The Wonder(48)

Malachy came in for a few words with his daughter. “Which are these, now?”

Anna introduced him to the flowers in her jar: bog asphodel, bog bean, cross-leaved heath, purple moor grass, butterwort.

His hand absentmindedly followed the curve of her ear.

Did he notice the thinning hair? Lib wondered. The scaly patches, the down on her face, the distended limbs? Or was Anna always the same in her father’s eyes?

No knocks at the cabin door that afternoon; perhaps the constant rain kept the curious at bay. Anna seemed muted after her encounter with the priest. She sat with a hymnbook open in her lap.

Five days, thought Lib, staring so hard her eyes prickled. Could a stubborn child possibly last five days on sips of water?

Kitty brought Lib’s tray in at a quarter to four. Cabbage, turnips, and the inevitable oatcakes—but Lib was hungry, so she set to as if it were the finest of spreads. The oatcakes were slightly blackened this time, and raw in the middle. But she forced them down. She’d cleared half her plate by the time she even remembered Anna, not three feet away, muttering what Lib still thought of as the Dorothy prayer. That was what hunger could do: blind you to everything else. The wad of oats rose in Lib’s throat.

A nurse she’d known at Scutari had passed some time on a plantation in Mississippi and said the most dreadful thing was how quickly one stopped noticing the collars and chains. One could grow used to anything.

Lib stared at her plate now and imagined seeing it as Anna claimed she saw it: a horseshoe, or a log, or a rock. Impossible. She tried again, picturing the vegetables in a detached way, as if in a frame. Now this was only a photograph of a greasy plate, and after all, one wouldn’t put one’s tongue to an image or take a bite out of a page. Lib added a layer of glass, then another frame and another sheet of glass, boxing the thing away. Not for eating.

But the cabbage was an old friend; its hot, savoury scent spoke to her. She forked it into her mouth.

Anna watched the rain, face almost pressed to the smeary window.

Miss N. held passionate views on the importance of sunshine to the sick, Lib remembered. Like plants, they shrank without it. Which made her think of McBrearty and his arcane theory about living off light.

The skies finally cleared around six, and Lib decided there was little risk of visitors this late, so she took Anna out for a turn around the farmyard, wrapped up well in two shawls.

The girl held out her swollen hand to a brown butterfly that jerked about and wouldn’t light on it. “Isn’t that cloud over there exactly like a seal?”

Lib squinted at it. “You’ve never seen a real seal, I think, Anna.”

“Real in a picture, I have.”

Children would like clouds, of course: formless, or, rather, ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic. This little girl’s inchoate mind had never been put in order. No wonder she’d fallen prey to an ambition as fantastical as a life free of appetite.

When they came back in, a tall, bearded man was smoking on a stool in the best chair. He turned to beam at Anna.

“You let a stranger in the minute my back was turned?” Lib asked Rosaleen O’Donnell in a sharp whisper.

“Sure John Flynn’s no stranger.” The mother didn’t lower her voice. “He has a fine big farm up the road, and doesn’t he often stop in of an evening to bring Malachy the paper?”

“No visitors,” Lib reminded her.

The voice that emerged from that beard was very deep. “I’m a member of the committee that’s paying your wages, Mrs. Wright.”

Wrong-footed again. “I beg your pardon, sir. I didn’t realize.”

“Will you have a drop of whiskey, John?” Mrs. O’Donnell went for the little bottle kept for visitors in the nook beside the fire.

“I won’t, not at the minute. Anna, how are you this evening?” asked Flynn in a soft voice, beckoning the child closer.

“Very well,” Anna assured him.

“Aren’t you marvellous?” The farmer’s eyes looked glassy, as if he were seeing a vision. One massive hand stretched out as if he wanted to stroke the child’s head. “You give us all hope. The very thing we need in these depressed times,” he told her. “A beacon shining across these fields. Across the whole benighted island!”

Anna stood on one leg, squirming.

“Would you say a prayer with me?” he asked.

“She needs to get out of these damp things,” said Lib.

“Whisper one for me, then, when you’re going to sleep,” he called as Lib hurried the child towards the bedroom.

“I will of course, Mr. Flynn,” said Anna over her shoulder.

“Bless you!”

So poky and dim in there without the lamp. “It’ll be dark soon,” said Lib.

“He that followeth me walketh not in darkness,” quoted Anna, undoing her cuffs.

“You may as well put your nightclothes on now.”

“All right, Mrs. Elizabeth. Or is it Eliza, maybe?” Fatigue made the girl’s grin lopsided.

Lib concentrated on Anna’s tiny buttons.

“Or is it Lizzy? I like Lizzy.”

“It’s not Lizzy,” said Lib.

“Izzy? Ibby?”

“Iddly-diddly!”

Anna spilled over with laughter. “I’ll call you that, then, Mrs. Iddly-Diddly.”