He frowned, fumbling with the arms of his glasses. “I don’t see how that follows.”
“The child I met last Monday was vigorous,” said Lib, “and now she’s barely able to stand. What can I deduce but that you must call off the watch and bend all your efforts to persuading her to eat?”
His papery hands shot up. “My good woman, you overstep your mark. You’ve not been called upon to deduce anything. Though your protectiveness is only natural,” he added more gently. “I suppose the duties of a nurse, especially with a patient so young, must stimulate the dormant maternal capacity. Your own infant didn’t live, I understand?”
Lib looked away so he couldn’t read her face. It was an old wound the doctor had prodded, but he’d done it without warning, and she was dizzy with pain. With outrage too; had Matron really been obligated to share Lib’s history with the man?
“But you mustn’t allow your personal loss to distort your judgment.” McBrearty waved one crooked finger, almost playfully. “Given free rein, this kind of motherly anxiety can lead to irrational panic, and a touch of self-aggrandizement.”
Lib swallowed and made her voice as soft and womanly as she could. “Please, Doctor. Perhaps if you were to call your committee together, and warn them of the deterioration in Anna’s condition—”
He cut her off with a gesture. “I’ll pop in again this very afternoon, will that set your mind at rest?”
Lib lurched to the door.
She’d botched this interview. She should have brought McBrearty around gradually to the point where he thought it was his idea—and his duty—to abort the watch, just as he’d begun it. Since she’d come to this country eight days ago, Lib had made one blunder after another. How ashamed of her Miss N. would have been.
At one o’clock she found Anna in bed with hot bricks pushing up the blankets all around her feet.
“She needed a wee nap after we went around the yard,” murmured Sister Michael, fastening her cloak.
Lib couldn’t speak. This was the first time the child had taken to her bed in the middle of the day. She examined the tiny puddle in the chamber pot. A teaspoonful, at most, and very dark. Could that be blood in the urine?
When Anna roused from her doze, she and Lib chatted about the sunshine. Her pulse was 112, the highest Lib had recorded. “How do you feel, Anna?”
“Pretty well.” Barely audible.
“Is your throat dry? Will you take some water?”
“If you like.” Anna sat up and took a sip.
A tiny trail of red marked the spoon.
“Open your mouth, would you please?” Lib peered in, tilting Anna’s jaw towards the light. Scarlet brimmed around several of the teeth. Well, at least the bleeding was coming from the gums rather than the stomach. One of the molars was at an odd angle. Lib nudged it with her nail, and it tilted sideways. When she tugged it out, between finger and thumb, she saw it wasn’t a milk tooth but one of the permanent ones.
Anna blinked at the tooth, and then at Lib. As if daring the nurse to say something.
Lib slipped it into the pocket of her apron. She’d wait to show it to McBrearty. She’d follow her orders, keep gathering information to strengthen her case, and bide her time—but not much longer.
The child was dark around the lips and under the eyes. Lib noted everything down in her book. The simian fuzz on the cheeks had thickened, and it was coming in on the neck. A cluster of brown marks around the collarbone, scaly. Even where the skin was still pale, it was turning bumpy, like sandpaper. Anna’s pupils seemed more dilated than usual too, as if the black holes had been growing day by day, swallowing up the light brown. “How are your eyes? Can you see as you used to?”
“I see what I need to see,” said Anna.
Weakening sight, Lib added to her memoranda. “Is there anything else… do you hurt anywhere?”
“’Tis just”—Anna made a vague gesture around her middle—“passing through.”
“Passing through you?”
“Not me.” So softly that Lib wasn’t sure she’d heard right.
The pain wasn’t Anna? The girl through whom the pain was passing wasn’t Anna? Anna wasn’t Anna? Perhaps the girl’s brain was beginning to be drained of force. Perhaps Lib’s was too.
The child turned the pages of her Book of Psalms and occasionally muttered lines aloud. “Thou that liftest me up from the gates. Deliver me out of the hands of my enemies.”
Lib didn’t know whether Anna could still make out the print or if she was reciting from memory.
“Save me from the lion’s mouth, and my lowness from the horns of unicorns.”
Unicorns? Lib had never pictured these storybook creatures as predators.
Anna reached up to place the book on her dresser. Then slid down in the bed, gratefully, as if it were night again.
In the silence, Lib thought of offering to read her something. Children often preferred to be told stories rather than read them, didn’t they? Lib couldn’t think of any. Not even any songs. Anna usually sang to herself; when had the singing stopped?
The girl’s eyes moved from wall to wall, as if she were looking for a way out. Nothing to rest on but four corners and her nurse’s strained face.
Lib called to the maid from the door, holding out the jar. “Kitty, fresh bedding, please, and could you fill this with a few flowers?”
“Which ones, now?”
“Anything colourful.”
Kitty came back in ten minutes with a pair of sheets and a handful of grasses and flowers. She turned her head sideways to consider the little girl in the bed.
Lib scrutinised the slavey’s broad features. Was that just tenderness, or was it guilt? Could it be that Kitty knew how Anna had been fed until recently, even if she hadn’t done it herself? Lib tried to think how to phrase the question without alarming the maid; how to persuade the maid to give up whatever information she possessed, if it might save Anna.
“Kitty!” Rosaleen O’Donnell’s cry was irritated.
“Coming.” The slavey hurried off.
Lib helped Anna up and onto a chair so she could change the bedding.
Anna huddled over the jar, arranging the stems. One was dogwood; Lib’s fingers itched to tear up its cruciform bloom, the brown marks of the Roman nails.
The child stroked an unremarkable leaf. “Look, Mrs. Lib, even the little teeth have tinier little teeth all over them.”
Lib thought of the fallen molar in her apron. She pulled the new sheets very tight and smooth. (A crease can score skin as surely as a whip, Miss N. always said.) She tucked Anna back into bed and covered her with three blankets.
Dinner, at four, was some kind of fish stew. Lib was wiping her plate with oat bread when Dr. McBrearty bustled in. She got up so fast that she almost knocked over her chair, oddly ashamed to be caught eating.
“Good day, Doctor,” the girl croaked, struggling up, and Lib raced to put another pillow behind her.
“Well, Anna. You’ve a good colour on you this afternoon.”
Could the old man really be mistaking that hectic flush for health?
He was gentle with the girl, at least, examining her as he chitchatted about the unusually fine weather. He kept referring to Lib in a mollifying way as our good Mrs. Wright here.
“Anna just lost a tooth,” said Lib.
“I see,” he said. “Do you know what I’ve brought you, child, kindly lent by Sir Otway Blackett himself? A bath chair, on wheels, so you can take the air without overtiring yourself.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
After another minute, he took his leave, but Lib followed him to just outside the bedroom door.
“Fascinating,” he murmured.
The word struck her dumb.
“The swelling of the limbs, the darkening skin, that blue tint to her lips and nails… I do believe Anna’s altering at a systemic level,” he confided in her ear. “It stands to reason that a constitution powered by something other than food would operate differently.”
Lib had to look away so McBrearty wouldn’t see her rage.