The Wonder (33 page)

Lungs: respirations 35; moist crackling.

No urine all day.

No water taken.

Inanition.

8:47: Delirium.

8:59: Breathing very distressed, heartbeat irregular.

9:07: Gone.

“Mrs. Wright.”

Lib fumbled the book shut.

The nun was at her side, dark under the eyes. “How are your burns this morning?”

“They don't matter,” said Lib.

It was Sister Michael, coming back from the votive mass, who'd found Lib last night, who'd dragged her out of the bog, led her back to the village, and bandaged her hands. Lib had been in such a state, no acting had been required.

“Sister, I don't know how to thank you.”

A shake of the head, gaze lowered.

One of the many things on Lib's conscience was that she was repaying the nun's care with cruelty. Sister Michael would spend the rest of her life convinced that the two of them had brought about, or at least failed to prevent, the death of Anna O'Donnell.

Well, it couldn't be helped. All that mattered was the girl.

For the first time, Lib understood the wolfishness of mothers. It occurred to her that if by some miracle she came through today's trials and got away to that room in Athlone where William Byrne was waiting, she'd become the girl's mother, or the nearest thing to it.

Take oh take me for thy child,
was that how the hymn went? In times to come, when Nan-who-was-once-Anna blamed someone, it would be Lib. That was part of motherhood, she supposed, bearing responsibility for pushing the child out of warm darkness into the dreadful brightness of new life.

Mr. Thaddeus walked past just then, with O'Flaherty. The gleam had been knocked off the priest; he was showing his age. He nodded to the nurses, gloomily abstracted.

“There's no need for you to be questioned by the committee,” Lib told the nun. “You know nothing.” That came out too brusque. “I mean, you weren't there—you were at the chapel—at the end.”

Sister Michael crossed herself. “God rest her, the creature.”

They stepped aside to make room for the baronet.

“I shouldn't keep them waiting,” said Lib, moving towards the back room.

But the nun put a hand on Lib's arm, above the bandage. “Best not do or say anything till you're called on. Humility, Mrs. Wright, and penitence.”

Lib blinked. “Penitence?” Her voice too loud. “Isn't it they who should be penitent?”

Sister Michael shushed her. “Blessed are the meek.”

“But I
told
them, three days ago—”

The nun stepped closer, her lips almost touching Lib's ear. “Be meek, Mrs. Wright, and just maybe they'll let you go.”

It was sound advice; Lib shut her mouth.

John Flynn strode by, his face set in hard lines.

And what comfort could Lib offer Sister Michael in return? “Anna had—how did you put it the other day?—she made a good death.”

“She went willingly? Unresisting?” There was something troubled in those big eyes, unless Lib was imagining it. Something more than misery; doubt? Suspicion, even?

Her throat tightened. “Quite willingly,” she assured the nun. “She was ready to go.”

Dr. McBrearty hurried down the passage, his face caved in, panting as if he'd been running. He didn't so much as glance at the nurses as he went by.

“I'm sorry, Sister,” said Lib, her voice uneven, “so very sorry.”

“Shush,” said the nun again, softly, as if to a child. “Between you and me, Mrs. Wright, I had a vision.”

“A vision?”

“A sort of waking dream. I came away from the chapel early, you see, as I was fearful for Anna.”

Lib's heart started to pound.

“I was walking down the lane when I thought I saw… I seemed to see an angel riding away with the child.”

Dumbstruck.
She knows.
Loud in Lib's head.
She has our fate in her hands.
Sister Michael was vowed to obedience; how could she not confess what she'd seen to the committee?

“Was it a true vision, would you say?” asked the nun, her gaze burning into Lib.

All she could do was nod.

A terrible silence. Then: “His ways are mysterious.”

“They are,” said Lib hoarsely.

“Has the child gone to a better place—can you promise me that much?”

One more nod.

“Mrs. Wright.” Ryan, jerking his thumb. “'Tis time.”

