The Wonder Page 5

  “Certainly.”

  Pious gimcrackery: a set of rosary beads made of—seeds, was it?—with a plain cross on the end, and a painted candlestick in the shape of the Virgin and Child.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” Anna reached out for the candlestick. “Mammy and Dadda gave it to me on my confirmation.”

  “An important day,” murmured Lib. The statuette was too sickly-sweet for her taste. She felt it all over to make sure it was really porcelain, not something edible. Only then did she let the girl take it.

  Anna held it to her chest. “Confirmation’s the most important day.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “’Tis the end of being a child.”

  Darkly comic, Lib found it, this slip of a thing thinking of herself as a grown woman. Next she peered at the writing on a tiny silvery oval, no bigger than the top of her finger.

  “That’s my Miraculous Medal,” said Anna, lifting it out of Lib’s hand.

  “What miracles has it done?”

  That came out too flippant, but the girl didn’t take offence. “Ever so many,” she assured Lib, rubbing it. “Not this one, I mean, but all the Miraculous Medals in Christendom together.”

  Lib didn’t comment. At the bottom of the box, in a glass case, she found a tiny disc. Not metal but white, this one, stamped with a lamb carrying a flag and a coat of arms. It couldn’t be the bread from Holy Communion, could it? Surely that would be sacrilege, to keep the Host in a toy box? “What’s this, Anna?”

  “My Agnus Dei.”

  Lamb of God; Lib knew that much Latin. She flipped up the lid of the case and grated the disc with her nail.

  “Don’t break it!”

  “I won’t.” It wasn’t bread, she realized, but wax. She laid the box in Anna’s cupped hand.

  “Each one’s been blessed by His Holiness,” the child assured her, clicking the lid shut. “Agnus Deis make floods go down and put out fires.”

  Lib puzzled over the origin of this legend. Considering how fast wax melted, who could imagine it any use against fire?

  Nothing left in the chest but a few books. She inspected the titles: all devotional. A Missal for the Use of the Laity; The Imitation of Christ. She plucked an ornamented rectangle about the size of a playing card out of the black Book of Psalms.

  “Put it back where it lives,” said Anna, agitated.

  Ah, could there be food hidden in the book? “Just a moment.” Lib riffled through the pages. Nothing but more little rectangles.

  “Those are my holy cards. Each one has its own place.”

  The one Lib held was a printed prayer with a fancy-cut border, like lace, and it had another of those tiny medals tied onto it with a ribbon. On the back, in saccharine pastels, a woman cuddled a sheep. Divine Bergère, it said at the top. Divine something?

  “See, this one matches Psalm One Hundred and Eighteen: I have gone astray like a sheep that is lost,” Anna recited, tapping the page without needing to check what it said.

  Very “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” Lib thought. She saw now that all the books in the chest were studded with these rectangles. “Who gave you these cards?”

  “Some were prizes at school or at the mission. Or presents from visitors.”

  “Where’s this mission?”

  “It’s gone now. My brother left me some of the loveliest ones,” said Anna, kissing the sheep card before tucking it into its place and closing the book.

  What a curious child. “Do you have a favourite saint?”

  Anna shook her head. “They all have different things to teach us. Some of them were born good, but others were very wicked until God cleaned their hearts.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “He can pick anyone to be holy,” Anna assured her.

  When the door burst open, Lib jumped.

  Kitty, with the basin of hot water. “Sorry to keep you. I’m after bringing himself his meal,” the young woman said, panting.

  Malachy O’Donnell, presumably. Off cutting turf for a neighbour, wasn’t he—as a favour? Lib wondered. Or a job of work to supplement the pittance the farm made? It struck her that perhaps only the men got food at midday here.

  “What’ll I be scrubbing for you?” asked the slavey.

  “I’ll do that,” Lib told her, taking the basin. She couldn’t allow any of the family access to this room. Kitty might have food for the child tucked in her apron right now, for all Lib knew.

  The maid frowned; confusion or resentment?

  “You must be busy,” said Lib. “Oh, and could I trouble you for another chair, as well as fresh bedding?”

  “A sheet?” asked Kitty.

