The Wonder Read online

  Something else: Anna’s earlobes and lips had a bluish tint to them, and so did the beds of the fingernails. She was chilly to the touch, as if she’d just come in from walking in a snowstorm. “Do you feel cold?” Lib asked.

  “Not especially.”

  Breadth of chest across level of mammae: 10 inches.

  Girth of ribs: 24 inches.

  The girl’s eyes followed her. “What’s your name?”

  “As I mentioned, it’s Mrs. Wright, but you may address me as Nurse.”

  “Your Christian name, I mean.”

  Lib ignored that bit of cheek and continued writing.

  Girth of hips: 25 inches.

  Girth of waist: 21 inches.

  Girth of middle of arm: 5 inches.

  “What are the numbers for?”

  “They’re… so we can be sure you’re in good health,” said Lib. An absurd answer, but the question had flustered her. Surely it was a breach of protocol to discuss the nature of her surveillance with its object?

  So far, as Lib had expected, the data in her notebook indicated that Anna O’Donnell was a false little baggage. Yes, she was thin in places, shoulder blades like the stubs of missing wings. But not the way a child would be after a month without food, let alone four. Lib knew what starvation looked like; at Scutari, skeletal refugees had been toted in, bones stretching the skin like tent poles under canvas. No, this girl’s belly was rounded, if anything. Fashionable belles tight-laced these days in hopes of a sixteen-inch waist, and Anna’s was five more than that.

  What Lib really would have liked to know was the child’s weight, because if it went up even an ounce over the course of the fortnight, that would constitute proof of covert feeding. She took two steps towards the kitchen to fetch a weighing scales before she remembered that she was obliged to keep this child in sight at all times until nine o’clock tonight.

  A strange sensation of imprisonment. Lib thought of calling to Mrs. O’Donnell from inside the bedroom, but she didn’t want to come off as high-handed, especially so early in her first shift.

  “Beware of spurious imitations,” murmured Anna.

  “I beg your pardon?” Lib said.

  One round fingertip traced the words stamped into the ribbed leather cover of the memorandum book.

  Lib gave the girl a hard look. Spurious imitations, indeed. “The manufacturers are claiming that their velvet paper is unlike any other.”

  “What’s velvet paper?”

  “It’s been coated to take the mark of a metallic pencil.”

  The girl stroked the tiny page.

  “Anything written on that will be indelible, like ink,” said Lib. “Do you know what indelible means?”

  “A stain that won’t come off.”

  “Correct.” Lib took back the memorandum book and tried to think of what other information she needed to extract from the girl. “Are you troubled by any pain, Anna?”

  “No.”

  “Dizziness?”

  “Maybe the odd time,” Anna admitted.

  “Does your pulse pause or skip?”

  “Some days it might flutter a bit.”

  “Are you nervous?”

  “Nervous of what?”

  Being found out, you swindler. But what Lib said was “Sister Michael and myself, perhaps. Strangers in your home.”

  Anna shook her head. “You seem kind. I don’t think you’d do me any harm.”

  “Quite right.” But Lib felt uncomfortable, as if she’d promised more than she ought. She wasn’t here to be kind.

  The child had her eyes shut now and was whispering. After a moment Lib realized it had to be a prayer. A show of piety, to make this fast of Anna’s more plausible?

  The girl finished and looked up, her expression as placid as ever.

  “Open your mouth, please,” said Lib.

  Mostly milk teeth; one or two large adult ones, and several gaps where a replacement had not yet come through. Like the mouth of a much younger child.

  Several carious? Breath a little sour.

  Clean tongue, rather red and smooth.

  Tonsils slightly enlarged.

  No cap covered Anna’s dark auburn hair, parted in the centre and pulled back in a small bun. Lib undid it now and worked her fingers through the strands, dry and frizzy to the touch. She felt the scalp for anything hidden but found nothing except a scaly patch behind one ear. “You may put it up again.”

  Anna’s fingers fumbled with the hairpins.

  Lib went to help—then held back. She wasn’t here to tend the girl or be her maid. She was being paid just to stare.

