“But Pat still felt so faint and cold in himself,” said Rosaleen O’Donnell, “we piled all the blankets in the house on his bed, and put his sister in beside him to warm him up.”
Lib shuddered. Not just at the thing, but at the retelling of it in the hearing of a sensitive girl.
“He panted a bit, and spoke nonsense, as if he was dreaming,” murmured his mother.
“Gone before breakfast, poor lad,” said Malachy O’Donnell. “No time to send for the priest, even.” He shook his head as if to get rid of a fly.
“Too good for this world,” exclaimed Rosaleen.
“I’m so very sorry,” said Lib. She turned back to the daguerreotype so she wouldn’t have to look at the parents. But she found she couldn’t bear the shine of those eyes, so she took Anna by the still-cold hand and went back to the bedroom.
Her eye fell on the treasure chest. The dark brown hair in the statuette she’d broken: that had to be the brother’s. Anna’s silence worried Lib. What a thing to do to a child, put her in beside a dying boy as a warming pan. “You must feel the loss of your brother.”
The girl’s face contorted. “’Tisn’t that. Or—I do, of course, Mrs. Elizabeth, but that’s not it.” She stepped up close to Lib and whispered, “Mammy and Dadda think he’s in heaven. Only, you see, we can’t be sure of that. Never despair, but never presume, they’re the two unforgiveable sins against the Holy Ghost. If Pat’s in purgatory, he’s burning—”
“Oh, Anna,” said Lib, breaking in. “You’re distressing yourself needlessly. He was only a boy.”
“But we’re all sinners. And he fell sick so fast, he didn’t get absolved in time.” Tears plummeted into the girl’s collar.
Confession—yes, Catholics clung to the notion of its unique power to wipe all sin away.
Anna wailed so Lib could hardly make out the words: “We have to be cleaned before we’re let in.”
“Very well, so your brother will be cleaned.” Lib’s tone absurdly practical, a nursery maid filling a bath.
“By fire, only by fire!”
“Oh, child…” This was an alien language and, frankly, one she didn’t want to learn. She patted the girl on the shoulder, awkwardly. Felt the knob of bone.
“Don’t put this in your paper,” said Lib over some kind of stew. (She’d found William Byrne dining in the small room at Ryan’s at half past one when she’d come in from her shift.) “Go on.”
Lib decided to take that as a promise. In a low voice: “Anna O’Donnell’s mourning her only brother, who died of a digestive complaint nine months ago.”
Byrne only nodded and wiped his plate with a crust.
Lib was nettled. “You doubt that’s enough to cause mental collapse in a child?”
He shrugged. “My whole country could be said to be in mourning, Mrs. Wright. After seven years of dearth and pestilence, what family was left unbroken?”
She didn’t know what to say. “Seven years, really?”
“The potato failed in ’45 and only came back fully in ’52,” he told her.
Discreetly Lib removed a fragment of bone from her mouth—rabbit, she thought. “Still, what does Anna know of these national questions? She may feel like the only girl who’s ever lost a brother.” The hymn droned in her head: So shall I never, never part from thee. “Perhaps she torments herself with wondering why he was taken and not her.”
“She seems depressed in her spirits, then?”
“At times,” said Lib uncertainly. “But sometimes quite otherwise: lit up with a secret joy.”
“Speaking of secrets, you haven’t yet caught her trying to get hold of any food on the sly?”
Lib shook her head. Under her breath: “I’ve come round to the opinion that Anna truly believes she’s living on nothing.” She hesitated, but she had to try her idea out on someone. “It’s occurred to me that one of the household, taking advantage of the child’s delusional state, may have been dosing her in her sleep.”
“Oh, come now.” William Byrne scraped the red curls out of his face.
“Such a subterfuge would make sense of Anna’s conviction that she’s not eaten for four months. If she’s been quite unconscious while someone has been pouring slop down her throat—”
“Possible. But likely?” He picked up his pencil. “May I air this in my next dispatch?”
“You may not! It’s speculation, not fact.”
“I’d call it the expert opinion of her nurse.”
Through her panic, Lib felt a sting of pleasure that Byrne was taking her seriously. “Besides, I’ve been strictly enjoined not to express any opinions until I report to the committee on Sunday week.”
He threw down his pencil. “So why tantalize me, then, if I can’t use a word of it?”
“My apologies,” said Lib crisply. “Let’s consider the subject closed.”
His grin was rueful. “I’m thrown back on reporting gossip, then. And not all of it benevolent. The girl’s far from being a universal favourite in these parts, you know.”
“You mean some assume she’s a liar?”
“Of course, or worse. Last night I stood a mad-eyed labourer a drink, and he shared his conviction that the fairies are behind it.”
“What do you mean?”
“The reason Anna doesn’t eat is that she’s some kind of monstrous changeling disguised as a girl.”
The other crowd… waiting on her hand and foot. That’s what Lib had heard a bearded farmer say the night she’d arrived. He must have meant that Anna had an unseen horde of fairy attendants.
“The fellow even had a remedy to propose. If ’twas beat, or put to the fire even”—the brogue Byrne put on was brutally accurate—“why, then, ’twould go back where it came from!”
Lib shuddered. It was this sort of drunken ignorance she found monstrous.
“Have you ever had a patient remotely like Anna O’Donnell?”
She shook her head. “In private nursing I’ve encountered specious cases—healthy people who pretend to be in an interesting state of disease. But Anna’s the opposite. An underfed child who maintains she’s in glowing health.”
“Hm. Should hypochondriacs be called pretenders, though?” asked Byrne.
Lib felt abashed, as if she’d been sneering at her employers.
“The mind can bamboozle the body,” he pointed out. “Think about itching and one feels an itch. Or yawning—” And he broke off to yawn into his hand.
“Well, but—” Lib had to stop because she was yawning too.
Byrne let out a great guffaw, then quietened and stared into space. “I suppose it’s within the bounds of possibility that a practiced mind could command the body to keep going without food, at least for a while.”
But wait. At Lib’s first encounter with Byrne, he’d called Anna a fraud; at their next, he’d accused Lib of keeping her from eating. Now, having scorned Lib’s sleep-feeding idea, he was suggesting the miraculous claims might be true after all? “Don’t say you’re going over to the O’Donnells’ camp.”
His mouth twisted. “It’s my job to keep an open mind. In India—I was sent to Lucknow to report on the rebellion—it’s not unknown for fakirs to make claims of suspended animation.”
“Fakers?”
“Fakirs, holy men,” he corrected her. “Colonel Wade, formerly agent to the governor-general of the Punjab, he told me he’d watched the digging up of a character called the Fakir of Lahore. Forty days underground—no food, drink, light, little air—and the fellow popped out hale and hearty.”
Lib snorted.
Byrne shrugged. “All I can tell you is that this battle-hardened old soldier talked my ear off with such conviction that I was almost inclined to believe him.”
“And you a cynical man of the press.”
“Am I? I name corruption when I see it,” said Byrne. “Does that make me a cynic?”
“I beg your pardon,” said Lib, thrown. “I said more than I meant.”
“A vice common among men of the press.” His smile a darting fish.
Had Byrne claimed his feelings were wounded only to put Lib in the wrong? she wondered dizzily.
“So might Anna O’Donnell be a diminutive Irish girl-yogi?”
“You wouldn’t make fun if you knew her.” The words burst out of Lib.
The man was on his feet. “I’ll accept that invitation at once.”