  “A pair of them,” Lib corrected her, “and a clean blanket.”

  “We’ve none,” said the maid, shaking her head.

  Such a vacant expression on the broad face; Lib wondered if Kitty was quite all there.

  “No clean sheets yet, she means,” Anna put in. “Wash day’s Monday next, unless ’tis too wet.”

  “I see,” said Lib, suppressing her irritation. “Well, just the chair, then, Kitty.”

  She added chlorinated soda from a bottle in her bag to the basin of water and wiped every surface; the smell was harsh, but clean. She made the child’s bed again, with the same tired sheets and grey blanket. Straightening up, she wondered where else a mouthful of food could possibly be stashed.

  This was nothing like the cluttered sickrooms of the upper classes. Apart from the bed, dresser, and chair, there was only a woven mat on the floor, with a pattern of darker lines. Lib lifted it up; nothing underneath. The room would be very cheerless if she took the mat away, as well as chill underfoot. Besides, the most likely place to hide a crust or an apple was in the bed, and surely the committee didn’t mean to make the girl sleep on bare boards like a prisoner? No, Lib would just have to inspect the room at frequent and unpredictable intervals to make sure no food had been sneaked in.

  Kitty brought in the chair at last, and thumped it down.

  “You might take this mat and beat the dust out when you have a moment,” said Lib. “Tell me, where would I find a scales to weigh Anna?”

  Kitty shook her head.

  “In the village, perhaps?”

  “We use fists,” said Kitty.

  Lib frowned.

  “Fistfuls of flour, like, and pinches of salt.” The slavey mimed them in the air.

  “I don’t mean household scales,” Lib told her. “Something big enough to weigh a person, or an animal. Perhaps on one of the neighbouring farms?”

  Kitty shrugged tiredly.

  Anna, watching the curling dandelion, gave no sign of hearing any of this, as if it were some other girl’s weight that was in question.

  Lib sighed. “A jug of cold water, please, then, and a teaspoon.”

  “Did you want a bit of something?” Kitty asked on her way out.

  The phrase confused Lib.

  “Or can you wait for your dinner?”

  “I can wait.”

  Lib regretted her words the moment the maid was gone, because she was hungry. But somehow, in front of Anna, she couldn’t declare that she was desperate for food. Which was absurd, she reminded herself, since the girl was nothing but a shammer.

  Anna was whispering her Dorothy prayer again. Lib did her best to ignore it. She’d put up with far more irksome habits before. There was that boy she’d nursed through scarlet fever who kept hawking up on the floor, and that demented old lady who’d been convinced her medicine was poison and had shoved it away, spilling it all down Lib.

  The girl was singing under her breath now, hands folded on her finished needlework. Nothing furtive about this hymn; the Dorothy prayer was the only secret Anna seemed to be keeping. The high notes were a little cracked, but sweet.

  Hark! the loud celestial hymn,

  Angel choirs above are raising,

  Cherubim and seraphim,

  In unceasing chorus praising.

  When Kitty brought in the jug of water, L
ib said, “What’s this, may I ask?” Patting the flaking whitewash.

  “A wall,” said Kitty.

  A tiny giggle escaped from the child.

  “I mean, of what is it made?” asked Lib.

  The slavey’s face cleared. “Mud.”

  “Just mud? Really?”

  “’Tis stone at the base, anyways, for keeping the rats out.”

  When Kitty was gone, Lib used the tiny bone spoon to taste the water in the jug. No hint of any flavour. “Are you thirsty, child?”

  Anna shook her head.

  “Hadn’t you better take a sip?”

  Overstepping her mark; the habits of a nurse died hard. Lib reminded herself that it was nothing to her whether the little fraud drank or not.

  But Anna opened her mouth for the spoon and swallowed without difficulty. “O forgive me, that I may be refreshed,” she murmured.

  Talking not to Lib, of course, but to God.

  “Another?”

  “No, thank you, Mrs. Wright.”

  Lib wrote down, 1:13 p.m., 1 tsp. water. Not that the quantity mattered, she supposed, except that she wanted to be able to give a full account of anything the child ingested on her watch.

