“No, no. The rule against visitors is strict.”
“Then how did Dr. Standish from Dublin get around it, may I ask?” His tone was still teasing, but the resentment was audible. “You didn’t mention that last night—that you’d let him in on his second try.”
“The cur!”
William Byrne dropped back into his seat. “A cur let him in?”
“Standish is the cur,” said Lib. “All this is in confidence?”
He slapped his memorandum book facedown.
“He recommended I tube-feed her by force.”
Byrne winced.
“He was granted entry at Dr. McBrearty’s insistence, against my better judgment,” Lib added, “but it won’t happen again.”
“Why, are you altered from gaoler to bodyguard, Elizabeth Wright? Will you stand in the gap and keep off all dragons?”
She didn’t answer. How did Byrne know her first name?
“Would I be right in thinking that you rather like the girl?”
“This is my job,” Lib snapped. “Your question is irrelevant.”
“It’s my job to ask questions, all of them.”
She gave him a hard look. “Why are you still here, Mr. Byrne?”
“I must say, you know the art of making a fellow traveller feel welcome.” He leaned so far back in his chair, it creaked.
“I beg your pardon. But how can this case deserve so many days of your undivided attention?”
“A fair query,” said William Byrne. “Before setting off on Monday, I put it to my editor that I could drum up a score of famished urchins on the streets of Dublin. Why trek all the way into the boglands?”
“And what did he say?” asked Lib.
“What I suspected he would: The one lost sheep, William.”
After a moment, she got the Gospel reference: the shepherd who left his flock of ninety-nine sheep to go after one stray.
“Journalistic investigations must be narrow,” he told her with a shrug. “Divide a reader’s concern among many deserving objects, and there’ll be too little left to make him shed a tear for any one.”
She nodded. “Nurses are the same. It seems to come naturally, to care more about the individual than the crowd.”
One faint auburn eyebrow went up.
“That’s why Miss—the lady who trained me,” Lib corrected herself, “wouldn’t allow us to sit down beside a particular patient and read to him and so on. She said it could lead to attachment.”
“Flirting, canoodling, and so forth?”
She refused to blush. “We had no time to waste. She told us, Do what’s needed, and walk on.”
“Miss Nightingale’s an invalid herself now, of course,” said Byrne.
Lib stared at him. She hadn’t heard anything about her teacher making any public appearances in recent years, but she’d assumed Miss N. was quietly getting on with her mission of hospital reform.
“I’m so sorry,” he said, leaning across the table. “You hadn’t heard.”
Lib struggled to compose herself.
“Was she as great a lady as they say, then?”
“Greater,” said Lib, choked. “And still is, invalid or not.”
She pushed the remains of her stew aside—unable to finish her meal, for once—and got to her feet.
“Are you itching to be away?” asked William Byrne.
Lib chose to answer that as if he’d meant away from the Irish Midlands, not this cramped dining room. “Well. It does sometimes seem as if the nineteenth century hasn’t reached this part of the world yet.”
He grinned.
“Milk for the fairies, wax discs to ward off fire and flood, girls living on air… Is there nothing the Irish won’t swallow?”
“Fairies aside,” said Byrne, “the majority of my countrymen swallow whatever pap our priests feed us.”
So he too was a Catholic; that surprised Lib somehow.
He beckoned her closer. She leaned in, just a little. “That’s why my money’s on Mr. Thaddeus,” he murmured. “The O’Donnell girl may be guileless—she may even have slept through months of night-feedings, if you’re right—but what of her puppet master?”
Like a blow to the ribs. Why hadn’t Lib thought of that? The priest was indeed too glib, too smiling.
But wait. She straightened up. Proceed logically and fair-mindedly. “Mr. Thaddeus claims he’s urged Anna to eat from the start.”
“Urged, only? She’s his parishioner, and a fervently pious one. He could command her to go up a mountain on her knees. No, I say the padre’s been behind the hoax from the start.”
“But with what motive?”
Byrne rubbed his fingers and thumb together.
“The visitors’ donations have been given to the needy,” said Lib.
“That means to the Church.”
Her head was spinning. It was all horribly plausible.
“If Mr. Thaddeus gets Anna’s case acknowledged as a miracle and this dreary hamlet as a site of pilgrimage,” said Byrne, “there’ll be no limit to the profits. The fasting girl’s a shrine-building fund!”
“But how could he have managed to feed her secretly by night?”
“No idea,” admitted Byrne. “He must be in league with the maid or the O’Donnells. Whom do you suspect?”
Lib demurred. “I really couldn’t take it on myself to—”
“Ah, go on, between ourselves. You’ve been in that household night and day since Monday.”
She hesitated, then said, very low, “Rosaleen O’Donnell.”
Byrne nodded. “Who was it said that mother is a child’s word for God?”
Lib had never heard that.
He waggled his pencil between his fingers. “Mind, I can’t print a word of this without proof or they’ll have me up for libel.”
“Of course not!”
“If you’ll let me have five minutes with the child, I bet I can weasel out the truth.”
“That’s impossible.”
“Well.” Byrne’s voice returned to its usual boom. “Sound her out yourself, then?”
Lib didn’t like the idea of acting as his snoop.
“At any rate, thanks for your company, Mrs. Wright.”
Almost three in the afternoon, and Lib’s next shift began at nine. She wanted air, but it was drizzling, and besides, she supposed she needed a nap more. So she went upstairs and took her boots off.
If the potato blight had been such a long catastrophe, ending only seven years ago, it occurred to Lib that a child now eleven must have been born into hunger. Weaned on it, reared on it; that had to shape a person. Every thrifty inch of Anna’s body had learned to make do with less. She’s never been greedy or clamoured for treats—that was how Rosaleen O’Donnell had praised her daughter. Anna must have been petted every time she said she’d had plenty. Earned a smile for every morsel she passed on to her brother or the maid.
But that didn’t begin to explain why all the other children in Ireland wanted their dinner, and Anna didn’t.
Perhaps what was different was the mother, Lib thought. Like the boastful one in the old tale who’d vaunted her daughter to the world as a spinner of gold. Had Rosaleen O’Donnell noticed her younger child’s talent for abstinence and dreamt up a way to turn it into pounds and pence, fame and glory?
Lib lay very still, eyes closed, but light prickled through the lids. Being tired didn’t mean one was capable of sleep, just as the need for food wasn’t the same as a relish for it. Which brought her back, as everything did, to Anna.
As the last of the evening light drained over the village street, Lib took a right turn down the lane. Rising over the graveyard was a waxing gibbous moon. She thought of the O’Donnell boy in his coffin. Nine months; rotting but not a skeleton yet. Were those his brown trousers the scarecrow wore?
The notice Lib had made for the cabin door was streaked with rain.
Sister Michael was waiting in the bedroom. “Out like a light already,” she whispered.
At midday, they’d had only a moment for Lib to report on her shift. This was a rare time when they might talk in private. “Sister Michael—” But Lib realized she couldn’t mention her speculations about sleep-feedings because the nun would close up like a box again. No, she’d much better stick to the common ground of their concern for this girl asleep in the narrow bed. “Did you know the child’s brother was dead?”