The Wonder(6)

Lib stepped into the shop. “You wished to speak to me?” she asked the man standing there. She wasn’t quite sure whether to add sir.

“Good morning, Mrs. Wright, I hope you slept well.” This Mr. Thaddeus was more well-spoken than she’d have expected from his faded coat. A pink, not quite youthful snub-nosed face; a shock of black hair sprang out as he lifted his hat. “I’m to bring you over to the O’Donnells’ now, if you’re ready.”

“Quite ready.”

But he must have heard the query in her voice, because he added, “The good doctor thought maybe a trusted friend of the family should make the introductions.”

Lib was confused. “I had the impression Dr. McBrearty was such a friend.”

“That he is,” said Mr. Thaddeus, “but I suppose the O’Donnells repose a special confidence in their priest.”

A priest? This man was in mufti. “I beg your pardon. Should it be Father Thaddeus?”

A shrug. “Well, that’s the new style, but we don’t bother our heads much about it in these parts.”

It was hard to imagine this amiable fellow as the confessor of the village, the holder of secrets. “You don’t wear a clerical collar, or—” Lib gestured at his chest, not knowing the name of the buttoned black robe.

“I’ve all the gear in my trunk for holy days, of course,” said Mr. Thaddeus with a smile.

The girl hurried back in, wiping her hands. “There’s your tobacco now,” she told him, twisting the ends of a paper package and sliding it over the counter.

“Bless you, Maggie, and a box of matches too. Right, so, Sister?”

He was looking past Lib. She spun around and found the nun hovering; when had she crept in?

Sister Michael nodded at the priest and then at Lib with a twitch of the lips that could have been meant for a smile. Crippled by shyness, Lib supposed.

Why couldn’t McBrearty have sent for two Nightingales while he was at it? It occurred to Lib now that perhaps none of the fifty-odd others—lay or religious—had been available at such short notice. Was Lib the only Crimean nurse who’d failed to find her niche half a decade on? The only one sufficiently at loose ends to take the poisoned bait of this job?

The three of them turned left down the street through a watery sunlight. Ill at ease between the priest and the nun, Lib gripped her leather bag.

Buildings turned different ways, giving one another the cold shoulder. An old woman in a window at a table stacked with baskets—a huckster peddling produce of some sort out of her front room? There was none of the Monday-morning bustle Lib would have expected in England. They passed one man laden with a sack who exchanged blessings with Mr. Thaddeus and Sister Michael.

“Mrs. Wright worked with Miss Nightingale,” the priest remarked in the nun’s direction.

“So I heard.” After a moment Sister Michael said to Lib, “You must have a power of experience with surgical cases.”

Lib nodded as modestly as she could. “We also dealt with a great deal of cholera, dysentery, malaria. Frostbite in the winter, of course.” In fact the English nurses had spent much of their time stuffing mattresses, stirring gruel, and standing at washtubs, but Lib didn’t want the nun to mistake her for an ignorant menial. That was what nobody understood: saving lives often came down to getting a latrine pipe unplugged.

No sign of a market square or green, as any English village would have possessed. The garish white chapel was the only new-looking building. Mr. Thaddeus cut right just before it, taking a muddy lane that led around a graveyard. The mossy, skewed tombstones seemed to have been planted not in rows but at random. “Is the O’Donnells’ house outside the village?” Lib asked, curious as to why the family hadn’t been courteous enough to send a driver, let alone put the nurses up themselves.

“A little way,” said the nun in her whispery voice.

“Malachy keeps shorthorns,” added the priest.

There was more power to this weak sun than Lib would have thought; she was perspiring under her cloak. “How many children have they at home?”

“Just the girl now, since Pat’s gone over, God bless him,” said Mr. Thaddeus.

Gone where? America seemed most likely to Lib, or Britain, or the Colonies. Ireland, an improvident mother, seemed to ship half her skinny brood abroad. Two children only for the O’Donnells, then; that seemed a paltry total to Lib.

They passed a shabby cabin with a smoking chimney. A path slanted off the lane towards another cottage. Lib’s eyes scanned the bogland ahead for any sign of the O’Donnells’ estate. Was she allowed to ask the priest for more than plain facts? Each of the nurses had been hired to form her own impressions. But then it struck Lib that this walk might be the only chance she’d get to talk to this trusted friend of the family. “Mr. Thaddeus, if I may—can you attest to the honesty of the O’Donnells?”

A moment went by. “Sure I’ve no reason to doubt it.”

Lib had never had a conversation with a Roman Catholic priest before and couldn’t read this one’s politic tone.

The nun’s eyes stayed on the green horizon.

“Malachy’s a man of few words,” Mr. Thaddeus went on. “A teetotaler.”

That surprised Lib.

“Not a drop since he took the Pledge, before the children were born. His wife’s a leading light of the parish, very active in the Sodality of Our Lady.”