Lib was at a loss. A nice girl. But a cheat of the deepest dye. Anna had to be. Didn’t she? “Generally calm,” she said instead. “What Miss Nightingale used to describe as an accumulative temperament, the kind that gathers in impressions gradually.”
McBrearty brightened up at the name, so much so that Lib wished she hadn’t used it. He signed the note, folded it, and held it out.
“Could you have it sent over to the O’Donnells’, please, to put a stop to these visits this very afternoon?”
“Oh, certainly.” He tugged off his glasses again, folded them in half with tremulous fingers. “Fascinating letter in the latest Telegraph, by the by.” McBrearty stirred the papers on his desk without finding what he was looking for. “It mentions a number of previous cases of ‘fasting girls’ who’ve lived without food—have been said to do so, at least,” he corrected himself, “in Britain and abroad over the centuries.”
Really? Lib had never heard of the phenomenon.
“The writer suggests that they might possibly have been, ah—well, not to put too fine a point on it—reabsorbing, subsisting on their own menses.”
What a revolting theory. Besides, this child was only eleven. “In my view, Anna is a long way from being pubescent.”
“Mm, true.” McBrearty looked dashed. Then the corners of his mouth turned up. “To think I might have stayed in England and never had the luck to encounter such a case!”
After leaving the doctor’s house, Lib strode away, trying to loosen her stiff legs and shake off the atmosphere of that fusty study.
A lane led towards a clump of woodland. She noticed leaves lobed like oak but on straighter branches than English oaks. The hedges were spiky with furze, and she breathed in the bouquet of the tiny yellow blooms. There were drooping pink flowers that no doubt Anna O’Donnell could have named. Lib tried to identify some of the birds twittering in the bushes, but the low boom of the bittern was the only one she knew for sure—the foghorn of some unseen ship.
One tree stood out at the back of a field; something odd about its dangling branches. Lib picked her way along the outside furrow—although her boots were so muddy already, she wasn’t sure why she was bothering to be careful. The tree was farther away than it seemed, a good stretch beyond where the cultivated strips ran out, past an outcropping of grey limestone cracked by sun and rain. Nearing, Lib saw that it was a hawthorn, new twigs coming in red against the glossy leaves. But what was that dangling in strips from the pinkish branches? Moss?
No, not moss. Wool?
Lib almost stumbled into a tiny pool in a cleft rock. Two azure dragonflies clung together a few inches above the water. Could it be a spring? Something like bladderwort fringed the edge of the pool. She was suddenly terribly thirsty, but when she crouched down, the dragonflies disappeared, and the water looked as black as the peaty soil. She cupped some in her palm. It had a whiff like creosote, so she swallowed her thirst and let it spill again.
Not wool hanging from the hawthorn branches above her; something man-made, in strips. How peculiar. Ribbons, scarves? They’d been knotted onto the tree for so long, they were grey and vegetal.
Back at Ryan’s, in the tiny dining room, she found a red-haired man finishing a chop and filling in a memorandum book much like hers with a rapid hand. He jumped to his feet. “You’re not from hereabouts, ma’am.”
How could he tell? Her plain green dress, her bearing?
The man was about her height, a few years younger, with that unmistakeably Irish milky skin under garish curls, and an accent, but an educated one. “William Byrne, of the Irish Times.”
Ah, the scribbler the photographist had mentioned. Lib accepted his handshake. “Mrs. Wright.”
“Touring the sights of the Midlands?”
He didn’t guess why she was here, then; he took her for a lady tourist. “Are there any?” That came out too sardonic.
Byrne chuckled. “Well, now, it depends how much your soul is stirred by the enigmatic atmosphere of stone circles, ring forts, or round barrows.”
“I’m not familiar with the second or the third.”
He made a face. “Variations on the stone circle, I suppose.”
“So all the sights hereabouts are rocky and circular?”
“Apart from the latest one,” said William Byrne, “a magical girl who lives on air.”
Lib stiffened.
“Not what I’d call hard news, but my editor in Dublin thought it’d do for August. However, I lamed my mare in a pothole outside Mullingar, had to tend her two nights till she was mended, and now that I’m here, I’ve been turned away from the girl’s humble cot!”
A quiver of embarrassment; he must have arrived just after the note she’d made McBrearty send the O’Donnells. But, really, more publicity for this case would fan the flames of delusion, and the watch could only be hindered by the prying of a newspaper reporter.
Lib would have liked to excuse herself and go upstairs before Byrne could say anything else about Anna O’Donnell, but she needed her dinner. “Could you not have left your horse and hired another?”
“I suspected they’d have shot Polly instead of feeding her hot mash as I did.”
She smiled at the image of the journalist curled up in the horse stall.
“My cold welcome at the prodigy’s cabin is the real catastrophe,” complained Byrne. “I’ve shot off a caustic paragraph to the paper by telegraph, but now I have to conjure up a full report to send by tonight’s mail coach.”
Was he always so free-spoken with strangers? Lib couldn’t think of anything to say except “Why caustic?”
“Well, it speaks ill of the family’s honesty, doesn’t it, if they won’t even let me in the door for fear I’ll see through their wunderkind at first glance?”
That wasn’t fair to the O’Donnells, but Lib could hardly tell him that he was talking to the very person who’d insisted on banning visitors. Her eyes fell and slid to his notes.
How illimitable is the gullibility of mankind, especially, it must be said, when combined with provincial ignorance. But Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur; that is to say, “If the world will be gulled, let it be gulled.” Thus quoth Petronius, in the days of Our Lord, an aphorism just as pertinent to our own time.
Maggie Ryan came in with more ale for Byrne.
“The chops were delicious,” he told her.
“Ah, now,” said Maggie with a touch of scorn, “hunger’s the best sauce.”
“I believe I’ll have a chop,” said Lib.
“They’re all ate, ma’am. There’s mutton.”
Lib agreed to mutton, not having a choice. Then she put her head down over Adam Bede immediately so William Byrne wouldn’t feel invited to linger.
When she reached the cabin at nine that night she recognized the moaning chorus of the Rosary: Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the hour of our death, amen.
She let herself in and waited on one of the three-legged stools the Irish called creepies. Like babies, the Catholics, babbling as they squeezed their beads. Sister Michael’s head was up, at least, eyes on the little girl, but was she concentrating on her or on the prayers?
Anna was in her nightdress already. Lib watched her lips shaping the words over and over: Now and at the hour of our death, amen. She trained her gaze in turn on the mother, the father, the poor cousin, wondering which of them was plotting to evade her scrutiny tonight.
“Sister, you’ll stay for a cup of tea with us?” asked Rosaleen O’Donnell afterwards.
“I won’t, Mrs. O’Donnell, but thank you kindly.”
Anna’s mother was flaunting her preference for the nun, Lib decided. Of course they’d like Sister Michael, familiar and inoffensive.
Rosaleen O’Donnell was using a little rake to tidy the embers into a circle. She set down three fresh sods like spokes in a wheel and sat back on her heels, crossing herself. Once the fresh turf flared up, she scooped ash from a bin and shook it over the flames, damping them down.