“Not now.”
Rosaleen O’Donnell knotted her knobby fingers. “Sure what sins would she be after committing, lying there like a cherub?”
You’re afraid of her telling him about the manna, Lib said in her head. Monster!
“Will we have a hymn, then?” asked Mr. Thaddeus.
“There’s an idea,” said Malachy O’Donnell, rubbing his chin.
“Lovely,” gasped Anna.
Lib offered the glass of water, but the child shook her head.
Kitty had sidled in too. With six people in it, the room felt unbearably full.
Rosaleen O’Donnell began the verse.
From the land of my exile
I call upon thee,
Then Mary, my mother,
Look kindly on me.
Why is Ireland the land of exile? Lib wondered.
The others joined in—the husband, the slavey, the priest, even Anna from her bed.
Then Mary, in pity,
Look down upon me,
’Tis the voice of thy child
That is calling on thee.
Wrath was a spike in the back of Lib’s head. No, this is your child, who needs your help, she told Rosaleen O’Donnell silently.
Kitty sang the next verse in a surprisingly sweet alto, all the creases of her face smoothened out.
In sorrow, in darkness,
Be still at my side,
My light and my refuge,
My guard and my guide.
Though snares should surround me,
Yet why should I fear?
I know I am weak
But my mother is here.
Lib grasped it now: This whole earth was the land of exile. Every interest, every satisfaction life could offer, was scorned as a snare for the soul bent on hurrying to heaven.
But the snares are in here. This cabin held together by dung and blood, hair and milk—a trap to hold and mangle a little girl.
“Bless you, my child,” Mr. Thaddeus said to Anna. “I’ll look in again tomorrow.”
Was that it, the best he could do? A hymn and a blessing and off went he?
The O’Donnells and Kitty filed out after the priest.
No sign of Byrne at the spirit grocery. No answer when Lib knocked on his door. Might he be regretting the kiss?
All afternoon she lay on top of her bed, eyes as dry as paper. Sleep was a distant country.
Do your duty while the world whirls, her teacher ordered.
What was Lib’s duty to Anna now? Deliver me out of the hands of my enemies, Anna had prayed. Was Lib her deliverer or another enemy? I’ll stop at nothing, Lib had boasted to Byrne last night. But what could she do to save a child who refused to be rescued?
At seven she made herself go downstairs and have some dinner, as she was feeling faint. Now broiled hare lay in her stomach like lead.
The August evening was stifling. By the time Lib reached the cabin, the dark horizon was swallowing up the sun. She knocked, tight with dread. Between one shift and the next, Anna could have slid into unconsciousness.
The kitchen smelled of porridge and the fire’s perpetual blaze. “How is she?” Lib demanded of Rosaleen O’Donnell.
“Much the same, the little angel.”
Not an angel. A human child.
Anna was weirdly yellowish against the dull sheets.
“Good evening, child. May I look at your eyes?”
The girl opened them, blinking.
Lib pulled the skin underneath one eye down to check it. Yes, the whites were the buttery hue of a daffodil. She threw a look at Sister Michael.
“The doctor confirmed it was jaundice when he looked in this afternoon,” murmured the nun as she fastened her cloak.
Lib turned to Rosaleen O’Donnell, standing in the doorway. “That’s a sign that Anna’s whole constitution is breaking down.”
The mother didn’t have a word to say to that; she received it like news of a storm or a distant war.
The chamber pot was dry. Lib tilted it.
The nun shook her head.
No urine passed at all, then. This was the point to which all the measurements were leading. Everything inside Anna was grinding to a halt.
“There’s to be a votive mass tomorrow evening at half past eight,” said Rosaleen O’Donnell.
“Votive?” asked Lib.
“Dedicated to a particular intention,” explained Sister Michael under her breath.
“For Anna. Isn’t that nice, pet?” asked her mother. “Mr. Thaddeus is offering a special mass because of you not being well, and everyone will be there.”
“Lovely.” Anna breathed as if it required her whole attention.
Lib pulled out her stethoscope and waited for the other two women to leave.
