“Leave such mysteries to those who’ve been trained for them.”
Lib would have given a lot to know where McBrearty had been trained, and how thoroughly, and whether it had been in this century or the last.
“Your job is simply to observe.”
But there was nothing simple about such a task; Lib knew that now as she hadn’t three days ago.
“’Tis her!” A screech in the distance. It was coming from a top-heavy wagon parked outside the O’Donnells’. Several of the passengers were waving.
Besieged already, even this early in the day. Where had Anna strayed? Lib’s head whipped around till she found the girl, inhaling the scent of some blossom. She couldn’t bear the prospect of the fawning, the flattery, the intrusive questions. “I must take her inside, Doctor.” She ran over and seized Anna’s arm.
“Please—”
“No, Anna, you’re not to speak to them. We have a rule and we must stick to it.”
She hurried the girl towards the cabin, cutting the corner of a field, the doctor at their heels. Anna stumbled and one of her big boots went sideways.
“Hurt?” asked Lib.
A shake of the head.
So Lib pulled her on, around the side of the cabin—why didn’t it have a back door?—and through the knot of visitors arguing with Rosaleen O’Donnell, who was floured to the elbows.
“Here she comes, the wee wonder,” cried one man.
A woman pushed up close. “If you’d let me take hold of the hem of your dress, sweetheart—”
Lib interposed her shoulder, shielding the child.
“—even a drop of your spit, or a dab of the oil of your fingers to mend this sore on my neck!”
Only when they were all inside and she’d slammed the door behind Dr. McBrearty did Lib realize that Anna was gasping, and not just out of fear of the grabbing hands. The girl was frail, Lib reminded herself. What kind of slapdash nurse would strain her beyond her strength? How Miss N. would have scolded.
“Are you ill, lovey?” demanded Rosaleen O’Donnell.
Anna sank down on the nearest stool.
“Just out of breath, I believe,” said McBrearty.
“I’ll warm a flannel for you.” The mother scraped her hands clean before she hung up a cloth at the fire.
“You got a little chilled on your walk,” McBrearty told the girl.
“She’s always chilled,” Lib muttered. The child’s hands were blue. Lib brought her over to a high-backed chair beside the hearth and chafed the thick fingers between her own—lightly, for fear of hurting them.
When the cloth was warmed, Rosaleen wrapped it tenderly around Anna’s throat.
Lib would have liked to feel the cloth first and make sure there was nothing edible hidden in it, but her nerve failed.
“And how are you getting along with Mrs. Wright, my dear?” asked the doctor.
“Very well,” Anna told him.
Was the child being polite? All Lib could remember were moments in which she’d been snappish or stern with the girl.
“She’s teaching me riddles,” added Anna.
“Charming!” The doctor held the child’s swollen wrist between his fingers, checking her pulse.
At the table by the back window, beside Kitty, Mrs. O’Donnell paused in the work of slapping oatcakes into shape. “What kind of riddles?”
“Clever ones,” Anna told her mother.
“Feeling a little better in yourself now?” McBrearty asked.
She nodded, smiling.
“Well, I’ll be off, then. Rosaleen, good day to you,” he said with a bow.
“And you, Doctor. God bless you for stopping in.”
When the door had shut behind McBrearty, Lib felt flat, grim. He’d barely listened to her; he was ignoring Standish’s warnings. Caught up in his own private fascination with the wee wonder.
She noticed the empty stool by the door. “I see the strongbox is gone.”
“We sent it to Mr. Thaddeus by one of Corcoran’s boys, along with the little gloves in the walnut shell,” said Kitty.
“Every penny gone to aid and comfort the needy,” Rosaleen O’Donnell threw in Lib’s direction. “Think of that, Anna. You’re storing up riches in heaven.”
How Rosaleen basked in the reflected glory. The mother was the genius behind the plot, not just one conspirator among others; Lib was almost sure of that. She averted her gaze now so her hostility wouldn’t show.
On the mantel, inches from Lib’s face, the new photograph stood beside the old one of the whole family. The little girl looked much the same in both—the same neat limbs, the not-quite-of-this-world expression. As if time didn’t pass for Anna; as if she were preserved behind glass.
But the really odd one was the brother, it struck Lib. Pat’s adolescent face was similar to his sister’s softer one, allowing for the fact that boys parted their hair on the right. But his eyes; something wrong with their glitter. The lips dark, as if rouged. He leaned back on his indomitable mother like a much younger child, or a drunken fop. What was that line in the psalm? Strange children have faded away.
Anna spread her hands to warm at the fire, like an elegant fan.
How to find out more about him? “You must miss your son, Mrs. O’Donnell.”
A pause. And then: “I do, of course,” said Rosaleen O’Donnell. She was cutting up elderly parsnips now, wielding the cleaver with one big gaunt hand. “Ah well. God fits the back for the burden, as they say.”
Milking it rather, Lib thought. “Is it long since you’ve heard from him?”
The cleaver stilled, and Rosaleen O’Donnell stared at her. “He looks down on us.”
What, had Pat O’Donnell done well in the New World, then? Too well to bother writing to his plebeian family?
“From heaven.” That was Kitty.
Lib blinked.
The slavey pointed upwards to make sure the Englishwoman understood. “’Twas last November he died.”
Lib’s hand flew up to cover her mouth.
“He wasn’t fifteen,” added the slavey.
“Oh, Mrs. O’Donnell,” cried Lib, “you must forgive my tactlessness. I didn’t realize—” Gesturing at the daguerreotype, where the boy seemed to watch her with contempt, or was it mirth? It wasn’t taken before his death, she realized, but after.
Anna, leaning back in the chair, seemed deaf to all this, mesmerized by the flames.
Instead of taking offence, Rosaleen O’Donnell was smiling in a gratified way. “He looks alive to you, ma’am? Well, there’s a thing.”
Propped up in his mother’s lap. Blackened lips, the first indication of decomposition; Lib should have guessed. Had the O’Donnell boy lain in this kitchen for a whole day, or two or three, while his family waited for the photographist?
Rosaleen O’Donnell came up so close that Lib flinched. She tapped the glass. “A fine bit of brushwork on his eyes, isn’t it?”
Someone had painted whites and pupils onto the corpse’s closed lids in the print; that was why the gaze was so crocodilian.
Mr. O’Donnell came in then, stamping mud off his boots. His wife greeted him in Gaelic, then switched to English. “Wait till you hear, Malachy. Mrs. Wright thought Pat was still on this side!”
The woman had a talent for taking pleasure from terrible things.
“Poor Pat,” said Malachy with an unoffended nod.
“It was the eyes, they tricked her entirely.” Rosaleen O’Donnell fingered the glass. “Worth every penny.”
Anna’s arms lay limp in her lap now, and her eyes reflected the flames. Lib longed to get her out of this room.
“’Twas his stomach that did for him,” said Malachy O’Donnell.
Kitty sniffed and wiped one eye on her frayed sleeve.
“Brought up his supper. Couldn’t touch another thing.”
The man was addressing Lib, so she had to nod.
“The pain took him there, then there, see?” Malachy prodded himself about the navel, then lower down on the right. “Swelled up like an egg.” He was speaking more fluently than she’d ever heard him. “In the morning it’d eased, like, so we thought we shouldn’t trouble Dr. McBrearty after all.”
Lib nodded again. Was the father appealing to her for her professional opinion? For a sort of forgiveness?