  Now there really was nothing left to do. Lib took the second chair. It was so close to Anna’s that their skirts were almost touching, but there was nowhere else to place it. She considered the long hours ahead with a sense of awkwardness. She’d spent months on end with other private patients, but this was different, because she was eyeing this child like a bird of prey, and Anna knew it.

  A soft knock at the door made her leap up.

  “Malachy O’Donnell, ma’am.” The farmer tapped his faded waistcoat where it buttoned.

  “Mr. O’Donnell,” said Lib, putting her hand into his leathery one. She would have thanked him for his hospitality except that she was here as a sort of spy on his whole household, so it hardly seemed fitting.

  He was short and wiry, as lean as his wife, but with a far narrower frame. Anna took after her father’s side. But no spare flesh on any of this family; a troupe of marionettes.

  He bent down to kiss his daughter somewhere near the ear. “How are you, pet?”

  “Very well, Dadda.” Beaming up at him.

  Malachy O’Donnell stood there, nodding.

  Disappointment weighed on Lib. She’d been expecting something more from the father. The grand showman behind the scenes—or at least a coconspirator, as prickly as his wife. But this yokel… “You keep, ah, shorthorns, Mr. O’Donnell?”

  “Well. A few now,” he said. “I have the lease on a couple of water meadows for the grazing. I sell the, you know, for fertilizer.”

  Lib realized he meant manure.

  “Cattle, now, sometimes…” Malachy trailed off. “With their straying and breaking legs and getting stuck when they come out wrong, see—you might say they do be more trouble than they’re worth.”

  What else had Lib seen outside the farmhouse? “You also have poultry, yes?”

  “Ah, they’d be Rosaleen’s, now. Mrs. O’Donnell’s.” The man gave one last nod, as if something had been settled, and stroked his daughter’s hairline. He headed out, then doubled back. “Meant to say. That fellow from the paper’s here.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  He gestured towards the window. Through the smeary glass Lib saw an enclosed wagon. “To take Anna.”

  “Take her where?” she snapped. Really, what did the committee men think they were doing, setting up the watch in this cramped and unhygienic cabin and then changing their minds and shipping the child off somewhere else?

  “Take her face, just,” said her father. “Her likeness.”

  REILLY & SONS, PHOTOGRAPHISTS, the van said on the side in pompous type. Lib could hear a stranger’s voice in the kitchen. Oh, this was too much. She took a few steps before remembering that she wasn’t allowed to leave the child’s side. She roped her arms around herself instead.

  Rosaleen O’Donnell bustled in. “Mr. Reilly’s ready to do your daguerreotype, Anna.”

  “Is this really necessary?” asked Lib.

  “’Tis to be engraved and put in the paper.”

  Printing a portrait of the young chancer, as if she were the queen. Or a two-headed calf, more like. “How far off is his studio?”

  “Sure he does it right there in the van.” Mrs. O’Donnell jabbed her finger towards the window.

  Lib let the child go outside in front of her but tugged her out of the way of an uncovered bucket, pungent with chemicals. Alcohol, she recognized, and… was it ether or chloroform? Those fruity stenches brought Lib back to Scutari, where the sedatives always seemed to run out halfway through a run of amputations.

  As she handed Anna up the folding steps, Lib wrinkled her nose against a more complicated reek. Something like vinegar and nails.

  “Scribbler been and gone, has he?” asked the lank-haired, disheveled man inside.

  Lib narrowed her eyes.

  “The journalist who’s writing the girl up.”

  “I know nothing of any journalist, Mr. Reilly.”

  His frock coat was blotched. “Stand by the pretty flowers, now, would you,” he said to Anna.

  “Mightn’t she sit instead, if she’ll have to hold position for very long?” asked Lib. On the one occasion when she’d posed for a daguerreotype—in the ranks of Miss N.’s nurses—she’d found it a wearisome business. After the first few minutes one of the flightier young women had shifted and blurred the image, so they’d had to start all over again.

  Reilly let out a chuckle and manoeuvred the camera a few inches on the wheeled foot of its tripod. “You’re looking at a master of the modern wet process. Three seconds, that’s all. The whole thing takes me no more than ten minutes from shutter to plate.”

