By ten Lib was up again. Hard to keep her eyes shut with all the clattering in the grocery below.
Mr. Ryan, her red-faced host, was directing a pair of boys as they hauled barrels into his cellar. He coughed over his shoulder with a sound like cardboard tearing and said it was too late for any breakfast because didn’t his daughter Maggie have the sheets to boil, so Mrs. Wright would just have to wait till noon.
Lib had been going to ask if her boots could be cleaned, but instead she requested rags, polish, and brush so she could do it herself. If they’d thought the Englishwoman too high-and-mighty to get her hands dirty, they couldn’t have been more wrong.
When her boots were gleaming again, she sat reading Adam Bede in her room, but Mr. Eliot’s moralizing was getting tedious, and her stomach kept growling. The Angelus bells rang out across the street. Lib checked her watch, which said two minutes past noon already.
When she went down to the dining room there was no one else there; the journalist must have gone back to Dublin. She chewed her ham in silence.
“Good day, Mrs. Wright,” said Anna when Lib came in that afternoon. The room smelled close. The child was as alert as ever, knitting a pair of stockings in creamy wool.
Lib raised her eyebrows interrogatively at Sister Michael.
“Nothing new,” murmured the nun. “Two spoons of water taken.” She closed the door behind her on her way out.
Anna didn’t say a word about the broken candlestick. “Maybe you might tell me your Christian name today?” she asked.
“I’ll tell you a riddle instead,” offered Lib.
“Do.”
“‘No legs have I, yet I dance,’” she recited.
I’m like a leaf, yet I grow on no tree.
I’m like a fish, but water kills me.
I’m your friend, but don’t come too close!
“‘Don’t come too close,’” murmured Anna. “Why, what would happen if I did?”
Lib waited.
“No water. No touching. Only let it dance…” Then her smile burst out. “A flame!”
“Very good,” said Lib.
This afternoon felt long. Not in the silent, stretching way of the night shift; this was tedium broken by jarring interruptions. Twice there came knocks at the front of the house, and Lib steeled herself. A loud conversation on the doorstep, and then Rosaleen O’Donnell would bustle into Anna’s room to announce that—as per Dr. McBrearty’s orders—she’d had to turn away visitors. Half a dozen important personages from France the first time, and then a group from the Cape; imagine! These good folk had heard of Anna as they passed through Cork or Belfast and come all this way by train and carriage because they couldn’t think of leaving the country without making her acquaintance. They’d insisted Mrs. O’Donnell pass on this bouquet, these edifying books, their fervent regret at being denied even a glimpse of the marvellous little girl.
The third time, Lib was ready with a notice that she suggested the mother paste on the front door.
PLEASE REFRAIN FROM KNOCKING. THE O’DONNELL FAMILY ARE NOT TO BE DISTURBED. THEY ARE GRATEFUL TO BE KEPT IN YOUR THOUGHTS.
Rosaleen took it with a barely audible sniff.
Anna seemed to pay no attention to any of this as she formed her stitches. She went about her day like any girl, Lib thought—reading, doing needlework, arranging the visitors’ flowers in a tall jug—except that she didn’t eat.
Didn’t seem to eat, Lib corrected herself, annoyed that she’d lapsed into accepting the sham even for a moment. But one thing was true: The girl wasn’t getting so much as a crumb on Lib’s watch. Even if by any chance the nun had dozed off on Monday night and Anna had snatched a few mouthfuls then, this was Wednesday afternoon, Anna’s third full day without a meal.
Lib’s pulse began to thump because it struck her that if the strict surveillance was preventing Anna from getting food by her previous methods, the girl might be starting to suffer in earnest. Could the watch be having the perverse effect of turning the O’Donnells’ lie to truth?
From the kitchen, on and off, came the swish and bump of the slavey working an old-fashioned plunge churn. She sang in a low drone.
“Is that a hymn?” Lib asked the child.
Anna shook her head. “Kitty has to charm the butter for it to come.” She half sang the rhyme.
