Lib decided to give in until she could speak to Dr. McBrearty. Lose a battle, win the war. She led Anna into the good room and took up a position right behind the child’s chair.
The visitors were a gentleman from the western port of Limerick with his wife and in-laws as well as a mother and daughter of their acquaintance who were visiting from the United States. The older American lady volunteered the information that she and her daughter were Spiritualists. “We believe the dead speak to us.”
Anna nodded, matter-of-fact.
“Your case, my dear, strikes us as the most glorious proof of the power of Mind.” The lady leaned over to squeeze the child’s fingers.
“No touching, please,” said Lib, and the visitor jerked back.
Rosaleen O’Donnell put her head in the door to offer them a cup of tea.
Lib was convinced the woman was provoking her. No food, she mouthed.
One of the gentlemen was interrogating Anna about the date of her last meal.
“April the seventh,” she told him.
“That was your eleventh birthday?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And how do you believe you’ve survived this long?”
Lib expected Anna to shrug or say she didn’t know. Instead she murmured something that sounded like mamma.
“Speak up, little girl,” said the older Irishwoman.
“I live on manna from heaven,” said Anna. As simply as she might have said, I live on my father’s farm.
Lib shut her eyes briefly so as not to roll them in disbelief.
“Manna from heaven,” the younger Spiritualist repeated to the elder. “Fancy that.”
The visitors were pulling out presents now. From Boston, a toy called a thaumatrope; did Anna have anything like it?
“I haven’t any toys,” she told them.
They liked that; the charming gravity of her tone. The Limerick gentleman showed her how to twist the disc’s two strings, then twirl it, so the pictures on the two sides blurred into one.
“The bird’s in the cage now,” marvelled Anna.
“Aha,” he cried, “mere illusion.”
The disc slowed and stopped, so the empty cage was left on the back, and the bird on the front flew free.
After Kitty brought the tea in, the wife produced something even more curious: a walnut that popped open in Anna’s hand to let out a crumpled ball that relaxed into a pair of exquisitely thin yellow gloves. “Chicken skin,” said the lady, fondling them. “All the rage when I was a child. Never made anywhere in the world but Limerick. I’ve kept this pair half a century without tearing them.”
Anna drew the gloves on, finger by fat finger; they were too long, but not by much.
“Bless you, my child, bless you.”
Once the tea was drunk, Lib made a pointed remark about Anna needing to rest.
“Would you say a little prayer with us first?” asked the lady who’d given her the gloves.
Anna looked to Lib, who felt she had to nod.
“Infant Jesus, meek and mild,” the girl began.
Look on me, a little child.
Pity mine and pity me,
Suffer me to come to thee.
“Beautiful!”
The elderly lady wanted to leave some homeopathic tonic pills.
Anna shook her head.
“Ah, keep them, do.”
“She can’t take them, Mother,” the woman’s daughter reminded her in a hiss.
“I don’t believe absorption under the tongue would count as eating, exactly.”
“No, thank you,” said Anna.
As they left, Lib listened to the coins clink into the money box.
Rosaleen O’Donnell was hooking a pot out of the dull heart of the fire and knocking ashen sods off its lid. Hands padded with rags, she lifted the lid and took out a round loaf with a cross marked on top.
Everything was religion here, thought Lib. Also, she was beginning to see why all her meals tasted of peat. If she did stay the full fortnight, she’d have consumed a good handful of boggy soil; the thought soured her mouth. “Those will be the last visitors admitted,” she told the mother in her firmest voice.
Anna was leaning on the half-door, watching the party climb into their carriage.
Rosaleen O’Donnell straightened up, shaking out her skirts. “Hospitality’s a sacred law with the Irish, Mrs. Wright. If anyone knocks, we must open up and feed and shelter them, even if the kitchen floor do be thick with sleeping people already.” The sweep of her arm encompassed a horde of invisible guests.
Hospitality, my foot. “This is hardly a matter of taking in paupers,” Lib told her.
“Rich, poor, we’re all alike in the eyes of God.”
It was the pious tone that pushed Lib over the edge. “These people are gawkers. So keen to see your daughter apparently subsist without food, they’re willing to pay for the privilege!”
Anna was twirling her thaumatrope now; it caught the light.
Mrs. O’Donnell chewed her lip. “If the sight moves them to almsgiving, what’s wrong with that?”
The child went up to her mother just then and handed over her gifts. To distract the two women from their quarrel? Lib wondered.
“Ah sure these are yours, pet,” said Rosaleen.
Anna shook her head. “The gold cross that lady left the other day, didn’t Mr. Thaddeus say it’d raise a good sum for the needy?”
“But these are only toys,” said her mother. “Well, the gloves in the shell, maybe, I suppose those could be sold…” She turned the walnut over in her palm. “Keep the spinny thing, though. Sure what harm. Unless Mrs. Wright sees any?”
Lib held her tongue.
She marched into the bedroom behind the girl and examined all the surfaces again, just as she had yesterday—the floor, the treasure box, the dresser, the bedding.
“Are you cross?” asked Anna, twirling her thaumatrope between her fingers.
“About your toy? No, no.” What a child Anna was still, for all the dark complications of her situation.
“About the visitors, then?”
“Well. They don’t have your welfare at heart.”
The bell chimed in the kitchen and Anna dropped to the floor. (No wonder the child’s shins were bruised.) The minutes ticked by while the prayers of the Angelus filled the air. Like being locked up in a monastery, Lib thought.
“Through the same Christ Our Lord, amen.” Anna got up and gripped the back of the chair.
“Dizzy?” asked Lib.
Anna shook her head and readjusted her shawl.
“How often must you all do this?”
“At noon only,” said the child. “’Twould be better to say it at six in the morning and in the evening as well, but Mammy and Dadda and Kitty are too busy.”
Yesterday Lib had made the mistake of telling the maid she could wait for her dinner. This time she went to the door and called out that she’d like something to eat.
Kitty brought in some fresh cream cheese; that must have been the white stuff dripping in the bag slung between the chairs last night. The bread, still warm, was too dense with bran for Lib’s liking. Waiting for the new potatoes of autumn, the family had to be getting down near the dust at the bottom of the meal bin.
Although she was used to eating in front of Anna by now, she still felt like a sow, nose in the trough.
Once Lib had finished, she tried the first chapter of a novel called Adam Bede. She was startled when the nun tapped on the door at one o’clock; she’d almost forgotten that her shift would end.
“Look, Sister,” said Anna, making her thaumatrope spin.
“What a thing!”
Lib could see she and the other nurse weren’t going to get a moment alone this time either. She stepped closer, till her face was at the side of the nun’s headdress, and whispered: “I’ve noted nothing untoward so far. You?”
A hesitation. “We’re not to confer.”
“Yes, but—”
“Dr. McBrearty was very firm that there should be no sharing of views.”
“I’m not looking for your views, Sister,” snapped Lib. “Only basic facts. Can you assure me that you’re keeping a careful note of anything excreted, for instance? Any solids, I mean.”
Very low: “There’s been nothing of that kind.”
Lib nodded. “I’ve explained to Mrs. O’Donnell that there’s to be no contact without supervision,” she went on. “One embrace at rising, say, and another when going to bed. Also, none of the family are to enter Anna’s room while she’s not there.”