No knocks at the cabin door that afternoon; perhaps the constant rain kept the curious at bay. Anna seemed muted after her encounter with the priest. She sat with a hymnbook open in her lap.
Five days, thought Lib, staring so hard her eyes prickled. Could a stubborn child possibly last five days on sips of water?
Kitty brought Lib’s tray in at a quarter to four. Cabbage, turnips, and the inevitable oatcakes—but Lib was hungry, so she set to as if it were the finest of spreads. The oatcakes were slightly blackened this time, and raw in the middle. But she forced them down. She’d cleared half her plate by the time she even remembered Anna, not three feet away, muttering what Lib still thought of as the Dorothy prayer. That was what hunger could do: blind you to everything else. The wad of oats rose in Lib’s throat.
A nurse she’d known at Scutari had passed some time on a plantation in Mississippi and said the most dreadful thing was how quickly one stopped noticing the collars and chains. One could grow used to anything.
Lib stared at her plate now and imagined seeing it as Anna claimed she saw it: a horseshoe, or a log, or a rock. Impossible. She tried again, picturing the vegetables in a detached way, as if in a frame. Now this was only a photograph of a greasy plate, and after all, one wouldn’t put one’s tongue to an image or take a bite out of a page. Lib added a layer of glass, then another frame and another sheet of glass, boxing the thing away. Not for eating.
But the cabbage was an old friend; its hot, savoury scent spoke to her. She forked it into her mouth.
Anna watched the rain, face almost pressed to the smeary window.
Miss N. held passionate views on the importance of sunshine to the sick, Lib remembered. Like plants, they shrank without it. Which made her think of McBrearty and his arcane theory about living off light.
The skies finally cleared around six, and Lib decided there was little risk of visitors this late, so she took Anna out for a turn around the farmyard, wrapped up well in two shawls.
The girl held out her swollen hand to a brown butterfly that jerked about and wouldn’t light on it. “Isn’t that cloud over there exactly like a seal?”
Lib squinted at it. “You’ve never seen a real seal, I think, Anna.”
“Real in a picture, I have.”
Children would like clouds, of course: formless, or, rather, ever-shifting, kaleidoscopic. This little girl’s inchoate mind had never been put in order. No wonder she’d fallen prey to an ambition as fantastical as a life free of appetite.
When they came back in, a tall, bearded man was smoking on a stool in the best chair. He turned to beam at Anna.
“You let a stranger in the minute my back was turned?” Lib asked Rosaleen O’Donnell in a sharp whisper.
“Sure John Flynn’s no stranger.” The mother didn’t lower her voice. “He has a fine big farm up the road, and doesn’t he often stop in of an evening to bring Malachy the paper?”
“No visitors,” Lib reminded her.
The voice that emerged from that beard was very deep. “I’m a member of the committee that’s paying your wages, Mrs. Wright.”
Wrong-footed again. “I beg your pardon, sir. I didn’t realize.”
“Will you have a drop of whiskey, John?” Mrs. O’Donnell went for the little bottle kept for visitors in the nook beside the fire.
“I won’t, not at the minute. Anna, how are you this evening?” asked Flynn in a soft voice, beckoning the child closer.
“Very well,” Anna assured him.
“Aren’t you marvellous?” The farmer’s eyes looked glassy, as if he were seeing a vision. One massive hand stretched out as if he wanted to stroke the child’s head. “You give us all hope. The very thing we need in these depressed times,” he told her. “A beacon shining across these fields. Across the whole benighted island!”
Anna stood on one leg, squirming.
“Would you say a prayer with me?” he asked.
“She needs to get out of these damp things,” said Lib.
“Whisper one for me, then, when you’re going to sleep,” he called as Lib hurried the child towards the bedroom.
“I will of course, Mr. Flynn,” said Anna over her shoulder.
“Bless you!”
So poky and dim in there without the lamp. “It’ll be dark soon,” said Lib.
“He that followeth me walketh not in darkness,” quoted Anna, undoing her cuffs.
“You may as well put your nightclothes on now.”
“All right, Mrs. Elizabeth. Or is it Eliza, maybe?” Fatigue made the girl’s grin lopsided.
Lib concentrated on Anna’s tiny buttons.
“Or is it Lizzy? I like Lizzy.”
“It’s not Lizzy,” said Lib.
“Izzy? Ibby?”
“Iddly-diddly!”
Anna spilled over with laughter. “I’ll call you that, then, Mrs. Iddly-Diddly.”
“You will not, you goblin girl,” said Lib. Were the O’Donnells and their friend Flynn wondering at all this mirth coming through the wall?
“I will so,” said Anna.
“Lib.” The word came out of her on its own, like a cough. “Lib’s what I was called.” Rather regretting telling her already.
“Lib,” said Anna with a satisfied nod.
It was sweet to hear it. Like childhood days, when Lib’s sister still looked up to her, when they’d thought they’d always have each other.
She pushed the memories to arm’s length. “What about you, have you ever had a nickname?”
Anna shook her head.
“You could be Annie, perhaps. Hanna, Nancy, Nan…”
“Nan,” said the girl, sounding out the syllable.
“You like Nan best?”
“But she wouldn’t be me.”
Lib shrugged. “A woman can change her name. On marriage, for instance.”
“You were married, Mrs. Lib.”
She nodded, wary. “I’m a widow.”
“Are you sad all the time?”
Lib was disconcerted. “I knew my husband less than a year.” Did that sound cold?
“You must have loved him,” said Anna.
She couldn’t answer that. She called up Wright in her mind; his face was a blur. “Sometimes, when disaster strikes, there’s nothing to be done but begin all over again.”
“Begin what?”
“Everything. A whole new life.”
The girl absorbed that notion in silence.
They were half blinded when Kitty carried in the flaring lamp.
Later, Rosaleen O’Donnell came in with the Irish Times that John Flynn had left. Here was the photograph of Anna that Reilly had taken on Monday afternoon but changed into a woodcut, all the lines and shades cruder. The effect unnerved Lib, as if her days and nights in this cramped cabin were being translated into a cautionary tale. She confiscated the folded page before Anna could see it.
“There’s a long piece below.” The mother was quivering with gratification.
While Anna was brushing her hair, Lib went over to the lamp and skimmed the article. This was William Byrne’s first dispatch, she realized, the one quoting Petronius, thrown together on Wednesday morning when he didn’t have any solid information about the case at all. She couldn’t disagree about provincial ignorance.
The second paragraph was new to her.
Of course, abstention has long been a distinctly Irish art. As the old Hibernian maxim goes, Leave the bed sleepy, leave the table hungry.
This wasn’t news, Lib thought, only chat; the flippant tone left a bad taste in her mouth.
Those metropolitan sophisticates who have shed their Gaelic may need to be reminded that in our ancient tongue, Wednesday is designated by a word that means “first fast,” Friday by “second fast.” (On both these days, tradition holds that impatient infants are to be let cry three times before getting the bottle.) The word for Thursday, by delightful contrast, means “the day between fasts.”