“A little goblin man who—”
But Rosaleen O’Donnell was hurrying in now to greet her daughter, not so much as glancing at the nurse. That broad back like a shield thrown in front of the child, that dark head bent over the smaller one. Doting syllables; Gaelic, no doubt. The whole performance set Lib’s teeth on edge.
She supposed that when a mother had only a solitary child left at home, all her passion was funnelled into that one. Had Pat and Anna had other brothers or sisters? she wondered.
Anna was kneeling beside her mother now, hands pressed together, eyes shut. “I have sinned exceedingly in thought, word, and deed, through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault.” On each fault, the child’s closed fist rapped her chest.
“Amen,” intoned Mrs. O’Donnell.
Anna began another prayer: “Maiden mother, meek and mild, take oh take me for thy child.”
Lib considered the long morning ahead. Later on she’d have to keep the girl out of sight in case of would-be visitors. “Anna,” she said the moment the mother had gone back into the kitchen, “shall we go out for an early walk?”
“’Tis barely day.”
Lib hadn’t even taken Anna’s pulse yet, but that would wait. “Why not? Get dressed and put on your cloak.”
The girl crossed herself and whispered the Dorothy prayer as she pulled her nightdress over her head. Was that a new bruise on her shoulder blade, greenish brown? Lib made a memorandum of it.
In the kitchen, Rosaleen O’Donnell said it was still dim out and they’d fall into cowpats or break their ankles.
“I’ll take perfectly good care of your daughter,” said Lib, and pushed the half-door open.
She stepped out, with Anna behind her, and the chickens clucked and scattered. The moist breeze was delicious.
They set off behind the cabin this time, on a faint path between two fields. Anna walked slowly and unevenly, remarking on everything. Wasn’t it funny that skylarks were never to be spotted on the ground, only when they shot high up into the sky to sing? Oh, look, that mountain over there with the sun coming up behind it was the one she called her whale.
Lib saw no mountains in this flattened landscape. Anna was pointing to a low ridge; no doubt the inhabitants of the dead centre of Ireland saw every ripple as a peak.
Anna sometimes fancied she could actually glimpse the wind; did Mrs. Something-Like-Elizabeth ever think that?
“Call me Mrs. Wright—”
“Or Nurse, or ma’am,” said Anna with a giggle.
Full of vitality, Lib thought; how on earth could this child be half starving? Someone was still sustaining Anna.
The hedgerows sparkled now. “‘Which is the broadest water,’” Lib asked, “‘and the least jeopardy to pass over?’”
“Is this a riddle?”
“Of course, one I learned when I was a little girl.”
“Hm. ‘The broadest water,’” Anna repeated.
“You’re imagining it like the sea, aren’t you? Don’t.”
“I’ve seen the sea in pictures.”
To grow up on this small island and yet never to have been to its edge, even…
“But great rivers with my own eyes,” said Anna, boasting.
“Oh yes?” said Lib.
“The Tullamore, and the Brosna too, the time we went to the fair at Mullingar.”
Lib recognized the name of the Midlands town where William Byrne’s horse had been lamed. Had he stayed on today at Ryan’s, in the room across the passage from hers, in hopes of learning more about Anna’s case? Or had his satirical dispatches from the scene been enough for the Irish Times? “The water in my riddle doesn’t look like the widest of rivers, even. Imagine it spread all over the ground, but no danger in crossing it.”
Anna wrestled with the thought, and finally shook her head.
“The dew,” said Lib.
“Oh! I should have known.”
“It’s so small, nobody remembers it.” She thought of the manna story: a dew lay round about the camp and covered the face of the earth.
“Another,” begged Anna.
“I can’t recall another just now,” said Lib.
The girl walked in silence for a minute, almost limping. Was she in pain?
Lib was tempted to take her elbow to help her over a rough patch, but no. Simply to observe, she reminded herself.
Up ahead was someone she took for Malachy O’Donnell, but as they neared he turned out to be a bent-looking older man. He was cutting black rectangles out of the ground and making a stack; turf for burning, she assumed.
“God bless the work,” Anna called to him.
He nodded back. His spade was a shape Lib had never seen before, the blade bent into wings.
“Is that another prayer you’re obliged to say?” she asked the child when they’d passed.
“Blessing the work? Yes, otherwise he might be hurt.”
“What, he’d be wounded that you didn’t think of him?” asked Lib with a touch of mockery.
Anna looked puzzled. “No, he might cut a toe off with the foot slane.”
Ah, so it was a sort of protective magic.
The girl was singing now, in her breathy voice.
Deep in thy wounds, Lord,
Hide and shelter me,
So shall I never,
Never part from thee.
The stirring tune didn’t fit the morbid words, in Lib’s view. The very idea of hiding deep inside a wound, like a maggot— “There’s Dr. McBrearty,” said Anna.
The old man was scuttling towards them from the cabin, lapels askew. He took off his hat to Lib, then turned to the child. “Your mother told me I’d find you out taking the air, Anna. Delighted to see you with roses in your cheeks.”
She was rather red in the face, but from the exertion of walking, Lib thought; roses was stretching a point.
“Still generally well?” McBrearty murmured to Lib.
Miss N. was very stern on the subject of discussing the ill in their hearing. “You go on ahead of us,” Lib suggested to Anna. “Why don’t you pick some flowers for your room?”
The child obeyed. Lib kept her eyes on her, though. It occurred to her that there might be berries around, unripe nuts, even… Might a hysteric—if that’s what Anna was—snatch mouthfuls of food without being conscious of what she did?
“I don’t quite know how to answer your question,” she told the doctor. Thinking of Standish’s phrase half starving.
McBrearty poked the soft ground with his cane.
Lib hesitated, then made herself say the name. “Did Dr. Standish get a chance to speak to you last night after he left Anna?” She was ready with her best arguments against forcible feeding.
The old man’s face screwed up as if he’d bitten into something sour. “His tone was most ungentlemanly. After I did him the politeness of letting him, of all the petitioners, into the cabin to see the girl!”
She waited.
But clearly McBrearty was not going to report the scolding he’d received. “Is her respiration still healthy?” he asked instead.
Lib nodded.
“Heart sounds, pulse?”
“Yes,” she conceded.
“Sleeping well?”
Another nod.
“She seems cheerful,” he noted, “and her voice is still strong. No vomiting or diarrhoea?”
“Well, I’d hardly expect that in someone who’s not eating.”
The old man’s watery eyes lit up. “So you believe she is indeed living without—”
Lib interrupted him. “I mean, not taking in enough to lead to any kind of voiding. Anna produces no excrement, and very little urine,” she pointed out. “This suggests to me that she’s getting some food—or was until the watch began, more likely—but not sufficient for there to be any waste.” Should Lib mention her notion about night-feedings to which Anna had been oblivious all these months? She quailed; it suddenly sounded as implausible as any of the old man’s own theories. “Don’t you think her eyes are beginning to bulge even more?” she asked. “Her skin’s covered with bruises and crusty patches, and her gums bleed. Scurvy, perhaps, I was thinking. Or pellagra, even. Certainly she seems anaemic.”
“Good Mrs. Wright.” McBrearty gouged the soft grass with his cane. “Are we beginning to stray beyond our remit?” An indulgent father reproving a child.
“I beg your pardon, Doctor,” she said stiffly.