Lib left the nun without a word of good-bye. She could hardly believe it. She was still steeled against the possibility of a shouted accusation, but none came. She couldn't stop herself from glancing over her shoulder. The nun had her hands joined and her head bowed.
She's setting us free.

In the back room, there was a stool placed before the trestle tables where the committee sat, but Lib stood in front of it, to look humbler, as Sister Michael had advised her.

McBrearty tugged the door shut behind him.

“Sir Otway?” That was the publican, deferential.

The baronet made a limp gesture. “Since I'm here not as resident magistrate but only in a private capacity—”

“I'll begin, so.” It was Flynn who spoke up in his bearish tone. “Nurse Wright.”

“Gentlemen.” Lib could hardly be heard. She didn't have to force her voice to quiver.

“What in all the blazes happened last night?”

Blazes?
For a moment she feared she was going to laugh; did Flynn even hear the pun?

Lib adjusted one of her bandages where it was digging into her wrist, and a stab of pain cleared her mind. She closed her eyes and bent her head as if overcome, producing a series of racked sobs.

“Ma'am, you'll do yourself no good by giving way in such a manner.” The baronet's voice was peevish.

No good legally, or did he mean only her health?

“Just tell us what happened to the little girl,” said Flynn.

Lib wailed, “Anna just, she wouldn't—that evening she got weaker and weaker. My notes.” She lunged at McBrearty and laid her memorandum book in front of him, open where the words and figures ran out. “I never thought she'd go so fast. She shivered, and fought for breath—until she suddenly stopped.” Lib gulped the air. Let the six men think about the sound of a child's last breath. “I shouted for help but I suppose no one was within hearing distance. The neighbours must have been at the church. I tried to get some whiskey down her throat. I was distracted; I ran about like a mad thing.”

If they knew anything about Nightingale-trained nurses, they'd realize the unlikelihood of this. Lib sped on. “Finally I tried to lift her, to put her in the chair so I could push her into the village in search of you, Dr. McBrearty, to see if she could be revived.” She fixed her eyes on his. Then she heard what she'd just said. “I mean, she was stone-dead, but I hoped against hope.”

The old man had his hand over his mouth as if he were about to vomit.

“But the lamp—my skirt must have knocked it over. I didn't know I was in flames till they reached my waist.” Lib's mummified hands throbbed, and she held them up in the air as evidence. “By then one of the blankets had caught fire. I dragged her body off the bed but it was too much for me, I saw flames licking the can—”

“What can?” asked O'Flaherty.

“The burning fluid,” Mr. Thaddeus told him.

“Lethal stuff,” growled Flynn. “I wouldn't have it in the house.”

“I'd been refilling the lamp, to keep the room bright so I could see. So I could watch her every minute.” Now Lib was weeping in earnest. Odd, that it was this detail she couldn't bear to remember: the constant light on that small sleeper. “I knew the can was going to explode, so I ran. God forgive me,” she threw in for good measure. Tears plummeted off her jawline; truth and lies so mixed up she couldn't tell them apart. “I raced out of the cabin. I heard it blow up behind me with an awful roar and I didn't stop to look, I just ran for my life.”

The scene was so vivid in Lib's mind, she felt as if she'd truly lived it. But would these men believe her?

She covered her face and steeled herself against their response. Let the police not be prising up blackened rafters right now, or examining the timbers of the bed and dresser, or digging around in that ashy mess. Let them be lazy and resigned. Let them conclude that the tiny charred bones must be irretrievably buried in the ruins.

It was Sir Otway who spoke up. “If you hadn't been so shockingly careless, Mrs. Wright, we could have gotten to the bottom of the matter, at least.”

Carelessness
—was that the only charge Lib was facing?
The matter
—meaning the death of a child?

“A postmortem examination would surely have determined whether the intestines contained any partially digested food,” added the baronet. “Correct, Doctor?”

So the real issue was that there was no little girl they could cut up to satisfy the general curiosity.

