The Wonder(55)

“My feet.”

“What about them?”

“I don’t feel them,” whispered Anna.

The tiny toes under the blanket were icy to the touch. Such poor circulation in someone so young. “Here, climb out for a minute to get the blood moving again.” The girl did, slowly and stiffly. Lib helped her to cross the room. “Left, right, like a soldier.”

Anna managed a clumsy march on the spot. Her eyes were on the open window. “Lots of stars tonight.”

“There are always just as many, if only we could see them,” Lib told her. She pointed out the Plough, the North Star, Cassiopeia.

“Do you know them all?” asked Anna, marvelling.

“Well, just our constellations.”

“Which ones are ours?”

“Those easily seen from the Northern Hemisphere, I mean,” said Lib. “They’re different in the South.”

“Really?” The girl’s teeth were chattering, so Lib helped her back into bed.

Wrapped in flannels, the brick was still hoarding heat from the fire in which it had sat all evening. She tucked it under the child’s feet.

“But it’s yours,” said the girl, shuddering.

“I don’t need it on a mild summer night. Do you feel the warmth yet?”

Anna shook her head. “I’m sure I will, though.”

Lib looked down at the small figure lying as straight as a Crusader on a tomb. “Go back to sleep, now.”

Still, Anna’s eyes stayed wide. She whispered her Dorothy prayer, the one she said so often that Lib barely noticed it anymore. Then she sang some hymns, barely above a whisper.

The night is dark,

And I am far from home,

Lead thou me on.

On Sunday morning Lib should have been catching up on her sleep, but the clanging church bells made that impossible. She lay awake, stiff-limbed, going through everything she’d learned about Anna O’Donnell. So many peculiar symptoms, but they didn’t constitute anything Lib recognized as a disease. She would have to speak to Dr. McBrearty again, and this time pin him down.

At one o’clock, the nun reported that the girl had been distressed at not being allowed to go to mass but had agreed to recite the liturgy for the day in her missal with Sister Michael instead.

For their walk, Lib set a very slow pace so as not to overtire Anna as she had the other day. She scanned the horizon before they set out to make sure there were no gawkers nearby.

They picked their way across the farmyard, their boots slithering. “If you were looking stronger,” she said, “we might have gone a half a mile that way”—pointing west—“as far as a very curious hawthorn I’ve found with strips of cloth tied all over it.”

Anna nodded with enthusiasm. “The rag tree at our holy well.”

“It didn’t have what I’d call a well, exactly, just a tiny pool.” Lib remembered the tarry whiff of the water; perhaps it had some mildly disinfectant power? Then again, there was no use looking for a seed of science in a superstition. “Are the rags some kind of offering?”

“They’re for dipping in the water and rubbing on a sore or an ache,” said Anna. “After, you tie the rag on the tree, see?”

Lib shook her head.

“The badness stays on the rag, and you leave it behind. Once it rots away, what was ailing you will be gone too.”

Meaning that time heals all ills, Lib supposed. A cunning legend, this one, because it would take so long for cloth to disintegrate, the sufferer’s complaint would be almost sure to be cured by then.

Anna stopped to stroke a vivid cushion of moss on a wall, or perhaps to catch her breath. A pair of birds picked at red currants in the hedge.

Lib pulled a bunch of the gleaming globes and held them up close to the child’s face. “Do you remember the taste of these?”

“I think so.” Anna’s lips were just a hand span from the currants.

“Doesn’t your mouth water?” asked Lib, her voice seductive.

The girl shook her head.

“God made these berries, didn’t he?” Your God, Lib had almost said.

“God made everything,” said Anna.

Lib crushed a red currant between her own teeth and juice flooded her mouth so fast it almost spilled. She’d never tasted anything so dazzling.

Anna picked one small red ball from the bunch.

Lib’s heart thudded loud enough to hear. Was this the moment? As easy as that? Ordinary life, as close as these dangling berries.

But the girl held out her palm quite flat, the currant in the middle, and waited till the bravest of the birds dived for it.

On the way back to the cabin, Anna moved slowly, as if she were walking through water.

Lib was so tired, stumbling back to the spirit grocery after nine that Sunday evening, she felt sure she’d sleep as soon as her head touched the pillow.

Instead her mind sprang to life like a buzzing hornet. It weighed on her that she might have misjudged William Byrne yesterday afternoon. What had he done but ask, one more time, for an interview with Anna? He hadn’t actually insulted Lib; it was she who’d leapt to conclusions so touchily. If he really found her company so tedious, wouldn’t he have kept their conversations brief and focused on Anna O’Donnell?

His room was just across the passage, but he probably hadn’t gone to bed yet. Lib wished she could talk to him—as an intelligent Roman Catholic—about the child’s last meal having been Holy Communion. The fact was, she was getting desperate for someone else’s opinion of the girl. Someone whose mind Lib trusted; not Standish with his hostility, McBrearty with his fey hopefulness, the blinkered nun or bland priest, the besotted and probably corrupt parents. Someone who could tell Lib if she was losing her grip on reality.