The Wonder(25)

Once Lib had finished, she tried the first chapter of a novel called Adam Bede. She was startled when the nun tapped on the door at one o’clock; she’d almost forgotten that her shift would end.

“Look, Sister,” said Anna, making her thaumatrope spin.

“What a thing!”

Lib could see she and the other nurse weren’t going to get a moment alone this time either. She stepped closer, till her face was at the side of the nun’s headdress, and whispered: “I’ve noted nothing untoward so far. You?”

A hesitation. “We’re not to confer.”

“Yes, but—”

“Dr. McBrearty was very firm that there should be no sharing of views.”

“I’m not looking for your views, Sister,” snapped Lib. “Only basic facts. Can you assure me that you’re keeping a careful note of anything excreted, for instance? Any solids, I mean.”

Very low: “There’s been nothing of that kind.”

Lib nodded. “I’ve explained to Mrs. O’Donnell that there’s to be no contact without supervision,” she went on. “One embrace at rising, say, and another when going to bed. Also, none of the family are to enter Anna’s room while she’s not there.”

The nun was like some undertaker’s hired mute.

Lib picked her way along the dirty lane, which was potholed with ovals of blue sky; last night’s rain. She was coming to the conclusion that without a fellow nurse working to Lib’s own high standards—Miss N.’s standards—the whole watch was flawed. For lack of due vigilance over a crafty child, all this trouble and expense might go to waste.

And yet Lib had seen no real evidence of craftiness in the girl yet. Except for the one vast lie, of course: the claim of living without food.

Manna from heaven, that’s what she’d forgotten to ask Sister Michael about. Lib might not have much faith in the nun’s judgment, but surely the woman would know her Bible?

It was almost hot this afternoon; Lib took off her cloak and carried it over her arm. She tugged at her collar and wished her uniform were less thick and scratchy.

In the room above the spirit grocery, she changed into a plain green costume. She couldn’t bear to stay in, not for a moment; she’d spent half the day shut up already.

Downstairs, two men were carrying an unmistakeable shape out of a passage. Lib recoiled.

“Beg your pardon, Mrs. Wright,” said Maggie Ryan, “they’ll have him out of your way in two ticks.”

Lib watched the men steer the unvarnished coffin around the counter.

“My father’s the undertaker too,” the girl explained, “on account of having the couple of gigs for hire.”

So the carriage outside the window stood in for a hearse as needed. Ryan’s combination of trades struck Lib as unsavoury. “A quiet place, this.”

Maggie nodded as the door swung shut behind the coffin. “There used to be twice as many of us before the bad time.”

Us, meaning the people in this village or in the county? Or the whole of Ireland, perhaps? The bad time, Lib assumed, was that terrible failure of the potato ten or fifteen years back. She tried to call up the details. All she could generally remember of old news was a flicker of headlines in grim type. When she was young, she’d never really studied the paper, only glanced at it. Folded the Times and laid it beside Wright’s plate, every morning, the year she’d been his wife.

She thought of the beggars. “On the drive here I saw many women alone with their children,” she mentioned to Maggie Ryan.

“Ah, lots of the men are gone for the season, just, harvesting over your way,” said Maggie.

Lib took her to mean England.

“But the most part of the young folk do have their hearts set on America, and then there’s no coming home.” She jerked her chin, as if to say good riddance to those young folk who weren’t anchored to this spot.

Judging from her face, Lib thought Maggie herself couldn’t have been more than twenty. “You wouldn’t consider it?”

“Sure there’s no hearth like your own, as they say.” Her tone more resigned than fond.

Lib asked her for directions to Dr. McBrearty’s.

His house was a substantial one at the end of a lane, some way out on the Athlone road. A maid as decrepit as her master showed Lib into the study. McBrearty whipped off his octagonal glasses as he stood up.

Vanity? she wondered. Did he fancy he looked younger without them?

“Good afternoon, Mrs. Wright. How are you?”

Irked, Lib thought of saying. Frustrated. Thwarted on all sides.

“Anything of an urgent nature to report?” he asked as they sat.

“Urgent? Not exactly.”

“No hint of fraud, then?”

“No positive evidence,” Lib corrected him. “But I thought you might have visited your patient to see for yourself.”

His sunken cheeks flushed. “Oh, I assure you, little Anna’s on my mind at all hours. In fact, I’m so very concerned for the watch that I’ve thought it best to absent myself so it can’t be insinuated afterwards that I exerted any influence over your findings.”

Lib let out a small sigh. McBrearty still seemed to be assuming that the watch would prove the little girl a modern-day miracle. “I’m concerned that Anna’s temperature seems low, especially in her extremities.”