The Wonder(26)

“Interesting.” McBrearty rubbed his chin.

“Her skin’s not good,” Lib went on, “nor her nails, nor her hair.” This sounded like petty stuff from a magazine of beauty. “And there’s a downy fuzz growing all over her. But what worries me most is the swelling in her legs—her face and hands, too, but the lower legs are the worst. She’s resorted to wearing her brother’s old boots.”

“Mm, yes, Anna’s been dropsical for some time. However, she doesn’t complain of pain.”

“Well. She doesn’t complain at all.”

The doctor nodded as if that reassured him. “Digitalis is a proven remedy for fluid retention, but of course she won’t take anything by mouth. One might resort to a dry diet—”

“Limit her liquids even further?” Lib’s voice shot upwards. “She has only a few spoonfuls of water a day as it is.”

Dr. McBrearty plucked at his side-whiskers. “I could reduce her legs mechanically, I suppose.”

Bleeding, did he mean? Leeching? Lib wished she hadn’t said a word to this antediluvian.

“But that has its own risks. No, no, on the whole, safer to watch and wait.”

Lib was still uneasy. Then again, if Anna was imperiling her own health, whose fault was it but her own? Or the fault of whoever was putting her up to this, Lib supposed.

“She doesn’t look like a child who hasn’t eaten in four months, does she?” the doctor asked.

“Far from it.”

“My sense of it exactly! A wonderful anomaly.”

The old man had misunderstood her. He was wilfully blind to the obvious conclusion: the child was getting fed somehow. “Doctor, if Anna were really taking no nourishment at all, don’t you think she’d be prostrated by now? Of course you must have seen many famished patients during the potato blight, far more than I,” Lib added, as a sop to his expertise.

McBrearty shook his head. “As it happens I was still in Gloucestershire then. I inherited this estate only five years ago and couldn’t rent it out, so I thought I’d return and practice here.” He rose to his feet as if to say their interview was over.

“Also,” she went on in a rush, “I can’t say I have the utmost confidence in my fellow nurse. It will be no easy task to maintain complete alertness during night shifts in particular.”

“But Sister Michael should be an old hand at that,” said McBrearty. “She nursed at the Charitable Infirmary in Dublin for twelve years.”

Oh. Why had nobody thought to tell Lib this?

“And at the House of Mercy, they rise for Night Office at midnight, I believe, and again for Lauds at dawn.”

“I see,” said Lib, mortified. “Well. The real problem is that the conditions at the cabin are most unscientific. I have no way to weigh the child, and there are no lamps to provide adequate light. Anna’s room can easily be accessed from the kitchen, so anyone might go in when I take her out walking. Without your authority, Mrs. O’Donnell won’t even let me shut the door to oglers, which makes it impossible to watch the child rigourously enough. Could I have it in your hand that there are to be no visitors admitted?”

“Quite, yes.” McBrearty wiped his pen on a cloth and took up a fresh page. He fumbled in his breast pocket.

“The mother may resist turning away the mob, of course, on account of the loss of money.”

The old man blinked his rheumy eyes and kept digging in his pocket. “Oh, but the donations all go into the poor box that Mr. Thaddeus gave the O’Donnells. You don’t understand these people if you think they’d keep a farthing.”

Lib’s mouth set. “Are you by any chance looking for your spectacles?” She pointed to where they lay among his papers.

“Ah, very good.” He jammed the side arms over his ears and began to write. “How do you find Anna otherwise, may I ask?”

Otherwise? “In spirits, you mean?”

“In, well, in character, I suppose.”

Lib was at a loss. A nice girl. But a cheat of the deepest dye. Anna had to be. Didn’t she? “Generally calm,” she said instead. “What Miss Nightingale used to describe as an accumulative temperament, the kind that gathers in impressions gradually.”

McBrearty brightened up at the name, so much so that Lib wished she hadn’t used it. He signed the note, folded it, and held it out.

“Could you have it sent over to the O’Donnells’, please, to put a stop to these visits this very afternoon?”

“Oh, certainly.” He tugged off his glasses again, folded them in half with tremulous fingers. “Fascinating letter in the latest Telegraph, by the by.” McBrearty stirred the papers on his desk without finding what he was looking for. “It mentions a number of previous cases of ‘fasting girls’ who’ve lived without food—have been said to do so, at least,” he corrected himself, “in Britain and abroad over the centuries.”

Really? Lib had never heard of the phenomenon.

“The writer suggests that they might possibly have been, ah—well, not to put too fine a point on it—reabsorbing, subsisting on their own menses.”

What a revolting theory. Besides, this child was only eleven. “In my view, Anna is a long way from being pubescent.”