The Wonder (9 page)

Nurse and charge settled into a sort of rhythm on this second day. They read—Lib caught up on Madame Defarge's nefarious doings in
All the Year Round
—and chatted a little. The girl was charming, in her unworldly way. Lib found it hard to keep in mind that Anna was a trickster, a great liar in a country famous for them.

Several times an hour the child whispered what Lib thought of as the Dorothy prayer. Was it meant to strengthen her resolve every time emptiness cramped her belly?

Later in the morning Lib took Anna out for another constitutional—only around the farmyard, because the skies were threatening. When Lib remarked on Anna's halting gait, the child said that was just how she walked. She sang hymns as she went, like a stoical soldier.

“Do you like riddles?” Lib asked her when there came a break in the music.

“I don't know any.”

“Dear me.” Lib remembered the riddles of childhood more vividly than all the things she'd had to memorize in the schoolroom. “What about this: ‘There's not a kingdom on the earth, but what I've travelled o'er and o'er, and whether it be day or night I neither am nor can be seen. What am I?'”

Anna looked mystified, so Lib repeated it.

“‘I neither am nor can be seen,'” echoed the girl. “Does that mean that I amn't—I don't exist—or I amn't seen?”

“The latter,” said Lib.

“Someone invisible,” said Anna, “who travels all across the earth—”

“Or some
thing,
” Lib put in.

The child's frown lifted. “The wind?”

“Very good. You're a quick study.”

“Another. Please.”

“Hmm, let's see. ‘The land was white,'” Lib began, “‘the seed was black. It'll take a good scholar to riddle me that.'”

“Paper, with ink on it!”

“Clever puss.”

“It was because of
scholar.
”

“You should go back to school,” Lib told her.

Anna looked away, towards a cow munching grass. “I'm all right at home.”

“You're an intelligent girl.” The compliment came out more like an accusation.

Low clouds were gathering now, so Lib hurried the two of them back into the stuffy cabin. But then the rain held off, and she wished they'd stayed out longer.

Kitty finally brought in Lib's breakfast: two eggs and a cup of milk. This time greed made Lib eat so fast, tiny fragments of shell crunched in her teeth. The eggs were gritty and reeked of peat; roasted in the ashes, no doubt.

How could the child bear not just the hunger, but the boredom? The rest of humankind used meals to divide the day, Lib realized—as reward, as entertainment, the chiming of an inner clock. For Anna, during this watch, each day had to pass like one endless moment.

The child accepted a spoonful of water as if it were some rich wine.

“What's so special about water?”

Anna looked confused.

Lib held up her own cup. “What's the difference between water and this milk?”

Anna hesitated, as if this were another riddle. “There's nothing in the water.”

“There's nothing in the milk but water and the goodness of the grass the cow ate.”

Anna shook her head, almost smiling.

Lib dropped the subject because Kitty was coming in to take the tray.

She watched the child, who was embroidering a flower on the corner of a handkerchief. Head bent over her stitches, just the tip of her tongue sticking out, in the way of little girls trying their hardest.

A knock at the front door, shortly after ten. Lib heard a muffled conversation. Then Rosaleen O'Donnell tapped on the door of the bedroom and looked past the nurse. “More guests for you, pet. Half a dozen of them, some of them come all the way from America.”

The big Irishwoman's sprightliness sickened Lib; she was like some chaperone at a debutante's first ball. “I should have thought it obvious that such visits must be suspended, Mrs. O'Donnell.”

“Why so?” The mother jerked her head over her shoulder towards the good room. “These seem like decent people.”

“The watch requires conditions of regularity and calm. Without any way of checking what visitors might have on them—”

The woman interrupted. “What kind of what?”

“Well, food,” said Lib.

“Sure there's food in this house already without anyone shipping it all the way across the Atlantic.” Rosaleen O'Donnell let out a laugh. “Besides, Anna doesn't want it. Haven't you seen proof of that by now?”

“My job is to make sure not only that no one passes the child anything, but that nothing is hidden where she can find it later.”

