The Wonder

  His papery hands shot up. “My good woman, you overstep your mark. You’ve not been called upon to deduce anything. Though your protectiveness is only natural,” he added more gently. “I suppose the duties of a nurse, especially with a patient so young, must stimulate the dormant maternal capacity. Your own infant didn’t live, I understand?”

  Lib looked away so he couldn’t read her face. It was an old wound the doctor had prodded, but he’d done it without warning, and she was dizzy with pain. With outrage too; had Matron really been obligated to share Lib’s history with the man?

  “But you mustn’t allow your personal loss to distort your judgment.” McBrearty waved one crooked finger, almost playfully. “Given free rein, this kind of motherly anxiety can lead to irrational panic, and a touch of self-aggrandizement.”

  Lib swallowed and made her voice as soft and womanly as she could. “Please, Doctor. Perhaps if you were to call your committee together, and warn them of the deterioration in Anna’s condition—”

  He cut her off with a gesture. “I’ll pop in again this very afternoon, will that set your mind at rest?”

  Lib lurched to the door.

  She’d botched this interview. She should have brought McBrearty around gradually to the point where he thought it was his idea—and his duty—to abort the watch, just as he’d begun it. Since she’d come to this country eight days ago, Lib had made one blunder after another. How ashamed of her Miss N. would have been.

  At one o’clock she found Anna in bed with hot bricks pushing up the blankets all around her feet.

  “She needed a wee nap after we went around the yard,” murmured Sister Michael, fastening her cloak.

  Lib couldn’t speak. This was the first time the child had taken to her bed in the middle of the day. She examined the tiny puddle in the chamber pot. A teaspoonful, at most, and very dark. Could that be blood in the urine?

  When Anna roused from her doze, she and Lib chatted about the sunshine. Her pulse was 112, the highest Lib had recorded. “How do you feel, Anna?”

  “Pretty well.” Barely audible.

  “Is your throat dry? Will you take some water?”

  “If you like.” Anna sat up and took a sip.

  A tiny trail of red marked the spoon.

  “Open your mouth, would you please?” Lib peered in, tilting Anna’s jaw towards the light. Scarlet brimmed around several of the teeth. Well, at least the bleeding was coming from the gums rather than the stomach. One of the molars was at an odd angle. Lib nudged it with her nail, and it tilted sideways. When she tugged it out, between finger and thumb, she saw it wasn’t a milk tooth but one of the permanent ones.

  Anna blinked at the tooth, and then at Lib. As if daring the nurse to say something.

  Lib slipped it into the pocket of her apron. She’d wait to show it to McBrearty. She’d follow her orders, keep gathering information to strengthen her case, and bide her time—but not much longer.

  The child was dark around the lips and under the eyes. Lib noted everything down in her book. The simian fuzz on the cheeks had thickened, and it was coming in on the neck. A cluster of brown marks around the collarbone, scaly. Even where the skin was still pale, it was turning bumpy, like sandpaper. Anna’s pupils seemed more dilated than usual too, as if the black holes had been growing day by day, swallowing up the light brown. “How are your eyes? Can you see as you used to?”

  “I see what I need to see,” said Anna.

  Weakening sight, Lib added to her memoranda. “Is there anything else… do you hurt anywhere?”

  “’Tis just”—Anna made a vague gesture around her middle—“passing through.”

  “Passing through you?”

  “Not me.” So softly that Lib wasn’t sure she’d heard right.

  The pain wasn’t Anna? The girl through whom the pain was passing wasn’t Anna? Anna wasn’t Anna? Perhaps the girl’s brain was beginning to be drained of force. Perhaps Lib’s was too.

  The child turned the pages of her Book of Psalms and occasionally muttered lines aloud. “Thou that liftest me up from the gates. Deliver me out of the hands of my enemies.”

  Lib didn’t know whether Anna could still make out the print or if she was reciting from memory.

  “Save me from the lion’s mouth, and my lowness from the horns of unicorns.”

  Unicorns? Lib had never pictured these storybook creatures as predators.

