The Wonder(14)

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

“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?”