“Why ever would they do that when they've come all this way to see the amazing little girl who
doesn't
eat?”

“Nonetheless.”

Mrs. O'Donnell's lips set hard. “Our guests are in the house already, so they are, and 'tis too late to turn them away without grave offence.”

At this point it occurred to Lib to slam the bedroom door and set her back against it.

The woman's pebble eyes held hers.

Lib decided to give in until she could speak to Dr. McBrearty.
Lose a battle, win the war.
She led Anna into the good room and took up a position right behind the child's chair.

The visitors were a gentleman from the western port of Limerick with his wife and in-laws as well as a mother and daughter of their acquaintance who were visiting from the United States. The older American lady volunteered the information that she and her daughter were Spiritualists. “We believe the dead speak to us.”

Anna nodded, matter-of-fact.

“Your case, my dear, strikes us as the most glorious proof of the power of Mind.” The lady leaned over to squeeze the child's fingers.

“No touching, please,” said Lib, and the visitor jerked back.

Rosaleen O'Donnell put her head in the door to offer them a cup of tea.

Lib was convinced the woman was provoking her.
No food,
she mouthed.

One of the gentlemen was interrogating Anna about the date of her last meal.

“April the seventh,” she told him.

“That was your eleventh birthday?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And how do you believe you've survived this long?”

Lib expected Anna to shrug or say she didn't know. Instead she murmured something that sounded like
mamma.

“Speak up, little girl,” said the older Irishwoman.

“I live on manna from heaven,” said Anna. As simply as she might have said,
I live on my father's farm.

Lib shut her eyes briefly so as not to roll them in disbelief.

“Manna from heaven,” the younger Spiritualist repeated to the elder. “Fancy that.”

The visitors were pulling out presents now. From Boston, a toy called a thaumatrope; did Anna have anything like it?

“I haven't any toys,” she told them.

They liked that; the charming gravity of her tone. The Limerick gentleman showed her how to twist the disc's two strings, then twirl it, so the pictures on the two sides blurred into one.

“The bird's in the cage now,” marvelled Anna.

“Aha,” he cried, “mere illusion.”

The disc slowed and stopped, so the empty cage was left on the back, and the bird on the front flew free.

After Kitty brought the tea in, the wife produced something even more curious: a walnut that popped open in Anna's hand to let out a crumpled ball that relaxed into a pair of exquisitely thin yellow gloves. “Chicken skin,” said the lady, fondling them. “All the rage when I was a child. Never made anywhere in the world but Limerick. I've kept this pair half a century without tearing them.”

Anna drew the gloves on, finger by fat finger; they were too long, but not by much.

“Bless you, my child, bless you.”

Once the tea was drunk, Lib made a pointed remark about Anna needing to rest.

“Would you say a little prayer with us first?” asked the lady who'd given her the gloves.

Anna looked to Lib, who felt she had to nod.

“Infant Jesus, meek and mild,”
the girl began.

Look on me, a little child.

Pity mine and pity me,

Suffer me to come to thee.

“Beautiful!”

The elderly lady wanted to leave some homeopathic tonic pills.

Anna shook her head.

“Ah, keep them, do.”

“She can't take them, Mother,” the woman's daughter reminded her in a hiss.

“I don't believe absorption under the tongue would count as eating, exactly.”

“No, thank you,” said Anna.

As they left, Lib listened to the coins clink into the money box.

Rosaleen O'Donnell was hooking a pot out of the dull heart of the fire and knocking ashen sods off its lid. Hands padded with rags, she lifted the lid and took out a round loaf with a cross marked on top.

Everything was religion here, thought Lib. Also, she was beginning to see why all her meals tasted of peat. If she did stay the full fortnight, she'd have consumed a good handful of boggy soil; the thought soured her mouth. “Those will be the last visitors admitted,” she told the mother in her firmest voice.

Anna was leaning on the half-door, watching the party climb into their carriage.

