The nun was like some undertaker’s hired mute.
Lib picked her way along the dirty lane, which was potholed with ovals of blue sky; last night’s rain. She was coming to the conclusion that without a fellow nurse working to Lib’s own high standards—Miss N.’s standards—the whole watch was flawed. For lack of due vigilance over a crafty child, all this trouble and expense might go to waste.
And yet Lib had seen no real evidence of craftiness in the girl yet. Except for the one vast lie, of course: the claim of living without food.
Manna from heaven, that’s what she’d forgotten to ask Sister Michael about. Lib might not have much faith in the nun’s judgment, but surely the woman would know her Bible?
It was almost hot this afternoon; Lib took off her cloak and carried it over her arm. She tugged at her collar and wished her uniform were less thick and scratchy.
In the room above the spirit grocery, she changed into a plain green costume. She couldn’t bear to stay in, not for a moment; she’d spent half the day shut up already.
Downstairs, two men were carrying an unmistakeable shape out of a passage. Lib recoiled.
“Beg your pardon, Mrs. Wright,” said Maggie Ryan, “they’ll have him out of your way in two ticks.”
Lib watched the men steer the unvarnished coffin around the counter.
“My father’s the undertaker too,” the girl explained, “on account of having the couple of gigs for hire.”
So the carriage outside the window stood in for a hearse as needed. Ryan’s combination of trades struck Lib as unsavoury. “A quiet place, this.”
Maggie nodded as the door swung shut behind the coffin. “There used to be twice as many of us before the bad time.”
Us, meaning the people in this village or in the county? Or the whole of Ireland, perhaps? The bad time, Lib assumed, was that terrible failure of the potato ten or fifteen years back. She tried to call up the details. All she could generally remember of old news was a flicker of headlines in grim type. When she was young, she’d never really studied the paper, only glanced at it. Folded the Times and laid it beside Wright’s plate, every morning, the year she’d been his wife.
She thought of the beggars. “On the drive here I saw many women alone with their children,” she mentioned to Maggie Ryan.
“Ah, lots of the men are gone for the season, just, harvesting over your way,” said Maggie.
Lib took her to mean England.
“But the most part of the young folk do have their hearts set on America, and then there’s no coming home.” She jerked her chin, as if to say good riddance to those young folk who weren’t anchored to this spot.
Judging from her face, Lib thought Maggie herself couldn’t have been more than twenty. “You wouldn’t consider it?”
“Sure there’s no hearth like your own, as they say.” Her tone more resigned than fond.
Lib asked her for directions to Dr. McBrearty’s.
His house was a substantial one at the end of a lane, some way out on the Athlone road. A maid as decrepit as her master showed Lib into the study. McBrearty whipped off his octagonal glasses as he stood up.
Vanity? she wondered. Did he fancy he looked younger without them?
“Good afternoon, Mrs. Wright. How are you?”
Irked, Lib thought of saying. Frustrated. Thwarted on all sides.
“Anything of an urgent nature to report?” he asked as they sat.
“Urgent? Not exactly.”
“No hint of fraud, then?”
“No positive evidence,” Lib corrected him. “But I thought you might have visited your patient to see for yourself.”
His sunken cheeks flushed. “Oh, I assure you, little Anna’s on my mind at all hours. In fact, I’m so very concerned for the watch that I’ve thought it best to absent myself so it can’t be insinuated afterwards that I exerted any influence over your findings.”
Lib let out a small sigh. McBrearty still seemed to be assuming that the watch would prove the little girl a modern-day miracle. “I’m concerned that Anna’s temperature seems low, especially in her extremities.”
“Interesting.” McBrearty rubbed his chin.
“Her skin’s not good,” Lib went on, “nor her nails, nor her hair.” This sounded like petty stuff from a magazine of beauty. “And there’s a downy fuzz growing all over her. But what worries me most is the swelling in her legs—her face and hands, too, but the lower legs are the worst. She’s resorted to wearing her brother’s old boots.”
“Mm, yes, Anna’s been dropsical for some time. However, she doesn’t complain of pain.”
“Well. She doesn’t complain at all.”
The doctor nodded as if that reassured him. “Digitalis is a proven remedy for fluid retention, but of course she won’t take anything by mouth. One might resort to a dry diet—”
“Limit her liquids even further?” Lib’s voice shot upwards. “She has only a few spoonfuls of water a day as it is.”
Dr. McBrearty plucked at his side-whiskers. “I could reduce her legs mechanically, I suppose.”
Bleeding, did he mean? Leeching? Lib wished she hadn’t said a word to this antediluvian.
“But that has its own risks. No, no, on the whole, safer to watch and wait.”
Lib was still uneasy. Then again, if Anna was imperiling her own health, whose fault was it but her own? Or the fault of whoever was putting her up to this, Lib supposed.
“She doesn’t look like a child who hasn’t eaten in four months, does she?” the doctor asked.
“Far from it.”
“My sense of it exactly! A wonderful anomaly.”
The old man had misunderstood her. He was wilfully blind to the obvious conclusion: the child was getting fed somehow. “Doctor, if Anna were really taking no nourishment at all, don’t you think she’d be prostrated by now? Of course you must have seen many famished patients during the potato blight, far more than I,” Lib added, as a sop to his expertise.
McBrearty shook his head. “As it happens I was still in Gloucestershire then. I inherited this estate only five years ago and couldn’t rent it out, so I thought I’d return and practice here.” He rose to his feet as if to say their interview was over.
“Also,” she went on in a rush, “I can’t say I have the utmost confidence in my fellow nurse. It will be no easy task to maintain complete alertness during night shifts in particular.”
“But Sister Michael should be an old hand at that,” said McBrearty. “She nursed at the Charitable Infirmary in Dublin for twelve years.”
Oh. Why had nobody thought to tell Lib this?
“And at the House of Mercy, they rise for Night Office at midnight, I believe, and again for Lauds at dawn.”
“I see,” said Lib, mortified. “Well. The real problem is that the conditions at the cabin are most unscientific. I have no way to weigh the child, and there are no lamps to provide adequate light. Anna’s room can easily be accessed from the kitchen, so anyone might go in when I take her out walking. Without your authority, Mrs. O’Donnell won’t even let me shut the door to oglers, which makes it impossible to watch the child rigourously enough. Could I have it in your hand that there are to be no visitors admitted?”
“Quite, yes.” McBrearty wiped his pen on a cloth and took up a fresh page. He fumbled in his breast pocket.
“The mother may resist turning away the mob, of course, on account of the loss of money.”
The old man blinked his rheumy eyes and kept digging in his pocket. “Oh, but the donations all go into the poor box that Mr. Thaddeus gave the O’Donnells. You don’t understand these people if you think they’d keep a farthing.”
Lib’s mouth set. “Are you by any chance looking for your spectacles?” She pointed to where they lay among his papers.
“Ah, very good.” He jammed the side arms over his ears and began to write. “How do you find Anna otherwise, may I ask?”
Otherwise? “In spirits, you mean?”
“In, well, in character, I suppose.”