The Wonder(38)

Anna wrestled with the thought, and finally shook her head.

“The dew,” said Lib.

“Oh! I should have known.”

“It’s so small, nobody remembers it.” She thought of the manna story: a dew lay round about the camp and covered the face of the earth.

“Another,” begged Anna.

“I can’t recall another just now,” said Lib.

The girl walked in silence for a minute, almost limping. Was she in pain?

Lib was tempted to take her elbow to help her over a rough patch, but no. Simply to observe, she reminded herself.

Up ahead was someone she took for Malachy O’Donnell, but as they neared he turned out to be a bent-looking older man. He was cutting black rectangles out of the ground and making a stack; turf for burning, she assumed.

“God bless the work,” Anna called to him.

He nodded back. His spade was a shape Lib had never seen before, the blade bent into wings.

“Is that another prayer you’re obliged to say?” she asked the child when they’d passed.

“Blessing the work? Yes, otherwise he might be hurt.”

“What, he’d be wounded that you didn’t think of him?” asked Lib with a touch of mockery.

Anna looked puzzled. “No, he might cut a toe off with the foot slane.”

Ah, so it was a sort of protective magic.

The girl was singing now, in her breathy voice.

Deep in thy wounds, Lord,

Hide and shelter me,

So shall I never,

Never part from thee.

The stirring tune didn’t fit the morbid words, in Lib’s view. The very idea of hiding deep inside a wound, like a maggot— “There’s Dr. McBrearty,” said Anna.

The old man was scuttling towards them from the cabin, lapels askew. He took off his hat to Lib, then turned to the child. “Your mother told me I’d find you out taking the air, Anna. Delighted to see you with roses in your cheeks.”

She was rather red in the face, but from the exertion of walking, Lib thought; roses was stretching a point.

“Still generally well?” McBrearty murmured to Lib.

Miss N. was very stern on the subject of discussing the ill in their hearing. “You go on ahead of us,” Lib suggested to Anna. “Why don’t you pick some flowers for your room?”

The child obeyed. Lib kept her eyes on her, though. It occurred to her that there might be berries around, unripe nuts, even… Might a hysteric—if that’s what Anna was—snatch mouthfuls of food without being conscious of what she did?

“I don’t quite know how to answer your question,” she told the doctor. Thinking of Standish’s phrase half starving.

McBrearty poked the soft ground with his cane.

Lib hesitated, then made herself say the name. “Did Dr. Standish get a chance to speak to you last night after he left Anna?” She was ready with her best arguments against forcible feeding.

The old man’s face screwed up as if he’d bitten into something sour. “His tone was most ungentlemanly. After I did him the politeness of letting him, of all the petitioners, into the cabin to see the girl!”

She waited.

But clearly McBrearty was not going to report the scolding he’d received. “Is her respiration still healthy?” he asked instead.

Lib nodded.

“Heart sounds, pulse?”

“Yes,” she conceded.

“Sleeping well?”

Another nod.

“She seems cheerful,” he noted, “and her voice is still strong. No vomiting or diarrhoea?”

“Well, I’d hardly expect that in someone who’s not eating.”

The old man’s watery eyes lit up. “So you believe she is indeed living without—”

Lib interrupted him. “I mean, not taking in enough to lead to any kind of voiding. Anna produces no excrement, and very little urine,” she pointed out. “This suggests to me that she’s getting some food—or was until the watch began, more likely—but not sufficient for there to be any waste.” Should Lib mention her notion about night-feedings to which Anna had been oblivious all these months? She quailed; it suddenly sounded as implausible as any of the old man’s own theories. “Don’t you think her eyes are beginning to bulge even more?” she asked. “Her skin’s covered with bruises and crusty patches, and her gums bleed. Scurvy, perhaps, I was thinking. Or pellagra, even. Certainly she seems anaemic.”

“Good Mrs. Wright.” McBrearty gouged the soft grass with his cane. “Are we beginning to stray beyond our remit?” An indulgent father reproving a child.

“I beg your pardon, Doctor,” she said stiffly.

“Leave such mysteries to those who’ve been trained for them.”

Lib would have given a lot to know where McBrearty had been trained, and how thoroughly, and whether it had been in this century or the last.

“Your job is simply to observe.”

But there was nothing simple about such a task; Lib knew that now as she hadn’t three days ago.

“’Tis her!” A screech in the distance. It was coming from a top-heavy wagon parked outside the O’Donnells’. Several of the passengers were waving.

Besieged already, even this early in the day. Where had Anna strayed? Lib’s head whipped around till she found the girl, inhaling the scent of some blossom. She couldn’t bear the prospect of the fawning, the flattery, the intrusive questions. “I must take her inside, Doctor.” She ran over and seized Anna’s arm.