“Ah, well. A mother understands what a child doesn’t say, as the proverb has it. Here’s Dadda now.”
“Good morning, pet,” said Malachy from the doorway.
Anna cleared her throat. “Good morning, Dadda.”
He came over to stroke her hair. “How are you today?”
“Well enough,” she told him.
He nodded as if convinced.
The poor lived for the day, was that it? Lib wondered. Lacking control over their circumstances, they learned not to borrow trouble by looking any farther down the road?
Or else this pair of criminals knew exactly what they were doing to their daughter.
When they’d left, Lib made the bed again, with the two mattresses and then the sheepskin under the bottom sheet. “Hop back in now and rest some more.”
Hop: a ludicrous word for the way Anna was crawling into bed.
“Soft,” the girl murmured, patting the spongy surface.
“It’s to prevent bedsores,” Lib explained.
“How did you begin again, Mrs. Lib?” The words came low and gravelly.
Lib put her head to one side.
“When you were widowed. A whole new life, you said.”
She was ruefully impressed that the girl could rise above her own suffering and take an interest in Lib’s past. “There was a dreadful war in the east, and I wanted to help the sick and wounded.”
“And did you?”
Men had spewed, soiled, sprayed, seeped, died. Lib’s men, those Miss N. had assigned to her. They’d died sometimes in her arms but more often while she was obliged to be in another room stirring gruel or folding bandages. “I believe I helped some of them. Somewhat.” Lib had been there, at least. She’d tried. How much did that count? “My teacher said this was the kingdom of hell, and it was our job to haul it a little closer to heaven.”
Anna nodded, as if that went without saying.
Wednesday, August 17, 7:49 a.m., Lib noted down. Tenth day of watch.
Pulse: 109 beats per minute.
Lungs: 22 breaths per minute.
Unable to walk.
She took out the books again and worked through them until she had what she needed. Lib expected Anna to ask her what she was doing, but no. The girl lay still, eyes on the dust motes dancing in the rays of morning light.
“Would you like another riddle?” asked Lib at last.
“Oh yes.”
Two bodies have I,
Though both joined in one.
The stiller I stand,
The faster I run.
“‘The stiller I stand,’” repeated Anna in a murmur. “‘Two bodies.’”
Lib nodded, waited. “Do you give up?”
“Just a minute.”
Lib eyed the second hand of her watch going around. “No answer?”
Anna shook her head.
“An hourglass,” said Lib. “Time falling like sand through the glass, and nothing can slow it.”
The child looked back at Lib, unshaken.
Lib drew her chair very close to the bed. Time for battle. “Anna. You’ve convinced yourself that God has chosen you, out of all the people in the world, not to eat?”
Anna took a breath to speak.
“Hear me out, please. These holy books of yours, they’re full of instructions to the contrary.” Lib opened The Garden of the Soul and found the line she’d marked. “Look upon your meat and drink as medicines, necessary for your health. Or here, in the Psalms.” She flipped to the right page. “I am smitten as grass, and my heart is withered, because I forgot to eat my bread. And what about this: Eat, and drink, and be merry? Or this line that I hear you say all the time: Give us this day our daily bread.”
“Not actual bread,” muttered Anna.
“It’s actual bread that an actual child needs,” Lib told her. “Jesus shared the loaves and fishes with the five thousand, didn’t he?”
Anna swallowed slowly, as if she had a stone in her throat. “He was merciful because they were weak.”
“Because they were human, you mean. He didn’t say, Ignore your stomachs and keep listening while I preach. He gave them dinner.” Lib’s voice shook with wrath. “At the Last Supper he broke bread with his followers, didn’t he? What did he tell them, what were the exact words?”
Very low. “Take ye and eat.”
“There!”
“Once he’d consecrated it, the bread wasn’t bread anymore, it was him,” said Anna in a rush. “Like manna.” She stroked the leather binding of the Psalms as if the book were a cat. “For months I was fed on manna from heaven.”