She thought she heard something new in Anna’s heart this evening, a gallop. Could she be imagining it? She listened hard. There: three sounds instead of the usual two.
Next she counted the breaths. Twenty-nine in a minute; speeding up. Anna’s temperature seemed lower too, despite the heat of the past two days.
She sat down and took Anna’s scaly hand. “Your heart’s starting to jump. Have you felt it?” Something about the way the girl lay, arms and legs held so still. “You must be in pain.”
“That’s not the word,” whispered Anna.
“Whatever you call it, then.”
“Sister says ’tis the kiss of Jesus.”
“What is?” Lib demanded.
“When something hurts. She says it means I’ve got close enough to his cross that he can lean down and kiss me.”
The nun had meant it as comfort, no doubt, but it horrified Lib.
A rattling breath. “I just wish I knew how long it’ll take.”
Lib asked, “Dying, you mean?”
The girl nodded.
“It doesn’t come naturally at your age. Children are so very alive.” This was quite the strangest conversation Lib had ever had with a patient. “Are you afraid?”
A hesitation. Then a tiny nod.
“I don’t believe you truly want to die.”
She saw such misery in the child’s face then. Anna had never let this show before. “Thy will be done,” the girl whispered, crossing herself.
“This is not God’s doing,” Lib reminded her. “It’s yours.”
The limp lids fluttered and finally shut. The loud breathing softened and evened out.
Lib kept hold of the swollen hand. Sleep, a temporary mercy. She hoped it would last the night.
The Rosary began on the other side of the wall. Muted this time; the chanting low. Lib waited for it to be over, for the cabin to settle down as the O’Donnells retreated to their hole in the wall and Kitty bedded down on the settle in the kitchen. The fading of all the small sounds.
Finally Lib was the only one awake. The watcher. Ever this night be at my side.
It occurred to her to ask herself why she wanted Anna to live through this Friday night, and the next night, and however many nights were left. As a matter of compassion, shouldn’t Lib be wishing for this to be over? After all, everything she did to make Anna more comfortable—a sip of water, another pillow—was just prolonging her suffering.
For a moment, Lib let herself imagine bringing on the end: lifting and folding a blanket, setting it down over the child’s face, and bearing down on it with all her weight. It wouldn’t be difficult, or take more than a couple of minutes. It would be an act of mercy, really.
A murder.
How had Lib reached the point of contemplating killing a patient?
She blamed the lack of sleep, the uncertainty. Everything a muddle and a mess. A swampy wilderness, a child lost, and Lib stumbling after her.
Never despair, she ordered herself. Wasn’t that one of the unforgiveable sins? She remembered a story about a man wrestling with an angel all night and being thrown down over and over again. Never winning, but never giving up.
Think, think. She struggled to apply her trained min
d. What history has a child? Rosaleen O’Donnell had asked that in reply to Lib’s questions that first morning. But every disease had a story with a beginning, middle, and end. How to trace this one all the way back?
Her eyes roamed the room. When they fell on Anna’s treasure chest, she remembered the candlestick she’d cracked, and the dark curl of hair. The brother, Pat O’Donnell, whom Lib knew only from a photograph with painted-on eyes. How had his little sister become convinced that she needed to purchase his soul with her own?
Lib laboured to take Anna’s struggle on its own terms. To put herself in the position of a girl for whom these ancient narratives were literal truth. Four and a half months of fasting; how could that much sacrifice not be enough to make amends for the sins of a mere boy?
“Anna.” Only a whisper. Then more loudly. “Anna!”
The child struggled to surface.
“Anna!”
Her heavy lids batted.
Lib put her mouth very close to the girl’s ear. “Did Pat do something bad?”
No answer.
“Something nobody else knows about?”
Lib waited. Watched the flickering lids. Leave her be, she told herself, suddenly exhausted. What did any of this matter now?
“He said it was all right.” Anna barely voiced the words. Eyes still shut, as if she were still in her dream.
Lib waited, breath held.
“He said it was double.”