Come, butter, come,
Come, butter, come,
Peter stands at the gate,
Waiting for a buttered cake.
What went through the child’s mind when she thought of butter or cake? Lib wondered.
She stared at a blue vein on the back of Anna’s hand and thought of the weird theory McBrearty had mentioned about the reabsorption of blood. “I don’t suppose you have your courses yet, do you?” she asked in a low voice.
Anna looked blank.
What did Irishwomen call it? “Your monthlies? Have you ever bled?”
“A few times,” said Anna, her face clearing.
“Really?” Lib was taken aback.
“In my mouth.”
“Oh.” Could an eleven-year-old farm child really be so innocent that she didn’t know about becoming a woman?
Obligingly, Anna put her finger in her mouth; she brought it out tipped with red.
Lib was abashed that she hadn’t examined the girl’s gums carefully enough on the first day. “Open wide for a minute.” Yes, the tissue was spongy, mauve in patches. She gripped an incisor and wriggled it; slightly loose in its socket? “Here’s another riddle for you,” she said, to lighten the moment.
A flock of white sheep,
On a red hill.
Here they go, there they go,
Now they stand still.
“Teeth,” cried Anna indistinctly.
“Quite right.” Lib wiped her hand on her apron.
She realized all at once that she was going to have to warn the girl, even if it was no part of what she’d been hired to do. “Anna, I believe you’re suffering from a complaint typical of long ocean voyages, caused by poor diet.”
The girl listened, head tilted, as if to a story. “I’m all right.”
Lib crossed her arms. “In my educated opinion, you’re nothing of the sort.”
Anna only smiled.
A surge of anger shook Lib. For a girl blessed with health to embark on this dreadful game—
Kitty brought in the nurse’s dinner tray just then, letting in a gust of smoky air from the kitchen.
“Does the fire always have to be kept so high,” asked Lib, “even on such a warm day?”
“The smoke does dry the thatch and preserve the timbers,” said the maid, gesturing at the low ceiling. “If we were ever to let the fire go out, sure the house would fall down.”
Lib didn’t bother correcting her. Was there a single aspect of life that this creature didn’t see through the dark lens of superstition?
Dinner today consisted of three minuscule fish called roach that the master had netted in the lough. No particular flavour, but a change from oats, at least. Lib took the delicate bones from her mouth and set them on the side of her plate.
The hours passed. She read her novel but kept losing track of the plot. Anna drank two spoonfuls of water and produced a little urine. Nothing that amounted to evidence so far. It rained for a few minutes, drops trickling down the small windowpane. When it cleared, Lib would have liked to go out for a walk, but it struck her: What if eager petitioners were hanging around in the lane in hopes of a glimpse of Anna?
The child lifted her holy cards out of their books and whispered sweet nothings to them.
“I’m very sorry about your candlestick,” Lib found herself saying. “I shouldn’t have been so clumsy, or taken it out in the first place.”
“I forgive you,” said Anna.
Lib tried to remember if anyone had ever said that to her so formally. “I know you were fond of it. Wasn’t it a gift to mark your confirmation?”
The girl lifted the candlestick out of the c
hest and stroked the crack where the porcelain pieces rested together. “Better not to get too fond of things.”
This tone of renunciation chilled Lib. Wasn’t it in the nature of children to be graspers, greedy for all of life’s pleasures? She remembered the words of the Rosary: Poor banished children of Eve. Munchers of any windfalls they could find.
Anna took up the little packet of hair and pushed it back inside the Virgin.
Too dark to be her own. A friend’s? Or the brother’s? Yes, Anna might very well have asked Pat for a lock of hair before the ship carried him away.
“What prayers do Protestants say?” the child asked.
Lib was startled by the question. She summoned her forces to give a bland answer about the similarities between the two traditions. Instead, she found herself saying, “I don’t pray.”
Anna’s eyes went wide.
“Nor do I go to church, not for many years now,” Lib added. In for a penny, in for a pound.