“Anna!” Lib tugged the volume away from her, too hard, and it thumped onto the floor, scattering its cargo of precious cards.
“What’s all the commotion?” Rosaleen O’Donnell put her face around the door.
“Nothing,” said Lib, on her knees, heart pounding as she snatched up the tiny pictures.
A terrible pause.
Lib wouldn’t look up. She couldn’t afford to meet the woman’s eye in case her feelings showed.
“All right, pet?” Rosaleen asked her daughter.
“Yes, Mammy.”
Why didn’t Anna say the Englishwoman had thrown down her book and was bullying Anna to break her fast? Then the O’Donnells would no doubt lodge a complaint against Lib, and she’d be sent packing.
Anna said nothing else, and Rosaleen withdrew.
Once the two were alone again, Lib stood and put the book back in the child’s lap, the cards in a small pile on top. “I’m sorry they’re out of place.”
“I know where they all go.” Her thick fingers still deft, Anna tucked each one back where it belonged.
Lib reminded herself that she was quite prepared to lose this job. Hadn’t William Byrne been cashiered at sixteen for the seditious truths he’d told about his famished countrymen? That had probably been the making of the man. Not so much the loss itself as his surviving it, realizing that it was possible to fail and start again.
Anna took a long breath, and Lib heard the faintest of crackles. Fluid in the lungs, she registered. Which meant there was little time left.
I’ve seen you where you never were, and where you never will be.
“Will you listen to me, please?” Dear child, she almost added, but that was the mother’s soft language; Lib had to speak plainly. “You must see that you’re getting worse.”
Anna shook her head.
“Does this hurt?” Lib leaned down and pressed where the belly was roundest.
Agony shot across the child’s face.
“I’m sorry,” said Lib, only half sincerely. She tugged Anna’s cap off. “Look how much hair you’re losing every day.”
“The very hairs of your head are all numbered,” the girl whispered.
Science was the most magical force Lib knew. If anything could break the spell that held this girl—“The body’s a kind of engine,” she began, trying to summon up Miss N.’s most teacherly tone. “Digestion is the burning of fuel. Denied fuel, the body will destroy its own tissues.” She sat down and laid her palm on Anna’s belly again, gently this time. “This is the stove. The food you had the year you were ten, the amount you grew that year as a consequence—it’s all been used up in the past four months. Think of what you ate at nine, at eight. Burnt to cinders already.” Time rolled backwards sickeningly. “When you were seven, six, five. Every meal your father toiled to put on the table, every bite your mother cooked, is being consumed now by the desperate fire inside you.” Anna at four, three, before she’d formed her first sentence. At two, toddling; one. All the way back to her first day, her first suck of mother’s milk. “But the engine can’t run much longer without proper fuel, do you see?”
Anna’s calm was a layer of unbreakable crystal.
“It’s not just that there’s less of you every day,” Lib told her, “it’s that all your workings are winding down, beginning to seize up.”
“I’m not a machine.”
/> “Like a machine, that’s all I mean. No insult to your Creator,” Lib told her. “Think of him as the most ingenious of engineers.”
Anna shook her head. “I’m his child.”
“Could I speak to you in the kitchen, Mrs. Wright?” Rosaleen O’Donnell, in the doorway, long arms akimbo.
How much had the woman heard? “This is not a convenient time.”
“I must insist, ma’am.”
Lib stood up with a short sigh.
She’d be breaking the rule about leaving Anna alone in the room, but what did it matter now? She couldn’t imagine the child leaning out of bed to scrape crumbs out of some hidey-hole, and, frankly, if that were to happen, Lib would be glad. Cheat me, hoodwink me, so long as you eat.
She shut the door behind her so Anna wouldn’t hear a word.
Rosaleen O’Donnell was alone, looking out the smallest kitchen window. She turned and brandished a newspaper. “John Flynn got hold of this in Mullingar this morning.”