Rosaleen O'Donnell straightened up, shaking out her skirts. “Hospitality's a sacred law with the Irish, Mrs. Wright. If anyone knocks, we must open up and feed and shelter them, even if the kitchen floor do be thick with sleeping people already.” The sweep of her arm encompassed a horde of invisible guests.

Hospitality, my foot.
“This is hardly a matter of taking in paupers,” Lib told her.

“Rich, poor, we're all alike in the eyes of God.”

It was the pious tone that pushed Lib over the edge. “These people are gawkers. So keen to see your daughter apparently subsist without food, they're willing to pay for the privilege!”

Anna was twirling her thaumatrope now; it caught the light.

Mrs. O'Donnell chewed her lip. “If the sight moves them to almsgiving, what's wrong with that?”

The child went up to her mother just then and handed over her gifts. To distract the two women from their quarrel? Lib wondered.

“Ah sure these are yours, pet,” said Rosaleen.

Anna shook her head. “The gold cross that lady left the other day, didn't Mr. Thaddeus say it'd raise a good sum for the needy?”

“But these are only toys,” said her mother. “Well, the gloves in the shell, maybe, I suppose those could be sold…” She turned the walnut over in her palm. “Keep the spinny thing, though. Sure what harm. Unless Mrs. Wright sees any?”

Lib held her tongue.

She marched into the bedroom behind the girl and examined all the surfaces again, just as she had yesterday—the floor, the treasure box, the dresser, the bedding.

“Are you cross?” asked Anna, twirling her thaumatrope between her fingers.

“About your toy? No, no.” What a child Anna was still, for all the dark complications of her situation.

“About the visitors, then?”

“Well. They don't have your welfare at heart.”

The bell chimed in the kitchen and Anna dropped to the floor. (No wonder the child's shins were bruised.) The minutes ticked by while the prayers of the Angelus filled the air. Like being locked up in a monastery, Lib thought.

“Through the same Christ Our Lord, amen.”
Anna got up and gripped the back of the chair.

“Dizzy?” asked Lib.

Anna shook her head and readjusted her shawl.

“How often must you all do this?”

“At noon only,” said the child. “'Twould be better to say it at six in the morning and in the evening as well, but Mammy and Dadda and Kitty are too busy.”

Yesterday Lib had made the mistake of telling the maid she could wait for her dinner. This time she went to the door and called out that she'd like something to eat.

Kitty brought in some fresh cream cheese; that must have been the white stuff dripping in the bag slung between the chairs last night. The bread, still warm, was too dense with bran for Lib's liking. Waiting for the new potatoes of autumn, the family had to be getting down near the dust at the bottom of the meal bin.

Although she was used to eating in front of Anna by now, she still felt like a sow, nose in the trough.

Once Lib had finished, she tried the first chapter of a novel called
Adam Bede
. She was startled when the nun tapped on the door at one o'clock; she'd almost forgotten that her shift would end.

“Look, Sister,” said Anna, making her thaumatrope spin.

“What a thing!”

Lib could see she and the other nurse weren't going to get a moment alone this time either. She stepped closer, till her face was at the side of the nun's headdress, and whispered: “I've noted nothing untoward so far. You?”

A hesitation. “We're not to confer.”

“Yes, but—”

“Dr. McBrearty was very firm that there should be no sharing of views.”

“I'm not looking for your views, Sister,” snapped Lib. “Only basic facts. Can you assure me that you're keeping a careful note of anything excreted, for instance? Any solids, I mean.”

Very low: “There's been nothing of that kind.”

Lib nodded. “I've explained to Mrs. O'Donnell that there's to be no contact without supervision,” she went on. “One embrace at rising, say, and another when going to bed. Also, none of the family are to enter Anna's room while she's not there.”

The nun was like some undertaker's hired mute.

Lib picked her way along the dirty lane, which was potholed with ovals of blue sky; last night's rain. She was coming to the conclusion that without a fellow nurse working to Lib's own high standards—Miss N.'s standards—the whole watch was flawed. For lack of due vigilance over a crafty child, all this trouble and expense might go to waste.