“More happiness than a feast,” the girl quoted.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Prayer brings more happiness than a feast.”
“I never found it did much good.” Lib felt absurdly embarrassed by her admission. “I had no sense of getting a reply.”
“Poor Mrs. Wright,” murmured Anna. “Why won’t you tell me your first name?”
“Why poor?” asked Lib.
“Because your soul must be lonely. That silence you heard, when you tried to pray—that’s the sound of God listening.” The child’s face shone.
A commotion at the front door released Lib from this conversation. A man’s voice, booming above Rosaleen O’Donnell’s; without being able to make out more than a few words, Lib could tell that he was an English gentleman, and in a temper. Then the sound of the front door shutting.
Anna didn’t even lift her eyes from the book she’d picked up, The Garden of the Soul.
Kitty came in to check the lamp was prepared. “I heard tell of one that the vapours caught on fire,” she warned Lib, “and cinderized the family in the night!”
“The lamp glass must have been sooty, in that case, so mind you wipe this one well.”
“Right, so,” said Kitty, with one of her tremendous yawns.
Half an hour later the same angry petitioner was back.
A minute later he was stalking into Anna’s room with Rosaleen O’Donnell behind him. A great domed forehead with long silver locks below. He introduced himself to Lib as Dr. Standish, chief of medicine at a Dublin hospital.
“He’s brought a note from Dr. McBrearty,” said Rosaleen O’Donnell, waving it, “to say could we make an exception and let him in as a most distinguished visitor.”
“Given that I’m here as a matter of professional courtesy,” Standish barked, his accent very clipped and English, “I don’t appreciate having my time wasted by being obliged to chase backwards and forwards along these foul boreens for permission to examine a child.” His pale blue eyes were fastened on Anna.
She was looking nervous. Afraid this doctor would find out something McBrearty and the nurses hadn’t? Lib wondered. Or simply because the man was so severe?
“Can I offer you a cup of tea, Doctor?” asked Mrs. O’Donnell.
“Nothing, thank you.”
Said so curtly that she backed out and pulled the door to.
Dr. Standish sniffed the air. “When was this room last fumigated, Nurse?”
“The fresh air from the window, sir—”
“See to it. Chloride of lime, or zinc. But, first, kindly undress the child.”
“I’ve already taken her complete measurements, if you’d like to see them,” offered Lib.
He waved her memorandum book away and insisted she strip Anna down till she was stark naked.
The child shuddered on the woven mat, hands drooping by her sides. Angles of shoulder blades and elbows, bulges of calves and belly; Anna had flesh on her, but it had all slid downwards, as if she were slowly melting. Lib looked away. What gentleman would bare a girl of eleven like a plucked goose on a hook?
Standish carried on poking and prodding, tapping Anna with his cold instruments, keeping up a barrage of orders. “Tongue out farther.” He put his finger so far down Anna’s throat, she gagged. “Does that cause pain?” he asked, pressing between her ribs. “And that? What about this?”
Anna kept shaking her head, but Lib didn’t believe her.
“Can you bend over any farther? Breathe in and hold it,” said the doctor. “Cough. Again. Louder. When did you last move your bowels?”
“I don’t remember,” whispered Anna.
He dug into her misshapen legs. “Does that hurt you?”
Anna gave a little shrug.
“Answer me.”
“Hurt’s not the word for it.”
“Well, what word would you prefer?”
“Humming.”
“Humming?”
“It seems to hum.”
Standish snorted and lifted one of her thickened feet to scrape the sole with a fingernail.
Humming? Lib tried to imagine being swollen up, every cell tight as if ready to burst. Would it feel like a high-pitched vibration, the whole body a tautened bow?
Finally Standish told the child to dress and shoved his instruments back into his bag. “As I suspected, a simple case of hysteria,” he threw in Lib’s direction.
She was disconcerted. Anna wasn’t like any hysteric she’d ever encountered at the hospital: no tics, faints, paralyses, convulsions; no fixed stares or shrieks.
