The Wonder(72)

“Thou that liftest me up from the gates,” murmured Anna, eyes shut. “Deliver me out of the hands of my enemies.”

How gladly Lib would have done that if she’d known how, delivered Anna, set her free from her bonds. The way a message was delivered, or a blow, or a baby. “More water?” She offered the spoon.

Anna’s eyelids flickered but didn’t open; she shook her head. “Be it done to me.”

“You may not feel thirst, but you need to drink all the same.”

The lips clung together stickily as they opened and let in a spoonful of water.

It would be easier to talk frankly outdoors. “Would you like to go out in the chair again? It’s a lovely afternoon.”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Lib.”

Lib put that down too: Too weak to be wheeled in chair. Her memorandum book wasn’t just to supplement her memory anymore. It was evidence of a crime.

“This boat’s big enough for me,” mumbled Anna.

Was that a whimsical metaphor for the bed, the child’s one inheritance from her brother? Or was her brain becoming affected by her fast? Lib wrote, Slight confusion? Then it struck her that perhaps she’d misheard bed, slurred, as boat.

“Anna.” She took one of the bloated hands between her two. Cold, like a china doll’s. “You know of the sin called self-murder.”

The hazel-brown eyes opened, but angled away from her.

“Let me read you something from The Examination of Conscience,” said Lib, snatching up the missal and finding the page she’d marked yesterday. “Have you done anything to shorten your life, or to hasten death? Have you desired your own death, through passion or impatience?”

Anna shook her head. Whispering: “I will fly and be at rest.”

“Are you sure of that? Don’t suicides go to hell?” Lib forced herself on. “You won’t be buried with Pat, even, but outside the wall of the churchyard.”

Anna turned her cheek to her pillow like a small child with an earache.

Lib thought of the first riddle she’d ever told the girl: I neither am nor can be seen. She leaned closer and whispered: “Why are you trying to die?”

“To give myself.” Anna corrected her instead of denying it. She began muttering her Dorothy prayer again, over and over: “I adore thee, O most precious cross, adorned by the tender, delicate and venerable members of Jesus my Saviour, sprinkled and stained with his precious blood.”

By the last light of the afternoon, Lib helped the child into a chair so she could air the bedclothes and smoothen the sheets. Anna sat with her knees up under her chin. She hobbled to the pot but produced only a dark drip. Then back to bed, moving like an old woman, the old woman she’d never grow up to be.

Lib paced as the child dozed. Nothing to do but call for more hot bricks, because all the heat of the day couldn’t stop Anna’s shivers.

The slavey’s eyes were rimmed with scarlet a quarter of an hour later when she brought four bricks in—still ashy from the fire—and tucked them under Anna’s blankets. The child was deep in slumber now.

“Kitty,” said Lib, before she knew she was going to speak. Her pulse hammered. If she was wrong—if the maid was as bad as Mrs. O’Donnell and in on the plot with her—then this attempt would do more harm than good. How to begin? Not with accusation, or even information. Compassion—that’s what Lib needed to rouse in the young woman. “Your cousin’s dying.”

Water brimmed in Kitty’s eyes at once.

“All God’s children need to eat,” Lib told her. She lowered her voice further. “Until a few days ago, Anna’s been kept alive by means of a wicked trick, a criminal swindle practiced on the whole world.” She regretted criminal, because fear was flaring in the maid’s eyes now. “Do you know what I’m about to tell you?”

“Sure how could I know that?” asked Kitty, with the look of a rabbit scenting a fox.

“Your mistress”—Aunt? Lib wondered now. Cousin of some sort?—“Mrs. O’Donnell, has been feeding the child from her own mouth, pretending to kiss her, you see?” It struck her that Kitty might blame the girl. “In her innocence, Anna thought she was receiving holy manna from heaven.”

The wide eyes narrowed all of a sudden. A guttural sound.

Lib leaned forward. “What did you say?”

No answer.

“It must be a shock, I know—”

“You!” No mistaking the syllable this time, or the fury contorting the maid’s face.

“I’m telling you so you can help me save your little cousin’s life.”

A pair of hard hands seized her face, then clamped over her mouth. “Shut your lying gob.”

Lib staggered backwards.

“Like a sickness you came into this house, spreading your poison. Godless, heartless, have you no shame?”

The child in the bed shifted then, as if disturbed by the voices, and both women froze.

Kitty dropped her arms. Took two steps to the bed and bent down, planted the lightest of kisses on Anna’s temple. When she straightened up, her face was striped with tears.

The door banged behind her.

You tried, Lib reminded herself, standing very still.

This time she couldn’t tell what she’d done wrong. Perhaps it was inevitable that Kitty would have blindly sided with the O’Donnells; they were all she had in the world—family, home, the only means of earning her crust.