The Wonder

She looked sideways at him. Was this one of his jokes?

  “It was the winter of ’47, when Ireland was chest-deep in snow for the first time in her history. Because charity was considered corrupting,” he said ironically, “the starving were invited to go on the Public Works instead. In these parts, that meant building a road from nowhere to nowhere.”

  Lib frowned at him, jerking her head towards the girl.

  “Oh, I’m sure she’s heard all the stories.” But he bent to look at Anna.

  Asleep again, head limp in the corner of the chair. Lib tucked the loosening blankets around her.

  “So the men picked stones out of the ground and hammered them apart for a pittance a basket,” he went on in a low voice, “while the women toted the baskets and fitted the pieces together. The children—”

  “Mr. Byrne,” Lib protested.

  “You wanted to know about the road,” he reminded her.

  Did he resent her for the mere fact of her being English? she wondered. If he knew the feelings she was harbouring for him, would he respond with contempt? Pity, even? Pity would be worse.

  “But I’ll be brief. Whoever was struck down by cold or hunger or fever and didn’t get up was buried by the verge, in a sack, just a couple of inches under.”

  Lib thought of her boots going along the soft, flowered edge of the green road. Bog never forgot; it kept things in a remarkable state of preservation. “No more,” she begged, “please.”

  A merciful silence between them, at last.

  Anna twitched, and turned her face against the threadbare velvet. One drop of rain, then another. Lib clawed at the black canopy of the bath chair with its rusty hinges, and Byrne helped her unfold it over the sleeping child a moment before the rain slammed down.

  She couldn’t sleep in her room at Ryan’s, couldn’t read, couldn’t do anything but fret. She knew she should have some supper, but her throat felt sealed up.

  At midnight the lamp was burning low on Anna’s dresser, and the child was a handful of dark hair across the pillow, her body hardly interrupting the plane of the blankets. All evening Lib had talked to the child—at the child—until she was hoarse.

  Now she sat close to the bed making herself think of a tube. A very narrow, flexible, greased one, no wider than a straw, snaking between the girl’s lips, so slowly, so very gently that Anna might possibly even sleep on. Lib imagined trickling fresh milk down that tube into the child’s stomach, just a little at a time.

  Because what if Anna’s obsession was the result of her fast as much as its cause? After all, who could think straight on an empty stomach? Perhaps, paradoxically, the child could learn to feel normal hunger again only once she had some food in her. If Lib tube-fed Anna, really, she’d be fortifying the girl. Tugging Anna back from the brink, giving her time to come to her senses. It wouldn’t be using force so much as taking responsibility; Nurse Wright, alone out of all the grown-ups, brave enough to do what was needed to save Anna O’Donnell from herself.

  Lib’s teeth pressed together so hard they ached.

  Didn’t adults often do painful things to children for their own good? Or nurses to patients? Hadn’t Lib debrided burns and picked shrapnel out of wounds, dragging more than a few patients back into the land of the living by rough means? And after all, lunatics and prisoners survived force-feeding several times a day.

  She pictured Anna waking, beginning to struggle, choking, retching, her eyes wet with betrayal. Lib holding the girl’s small nose, pressing her head down on the pillow. Lie still, my dear. Let me. You must. Pushing in the tube, inexorable.

  No! So loud in her head, Lib thought for a moment she’d shouted it.

  It wouldn’t work. That was what she should have told Byrne this afternoon. Physiologically, yes, she supposed slop forced down Anna’s throat would supply her with energy, but it wouldn’t keep her alive. If anything, it would speed her withdrawal from the world. Crack her spirit.

  Lib counted the breaths for a full minute on her watch. Twenty-five, too many, dangerously fast. But still so perfectly regular. For all the thinning hair, the dun patches, the sore at the corner of the mouth, Anna was beautiful as any sleeping child.

  For months I was fed on manna from heaven. That’s what she’d said this morning. I live on manna from heaven, she’d told her Spiritualist visitors last week. But today, Lib noticed, it had come out differently, in a wistful past tense: For months I was fed on manna from heaven.