  Anna stood where Reilly had put her, beside a spindly table, with her right hand resting next to a vase of silk roses.

  He tilted a mirror on a stand so a square of light hit her face, then ducked under the black drape that covered his camera. “Eyes up now, girlie. To me, to me.”

  Anna’s gaze wandered around the room.

  “Look to your public.”

  That meant even less to the child. Her eyes found Lib instead, and she almost smiled, although Lib wasn’t smiling.

  Reilly emerged and slotted a wooden rectangle into the machine. “Hold that, now. Still as stone.” He rolled the brass circle off the lens. “One, two, three…” Then he flicked it shut and shook the greasy hair out of his eyes. “Out you go, ladies.” He pushed the door open and jumped down from the van, then climbed back in with his reeking bucket of chemicals.

  “Why do you keep that outside?” Lib asked, taking Anna by the hand.

  Reilly was tugging at cords to let blinds fall over one window after another and darken the interior of the van. “Risk of explosion.”

  Lib yanked Anna to the door.

  Outside the wagon, the child took a long breath, looking towards the green fields. In sunlight Anna O’Donnell had an almost transparent quality; a blue vein stood out at the temple.

  It was a long afternoon back in the bedroom. The girl whispered her prayers and read her books. Lib applied herself to a not-uninteresting article on fungus in All the Year Round. At one point Anna accepted another two spoonfuls of water. They sat just a few feet apart, Lib occasionally glancing at the girl over the top of her page. Strange to feel so yoked to another person.

  Lib wasn’t even free to go out to the privy; she had to make do with the chamber pot. “Do you need this, Anna?”

  “No, thank you, ma’am.”

  Lib left the pot by the door with a cloth over it. She repressed a yawn. “Would you care for a walk?”

  Anna brightened. “May we, really?”

  “So long as I’m with you.” She wanted to test the girl’s stamina; did the swelling in Anna’s limbs impede her movement? Besides, Lib couldn’t bear to stay cooped up in this room any longer.

  In the ki
tchen, side by side, Rosaleen O’Donnell and Kitty were skimming cream off pans with saucer-shaped strainers. The maid looked half the size of the mistress. “Anything you need, pet?” asked Rosaleen.

  “No, thank you, Mammy.”

  Dinner, Lib said silently, that’s what every child needs. Wasn’t feeding what defined a mother from the first day on? A woman’s worst pain was to have nothing to give her baby. Or to see the tiny mouth turn away from what she offered.

  “We’re just stepping out for a walk,” Lib told her.

  Rosaleen O’Donnell swatted away a fat bluebottle and went back to her work.

  There were only two possible explanations for the Irishwoman’s serenity, Lib decided: either Rosaleen was so convinced of divine intervention that she had no anxiety for her daughter, or, more likely, she had reason to believe the girl was getting plenty to eat on the sly.

  Anna shuffled and clumped along in those boy’s boots with an almost undetectable lurch as she shifted her weight from one leg to another. “Perfect thou my goings in thy paths,” she murmured, “that my footsteps be not moved.”

  “Do your knees hurt you?” Lib asked as they followed the track past fretful brown hens.

  “Not particularly,” said Anna, tilting her face up to catch the sun.

  “Are these all your father’s fields?”

  “Well, he rents them,” said the girl. “We’ve none of our own.”

  Lib hadn’t seen any hired men. “Does he do all the work himself?”

  “Pat helped, when he was still with us. This one’s for oats,” said Anna, pointing.

  A bedraggled scarecrow in brown trousers leaned sideways. Were these Malachy O’Donnell’s old clothes? Lib wondered.

  “And over there is hay. The rain usually spoils it, but not this year, it’s been so fine,” said Anna.

  Lib thought she recognized a wide square of low green: the longed-for potatoes.

  When they reached the lane, she turned in the direction she hadn’t yet been, away from the village. A sun-browned man was mending a stone wall in a desultory way.

  “God bless the work,” called Anna.

  “And you too,” he answered.

  “That’s our neighbour Mr. Corcoran,” she whispered to Lib. She bent down and tugged up a brownish stalk topped with starry yellow. Then a tall grass, dull purple at the top.