they were all sipping the strong tea, the maid included.

“Well enough in herself, thanks be to God.” Mrs. O'Donnell cast another anxious glance towards the good room.

Was the girl in there singing hymns with these visitors?

“Perhaps you could tell the nurses her history,” suggested Mr. Thaddeus.

The woman looked blank. “Sure what history has a child?”

Lib met Sister Michael's eyes and took the lead. “Until this year, Mrs. O'Donnell, how would you have described your daughter's health?”

A blink. “Well, she's always been a delicate flower, but not a sniveller or tetchy. If ever she had a scrape or a stye, she'd make it a little offering to heaven.”

“What about her appetite?” asked Lib.

“Ah, she's never been greedy or clamoured for treats. Good as gold.”

“And her spirits?” asked the nun.

“No cause for complaint,” said Mrs. O'Donnell.

These ambiguous answers didn't satisfy Lib. “Does Anna go to school?”

“Oh, Mr. O'Flaherty only doted on her.”

“Didn't she win the medal, sure?” The maid pointed at the mantel so suddenly that the tea sloshed in her cup.

“That's right, Kitty,” said the mother, nodding like a pecking hen.

Lib looked for a medal and found it, a small bronzed disc in a presentation case beside the photograph.

“But after she caught the whooping cough when it came through the school last year,” Mrs. O'Donnell went on, “we thought to keep our little colleen home, considering the dirt up there and the windows that do be always getting broken and letting draughts in.”

Colleen;
that was what the Irish seemed to call every young female.

“Doesn't she study just as hard at home anyway, with all her books around her? The nest is enough for the wren, as they say.”

Lib didn't know that maxim. She pushed on, because it had occurred to her that Anna's preposterous lie might be rooted in truth. “Since her illness, has she suffered from disturbances of the stomach?” She wondered if violent coughing might have ruptured the child internally.

But Mrs. O'Donnell shook her head with a fixed smile.

“Vomiting, blockages, loose stools?”

“No more than once in a while in the ordinary course of growing.”

“So until she turned eleven,” Lib asked, “you'd have described your daughter as delicate, nothing more?”

The woman's flaking lips pressed together. “The seventh of April, four months ago yesterday. Overnight, Anna wouldn't take bite nor sup, nothing but God's own water.”

Lib felt a surge of dislike. If this were actually true, what kind of mother would report it with such excitement?

But of course it wasn't true, she reminded herself. Either Rosaleen O'Donnell had had a hand in the hoax or the daughter had managed to pull the wool over the mother's eyes, but in any case, cynical or gullible, the woman had no reason to feel afraid for her child.

“Before her birthday, had she choked on a morsel? Eaten anything rancid?”