The Wonder(82)

Was it too inconceivable a horror for Rosaleen to take in? Did she need to believe Lib was making it up?

“That’s the same filthy falsehood Anna came out with after Pat’s funeral,” Rosaleen went on, “and I told her not to be slandering her poor brother.”

Lib had to lean on the gritty wall of the cabin. So this wasn’t news to the woman at all. A mother understands what a child doesn’t say, wasn’t that how the proverb went? But Anna had said it. Grief for her dead Pat had given her the courage to confess the whole shameful story to her mother, back in November. Rosaleen had called her a liar and maintained that now, even as she watched her daughter pine away.

“Not another word out of you,” growled Rosaleen, “and may the devil take you.” She swept back inside.

Just after six, Saturday morning. Lib pushed a note under Byrne’s door.

Then she left the spirit grocery and hurried away across the muddy field under a shrinking moon. This was the kingdom of hell, drifting irretrievably out of the orbit of heaven.

The hawthorn at the tiny holy well stood up before her, its disintegrating rags dancing in a breath of warm wind. Lib saw the point of such superstition now. If there was a ritual she could perform that offered a chance of saving Anna, wouldn’t she try it? She’d bow down to a tree or a rock or a carved turnip for the child’s sake. Lib thought of all those people walking away from this tree over the centuries, trying to believe that they’d left their aches and sorrows behind. Years on, some of them reminding themselves, If I still feel the pain, that’s only because the rag’s not quite rotten yet.

Anna wanted to leave her body, drop it like an old coat. To shed her creased skin, her name, her broken history; to be done with it all. Yes, Lib would have liked that for the girl, and more—for Anna to be born all over again, as people in the Far East believed was possible. To wake up tomorrow and discover that she was someone else. A little girl with no damage done to her, no debts to pay, able and allowed to eat her fill.

And then came a hurrying outline against the lightening sky, and Lib felt at once what she’d never really known until this moment: the body’s claims were undeniable.

William Byrne’s curls were snakish and his waistcoat was buttoned up wrong. He clutched her note.

“Did I wake you?” Lib asked foolishly.

“I wasn’t sleeping,” he said, grabbing her hand.

Despite everything, warmth spread through her.

“At Ryan’s, last night,” he said, “no one could talk of anything but Anna. Word’s spread about you telling the committee that she’s failing fast. I believe the whole village will attend this mass.”

What collective madness had the townspeople in its grip? “If they’re concerned that a child is being allowed to kill herself,” Lib demanded, “why don’t they storm the cabin?”

Byrne gave a great shrug. “We Irish have a gift for resignation. Or, put another way, fatalism.”

He tucked her arm through his, and they walked under the trees. The sun was up, and it looked set to be another horribly lovely day.

“Yesterday I was in Athlone,” he told her, “arguing with the police. This officer, a piece of apathetic pomposity with his hat and musket—he kept stroking his moustache and saying that the situation was one of considerable delicacy. Far be it from the constabulary, says he, to invade a domestic sanctum in the absence of any evidence of a crime having been committed.”

Lib nodded. And, really, what could the police possibly have done? Still, she appreciated Byrne’s impulse to try something, anything.

How she wished she could tell him all that she’d learned the night before, and not just for the relief of sharing it but because he cared for Anna as she did.

No. It would be treachery to expose the secret that the child carried within her puny body to a man, any man, even one who was Anna’s champion. How could Byrne ever look at this innocent girl the same way afterwards? Lib owed it to Anna to keep her mouth shut.

She couldn’t tell anyone else either. If Anna’s own mother had called her a liar, most likely so would the rest of the world. Lib couldn’t put Anna through the violation of a medical examination; that body had endured so much probing already. Besides, even if the fact could be proved, what Lib saw as incestuous rape, others would call seduction. Wasn’t it so often the girl—no matter how young—who got blamed for having incited her molester with a look?

“I’ve come to a dreadful conclusion,” she said to Byrne. “Anna can’t live in this family.”

His brows contracted. “But they’re all she’s got. All she knows. What’s a child without a family?”

The nest is enough for the wren, Rosaleen O’Donnell had boasted. But what if a baby bird of rare plumage found herself in the wrong nest, and the mother bird turned her sharp beak on the chick? “Trust me, they’re no family,” Lib told him. “They won’t lift a finger to save her.”

Byrne nodded.

But was he convinced? “I’ve watched a child die,” she said, “and I can’t do it again.”

“In your line of work—”

“No. You don’t understand. My child. My daughter.”

Byrne stared. His arm tightened around hers.

“Three weeks and three days, that’s how long she hung on.” Bleating, coughing like a goat. There must have been something sour in Lib’s milk, because the baby had turned away or spat it out, and what little she got down had made her dwindle as if it were the opposite of food, a magical shrinking potion.