  Unless Lib had heard it wrong? Not for months. Four months, was that it? Four months I was fed on manna from heaven. Anna had started her fast four months ago, in April, and subsisted on manna—whatever secret means of nourishment she meant by that—until the arrival of the nurses.

  But no, this made no sense, because then she should have begun to show the effects of a complete fast no more than a couple of days later. Lib hadn’t noticed any such deterioration until Byrne had alerted her to it on Monday of this second week. Could a child really have gone seven days before flagging?

  Lib flicked back through her memorandum book now, a series of telegraphic dispatches from a distant battlefront. Every day during the first week had been much the same until—

  Refused mother’s greeting.

  She stared at the neat words. Saturday morning, six days into the watch. Not a medical notation at all; Lib had jotted it down simply because it was an unexplained change in the child’s behaviour.

  How could she have been so blind?

  Not just a greeting twice a day; an embrace in which the big bony woman’s frame had blocked the child’s face from view. A kiss like that of a great bird feeding her nestling.

  Lib broke Miss N.’s rule and shook the girl awake.

  Anna blinked, cringing away from the harsh light of the lamp.

  Lib whispered, “When you were fed on manna, who—” Not who gave it to you, because Anna would say that manna came from God. “Who brought it to you?”

  She was expecting resistance, denial. Some elaborate cover story about angels.

  “Mammy,” murmured Anna.

  Had the girl always been ready to answer so candidly the moment she was asked? If only Lib had been a little less contemptuous of pious legends, she might have paid more attention to what the child was trying to tell her.

  She remembered the way Rosaleen O’Donnell had sidled in for the permitted embrace morning and evening, smiling but oddly silent. So full of chatter at other times, but not when she came to hug her daughter. Yes, Rosaleen always kept her mouth shut tight until after she’d bent down to wrap her whole body around Anna.

  Lib moved closer to the small ear. “She passed it from her mouth to yours?”

  “By a holy kiss,” said Anna, nodding, with no sign of shame.

  Fury shot through Lib’s veins. So the mother had chewed food to pap in the kitchen, then fed Anna right in front of the nurses, making sport of them twice a day. “What does manna taste like?” she asked. “Milky, or porridge-like?”

  “Like heaven,” said Anna, as if the answer were obvious.

  “She told you it was from heaven?”

  Anna looked confused by the question. “That’s what manna is.”

  “Does anyone else know? Kitty? Your father?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ve never spoken of it.”

  “Why?” asked Lib. “Did your mother forbid you? Threaten you?”

  “It’s private.”

  A secret exchange, too sacred to be put into words. Yes, Lib could imagine a woman of strong character persuading her little girl of that. Especially such a girl as Anna, growing up in a world of mysteries. The young placed such trust in the grown-ups into whose hands they were consigned. Had the feeding begun on Anna’s eleventh birthday or perhaps developed gradually long before that? Was it a sort of sleight of hand, the mother reading the daughter the manna story from the Bible and confounding her with mystical obscurities? Or had both parties contributed something unspoken to the invention of this deadly game? After all, the
girl was brighter than the mother, and better read. Families all had their peculiar ways that couldn’t be discerned by outsiders.

  “So why tell me?” Lib demanded.

  “You’re my friend.”

  The way the girl’s chin tilted up then. It broke Lib’s heart. “You don’t take the manna anymore, do you? Not since Saturday.”

  “I don’t need it,” said Anna.

  Didn’t I feed her as long as she’d let me? Rosaleen had wailed. Lib had heard the woman’s grief and remorse and still not understood. The mother had set Anna up on a pedestal to shine like a beacon to the world. She’d had every intention of keeping her daughter alive indefinitely with this covert supply of food. It was Anna who’d put an end to it, one week into the watch.

  Had the child had any sense of what the consequence would be? Did she grasp it now?

  “What your mother spat into your mouth”—Lib spoke with deliberate crudity—“that was food from the kitchen. Those doses of mush are what’s been keeping you alive all these months.”

