The Wonder(77)

For a moment Lib pictured the child’s treasure chest, and then she realized that he meant a coffin. Forty-six inches, she remembered from her first measurements of Anna. Barely more than four inches of growth for each year on earth.

“I’ve been lying on my bed in there wondering about you, Lib Wright.”

Lib bristled. “What about me?”

“How far will you go to save this girl?”

Only when he asked it did she find she knew the answer. “I’ll stop at nothing.”

One eyebrow went up, sceptical.

“I’m not what you think me, Mr. Byrne.”

“What do you believe I think you?”

“A stickler, a fusspot, a prudish widow. When the truth is, I’m not a widow at all.” The words came out of Lib’s mouth with no warning.

That made the Irishman sit up straight. “You weren’t married?” His face alight with curiosity, or was it disgust?

“I was. I still am, for all I know.” Lib could hardly believe she was telling her worst secret, and to a newspaperman of all people. But there was a glory in it too, that rare sensation of risking all. “Wright didn’t die, he…” Absconded? Cut and run? Left? “He took his leave.”

“Why?” The syllable erupted from Byrne.

Lib shrugged so sharply that a pain went through her shoulder. “You assume he had cause, then.” She could have told him about the baby, but she didn’t want to, not now.

“No! You’re taking me up wrong, you’re—”

She tried to recall whether she’d ever seen this man lost for words.

He asked, “Whatever could possess a man to leave you?”

Now her tears brimmed. It was the note of indignation on her behalf that took her unawares.

Her parents hadn’t been sympathetic. Appalled, rather, that Lib had been so unlucky as to lose a husband less than a year after catching him. (Thinking that she’d been negligent, perhaps, to some degree, though they never said that aloud.) They’d been loyal enough to help her move to London and pass herself off as a widow. This conspiracy had shocked Lib’s sister so much, she’d never spoken to any of the three of them again. But the one question her mother and father hadn’t asked Lib was, How could he?

She blinked hard, because she couldn’t bear the idea that Byrne might think she was weeping for her husband, who was really not worth a single tear. She smiled a little instead.

“And Englishmen call Irishmen stupid!” he added.

That made her laugh out loud. She stifled it with her hand.

William Byrne kissed her, so fast and so hard that she almost tipped over. Not a word, only that single kiss, and then he walked out of her room.

Strangely enough, Lib did sleep then, despite all the clamour in her head.

When she woke, she fumbled for her watch on the table and pressed the button. It beat out the hours inside her fist: one, two, three, four. Friday morning. Only then did she remember how Byrne had kissed her. No, how the two of them had kissed.

Guilt brought her bolt upright. How could she be sure that Anna hadn’t worsened in the night, hadn’t taken her last ragged breath? Ever this night be at my side, to light and guard. She longed to be back in that small airless room. Would the O’Donnells even let her in this morning, after what she’d said at the meeting?

Lib dressed herself by feel, not even lighting her candle. She patted her way down the stairs and struggled with the front door until the bar heaved up and let her out.

Still dark; a cloud loosely bandaged the waning moon. So quiet, so lone, as if some disaster had laid waste the whole country and Lib was the last to walk its muddy paths.

There was one light in the small window of the O’Donnells’ cabin that had not stopped blazing for eleven days and nights now, like some awful eye that had forgotten how to blink. Lib walked up to the burning square and peeped in at the scene.

Sister Michael sitting beside the bed, her eyes on Anna’s profile. The tiny face transfigured by light. Sleeping beauty; innocence preserved; a child who looked perfect, perhaps because she wasn’t moving, wasn’t asking for anything, wasn’t causing any trouble. An illustration out of a cheap paper: The Final Vigil. Or The Little Angel’s Last Rest.

Lib must have moved or else Sister Michael had that uncanny ability to feel herself being watched, because the nun looked up and nodded a wan greeting.

Lib went to the front door and let herself in, braced for a rebuff.

Malachy O’Donnell was drinking tea by the fire. Rosaleen and Kitty were scraping something from one pot into another. The slavey kept her head down. The mistress glanced Lib’s way, but only briefly, as if she’d felt a draught. So the O’Donnells weren’t going to defy the committee by barring Lib from the cabin, at least not today.

In the bedroom, Anna was so deeply asleep that she looked like a waxwork.

Lib took Sister Michael’s cool hand and squeezed it, which startled the nun. “Thank you for coming last night.”

“But it did no good, did it?” asked Sister Michael.

“Still.”

The sun came up at a quarter past six. As if summoned by the light, Anna lurched off the pillow and put her hand out towards the empty chamber pot. Lib rushed to give it to her.

What the girl retched up was sunshine yellow but transparent. How could this hollowed-out stomach make such a gaudy shade out of nothing but water? Anna shuddered, contracting her lips as if to shake the drops off.