Byrne’s eyes were dark, almost navy blue. “Will you—would you consider forcing her?”
Lib made herself picture the procedure: holding Anna down, pushing a tube down her throat, and dosing her. She looked up, met his burning gaze. “I don’t think I could. It’s not a matter of squeamishness,” she assured him.
“I know what it would cost you.”
That wasn’t it either, or not all of it. She couldn’t explain.
They walked for a minute; two. It struck Lib that the three of them could have been mistaken for a family taking the air.
Byrne began again, in a brisker tone. “Well, it turns out the padre’s not behind the hoax after all.”
“Mr. Thaddeus? How can you be sure?”
“O’Flaherty the schoolteacher says it may have been McBrearty who talked them all into forming this committee, but it was the priest who insisted they mount a formal guard on the girl, with seasoned nurses.”
Lib puzzled over that. Byrne was right; why would a guilty man have wanted Anna watched? Perhaps she’d been too quick to go along with Byrne’s suspicions of Mr. Thaddeus because of her wariness of priests.
“Also I found out more about this mission Anna mentioned,” said Byrne. “Last spring, Redemptorists from Belgium swooped down—”
“Redemptorists?”
“Missionary priests. The pope sends them out all over Christendom, like bloodhounds, to round up the faithful and sniff out unorthodoxy. They hammer the rules into the heads of country folk, put the fear of God back into their souls,” he told her. “So. For three weeks, thrice daily, these Redemptorists harrowed the bog men in these parts.” His finger swung across the motley-coloured land. “According to Maggie Ryan, one sermon was a real barnstormer: hellfire and brimstone raining down, children screeching, and such urgent queues for confession afterwards that a fellow fell under the crowd and got his ribs stove in. The mission wound up with a massive Quarantore—”
“A what?” asked Lib, lost again.
“Forty hours, it means—the length of time Our Lord spent in the tomb.” Byrne put on a heavy brogue. “Do you know nothing, you heathen?”
That made her smile.
“For forty hours the Blessed Sacrament was exposed in all the chapels within walking distance, with a mob of the faithful shoving along the lanes to prostrate themselves before it. The whole hullabaloo culminated in the confirmation of all eligible boys and girls.”
“Including Anna,” Lib guessed.
“The day before her eleventh birthday.”
Confirmation: the moment of decision. The end of being a child was how Anna had described it. Placed on her tongue, the sacred Host—her God in the guise of a little disc of bread. But how could she have formed the dire resolution to make that her last meal? Could she have misunderstood something the foreign priests had said as they wound the crowd up to a fever pitch?
Lib felt so nauseated, she had to stop for a moment and lean on the bath chair’s leather handles. “What was it about, the sermon that caused such a riot, did you learn?”
“Oh, fornication, what else?”
The word made Lib angle her face away.
“Is that an eagle?” The thin voice startled them.
“Where?” Byrne asked Anna.
“Away up there, over the green road.”
“I think not,” he told the child, “just the king of all crows.”
“I walked that so-called green road the other day,” said Lib, making conversation. “A long and rambling waste of time.”
“An English invention, as it happens,” said Byrne.
She looked sideways at him. Was this one of his jokes?
“It was the winter of ’47, when Ireland was chest-deep in snow for the first time in her history. Because charity was considered corrupting,” he said ironically, “the starving were invited to go on the Public Works instead. In these parts, that meant building a road from nowhere to nowhere.”
Lib frowned at him, jerking her head towards the girl.
“Oh, I’m sure she’s heard all the stories.” But he bent to look at Anna.
Asleep again, head limp in the corner of the chair. Lib tucked the loosening blankets around her.
“So the men picked stones out of the ground and hammered them apart for a pittance a basket,” he went on in a low voice, “while the women toted the baskets and fitted the pieces together. The children—”
“Mr. Byrne,” Lib protested.
“You wanted to know about the road,” he reminded her.
Did he resent her for the mere fact of her being English? she wondered. If he knew the feelings she was harbouring for him, would he respond with contempt? Pity, even? Pity would be worse.
“But I’ll be brief. Whoever was struck down by cold or hunger or fever and didn’t get up was buried by the verge, in a sack, just a couple of inches under.”
Lib thought of her boots going along the soft, flowered edge of the green road. Bog never forgot; it kept things in a remarkable state of preservation. “No more,” she begged, “please.”
A merciful silence between them, at last.
Anna twitched, and turned her face against the threadbare velvet. One drop of rain, then another. Lib clawed at the black canopy of the bath chair with its rusty hinges, and Byrne helped her unfold it over the sleeping child a moment before the rain slammed down.
She couldn’t sleep in her room at Ryan’s, couldn’t read, couldn’t do anything but fret. She knew she should have some supper, but her throat felt sealed up.
At midnight the lamp was burning low on Anna’s dresser, and the child was a handful of dark hair across the pillow, her body hardly interrupting the plane of the blankets. All evening Lib had talked to the child—at the child—until she was hoarse.
Now she sat close to the bed making herself think of a tube. A very narrow, flexible, greased one, no wider than a straw, snaking between the girl’s lips, so slowly, so very gently that Anna might possibly even sleep on. Lib imagined trickling fresh milk down that tube into the child’s stomach, just a little at a time.
Because what if Anna’s obsession was the result of her fast as much as its cause? After all, who could think straight on an empty stomach? Perhaps, paradoxically, the child could learn to feel normal hunger again only once she had some food in her. If Lib tube-fed Anna, really, she’d be fortifying the girl. Tugging Anna back from the brink, giving her time to come to her senses. It wouldn’t be using force so much as taking responsibility; Nurse Wright, alone out of all the grown-ups, brave enough to do what was needed to save Anna O’Donnell from herself.
Lib’s teeth pressed together so hard they ached.
Didn’t adults often do painful things to children for their own good? Or nurses to patients? Hadn’t Lib debrided burns and picked shrapnel out of wounds, dragging more than a few patients back into the land of the living by rough means? And after all, lunatics and prisoners survived force-feeding several times a day.
She pictured Anna waking, beginning to struggle, choking, retching, her eyes wet with betrayal. Lib holding the girl’s small nose, pressing her head down on the pillow. Lie still, my dear. Let me. You must. Pushing in the tube, inexorable.
No! So loud in her head, Lib thought for a moment she’d shouted it.
It wouldn’t work. That was what she should have told Byrne this afternoon. Physiologically, yes, she supposed slop forced down Anna’s throat would supply her with energy, but it wouldn’t keep her alive. If anything, it would speed her withdrawal from the world. Crack her spirit.
Lib counted the breaths for a full minute on her watch. Twenty-five, too many, dangerously fast. But still so perfectly regular. For all the thinning hair, the dun patches, the sore at the corner of the mouth, Anna was beautiful as any sleeping child.