McBrearty just nodded, as if he couldn't speak.

“Of course there'd have been
some
food,” muttered Ryan. “The talk of a miracle was all nonsense.”

“On the contrary, when nothing was found in Anna's intestines,” John Flynn burst out, “the O'Donnells' name would have been cleared. A pair of good Christians have lost their last child—a little martyr!—and this imbecile has destroyed all evidence of their innocence.”

Lib kept her head down.

“But the nurses bear no responsibility for the child's death.” That was Mr. Thaddeus, speaking up at last.

“Certainly not.” Dr. McBrearty found his voice. “They were only servants of this committee, working under the authority of myself as the girl's physician.”

The priest and the doctor seemed to be trying to clear Lib and the nun of blame by calling them brainless drudges. She held her tongue, because it didn't matter now.

“This one shouldn't get her whole pay, though, because of the fire,” said the schoolteacher.

Lib almost screamed. If these men offered her even one Judas coin she'd fling it in their faces. “I deserve none, gentlemen.”

THE ENGLISH & IRISH MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH COMPANY

Received the following message the
23
rd day of August
1859

Here follows this correspondent's last report on the Fasting Girl of Ireland.

At seven minutes past nine on Saturday night last, while virtually the whole Roman Catholic population of her hamlet was pressed into the little white chapel to pray for her, Anna O'Donnell expired—it is to be presumed, from simple starvation. The exact physiological cause of that death cannot be determined by postmortem because of this tale's appalling coda, which this correspondent has heard from one who attended the final meeting of the committee.

The nurse in attendance was naturally distressed on the child's sudden death and attempted extraordinary measures to rouse her, in the course of which she accidentally dislodged the lamp. A crude device borrowed from a neighbour, it had been adapted to run not on whale oil but a cheaper product known as burning fluid or camphine. (This mixture—alcohol adulterated with turpentine in a ratio of four to one, plus a little ether—is notoriously combustible, and is reported to have caused more deaths in the United States than steamboat and railway accidents combined.) The lamp smashing to the ground, the flames engulfed the bedding and corpse of the child, and although the nurse made valiant attempts to put it out—injuring herself severely in the process—it was to no avail. The entire can of burning fluid went up in an explosion, and the nurse was forced to flee the inferno.

The next day Anna O'Donnell was declared dead
in absentia,
as her remains could not be unearthed from the ruins. According to the constabulary, no charges have been or are likely to be laid.

This does not put the matter to rest. Foul play, it should be called, when a girl not suffering from any organic illness is allowed—nay, incited by popular superstition—to starve herself to death in the midst of plenty during the prosperous reign of Victoria and no one is punished or even held to account. Not the father, who abrogated his legal as well as moral responsibility. Not the mother, who broke the law of nature by—at the very least—standing by while her little one weakened. Certainly not the eccentric, septuagenarian physician under whose so-called care Anna O'Donnell wasted away. Nor her parish priest, who failed to use the powers of his office to dissuade the girl from her fatal fast. Nor any other member of that self-appointed surveillant committee who heard evidence that the girl was on her deathbed and refused to believe it.

None are so blind as those who will not see.
The same could be said of the many inhabitants of the locality who, by laying floral and other tributes at the blackened remains of the cabin in recent days, seem to express a naïve conviction that what happened there was the apotheosis of a local saint rather than the unlawful killing of a child.

What none can dispute is that the watch that was set a fortnight ago wound up the clockwork of death, most likely by blocking a covert means of feeding, and contributed to the destruction of the little girl it was designed to study. The committee's last act before dissolving itself was to declare the death to have been an
act of God
proceeding from
natural causes.
But neither the Creator nor Nature should be blamed for what human hands have wrought.

Dear Matron,

You may have heard by now of the tragic conclusion to my recent employment. I must confess myself so shaken—my whole system so broken down—that I will not be returning to the hospital for the foreseeable future. I have accepted an invitation to stay with my remaining connections in the north.