  Anna reached up to place the book on her dresser. Then slid down in the bed, gratefully, as if it were night again.

  In the silence, Lib thought of offering to read her something. Children often preferred to be told stories rather than read them, didn’t they? Lib couldn’t think of any. Not even any songs. Anna usually sang to herself; when had the singing stopped?

  The girl’s eyes moved from wall to wall, as if she were looking for a way out. Nothing to rest on but four corners and her nurse’s strained face.

  Lib called to the maid from the door, holding out the jar. “Kitty, fresh bedding, please, and could you fill this with a few flowers?”

  “Which ones, now?”

  “Anything colourful.”

  Kitty came back in ten minutes with a pair of sheets and a handful of grasses and flowers. She turned her head sideways to consider the little girl in the bed.

  Lib scrutinised the slavey’s broad features. Was that just tenderness, or was it guilt? Could it be that Kitty knew how Anna had been fed until recently, even if she hadn’t done it herself? Lib tried to think how to phrase the question without alarming the maid; how to persuade the maid to give up whatever information she possessed, if it might save Anna.

  “Kitty!” Rosaleen O’Donnell’s cry was irritated.

  “Coming.” The slavey hurried off.

  Lib helped Anna up and onto a chair so she could change the bedding.

  Anna huddled over the jar, arranging the stems. One was dogwood; Lib’s fingers itched to tear up its cruciform bloom, the brown marks of the Roman nails.

  The child stroked an unremarkable leaf. “Look, Mrs. Lib, even the little teeth have tinier little teeth all over them.”

  Lib thought of the fallen molar in her apron. She pulled the new sheets very tight and smooth. (A crease can score skin as surely as a whip, Miss N. always said.) She tucked Anna back into bed and covered her with three blankets.

  Dinner, at four, was some kind of fish stew. Lib was wiping her plate with oat bread when Dr. McBrearty bustled in. She got up so fast that she almost knocked over her chair, oddly ashamed to be caught eating.

  “Good day, Doctor,” the girl croaked, struggling up, and Lib raced to put another pillow behind her.

  “Well, Anna. You’ve a good colour on you this afternoon.”

  Could the old man really be mistaking that hectic flush for health?

  He was gentle with the girl, at least, examining her as he chitchatted about the unusually fine weather. He kept referring to Lib in a mollifying way as our good Mrs. Wright here.

  “Anna just lost a tooth,” said Lib.

  “I see,” he said. “Do you know what I’ve brought you, child, kindly lent by Sir Otway Blackett himself? A bath chair, on wheels, so you can take the air without overtiring yourself.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.”

  After another minute, he took his leave, but Lib followed him to just outside the bedroom door.

  “Fascinating,” he murmured.

  The word struck her dumb.

  “The swelling of the limbs, the darkening skin, that blue tint to her lips and nails… I do believe Anna’s altering at a systemic level,” he confided in her ear. “It stands to reason that a constitution powered by something other than food would operate differently.”

  Lib had to look away so McBrearty wouldn’t see her rage.

  The baronet’s chair was parked just inside the front door: a bulky thing in worn green velvet with three wheels and a folding hood. Kitty was standing at the long table, red eyes dripping as she chopped onions.

>   “But I still see no real, imminent risk in the absence of a plunging temperature or a constant pallor,” McBrearty went on, rubbing his side-whiskers.

  Pallor! Had the man studied medicine by reading French novels? “I’ve known men on their deathbeds look yellow or red more than white,” Lib told him, her voice rising despite her efforts.

  “Have you really? But Anna has no fits either, you notice, and no delirium,” he wound up. “It goes without saying, of course, that you must send for me if she shows any sign of serious exhaustion.”

  “She’s already bedridden!”

  “A few days’ rest should do her a world of good. I wouldn’t be surprised if she rallied by the end of the week.”

  So McBrearty was twice the idiot she’d thought him. “Doctor,” said Lib, “if you won’t call off this watch—”

  The hint of threat in her tone made his face close up. He snapped, “For one thing, such a step would require the unanimous consent of the committee.”

  “Then ask them.”

