The Wonder(37)

Did William Byrne have any such right? Lib shouldn’t have been talking to him so frankly in the dining room last night—or at all, probably.

She glanced up and jumped, because the child was looking right at her. “Good morning, Anna.” It came out too fast, like an admission of guilt.

“Good morning, Mrs. Whatever-Your-Name-Is.”

That was impudence, but Lib found herself laughing. “Elizabeth, if you must know.” It had a strange ring to it. Lib’s husband of eleven months had been the last to use that name, and at the hospital she was Mrs. Wright.

“Good morning, Mrs. Elizabeth,” said Anna, trying it out.

That sounded like some other woman entirely. “No one calls me that.”

“Then what do they call you?” asked Anna, getting up on her elbows and rubbing sleep out of one eye.

Lib was already regretting having given her first name, but then, she wouldn’t be here for long, so really, what did it matter? “Mrs. Wright, or Nurse, or ma’am. Did you sleep well?”

The girl struggled into a sitting position. “I have slept and have taken my rest,” she murmured. “So what do your family call you?”

Lib was disconcerted by this rapid switching between Scripture and ordinary conversation. “I have none left.” It was technically true; her sister, if still living, had chosen to go beyond Lib’s reach.

Anna’s eyes grew huge.

In childhood, Lib remembered, family seemed as necessary and inescapable as a ring of mountains. One never imagined that as the decades went by, one might drift into an unbounded country. It struck Lib now how alone in the world she was.

“But when you were little,” said Anna. “Were you Eliza? Elsie? Effie?”

Lib made a joke of it. “What’s this, the tale of Rumpelstiltskin?”

“Who’s that?”

“A little goblin man who—”

But Rosaleen O’Donnell was hurrying in now to greet her daughter, not so much as glancing at the nurse. That broad back like a shield thrown in front of the child, that dark head bent over the smaller one. Doting syllables; Gaelic, no doubt. The whole performance set Lib’s teeth on edge.

She supposed that when a mother had only a solitary child left at home, all her passion was funnelled into that one. Had Pat and Anna had other brothers or sisters? she wondered.

Anna was kneeling beside her mother now, hands pressed together, eyes shut. “I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word, and deed, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.” On each fault, the child’s closed fist rapped her chest.

“Amen,” intoned Mrs. O’Donnell.

Anna began another prayer: “Maiden mother, meek and mild, take oh take me for thy child.”

Lib considered the long morning ahead. Later on she’d have to keep the girl out of sight in case of would-be visitors. “Anna,” she said the moment the mother had gone back into the kitchen, “shall we go out for an early walk?”

“’Tis barely day.”

Lib hadn’t even taken Anna’s pulse yet, but that would wait. “Why not? Get dressed and put on your cloak.”

The girl crossed herself and whispered the Dorothy prayer as she pulled her nightdress over her head. Was that a new bruise on her shoulder blade, greenish brown? Lib made a memorandum of it.

In the kitchen, Rosaleen O’Donnell said it was still dim out and they’d fall into cowpats or break their ankles.

“I’ll take perfectly good care of your daughter,” said Lib, and pushed the half-door open.

She stepped out, with Anna behind her, and the chickens clucked and scattered. The moist breeze was delicious.

They set off behind the cabin this time, on a faint path between two fields. Anna walked slowly and unevenly, remarking on everything. Wasn’t it funny that skylarks were never to be spotted on the ground, only when they shot high up into the sky to sing? Oh, look, that mountain over there with the sun coming up behind it was the one she called her whale.

Lib saw no mountains in this flattened landscape. Anna was pointing to a low ridge; no doubt the inhabitants of the dead centre of Ireland saw every ripple as a peak.

Anna sometimes fancied she could actually glimpse the wind; did Mrs. Something-Like-Elizabeth ever think that?

“Call me Mrs. Wright—”

“Or Nurse, or ma’am,” said Anna with a giggle.

Full of vitality, Lib thought; how on earth could this child be half starving? Someone was still sustaining Anna.

The hedgerows sparkled now. “‘Which is the broadest water,’” Lib asked, “‘and the least jeopardy to pass over?’”

“Is this a riddle?”

“Of course, one I learned when I was a little girl.”

“Hm. ‘The broadest water,’” Anna repeated.

“You’re imagining it like the sea, aren’t you? Don’t.”

“I’ve seen the sea in pictures.”

To grow up on this small island and yet never to have been to its edge, even…

“But great rivers with my own eyes,” said Anna, boasting.

“Oh yes?” said Lib.

“The Tullamore, and the Brosna too, the time we went to the fair at Mullingar.”

Lib recognized the name of the Midlands town where William Byrne’s horse had been lamed. Had he stayed on today at Ryan’s, in the room across the passage from hers, in hopes of learning more about Anna’s case? Or had his satirical dispatches from the scene been enough for the Irish Times? “The water in my riddle doesn’t look like the widest of rivers, even. Imagine it spread all over the ground, but no danger in crossing it.”