The Wonder(68)

“They roll over her like water,” she admitted, turning the chair away from the village and pushing it along to keep the girl asleep. “This fast, it’s Anna’s rock. Her daily task, her vocation.”

He nodded grimly. “If she keeps going downhill so quickly—”

What was coming?

Byrne’s eyes were dark, almost navy blue. “Will you—would you consider forcing her?”

Lib made herself picture the procedure: holding Anna down, pushing a tube down her throat, and dosing her. She looked up, met his burning gaze. “I don’t think I could. It’s not a matter of squeamishness,” she assured him.

“I know what it would cost you.”

That wasn’t it either, or not all of it. She couldn’t explain.

They walked for a minute; two. It struck Lib that the three of them could have been mistaken for a family taking the air.

Byrne began again, in a brisker tone. “Well, it turns out the padre’s not behind the hoax after all.”

“Mr. Thaddeus? How can you be sure?”

“O’Flaherty the schoolteacher says it may have been McBrearty who talked them all into forming this committee, but it was the priest who insisted they mount a formal guard on the girl, with seasoned nurses.”

Lib puzzled over that. Byrne was right; why would a guilty man have wanted Anna watched? Perhaps she’d been too quick to go along with Byrne’s suspicions of Mr. Thaddeus because of her wariness of priests.

“Also I found out more about this mission Anna mentioned,” said Byrne. “Last spring, Redemptorists from Belgium swooped down—”

“Redemptorists?”

“Missionary priests. The pope sends them out all over Christendom, like bloodhounds, to round up the faithful and sniff out unorthodoxy. They hammer the rules into the heads of country folk, put the fear of God back into their souls,” he told her. “So. For three weeks, thrice daily, these Redemptorists harrowed the bog men in these parts.” His finger swung across the motley-coloured land. “According to Maggie Ryan, one sermon was a real barnstormer: hellfire and brimstone raining down, children screeching, and such urgent queues for confession afterwards that a fellow fell under the crowd and got his ribs stove in. The mission wound up with a massive Quarantore—”

“A what?” asked Lib, lost again.

“Forty hours, it means—the length of time Our Lord spent in the tomb.” Byrne put on a heavy brogue. “Do you know nothing, you heathen?”

That made her smile.

“For forty hours the Blessed Sacrament was exposed in all the chapels within walking distance, with a mob of the faithful shoving along the lanes to prostrate themselves before it. The whole hullabaloo culminated in the confirmation of all eligible boys and girls.”

“Including Anna,” Lib guessed.

“The day before her eleventh birthday.”

Confirmation: the moment of decision. The end of being a child was how Anna had described it. Placed on her tongue, the sacred Host—her God in the guise of a little disc of bread. But how could she have formed the dire resolution to make that her last meal? Could she have misunderstood something the foreign priests had said as they wound the crowd up to a fever pitch?

Lib felt so nauseated, she had to stop for a moment and lean on the bath chair’s leather handles. “What was it about, the sermon that caused such a riot, did you learn?”

“Oh, fornication, what else?”

The word made Lib angle her face away.

“Is that an eagle?” The thin voice startled them.

“Where?” Byrne asked Anna.

“Away up there, over the green road.”

“I think not,” he told the child, “just the king of all crows.”

“I walked that so-called green road the other day,” said Lib, making conversation. “A long and rambling waste of time.”

“An English invention, as it happens,” said Byrne.

She looked sideways at him. Was this one of his jokes?

“It was the winter of ’47, when Ireland was chest-deep in snow for the first time in her history. Because charity was considered corrupting,” he said ironically, “the starving were invited to go on the Public Works instead. In these parts, that meant building a road from nowhere to nowhere.”

Lib frowned at him, jerking her head towards the girl.

“Oh, I’m sure she’s heard all the stories.” But he bent to look at Anna.

Asleep again, head limp in the corner of the chair. Lib tucked the loosening blankets around her.

“So the men picked stones out of the ground and hammered them apart for a pittance a basket,” he went on in a low voice, “while the women toted the baskets and fitted the pieces together. The children—”

“Mr. Byrne,” Lib protested.

“You wanted to know about the road,” he reminded her.

Did he resent her for the mere fact of her being English? she wondered. If he knew the feelings she was harbouring for him, would he respond with contempt? Pity, even? Pity would be worse.

“But I’ll be brief. Whoever was struck down by cold or hunger or fever and didn’t get up was buried by the verge, in a sack, just a couple of inches under.”

Lib thought of her boots going along the soft, flowered edge of the green road. Bog never forgot; it kept things in a remarkable state of preservation. “No more,” she begged, “please.”