  Somewhat clumsy.

  Reflexes normal, if a little slow.

  Fingernails rather ridged, spotted with white.

  Palms and fingers distinctly swollen.

  “Step out of your boots for me, please.”

  “They were my brother’s,” said Anna as she obeyed.

  Feet, ankles, and lower legs very swollen, Lib recorded; no wonder Anna had resorted to the emigrant’s discarded boots. Possibly dropsy, water collecting in the tissues? “How long have your legs been so?”

  The girl shrugged.

  Where the stockings had been tied below Anna’s knees, the marks stayed concave. The same with the backs of her heels. Lib had seen this kind of swelling in pregnant women and the occasional old soldier. She pushed her finger into the girl’s calf, like a sculptor forming a child out of clay. The pit remained when she removed her finger. “Does that pain you?”

  Anna shook her head.

  Lib stared at the indented leg. Perhaps it wasn’t too serious, but something was wrong with this child.

  She carried on lifting one piece of clothing at a time. Even if Anna was a fraud, there was no need to mortify her. The girl shivered, but not as if embarrassed, only as if it were January rather than August. Few signs of maturity, Lib jotted down; Anna seemed more like eight or nine than eleven. Smallpox vaccination on upper arm. The milk-white skin was dry to the touch, brownish and rough in places. Bruises on the knees, typical in children. But those tiny spots on the girl’s shins, blue-red—Lib had never encountered them before. She noticed that same fine down on the girl’s forearms, back, belly, legs; like a baby monkey. Was this hairiness common among the Irish, by any chance? Lib recalled cartoons in the popular press depicting them as apish pygmies.

  She remembered to check the calf again, the left one. It was as flat as the other now.

  Lib glanced through her notes. A few troubling anomalies, yes, but nothing that lent weight to the O’Donnells’ grandiose claims of a four-month fast.

  Now, where could the child be hiding her food? Lib compressed every seam of Anna’s dress and petticoat, feeling for pockets. The clothes had been darned often but well; a decent kind of poverty. She checked each part of the girl’s body that could possibly hold the tiniest store, from the armpits down to the crevices (cracked in places) between the swollen toes. Not a crumb.

  Anna made no protest. She was whispering to herself again now, lashes resting on cheeks. Lib couldn’t make out any of the words except for one that came up over and over and sounded like… Dorothy, could it be? Roman Catholics were always begging various intermediaries to take up their petty causes with God. Was there a Saint Dorothy?

  “What’s that you’re reciting?” Lib asked when the girl seemed to have finished.

  A shake of the head.

  “Come now, Anna, aren’t we to be friends?”

  Lib regretted her choice of word at once, because the round face lit up. “I’d like that.”

  “Then tell me about this prayer I hear you muttering on and off.”

  “That one, ’tis… not for talking about,” said Anna.

  “Ah. A secret prayer.”

  “Private,” she corrected Lib.

  Little girls—even honest ones—did love their secrets. Lib remembered her own sister keeping a diary hidden under their mattress. (Not that it stopped Lib reading every anodyne word of it.)<
br />
  Lib screwed the sections of her stethoscope together. She pressed the flat base to the left side of the child’s chest, between the fifth and sixth rib, and put the other end to her own right ear. Lub-dub, lub-dub; she listened for the minutest variation in the sounds of the heart. Then for a full minute, by the watch that hung at her waist, she counted. Pulse distinct, she wrote, 89 beats per minute. That was within the expected range. Lib moved the stethoscope to different positions on the child’s back. Lungs healthy, 17 respirations per minute, she recorded. No crackles or wheezes; despite her odd symptoms, Anna seemed healthier than half her compatriots.

  Sitting down on the chair—Miss N. always began by breaking her trainees of the habit of perching on a patient’s bed—Lib put the device on the child’s belly. She listened for the least gurgle that would betray the presence of food. Tried another spot. Silence. Digestive cavity hard, tympanitic, drumlike, she wrote. She percussed the belly lightly. “How does that feel?”

