The Wonder(46)

A bird with a curved bill stalked past and sent up a high-pitched complaint. Small white tufts nodded in ones and twos across the wet ground. When Lib bent down to look at a curious lichen, it proved to have horns, like those of a minuscule deer.

A chopping sound came from a great gouge in the ground. When Lib approached and peered in, she saw the hole was half full of brown water, and there was a man in it up to his chest, clinging by one hooked elbow to a sort of rudimentary ladder. “Wait!” she cried.

He gawked up at Lib.

“I’ll be back with help as soon as I can,” she told him.

“I’m grand, missus.”

“But—” She gestured at the engulfing water.

“Just taking a bit of a rest.”

Lib had misunderstood again. Her cheeks scorched.

He swung his weight and gripped the ladder with his other arm now. “You’ll be the English nurse.”

“That’s right.”

“Don’t they cut turf over there?”

Only then did she recognize the winged spade hanging from his ladder. “Not in my part of the country. May I ask, why do you go down so low?”

“Ah, the scraw at the top’s no good.” He gestured at the rim of the hole. “Just moss for bedding animals and dressing wounds, like.”

Lib couldn’t imagine inserting this rotting matter into any wound, even on a battlefield.

“For turves for burning, you have to dig down the length of a man or two.”

“How interesting.” Lib was trying to seem practical, but she sounded more like a silly lady at a party.

“Are you lost, missus?”

“Not at all. Just getting my constitutional. Exercise,” she added, in case the turf cutter was unfamiliar with the word.

He nodded. “Have you a slice of bread in your pocket?”

She stepped back, discomfited. Was the fellow a beggar? “I do not. Nor any money either.”

“Ah, money’s no good. You want a bit of bread to keep off the other crowd when you’re out walking.”

“The other crowd?”

“The little folk,” he said.

More fairy nonsense, evidently. Lib turned to go.

“You’ll have been up the green road?”

Another supernatural reference? She turned back. “I’m afraid I don’t know what that means.”

“Sure you’re on it, nearly.”

Looking the way the turf cutter pointed, Lib was startled to spot a path. “Thank you.”

“How’s the girleen doing?”

She almost answered with an automatic Well enough but stopped herself in time. “I’m not at liberty to discuss the case. Good day.”

Up close, the green road was a proper cart track paved with crushed rock that began all at once in the middle of the bog. Perhaps it led here from the next village, and the final section—the one that would bring it all the way down to the O’Donnells’ village—hadn’t been built yet? Nothing particularly green about it, yet the name promised something. Lib set out at a brisk pace on the soft verge where occasional flowers bloomed.

Half an hour later, the track had zigzagged up the side of the low rise and down again without any obvious reason. Lib clicked her tongue with irritation. Was a straight path to walk too much to ask? Finally it seemed to turn back on itself, disheartened, and the surface began to break up. The so-called road petered out as arbitrarily as it had begun, its stones swallowed up by weeds.

What a rabble, the Irish. Shiftless, thriftless, hopeless, hapless, always brooding over past wrongs. Their tracks going nowhere, their trees hung with putrid rags.

Lib stomped all the way back. The wet had slanted under her umbrella and misted her cloak. She was determined to have a word with the fellow who’d set her on that pointless course, but when she got to that bog hole, all it contained was water. Unless she’d confused it with another one? Beside the great bite out of the earth, turf sods lay on drying racks in the rain.

On the way down to Ryan’s, she spotted what she thought was a tiny orchid. Perhaps she could pick it for Anna. She stepped onto an emerald patch to reach the flower and too late felt the moss give way underfoot.

Thrown headlong, Lib found herself groveling facedown in slime. Although she got up on her knees almost at once, she was soaked through. When she hauled up her skirt and set one foot down, it sank through the peat. Like a creature caught in a snare, she clawed her way out, panting.

Staggering back down the lane, Lib was just relieved that the spirit grocery was close by so she wouldn’t have to walk the length of the village street in this state.

Her landlord, in the doorway, raised his bushy eyebrows.

“Treacherous, your bogs, Mr. Ryan.” Her skirt dripped. “Do many drown in them?”

He snorted, which brought on a coughing fit. “Only if they’re soft in the head,” he said when he could speak again, “or loaded with drink on a moonless night.”

By the time Lib had dried herself off and put on her spare uniform, it was five past one. She strode as fast as she could to the O’Donnells’. She’d have run if it hadn’t been beneath the dignity of a nurse. To be twenty minutes late for her shift, after all her insistence on high standards…

Where the laundry tub had stood this morning was an ashy puddle with a four-footed wooden dolly laid down beside it. Sheets and clothes were draped over bushes and pegged on a rope strung between the cabin and a crooked tree.