The Wonder(57)

Could eating little or nothing open the pores? Lib wondered. Sharpen the senses?

“I see my feet,” said Anna, “but as if they belong to somebody else.” Looking down at her brother’s worn boots.

Lib tightened her grip on the girl.

A black-jacketed silhouette at the end of the path, out of sight of the cabin: William Byrne. He lifted his hat and unleashed his curls. “Mrs. Wright.”

“Ah, I believe I know this gentleman,” remarked Lib as casually as she could. Thinking, did she know him at all, really? The committee could dismiss her for arranging this interview if any of its members heard about it. “Mr. Byrne, this is Anna O’Donnell.”

“Good morning, Anna.” He shook her hand. Lib saw him eyeing the bloated fingers.

She began with bland nothings about the weather, her mind skittering along underneath. Where could the three walk to run the lowest risk of being spotted? How soon would the family come back from mass? She steered Byrne and Anna away from the village and took a cart track that looked little used.

“Is Mr. Byrne a visitor, Mrs. Lib?”

Startled by the child’s question, she shook her head. She couldn’t have Anna reporting to her parents that the nurse had broken her own rule.

“I’m in these parts just for a little while, to see the sights,” said Byrne.

“With your children?” asked Anna.

“Sadly, I have none, as yet.”

“Have you a wife?”

“Anna!”

“That’s all right,” Byrne told Lib, and he turned back to Anna. “No, my dear. I very nearly had one once, but at the last minute, the lady changed her mind.”

Lib looked away, at a stretch of bog studded with shining puddles.

“Oh,” said Anna sorrowfully.

Byrne shrugged. “She’s settled in Cork, and good riddance to her.”

Lib liked him for that.

Byrne found out that Anna loved flowers, which was a very great coincidence, he told her, because he did too. He broke off a red stem of dogwood with one last white bloom and gave it to her.

“At the mission,” she told him, “we learned that the cross was made of dogwood, so the tree only grows short and twisted now because of being sorry.”

He bent right down to hear her.

“The flowers are like a cross, see? Two long petals, two short,” said Anna. “And those brown bits are the nail prints, and that’s the crown of thorns in the middle.”

“Fascinating,” said Byrne.

Lib was glad she’d risked this meeting after all. Before, he’d been able only to crack jokes about the case; now he was getting a sense of the real girl.

Byrne told a story of a Persian king who’d halted his army for days just to admire a plane tree. He broke off to point out a grouse running by, gingery body vivid against the grasses. “See its red eyebrows, like mine?”

“Redder than yours.” Anna laughed.

He’d been to Persia himself, he told her, and Egypt too.

“Mr. Byrne is quite a traveller,” said Lib.

“Oh, I’ve thought of going farther,” he said.

She looked sideways at him.

“Settling in Canada, perhaps, or the States, even Australia or New Zealand. Wider horizons.”

“But to sever all your connections, professional as well as personal…” Lib fumbled for words. “Wouldn’t it be like a little death?”

Byrne nodded. “I believe emigration generally is that. The price of a new life.”

“Would you like to hear a riddle?” Anna asked him suddenly.

“Very much,” he told her.

She repeated the ones about the wind, paper, and flame; she turned to Lib only to confirm one or two words. Byrne failed to guess any of them and rapped himself on the skull on hearing the answer every time.

He tested Anna on birdsongs next. She correctly identified the melodic sobbing of a curlew and a drumming made by the wings of what she called a bog bleater, which turned out to be an Irishism for snipe.

Finally Anna admitted that she was a little tired. Lib gave her a searching look and felt her forehead, which was still stone cool, despite the sunshine and exertion.

“Would you like a little rest here to fortify you for the walk back?” asked Byrne.

“Yes, please.”

He took off his coat with a flap of the tails and spread it out on a large flat rock for the child.

“Sit down,” said Lib, crouching to pat the brown lining, still warm from his back.

Anna subsided onto it and stroked the satin with one finger.

“I’ll have my eye on you all the time,” Lib promised the girl. Then she and Byrne stepped away.

The two of them drifted till they reached a broken wall. They stood close enough that Lib could feel the heat coming off his shirtsleeve like a vapour. “Well?”

“Well what, Mrs. Lib?” His voice was oddly tight.

“What do you make of her?”

“She’s delightful.” Byrne spoke so quietly that she had to lean in to make it out.

“Isn’t she?”

“A delightful dying child.”

Lib was suddenly winded. She looked over her shoulder at Anna, a tidy figure on one edge of the man’s long jacket.

“Are you blind?” asked Byrne, still as softly as if he were saying something kind. “The girl’s wasting away in front of you.”