  “Full,” said Anna.

  Lib stared. Full, when the belly sounded so empty? Was this defiance? “Uncomfortably full?”

  “No.”

  “You may dress yourself now.”

  Anna did, slowly and a little awkwardly.

  Reports sleeping well at night, seven to nine hours.

  Intellectual faculties seem unimpaired.

  “Do you miss going to school, child?”

  A shake of the head.

  The O’Donnells’ pet apparently wasn’t expected to help with the housework, Lib noticed. “Perhaps you prefer to be idle?”

  “I read and sew and sing and pray.” The child’s voice undefensive.

  Confrontation was beyond Lib’s remit. But she might at least be frank, she decided. Miss N. always recommended it, since nothing preyed on a patient’s health like uncertainty. Lib could do this little faker real good by setting an example of candour, holding up a lamp for the girl to follow out of the wilderness into which she’d strayed. Snapping shut her memorandum book, Lib asked, “Do you know why I’m here?”

  “To make sure I don’t eat.”

  Of all the skewed ways of putting it… “Not at all, Anna. My job is to find out whether it’s true that you aren’t eating. But I would be most relieved if you’d take your meals as other children—other people—do.”

  A nod.

  “Is there anything at all you could fancy? Broth, sago pudding, something sweet?” Lib was only putting a neutral question to the child, she told herself, not pressing food on her in such a way as to influence the outcome of the watch.

  “No, thank you.”

  “Why not, do you suppose?”

  A trace of a smile. “I can’t say, Mrs.—ma’am,” Anna corrected herself.

  “Why? Is that private too?”

  The girl looked back at her mildly. Sharp as a pin, Lib decided. Anna must have realized that giving any explanation would get her into difficulties. If she claimed that her Maker had ordered her not to eat, she’d be comparing herself to a saint. But if she boasted of living by any particular natural means, then she’d be obliged to prove it to the satisfaction of science. I’m going to crack you like a nut, missy.

  Lib looked around. Until today it must have been child’s play for Anna to sneak food from the kitchen next door in the night or for one of the adults to bring it in without the others hearing a thing. “Your maid—”

  “Kitty? She’s our cousin.” Anna took a plaid shawl out of the dresser; its rich reds and browns lent a little colour to her face.

  A slavey who was also a poor relation, then; hard for such a subordinate to refuse to take part in a plot. “Where does she sleep?”

  “On the settle.” Anna nodded towards the kitchen.

  Of course; the lower classes often had more family members than they had beds, so they were obliged to improvise. “And your parents?”

  “They sleep in the outshot.”

  Lib didn’t know that word.

  “The bed built off the cabin, behind the curtain,” explained the child.

  Lib had noticed the flour-sack drape in the kitchen but assumed it covered a pantry of some kind. How ridiculous for the O’Donnells to leave their good room standing empty and lie down in a makeshift chamber. But Lib supposed they had just enough respectability to aspire to a little more.

  The first thing was to make this narrow bedroom proof against subterfuge. Lib touched her hand to the wall, and whitewash flaked off on her fingers. Plaster of some kind, dampish; not wood, brick, or stone, like an English cottage. Well, at least that meant any recess where food might be cached would be easy to discover.

  Also, she had to make sure there was nowhere the child could hide from Lib’s gaze. That rickety old wooden screen would have to go, for starters; Lib folded its three sections together and carried it to the door.

  She looked through without leaving the bedroom. Mrs. O’Donnell was stirring a three-legged pot over the fire, and the maid was mashing something at the long table. Lib set down the screen just inside the kitchen and said, “We won’t be needing this. Also, I’d like a basin of hot water and a cloth, please.”

  “Kitty,” said Mrs. O’Donnell to the maid, jerking her head.

  Lib’s eyes flicked to the child, who was whispering her prayers again.

