The Wonder(53)

Lib drew herself up. He made it sound as if she were some crazed witch invoking Lucifer on the moors. “What entitles you to assume—”

He interrupted. “You asked the question, ma’am. True believers never ask.”

The man had a point. “I believe in what I can see.”

“Nothing but the evidence of your senses, then?” One ruddy eyebrow tilted.

“Trial and error. Science,” she said. “It’s all we can rely on.”

“Was it being widowed that did that?”

Blood boiled up from her throat to her hairline. “Who’s been giving you information about me? And why must it always be presumed that a woman’s views are based on personal considerations?”

“The war, then?”

His intelligence cut to the quick. “At Scutari,” said Lib, “I found myself thinking, If the Creator can’t prevent such abominations, what good is he?”

“And if he can but won’t, he must be a devil.”

“I never said that.”

“Hume did,” said Byrne.

She didn’t know the name.

“A long-dead philosopher,” he told her. “Finer minds than yours have reached the same impasse. It’s a great puzzle.”

The only sounds the tread of their boots on the dried mud and the soft clopping of Polly’s hooves.

“So what possessed you to go to the Crimea in the first place?”

Lib half smiled. “A newspaper article, as it happens.”

“Russell, in the Times?”

“I don’t know the individual—”

“Billy Russell’s a Dubliner like myself,” said Byrne. “Those dispatches of his from the front changed everything. Made it impossible to turn a blind eye.”

“All those men rotting away,” said Lib, nodding, “and no one to help.”

“What was the worst of it?”

Byrne’s bluntness made her flinch. But she answered, “The paperwork.”

“How so?”

“To get a soldier a bed, say, one took a coloured slip to the ward officer and then to the purveyor to have it countersigned, whereupon—and only then—the commissariat would issue the bed,” Lib told him. “For a liquid or meat diet, or medicine, or even for an urgently required opiate, one had to bring a different-coloured form to a doctor and persuade him to find the time to make requisition of the relevant steward and have it countersigned by two other officers. By which point, the patient would very likely be dead.”

“Christ.” He didn’t apologize for swearing.

Lib couldn’t remember the last time anyone had listened to her with such attention. “Unwarranted items was the commissariat term for those things that, by definition, couldn’t be supplied because the men were supposed to have brought their own in their knapsacks: shirts, forks, and so forth. But in some cases the knapsacks had never been unloaded from the ships.”

“Bureaucrats,” murmured Byrne. “A phalanx of cold-blooded little Pilates, washing their hands of it all.”

“We had three spoons to feed a hundred men.” Only on the word spoons did her voice wobble. “There were rumours of a hoard in some supply cupboard, but we never did find it. Finally Miss Nightingale thrust her own purse into my hand and sent me to the market to buy a hundred spoons.”

The Irishman half laughed.

That day, Lib had been in too much of a hurry to ask herself why, out of all of them, Miss N. had sent her. She realized now that it hadn’t been a matter of nursing skills but of reliability. It occurred to Lib what an honour it was to have been chosen for that errand—better than any medal pinned on her cloak.

They walked in silence, very far from the village now. “Perhaps I’m a child, or a fool, that I still believe,” said William Byrne. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, et cetera.”

“I didn’t mean to imply—”

“No, I admit it: I can’t face horror without the shield of consolation.”

“Oh, I’d take consolation if I could get it,” said Lib under her breath.

Their footfalls, and Polly’s, and a bird making a clinking sound in the hedge.

“Haven’t people in all times and places cried out to their Maker?” asked Byrne. Sounding, for a moment, pompous and young.

“Which only proves we wish for one,” muttered Lib. “Doesn’t the very intensity of that longing make it all the more likely that it’s only a dream?”

“Oh, that’s cold.”

She sucked her lip.

“What about our dead?” asked Byrne. “The sense that they’re not quite gone, is that mere wishful thinking?”

Memory seized Lib like a cramp. The weight in her arms; sweet pale flesh, still warm, not moving. Blinded by tears, she stumbled forward, trying to escape him.

Byrne caught up to her and took her elbow.

She couldn’t explain herself. She bit down on her lip and tasted blood.

“I’m so very sorry,” he said, as if he understood.

Lib shook him off, folded her arms around herself. Tears raced down the oilproof cloth of the cloak over her arm.

“Forgive me. Talk’s my trade,” he said. “But I should learn to shut my mouth.”