“I’ve had night-feeders in my wards before, patients who won’t eat except when no one’s watching,” he added. “Nothing to distinguish this one except that she’s been indulged to the extremity of half starving herself.”
Half starving. So Standish believed Anna was sneaking food but far less than she needed? Or perhaps she’d been getting almost enough until the watch had begun, on Monday morning, but since then, nothing at all? Lib was horribly afraid he might be right about that. But was Anna nearer to starved or nearer to well? How to quantify the quality of being alive?
Tying her drawers at the waist, Anna showed no sign of having heard a word.
“My prescription’s very simple,” said Standish. “A quart of arrowroot in milk, three times a day.”
Lib stared at him, then spelled out the obvious. “She won’t take anything by mouth.”
“Then drench her like a sheep, woman!”
A slight quiver from Anna.
“Dr. Standish,” protested Lib. She knew the staff of asylums and prisons often resorted to force, but—
“If a patient of mine refuses a second meal, my nurses have standing orders to use a rubber tube, above or below.”
It took Lib a second to understand what the doctor meant by below. She found herself stepping forward, between him and Anna. “Only Dr. McBrearty could give such an order, with the permission of the parents.”
“It’s just as I suspected when I read about the case in the paper.” The words sprayed from Standish’s mouth. “In taking up this chit of a girl—and dignifying this charade by setting a formal watch—McBrearty’s made himself a laughingstock. No, made his whole unfortunate nation a laughingstock!”
Lib couldn’t disagree with that. Her eyes rested on Anna’s bent head. “But such unnecessary harshness, Doctor—”
“Unnecessary?” he scoffed. “Look at the state of her: scabby, hairy, and gross with dropsy.”
The bedroom door banged behind Standish. A strained silence in the room. Lib heard him bark something at the O’Donnells in the kitchen, then march out to his carriage.
Rosaleen O’Donnell put her head in. “What’s happened, in the name of God?”
“Nothing,” Lib told her. And held the woman’s gaze till she withdrew.
Lib thought Anna might be weeping, but no, the child looked more thoughtful than ever, adjusting her tiny cuffs.
Standish had years, no, decades of study and experien
ce that Lib lacked, that no woman could ever obtain. Anna’s downy, scaly skin, the puffy flesh—small matters in themselves, but was he right that they meant she was in actual danger from eating so little? Lib felt an impulse to put her arms around the child.
She restrained it, of course.
She remembered a freckled nurse at Scutari complaining that they weren’t allowed to follow the prompts of the heart—to take a quarter of an hour, for instance, to sit with a dying man and offer a word of comfort.
Miss N.’s nostrils had flared. You know what would comfort that man, if anything could? A stump pillow to rest his mangled knee on. So don’t listen to your heart, listen to me and get on with your work.
“What is fumigated?” asked Anna.
Lib blinked. “The air can be purified by burning certain disinfectant substances. My teacher didn’t believe in it.” She took two steps to Anna’s bed and began to smoothen the sheets, making every line straight.
“Why not?”
“Because it’s the harmful thing that must be taken out of the room, not merely its smell,” said Lib. “My teacher even made a joke about it.”
“I like jokes,” said Anna.
“Well, she said that fumigations are of essential importance to medicine—because they make such an abominable smell, they compel you to open the window.”
Anna mustered a tiny laugh. “Did she make lots of jokes?”
“That’s the only one I can recall.”
“What’s the harmful thing in this room?” The child looked from wall to wall as if a bogey might jump out at her.
“All that’s doing you harm is this fast.” Lib’s words were like stones thrown down in the quiet room. “Your body needs nourishment.”
The girl shook her head. “Not earthly food.”
“Every body—”
“Not mine.”
“Anna O’Donnell! You heard what the doctor said: half starving. You may be doing yourself grievous harm.”
“He’s looking wrongly.”
“No, you are. When you see a piece of bacon, say—don’t you feel anything?” asked Lib.
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