  She moved back to the narrow bed that stood against the wall and began stripping it. The bedstead was wood, and the tick was a straw one, covered in stained canvas. Well, at least it wasn’t a feather bed; Miss N. anathemized feathers. A new horsehair mattress would have been more hygienic, but Lib could hardly demand the O’Donnells drum up the money to buy one. (She thought of that strongbox full of coins, nominally destined for the poor.) Besides, she reminded herself, she wasn’t here to improve the girl’s health, only to study it. She felt the tick all over for any lumps or gaps in the stitching that might reveal hidey-holes.

  A strange tinkling in the kitchen. A bell? It sounded once, twice, three times. Calling the family to the table for the noon meal, perhaps. But of course Lib would have to wait to be served in this narrow bedroom.

  Anna O’Donnell was on her feet, hovering. “May I go say the Angelus?”

  “You need to stay where I can see you,” Lib reminded her, testing the flock-stuffed bolster with her fingers.

  A voice raised in the kitchen. The mother’s?

  The child dropped down on her knees, listening hard. “And she conceived of the Holy Spirit,” she answered. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…”

  Lib thought she recognized that one. This clearly wasn’t a private prayer; Anna sang out the words so they carried into the next room.

  Behind the wall, the women’s muffled voices matched the child’s. Then a lull. Rosaleen O’Donnell’s single voice again. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”

  “Be it done to me according to thy word,” chanted Anna.

  Lib tugged the bedstead well away from the wall so that from now on she’d be able to approach it from three sides. She laid the tick over the footboard to air it out and did the same with the bolster. The ritual was still going on, with its calls, responses, choruses, and occasional chiming of the bell.

  “And dwelt amongst us,” intoned the girl.

  Crouching at each corner of the bed in turn, Lib ran her hand under every bar, felt each knob and angle for scraps. She pawed the floor looking for any patch of beaten earth that might have been gouged up to bury something.

  Finally the prayers seemed to be over, and Anna got to her feet. “Do you not say the Angelus, Mrs. Wright?” she asked, a little breathless.

  “Is that the name of what you just did?” asked Lib instead of answering.

  A nod, as if everyone knew that.

  Lib shook the worst of the dust off her skirt and rubbed her hands on her apron. Where was the hot water? Was Kitty just lazy, or was she defying the English nurse?

  Anna took something large and white out of her workbag and began hemming it, standing in the corner by th
e window.

  “Sit down, child,” Lib told her, waving her to the chair.

  “I’m very well here, ma’am.”

  What a paradox: Anna O’Donnell was a shammer of the deepest dye—but with nice manners. Lib found she couldn’t treat her with the harshness she deserved. “Kitty,” she called, “could you bring in another chair as well as the hot water?”

  No answer from the kitchen.

  “Take this one for now,” she urged the girl. “I don’t want it.”

  Anna crossed herself, sat down on the chair, and sewed on.

  Lib inched the dresser away from the wall to make sure there was nothing hollowed out behind it. Tugging out each drawer—the wood was warped from damp—she went through the girl’s small stock of clothes, fingering every seam and hem.

  On top of the dresser sat a drooping dandelion in a jar. Miss N. approved of flowers in sickrooms, scorning the old wives’ tale about them poisoning the air; she said the brilliancy of colour and variety of form uplifted not only the mind but the body. (In Lib’s first week at the hospital, she’d tried to explain that to Matron, who’d called her la-di-da.)

  It occurred to Lib that the flower might be a source of nourishment hiding in plain sight. What about the liquid—was it really water or some kind of clear broth or syrup? Lib sniffed at the jar, but all her nose registered was the familiar tang of dandelion. She dipped her finger in the liquid, then put it to her lips. As tasteless as it was colourless. But might there be some kind of nutritive element that had those qualities?

  Lib could tell without looking that the girl was watching her. Oh, come now, Lib was falling into the trap of the old doctor’s delusions. This was just water. She wiped her hand on her apron.

  Beside the jar, nothing but a small wooden chest. Not even a mirror, it struck Lib now; did Anna never want to look at herself? She opened the box.

  “Those are my treasures,” said the girl, jumping up.

  “Lovely. May I see?” Lib’s hands already busy inside the chest, in case Anna was going to claim that these were private too.