  She paused for some reaction, but the child’s eyes had gone unfocused.

  Lib seized her thick wrists. “Your mother lied, don’t you see? You need food like everyone else. There’s nothing special about you.” The words were coming out all wrong, a rain of abuse. “If you won’t eat, child, you’ll die.”

  Anna looked right at her, then nodded and smiled.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Shift

  shift

  a change, an alteration

  a period of working time

  an expedient, means to an end

  a movement, a beginning

  Thursday came scorching, the August sky a terrible blue. When William Byrne walked into the dining room at noon, Lib was alone, staring into her soup. She looked up and tried to smile at him.

  “How’s Anna?” he asked, sitting down across from her, his knees against her skirt.

  She couldn’t answer.

  He nodded at her bowl. “If you aren’t sleeping, you need to keep up your strength.”

  The spoon made a metallic scraping when Lib lifted it. She brought it almost to her lips, then put it down with a small splash.

  Byrne leaned over the table. “Tell me.”

  Lib pushed away her bowl. Watching the door for the Ryan girl, she explained about the manna from heaven delivered under cover of an embrace.

  “Christ,” he marvelled. “The audacity of the woman.”

  Oh, the relief of unburdening herself. “Bad enough that Rosaleen O’Donnell’s been making her child subsist on two mouthfuls a day,” said Lib. “But for the past five days, Anna’s refused to take the manna, and her mother hasn’t said a word.”

  “I suppose she doesn’t know how to speak up without condemning herself.”

  A qualm struck her. “You can’t publish any of this, not yet.”

  “Why not?”

  How could Byrne have to ask? “I’m aware that it’s in the nature of your profession to broadcast everything,” she snapped, “but what matters is saving the girl.”

  “I know that. And what of your profession? For all the time you’ve spent with Anna, how far have you got?”

  Lib put her face in her hands.

  “I’m sorry.” Byrne grabbed her fingers. “I spoke out of frustration.”

  “It’s perfectly true.”

  “Still, forgive me.”

  Lib slid her hand out of his, the skin still burning.

  “Believe me,” he said, “it’s for Anna’s sake that the hoax should be shouted to the four winds.”

  “But a public scandal won’t do anything to make her eat!”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “Anna’s quite alone in this now.” Lib’s voice lurched. “She seems to welcome the prospect of death.”

  Byrne thrust his curls out of his face. “But why?”

  “Perhaps because your religion’s filled her head with morbid nonsense.”

  “Perhaps because she’s mistaken morbid nonsense for true religion!”

  “I don’t know why she’s doing this,” admitted Lib, “except that it has something to do with missing her brother.”

  He frowned in puzzlement. “Have you told the nun about the manna yet?”

  “There was no opportunity this morning.”

  “What about McBrearty?”

  “I’ve told no one but you.”

  Byrne looked at Lib in a way that made her wish she hadn’t blurted that out. “Well. I say you should share your discovery with the whole committee tonight.”

  “Tonight?” she echoed, confused.

  “Haven’t you and Sister been called in? At ten o’clock, they’re gathering in the back room here”—he jerked his head towards the peeling wallpaper—“at the doctor’s behest.”

  Perhaps McBrearty had taken in something of what Lib had told him yesterday after all. “No,” she said, sardonic, “we’re only the nurses, why would they want to hear from us?” She leaned her chin on her knotted hands. “Perhaps if I went to him now and told him about the manna trick—”

  Byrne shook his head. “Better to march into the meeting and announce to the whole committee that you’ve succeeded in the task for which they hired you.”

  Success? It felt more like a hopeless failure. “But how will that help Anna?”

  His hands flailed. “Once the watch is over, she’ll have room—time—out of the public eye. A chance to change her mind.”

  “She’s not keeping up her fast to impress the readers of the Irish Times,” Lib told him. “It’s between her and your greedy God.”

  “Don’t blame him for the follies of his followers. All he asks us to do is live.”

  The two of them eyed each other.

