“Consider me a fresh pair of eyes. If I say so myself, I know how to talk to people. Perhaps I can tease some truth out of the girl.”
Eyes down, she shook her head. Oh, the man knew how to talk to people, that was undeniable; he had a knack for teasing information out of those who should have known better.
“Five days I’ve been hanging around here,” he said, steelier, “and what have I to show for it?”
The blood swept up from Lib’s throat. Of course the journalist would consider all this time making conversation with the English nurse a waste and a bore. Not beautiful, not brilliant, no longer young; how could Lib have forgotten that she was only a means to an end?
She was under no obligation to exchange another word with this provocateur. She spun around and strode back in the direction of the village.
CHAPTER FOUR
Vigil
vigil
a devotional observance
an occasion of keeping awake for a purpose
a watch kept on the eve of a festival
The laundry was gone from the bushes, and the cabin smelled of steam and hot metal; the women must have been ironing all afternoon. No Rosary this evening, it seemed. Malachy O’Donnell was smoking a pipe, and Kitty was encouraging the hens into their cupboard. “Is your mistress out?” Lib asked her.
“’Tis her Female Sodality on Saturdays,” said Kitty.
“What’s that?”
But the slavey was running after one recalcitrant bird.
Lib had more urgent questions that had occurred to her as she’d lain awake this afternoon. Somehow, out of the whole crew, Kitty was the one she was most inclined to trust, for all that the young woman’s head was crammed with fairies and angels. In fact, Lib rather wished she’d taken more trouble to cultivate the maid’s friendship from the first day. She went a few steps closer now. “Kitty, do you by any chance remember the last food your cousin ate before her birthday?”
“I do, of course; sure how could I forget?” Kitty’s tone was ruffled. Bent in two, shutting the dresser, she added something that sounded like Toast.
“Toast?”
“The Host, she said,” Malachy O’Donnell threw over his shoulder. “The body of Our Lord, ah, under the species of bread.”
Lib pictured Anna opening her mouth to receive that tiny baked disc that Roman Catholics believed to be the actual flesh of their God.
Arms crossed, the maid nodded at her master. “Her very first Holy Communion, bless the girl.”
“’Twas no earthly food she wanted for her last meal, was it, Kitty?” he murmured, eyes on the fire again.
“’Twas not.”
Her last meal; like a condemned prisoner. So Anna had taken the Host for the first and only time, then shut her mouth. What strange distortion of doctrine could have impelled her? Lib wondered. Had Anna somehow picked up the notion that now she’d been granted divine nourishment, she’d no further need for the earthly kind?
The father’s face hung, uneven in the flicker of the flames. Some adult had been keeping Anna alive all these months, Lib reminded herself: Could it have been Malachy? She could hardly credit that.
Of course, there was a grey zone between innocent and guilty. What if the man had discovered the trick—his wife’s or their priest’s or both—but by then, his little pet’s fame had already spread so far, he hadn’t been able to bring himself to interfere?
In the bedroom, beside the sleeping girl, Sister Michael was already doing up her cloak. “Dr. McBrearty put his head in this afternoon,” she whispered.
Had everything Lib had told him sunk in at last? “What instructions did he give?”
“None.”
“But what did he say?”
“Nothing in particular.” The nun’s expression was unreadable.
Of all the doctors under whom Lib had served, this affable old man was the most difficult.
The nun left, and Anna slept on.
The night shift was so quiet, Lib had to keep pacing to ward off sleep herself. At one point she picked up the toy from Boston. The songbird was on one side, the cage on the other, yet when Lib twirled its strings as fast as she could, her senses were tricked and two incompatible things became one: a vibrating, humming caged bird.
Past three, Anna blinked awake.
“Can I do anything for you?” asked Lib, leaning over her. “Make you more comfortable?”
“My feet.”
“What about them?”
“I don’t feel them,” whispered Anna.
The tiny toes under the blanket were icy to the touch. Such poor circulation in someone so young. “Here, climb out for a minute to get the blood moving again.” The girl did, slowly and stiffly. Lib helped her to cross the room. “Left, right, like a soldier.”
Anna managed a clumsy march on the spot. Her eyes were on the open window. “Lots of stars tonight.”
“There are always just as many, if only we could see them,” Lib told her. She pointed out the Plough, the North Star, Cassiopeia.
“Do you know them all?” asked Anna, marvelling.
“Well, just our constellations.”
“Which ones are ours?”
“Those easily seen from the Northern Hemisphere, I mean,” said Lib. “They’re different in the South.”
“Really?” The girl’s teeth were chattering, so Lib helped her back into bed.
Wrapped in flannels, the brick was still hoarding heat from the fire in which it had sat all evening. She tucked it under the child’s feet.
“But it’s yours,” said the girl, shuddering.
“I don’t need it on a mild summer night. Do you feel the warmth yet?”
Anna shook her head. “I’m sure I will, though.”
Lib looked down at the small figure lying as straight as a Crusader on a tomb. “Go back to sleep, now.”
Still, Anna’s eyes stayed wide. She whispered her Dorothy prayer, the one she said so often that Lib barely noticed it anymore. Then she sang some hymns, barely above a whisper.
The night is dark,
And I am far from home,
Lead thou me on.
On Sunday morning Lib should have been catching up on her sleep, but the clanging church bells made that impossible. She lay awake, stiff-limbed, going through everything she’d learned about Anna O’Donnell. So many peculiar symptoms, but they didn’t constitute anything Lib recognized as a disease. She would have to speak to Dr. McBrearty again, and this time pin him down.
At one o’clock, the nun reported that the girl had been distressed at not being allowed to go to mass but had agreed to recite the liturgy for the day in her missal with Sister Michael instead.
For their walk, Lib set a very slow pace so as not to overtire Anna as she had the other day. She scanned the horizon before they set out to make sure there were no gawkers nearby.
They picked their way across the farmyard, their boots slithering. “If you were looking stronger,” she said, “we might have gone a half a mile that way”—pointing west—“as far as a very curious hawthorn I’ve found with strips of cloth tied all over it.”
Anna nodded with enthusiasm. “The rag tree at our holy well.”
“It didn’t have what I’d call a well, exactly, just a tiny pool.” Lib remembered the tarry whiff of the water; perhaps it had some mildly disinfectant power? Then again, there was no use looking for a seed of science in a superstition. “Are the rags some kind of offering?”
“They’re for dipping in the water and rubbing on a sore or an ache,” said Anna. “After, you tie the rag on the tree, see?”
Lib shook her head.
“The badness stays on the rag, and you leave it behind. Once it rots away, what was ailing you will be gone too.”
Meaning that time heals all ills, Lib supposed. A cunning legend, this one, because it would take so long for cloth to disintegrate, the sufferer’s complaint would be almost sure to be cured by then.
Anna stopped to stroke a vivid cushion of moss on a wall, or perhaps to catch her breath. A pair of birds picked at red currants in the hedge.
Lib pulled a bunch of the gleaming globes and held them up close to the child’s face. “Do you remember the taste of these?”
“I think so.” Anna’s lips were just a hand span from the currants.
“Doesn’t your mouth water?” asked Lib, her voice seductive.
The girl shook her head.