The Wonder(58)

She was almost stuttering. “Mr. Byrne. How, how—”

“I suppose that’s exactly it: you’re too close up to see it.”

“How can you—what makes you so sure?”

“I was sent to study famine when I was only five years older than her,” he reminded her in the quietest of snarls.

“Anna isn’t… her belly’s round,” Lib argued weakly.

“Some starve fast, some slow,” said Byrne. “The slow kind swell up, but it’s only water, there’s nothing there.” He kept his eyes on the green field. “That waddle, the ghastly fuzz on her face. And have you smelled her breath lately?”

Lib tried to remember. That wasn’t one of the measurements she’d been taught to record.

“It goes vinegary as the body turns on itself; eating itself up, I suppose.”

Lib looked over and saw that the child had crumpled like a leaf. She ran.

“I didn’t faint,” Anna kept insisting as William Byrne carried her home, blanketed in his jacket. “I was just resting.” Eyes looking as deep as bog holes.

Lib’s throat was constricted with fright. A delightful dying child. He was right, damn the man.

“Let me in,” Byrne told Lib outside the cabin. “You can tell the parents I happened to be passing and came to your aid.”

“Get away from here.” She wrenched Anna out of his arms.

Only when he’d turned towards the lane did Lib dip her nose to the girl’s face and inhale. There it was: a faint, awful fruitiness.

When Lib woke that Monday afternoon to the rattling of rain on Ryan’s roof, she was groggy. A rectangle of white at the base of the door confused her eye; she thought it was light, and only when she dragged herself out of bed did it turn into a page. Handwritten, hastily but without mistakes.

A chance and fleeting encounter with the Fasting Girl herself has at last given this correspondent an opportunity to form a personal opinion on this most heated of controversies, as to whether she is being used to perpetrate a nefarious fraud upon the public.

First, it must be said that Anna O’Donnell is an exceptional maiden. Despite having received only a limited education at the village’s National School, under a teacher who is obliged to supplement his income by cobbling, Miss O’Donnell speaks with sweetness, composure and candour. As well as the piety for which she is known, she displays great feeling for nature, and a sympathy striking in one so young. The Egyptian sage wrote some five millennia ago, Wise words are rarer than emeralds, yet they come from the mouths of poor slave girls.

Second, it falls to this correspondent to give the lie to the reports of Anna O’Donnell’s health. Her stoical character and elevated spirits may obscure the truth, but the lurching walk and strained posture, the chill, distended fingers, the sunken eyes, and above all the sharp-scented breath known as the odour of famine, all testify to her state of malnutrition.

Without speculating on what covert devices may have been used to keep Anna O’Donnell alive for four months until the watch commenced on the eighth of August, it may be said—rather, must be said, without equivocation—that the child is now in grave peril, and that her watchers must beware.

Lib balled up the page so tightly that it disappeared in her fist. How it bit, every word of it.

In her memorandum book, she’d logged so many warning signs—why had she resisted the obvious conclusion that the girl’s health was in decline? Arrogance, Lib supposed; she’d held firmly to her own judgment and overestimated her knowledge. Wishful thinking, too, as bad as what she’d seen in the families of those she’d nursed. Because Lib wanted the girl kept from harm, all week she’d indulged in fantasies about unconscious night-feedings or inexplicable powers of mind that bore the girl up. But to an outsider such as William Byrne, it was clear as day that Anna was just starving.

Her watchers must beware.

Lib’s guilt should have made her grateful to the man. So why, picturing his handsome face, did she feel incensed?

She pulled the pot out from underneath the bed and retched up the boiled ham she’d had for dinner.

The sun went down just before she reached the cabin that evening, and the moon came up full, a swollen white globe.

Lib hurried in past the O’Donnells and Kitty, who were sitting over cups of tea, with barely a word of greeting. She had to alert the nun. It struck her that Dr. McBrearty might perhaps hear the truth better from Sister Michael if the nun could possibly be persuaded to tackle him.

But for once, she found Anna lying flat in the bed and the Sister of Mercy sitting on the edge, the child so engrossed in a story the nun was telling that she didn’t even look over at Lib.

“A hundred years old, and in awful pain all the time,” Sister Michael was saying. Her eyes slid to Lib and then back to Anna. “The old woman confessed that when she was a little girl at mass, she’d taken Holy Communion but hadn’t closed her mouth in time, and the Host had slipped out onto the floor. She’d been too ashamed to tell a soul, you see, so she’d left it there.”

Anna sucked in her breath.

Lib had never heard her fellow nurse so voluble.

“Now, do you know what he did, that priest?”

“When it fell out of her mouth?” asked Anna.

“No, the priest to whom the woman was making her confession, when she was a hundred years old. He went back to that same church, and it was in ruins,” said Sister Michael, “but there was a bush blooming right out of the broken stones of the floor. He searched among the roots, and what did he find but the Host itself, as fresh as the day it fell from the little girl’s mouth nearly a century before.”