  He spoke in Lib’s ear, making her jump. “If I were to propose that we abort the watch on the grounds that it’s jeopardizing the child’s health by preventing some secret method of feeding, how would that look? It would be tantamount to a declaration that my old friends the O’Donnells are vile cheats!”

  Lib whispered back, “How will it look if your old friends let their daughter die?”

  McBrearty sucked in his breath. “Is this how Miss Nightingale taught you to speak to your superiors?”

  “She taught me to fight for my patients’ lives.”

  “Mrs. Wright, be so good as to let go of my sleeve.”

  Lib hadn’t even realized she was gripping it.

  The old man tugged it away and headed out of the cabin.

  Kitty’s mouth hung open.

  When Lib hurried back into the bedroom, she found Anna asleep again, the snub nose letting out the lightest of snores. Still oddly lovely, despite everything wrong with her.

  By rights Lib should have been packing her bag and asking for the driver with the jaunting car to take her to the station at Athlone. If she believed this watch to be indefensible, she should have no further part in it.

  But she couldn’t leave.

  At half past ten that Tuesday night, at Ryan’s, Lib tiptoed across the passage and tapped on William Byrne’s door.

  No answer.

  What if he’d returned to Dublin by now, revolted by what Lib was letting happen to Anna O’Donnell? What if another guest came to the door; how could she explain herself? Suddenly she saw this as others would: a desperate woman outside a man’s bedroom.

  She’d wait to the count of three, and then—

  The door was flung open. William Byrne, wild-haired and in his shirtsleeves. “You.”

  Lib blushed so fast it hurt her face. The only mercy was that he wasn’t in his nightshirt. “Please excuse me.”

  “No, no. Is something the matter? Won’t you—” His eyes veered to the bed and back.

  His small chamber or hers, both equally impossible for a conversation. Lib couldn’t ask him to come downstairs; that would attract even more attention at this time of night.

  “I owe you an apology. You’re entirely right about Anna’s state,” she whispered. “This watch is an abomination.” The word came out too loud; she’d bring Maggie Ryan running up the stairs.

  Byrne nodded, without triumph.

  “I’ve spoken to Sister Michael but she won’t take a single step without the express permission of her masters,” Lib told him. “I’ve urged Dr. McBrearty to halt the watch and concentrate on dissuading the child from starving herself, but he accused me of irrational panic.”

  “Thoroughly rational, I’d call it.”

  Byrne’s calm voice made Lib feel slightly better. How necessary this man’s conversation had become to her, and so quickly.

  He leaned into the door frame. “Do you take a vow? Like that old Hippocratic oath for doctors, to heal and never kill?”

  “Hypocrites’ oath, more like!”

  That made Byrne grin.

  “We have none,” she told him. “As a profession, nursing is in its infancy.”

  “Then for you it’s a matter of conscience.”

  “Yes,” said Lib. Only now did it sink in. Never mind orders; there was a deeper duty.

  “And more than that, I think,” he said. “You care for your nursling.”

  Byrne wouldn’t have believed her if she’d denied it. “I suppose I’d be back in England by now if I didn’t.”

  Better not to get too fond of things, Anna had said the other day. Miss N. warned against personal affection as much as she did against romance. Lib had been taught to watch for attachments in any form and root them out. So what had gone wrong this time?

  He asked, “Have you ever put it to Anna plain and simple that she must eat?”

  Lib struggled to remember. “I’ve certainly raised the issue. But on the whole I’ve tried to remain objective, neutral.”

  “The time for neutrality’s passed,” said Byrne.

  Footsteps on the stairs; someone coming up.

  Lib fled into her room and shut the door with the softest of pulls so as not to make a sound.

  Hot cheeks, a thumping head, icy hands. If Maggie Ryan had caught the English nurse talking to the journalist so late at night, what would she have thought? And would she have been wrong?

  Everybody was a repository of secrets.

  Lib’s state was horribly predictable. She’d have spotted the danger earlier if she hadn’t been so preoccupied with Anna. Or perhaps she wouldn’t have, because it was a new one for her. She’d never felt this for her husband, or for any other man.