Lib was taken aback. So this wasn’t about the things she’d been saying to the girl just now. She looked at the paper, folded open to an inside page. The banner at the top identified it as the Irish Times, and her eye immediately picked out Byrne’s article reporting on Anna’s decline. A chance and fleeting encounter with the Fasting Girl herself…
“How did this blaggard come to have a chance encounter with my child, may I ask?” demanded Rosaleen.
Lib weighed how much to admit.
“And where did he get this nonsense about her being in grave danger? I caught Kitty bawling into her apron this morning because she heard you say something to the doctor about a deathbed.”
Lib decided to go on the attack. “What would you call it, Mrs. O’Donnell?”
“The cheek of you!”
“Have you looked at your daughter lately?”
“Oh, ’tis you who knows better than the girl’s own physician, is it? You, who couldn’t even tell a dead child from a living one?” Rosaleen scoffed, gesturing at the photograph on the mantel.
That stung. “McBrearty imagines your daughter to be turning into something like a lizard. This is the dotard you’re trusting with her life.”
The woman’s fists were clenched, white knobs in red. “If you hadn’t been appointed by the committee, I’d have you out of my house this minute.”
“What, so that Anna can die all the faster?”
Rosaleen O’Donnell rushed at her.
Startled, Lib stepped aside to evade the blow.
“You know nothing about us!” the woman roared.
“I know Anna’s too famished to get out of bed.”
“If the child’s… struggling somewhat, ’tis only from the nervous strain of being watched like a prisoner.”
Lib snorted. She moved in closer to the woman, her whole body stiff. “What kind of mother would let it come to this?”
Rosaleen O’Donnell did the last thing Lib was expecting: she burst into tears.
Lib stared at her.
“Didn’t I try my best?” the woman wailed, water scudding down the lines of her face. “Sure isn’t she flesh of my flesh, my last hope? Didn’t I bring her into the world and rear her tenderly, and didn’t I feed her as long as she’d let me?”
For a moment Lib glimpsed how it must have been. That day in spring when the O’Donnells’ good little girl had turned eleven—and then, with no explanation, had refused to eat another bite. For her parents, perhaps it had been a horror as overwhelming as the illness that had carried off their boy the autumn before. The only way Rosaleen O’Donnell could have made sense of these cataclysms was to convince herself that they were part of God’s plan. “Mrs. O’Donnell,” she began, “let me assure you—”
But the woman fled, ducking into the little outshot behind the sack curtain.
Lib went back to the bedroom, shaking. It confused her, to feel such sympathy for a woman she loathed.
Anna showed no sign of having heard the quarrel. She lay propped up on pillows, absorbed in her holy cards.
Lib tried to collect herself. She looked over Anna’s shoulder at the picture of the girl floating on a cross-shaped raft. “The sea’s quite a different thing from a river, you know.”
“Bigger,” said Anna. She touched one fingertip to the card as if to feel the wet.
“Infinitely bigger,” Lib told the girl, “and while a river moves only one way, the sea seems to breathe, in and out, in and out.”
Anna inhaled, straining to fill her lungs.
Lib checked her watch: almost time. Noon was all she’d put on the note that she’d slipped under Byrne’s door before dawn. She didn’t like the look of those slate-grey clouds, but it couldn’t be helped. Besides, Irish weather turned every quarter of an hour.
At exactly twelve, the clamour of the Angelus went up in the kitchen. She was counting on it as a distraction. “Shall we take a little walk, Anna?”
Rosaleen O’Donnell and the maid were on their knees—“The angel of the Lord declared unto Mary”—as Lib hurried by to collect the invalid chair from outside the front door. “Now and at the hour of our death, amen.”
She pushed it through the kitchen, back wheel squeaking.
Anna had managed to clamber out of bed and kneel beside it. “Be it done to me according to thy word,” she was chanting. Lib covered the chair with one blanket, then helped the girl into it and added three more, tucking in her thickened feet. She wheeled her rapidly past the praying adults and out the door.