Lib puzzled over that. “Double what?”
“Love.” A push of tongue for the L, the merest puff of breath, teeth pressed to the lower lip for the V.
My love is mine, and I am his; one of Anna’s hymns. “What do you mean?”
Anna’s eyes were open now. “He married me in the night.”
Lib blinked once, twice. The room stayed still, but the world plunged dizzyingly around it.
He comes in to me as soon as I’m asleep, Anna had said, but she hadn’t meant Jesus. He wants me.
“I was his sister and his bride too,” the girl whispered. “Double.”
Nausea rose through Lib. There wasn’t another bedroom; the siblings must have shared this one. That folding screen she’d put outside the room on her first day had been all that had separated Pat’s bed—this bed, his deathbed—from Anna’s mattress on the floor. “When was this?” Lib asked, the words scraping her throat.
A tiny shrug.
“How old was Pat, do you remember?”
“Thirteen, maybe.”
“And you?”
“Nine,” said Anna.
Lib’s face puckered. “Did this happen just once, Anna—on a single occasion—or…”
“Marriage is forever.”
Oh, the terrible innocence of the child. Lib made a small sound, encouraging her to go on.
“When brothers and sisters marry, it’s a holy mystery. A secret between us and heaven, Pat told me. But then he died,” said Anna, voice cracking like a shell, eyes fixed on Lib. “I wondered if maybe he’d been wrong.”
Lib nodded.
“Maybe God took Pat because of what we’d done. ’Tisn’t fair, then, Mrs. Lib, because Pat’s bearing all the punishment.”
Lib pressed her lips together so the child would keep talking.
“Then at the mission—” Anna let out a single hard sob. “The Belgian priest, in his sermon, he said brother and sister, ’tis a mortal sin, the second worst of the six species of lust. Poor Pat never knew!”
Oh, poor Pat knew well enough to spin a glittering web around the thing he was doing to his little sister night after night.
“He died so fast,” the girl wailed, “he never got a chance to go to confession. Maybe he went straight to hell.” The wet eyes looked greenish in this light, and the words came out in gulps. “In hell the flames aren’t for cleaning, they’re for hurting, and there’s no end.”
“Anna.” Lib had heard enough.
“I don’t know if I can get him out, but I have to try. Surely God must be able to pluck someone—”
“Anna! You did nothing wrong.”
“But I did.”
“You didn’t know,” Lib insisted. “This was a wrong your brother did to you.”
Anna shook her head. “I loved him double too.”
Lib couldn’t say a word.
“If God grants it, we can be together soon, but no bodies this time. No marrying,” Anna pleaded. “Just brother and sister again.”
“Anna, I can’t bear this, I—” Lib was crouching on the edge of the bed now, blinded, as the room turned to water.
“Don’t cry, Mrs. Lib.” Those spindly arms were reaching out for her, enclosing Lib’s head, pulling her down. “Dear Mrs. Lib.”
She muffled her weeping in the blankets, the hard double ridge of the child’s lap. The upside-downness of it: to be consoled by a child, and such a child.
“Don’t fret, ’tis all right,” Anna murmured.
“No, it’s not!”
“All’s well. All will be well.”
Help her. Lib found herself praying to the God that she didn’t believe in. Help me. Help us all.
She heard only silence.
In the middle of the night—Lib couldn’t wait any longer—she felt her way through the kitchen, past the shape of the sleeping maid on the settle. The skin of Lib’s cheeks was still tight and salty from weeping. When her fingers found the rough curtain that partitioned off the outshot, she whispered: “Mrs. O’Donnell.”
A stir. “Is it Anna?” asked Rosaleen hoarsely.
“No, she’s fast asleep. I need to speak to you.”
“What is it?”
“In private,” said Lib. “Please.”
After long hours of brooding, she’d come to the conclusion that she had to reveal Anna’s secret. But only to one other person, perversely the one Lib trusted least: Rosaleen O’Donnell. Lib’s hope was that this revelation might wake Rosaleen to a sense of mercy for the tormented girl at last. This story was the family’s, and the mother of Pat and Anna was entitled, if anyone was, to hear the truth about what one of them had inflicted on the other.