  How much younger than Lib was Byrne, with his zestful energy and his milky skin? She could hear Miss N. sum it up: One of those yearnings that spring up like weeds in the dry soil of a nurse’s life. Had Lib no respect for herself at all?

  She was groggy with fatigue, but it took her a long time to fall asleep.

  Lib was on the green road again, hand in hand with a boy who was somehow a brother of hers. In the dream, the grass gave way to a wilderness of marsh, and the path grew faint. She couldn’t keep up; she was mired in the wet tangle, and despite her protests this brother loosed her hand and went ahead of her. When she could no longer make out his calls or distinguish them from those of the birds overhead, she found he’d marked the way with crusts of bread. But faster than she could follow, the birds carried them away in their sharp mouths. Now there was no sign of a path at all, and Lib was alone.

  On Wednesday morning, Lib’s face looked haggard in the mirror.

  She got to the cabin before five. The bath chair had been shifted outside the cabin door, its velvet damp with dew.

  She found Anna sunk in sleep, her face scored with pillow creases. The chamber pot held only a blackish trickle.

  “Mrs. Wright,” Sister Michael began, as if to justify herself.

  Lib looked her in the eye.

  The nun hesitated, then went out without another word.

  In the night, she’d decided on her tactics. She’d choose the weapon most likely to shake the girl: Holy Writ. She took the whole stack of Anna’s pious volumes into her lap now and started skimming them, marking passages with strips torn out of the back page of her memorandum book.

  When the girl woke a little later, Lib wasn’t ready yet, so she put the books back in the treasure box. “I have a riddle for you.”

  Anna managed a smile and a nod.

  Lib cleared her throat.

  I’ve seen you where you never were,

  And where you never will be,

  And yet you in that very same place

  May still be seen by me.

  “A mirror,” said Anna almost at once.

  “You’re getting too clever,” Lib told her. “I’m running out of riddles.” On impulse, she held the hand mirror up to Anna’s face.

  The child flinched. Then con
sidered her reflection steadily.

  “See what you look like these days?” asked Lib.

  “I see,” said Anna. And she crossed herself and clambered out of bed.

  But she was wobbling so much that Lib made her sit down right away. “Let me change your nightdress.” She took the fresh one out of the drawer.

  The child struggled with the tiny buttons, so Lib had to undo them. Lifting the nightdress over Anna’s head, she sucked in her breath at the extent of the brown patches on the skin, the reddish-blue spots that were like a scattering of coins now. New bruises too, in odd places, as if invisible assailants had been beating the girl in the night.

  When Anna was dressed and wrapped in two shawls to stop her shivering, Lib prevailed on her to take a spoonful of water. “Another tick, please, Kitty,” she called from the door.

  The maid was elbow-deep in a bucket of dishes. “We’ve no others, but the colleen’s welcome to mine.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’ll find something by bedtime. It doesn’t matter.” Kitty’s tone was desolate.

  Lib hesitated. “Very well, then. Could I have something soft, too, to put on top?”

  The maid wiped her eyebrow with a scarlet forearm. “A blanket?”

  “Softer than that,” said Lib.

  She pulled the three blankets off the bed and shook them so hard they made a dull slap. Piled all the blankets in the house on his bed, Rosaleen O’Donnell had said. This must have been Pat’s bed, it occurred to Lib; there was no other except in the outshot where the parents slept. She ripped off the grimy bottom sheet, baring the tick. Her eyes traced the indelible stains. So Pat had died right here, cooling in his little sister’s warm grip.

  In the chair, Anna seemed folded up into almost nothing, like the Limerick gloves in their walnut shell. Lib heard voices arguing in the kitchen.

  Rosaleen O’Donnell bustled in a quarter of an hour later with Kitty’s tick as well as a sheepskin she’d borrowed from the Corcorans. “Quiet this morning, sleepyhead?” She held her daughter’s misshapen hands in hers.

  How could this woman think sleepy was the word for such lethargy? Lib wondered. Couldn’t she see that Anna was melting away like a halfpenny taper?