The summer was beginning to turn already; some of those yellow starry flowers on their long stalks were darkening to bronze. A mass of cloud split as if along a seam, and light spilled through. “Here’s the sun,” croaked Anna, head back against the padding.
Down the track Lib hurried, bumping the chair through ruts and over stones. She turned onto the lane and there was William Byrne, just a few feet away.
He didn’t smile. “Unconscious?”
Only now did Lib see that Anna had slid down in the chair and was lying with her head to one side. She flicked the girl’s cheek lightly and the nearer eyelid flickered, to her relief. “Just dozing,” she told him.
Byrne had no small talk today. “Well, have your arguments done any good?”
“They roll over her like water,” she admitted, turning the chair away from the village and pushing it along to keep the girl asleep. “This fast, it’s Anna’s rock. Her daily task, her vocation.”
He nodded grimly. “If she keeps going downhill so quickly—”
What was coming?
Byrne’s eyes were dark, almost navy blue. “Will you—would you consider forcing her?”
Lib made herself picture the procedure: holding Anna down, pushing a tube down her throat, and dosing her. She looked up, met his burning gaze. “I don’t think I could. It’s not a matter of squeamishness,” she assured him.
“I know what it would cost you.”
That wasn’t it either, or not all of it. She couldn’t explain.
They walked for a minute; two. It struck Lib that the three of them could have been mistaken for a family taking the air.
Byrne began again, in a brisker tone. “Well, it turns out the padre’s not behind the hoax after all.”
“Mr. Thaddeus? How can you be sure?”
“O’Flaherty the schoolteacher says it may have been McBrearty who talked them all into forming this committee, but it was the priest who insisted they mount a formal guard on the girl, with seasoned nurses.”
Lib puzzled over that. Byrne was right; why would a guilty man have wanted Anna watched? Perhaps she’d been too quick to go along with Byrne’s suspicions of Mr. Thaddeus because of her wariness of priests.
“Also I found out more about this mission Anna mentioned,” said Byrne. “Last spring, Redemptorists from Belgium swooped down—”
“Redemptorists?”
“Missionary priests. The pope sends them out all over Christendom, like bloodhounds, to round up the faithful
and sniff out unorthodoxy. They hammer the rules into the heads of country folk, put the fear of God back into their souls,” he told her. “So. For three weeks, thrice daily, these Redemptorists harrowed the bog men in these parts.” His finger swung across the motley-coloured land. “According to Maggie Ryan, one sermon was a real barnstormer: hellfire and brimstone raining down, children screeching, and such urgent queues for confession afterwards that a fellow fell under the crowd and got his ribs stove in. The mission wound up with a massive Quarantore—”
“A what?” asked Lib, lost again.
“Forty hours, it means—the length of time Our Lord spent in the tomb.” Byrne put on a heavy brogue. “Do you know nothing, you heathen?”
That made her smile.
“For forty hours the Blessed Sacrament was exposed in all the chapels within walking distance, with a mob of the faithful shoving along the lanes to prostrate themselves before it. The whole hullabaloo culminated in the confirmation of all eligible boys and girls.”
“Including Anna,” Lib guessed.
“The day before her eleventh birthday.”
Confirmation: the moment of decision. The end of being a child was how Anna had described it. Placed on her tongue, the sacred Host—her God in the guise of a little disc of bread. But how could she have formed the dire resolution to make that her last meal? Could she have misunderstood something the foreign priests had said as they wound the crowd up to a fever pitch?
Lib felt so nauseated, she had to stop for a moment and lean on the bath chair’s leather handles. “What was it about, the sermon that caused such a riot, did you learn?”
“Oh, fornication, what else?”
The word made Lib angle her face away.
“Is that an eagle?” The thin voice startled them.
“Where?” Byrne asked Anna.
“Away up there, over the green road.”
“I think not,” he told the child, “just the king of all crows.”
“I walked that so-called green road the other day,” said Lib, making conversation. “A long and rambling waste of time.”
“An English invention, as it happens,” said Byrne.