The hymn to Mary sang in Lib’s head: My mother, look kindly on me.
Rosaleen O’Donnell shoved the curtain aside and climbed out of the little chamber. Her eyes were uncanny in the trace of red light from the banked-up fire.
Lib beckoned, and Rosaleen trailed her across the hard earth floor. Lib opened the front door and Rosaleen hesitated for only a moment before following her out.
With the door shut behind them, Lib spoke fast, before she could lose her nerve. “I know all about the manna,” she began, to gain the upper hand.
Rosaleen looked back at her, unblinking.
“But I haven’t told the committee. The world doesn’t need an explanation of how Anna’s lived all these months. What matters is whether she’ll go on living. If you love your daughter, Mrs. O’Donnell, why don’t you do everything in your power to get her to eat?”
Still not a word. Then, very low: “She’s chosen.”
“She’s been chosen?” Lib repeated, disgusted. “You mean by God? Called to martyrdom at the age of eleven?”
Rosaleen corrected her: “She’s made her choice.”
The absurdity of it choked Lib. “Don’t you understand how desperate Anna is, how racked with guilt? She’s not choosing any more than she might choose to fall down a bog hole.”
Not a word.
“She’s not intact.” Lib’s circumlocution sounded absurdly prim.
Rosaleen’s eyes narrowed.
“I must tell you that she’s been interfered with, and by your own son.” The syllables plain and brutal. “He began tampering with her when she was only nine.”
“Mrs. Wright,” said the woman, “I won’t stand for any more scandalmongering.”
Was it too inconceivable a horror for Rosaleen to take in? Did she need to believe Lib was making it up?
“That’s the same filthy falsehood Anna came out with after P
at’s funeral,” Rosaleen went on, “and I told her not to be slandering her poor brother.”
Lib had to lean on the gritty wall of the cabin. So this wasn’t news to the woman at all. A mother understands what a child doesn’t say, wasn’t that how the proverb went? But Anna had said it. Grief for her dead Pat had given her the courage to confess the whole shameful story to her mother, back in November. Rosaleen had called her a liar and maintained that now, even as she watched her daughter pine away.
“Not another word out of you,” growled Rosaleen, “and may the devil take you.” She swept back inside.
Just after six, Saturday morning. Lib pushed a note under Byrne’s door.
Then she left the spirit grocery and hurried away across the muddy field under a shrinking moon. This was the kingdom of hell, drifting irretrievably out of the orbit of heaven.
The hawthorn at the tiny holy well stood up before her, its disintegrating rags dancing in a breath of warm wind. Lib saw the point of such superstition now. If there was a ritual she could perform that offered a chance of saving Anna, wouldn’t she try it? She’d bow down to a tree or a rock or a carved turnip for the child’s sake. Lib thought of all those people walking away from this tree over the centuries, trying to believe that they’d left their aches and sorrows behind. Years on, some of them reminding themselves, If I still feel the pain, that’s only because the rag’s not quite rotten yet.
Anna wanted to leave her body, drop it like an old coat. To shed her creased skin, her name, her broken history; to be done with it all. Yes, Lib would have liked that for the girl, and more—for Anna to be born all over again, as people in the Far East believed was possible. To wake up tomorrow and discover that she was someone else. A little girl with no damage done to her, no debts to pay, able and allowed to eat her fill.
And then came a hurrying outline against the lightening sky, and Lib felt at once what she’d never really known until this moment: the body’s claims were undeniable.
William Byrne’s curls were snakish and his waistcoat was buttoned up wrong. He clutched her note.
“Did I wake you?” Lib asked foolishly.
“I wasn’t sleeping,” he said, grabbing her hand.
Despite everything, warmth spread through her.
“At Ryan’s, last night,” he said, “no one could talk of anything but Anna. Word’s spread about you telling the committee that she’s failing fast. I believe the whole village will attend this mass.”