  Then a grin lit Byrne’s face. “D’you know, I’ve never met a woman—a person—quite as blasphemous as you.”

  As he watched Lib, a slow heat spread right through her.

  Sun in her eyes. Lib’s uniform was glued to her sides already. By the time she reached the cabin, she’d decided she had to go to this committee meeting tonight, invited or not.

  Silence as she let herself in the door. Rosaleen O’Donnell and the maid were plucking a scrawny chicken at the long table. Had they been working in tense quiet or had they been talking—perhaps about the English nurse—until they’d heard her come in?

  “Good day,” said Lib.

  “Good day,” they both said, eyes on the carcass.

  Lib looked at Rosaleen O’Donnell’s long back and thought: I’ve found you out, you fiend. There was almost a sweetness to it, this sense of holding in her hand the one weapon that could demolish the woman’s shoddy imposture.

  Not yet, though. There’d be no going back from that point; if Rosaleen threw her out of the cabin, Lib would have no more chances to change Anna’s mind.

  In the bedroom, the child lay curled up, facing the window, ribs rising and falling. Her cracked mouth gulped air. Nothing at all in the chamber pot.

  The nun’s face was drawn. Worse, she mouthed as she gathered her cloak and bag.

  Lib put a hand on her arm to stop her from leaving. “Anna confessed,” she said in the nun’s ear, barely voicing the words.

  “To the priest?”

  “To me. Until last Saturday, the mother was feeding her chewed-up food under cover of kisses and convincing the girl that it was manna.”

  Sister Michael blanched, and crossed herself.

  “The committee will be at Ryan’s at ten this evening,” Lib went on, “and we must speak to them.”

  “Has Dr. McBrearty said so?”

  Lib was tempted to lie. Instead she said, “The man’s delusional. He thinks Anna’s turning cold-blooded! No, we must make our report to the rest of the committee.”

  “On Sunday, as instructed.”

  “Three more days is too long! Anna may not last,” she whispered, “and you know it.”

  The nun averted her face, big eyes blinking.

  ?
??I’ll do the talking, but you must stand with me.”

  Haltingly: “My place is here.”

  “Surely you can find someone else to watch Anna for an hour,” said Lib. “The Ryan girl, even.”

  The nun shook her head.

  “Instead of spying on Anna, we should all be doing everything we can to induce her to eat. To live.”

  The smoothly wimpled head kept swinging like a bell. “Those aren’t our orders. ’Tis all dreadfully sad, but—”

  “Sad?” Lib’s voice too loud, scathing. “Is that the word?”

  Sister Michael’s face crumpled in on itself.

  “Good nurses follow rules,” Lib growled, “but the best know when to break them.”

  The nun fled from the room.

  Lib took a long, ragged breath and sat down beside Anna.

  When the child woke, her heartbeat was like a violin string vibrating just under the skin. Thursday, August 18, 1:03 p.m. Pulse at 129, thready, Lib noted down, her hand as legible as ever. Straining for breath.

  She called Kitty in and told her to gather all the pillows in the house.

  Kitty stared, then rushed off to do it.

  Lib banked them up behind Anna so the girl could lie almost upright, which seemed to ease her breathing a little.

  “Thou that liftest me up from the gates,” murmured Anna, eyes shut. “Deliver me out of the hands of my enemies.”

  How gladly Lib would have done that if she’d known how, delivered Anna, set her free from her bonds. The way a message was delivered, or a blow, or a baby. “More water?” She offered the spoon.

  Anna’s eyelids flickered but didn’t open; she shook her head. “Be it done to me.”

  “You may not feel thirst, but you need to drink all the same.”

  The lips clung together stickily as they opened and let in a spoonful of water.

  It would be easier to talk frankly outdoors. “Would you like to go out in the chair again? It’s a lovely afternoon.”

  “No, thank you, Mrs. Lib.”

  Lib put that down too: Too weak to be wheeled in chair. Her memorandum book wasn’t just to supplement her memory anymore. It was evidence of a crime.

  “This boat’s big enough for me,” mumbled Anna.