It came to Lib then that the question to ask was not how a child might commit such a fraud, but why? Children told fibs, yes, but surely only one with a perverse nature would invent this particular story. Anna showed not the slightest interest in making her fortune. The young craved attention, perhaps even fame—but at the price of an empty belly, an aching body, the constant fretting about how to carry on the hoax?
Unless the O’Donnells had come up with the monstrous scheme, of course, and bullied Anna into it so they could profit from the visitors beating a path to their door. But she didn’t seem like a child under compulsion. She had a quiet firmness about her, an air of self-command unusual in one so young.
Adults could be barefaced liars too, of course, and about no subject so much as their own bodies. In Lib’s experience, those who wouldn’t cheat a shopkeeper by a farthing would lie about how much brandy they drank or whose room they’d entered and what they’d done there. Girls bursting out of their stays denied their condition till the pangs gripped them. Husbands swore blind that their wives’ smashed faces were none of their doing. Everybody was a repository of secrets.
The holy cards were distracting her, with their fancy details—edges like filigree lace, some of them—and exotic names. Saint Aloysius Gonzaga, Saint Catherine of Siena, Saint Philip Neri, Saint Margaret of Scotland, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary; like a set of dolls in national dress. He can pick anyone, Anna had said, any sinner or unbeliever. A whole series about the final sufferings of Christ, Our Lord Stripped of his Garments. Who could think it a good idea to put such grim images in the hands of a child, and a sensitive one at that?
One card showed a little girl in a boat with a dove over her head: Le Divin Pilote. Did the title mean that Christ was piloting her boat invisibly? Or perhaps the pilot was the dove. Wasn’t the Holy Ghost often shown as a bird? Or was the figure Lib had taken for a girl actually Jesus, with childish proportions and long hair?
Next, a woman in purple—the Virgin Mary, Lib guessed—bringing a flock of sheep to drink at a pool with a marble rim. What a curious mixture of elegance and rusticity. In the next card, the same woman was bandaging a round-bellied sheep. That dressing would never stay on, in Lib’s view. Mes brebis ne périssent jamais et personne ne les ravira de ma main. She struggled to make sense of the French. Her somethings never perished and no person could ravish them from her hand?
Anna stirred, her head rolling off the two pillows to lie crooked against her shoulder. Lib quickly closed the cards up in their book.
But Anna slept on. Angelic, as all children looked in that rapt state. The creamy lines of her face proved nothing, Lib reminded herself; sleep could make even adults look innocent. Whited sepulchres.
Which reminded her of something: the Madonna and Child. She reached past the books in the little chest and took out the candlestick. What might Anna have entrusted to this pastel-painted figurine? Lib shook it; no sound. It was a hollow tube, open at the bottom. She peered up into the shadowy head of the Virgin, looking for a tiny store of some richly sustaining food. When she put the candlestick to her nose, she smelled nothing. Her probing finger felt… something she could barely brush with her short nail. A miniature packet?
The scissors in her bag. Lib slid the blades down the rough inside of the statuette, digging. A hook was what she needed, really, but how to find one in the middle of the night? She gouged harder— And hissed as the whole thing cracked in two. China child broke away from china mother in her hands.
The packet—insubstantial, after all that—peeled away from its hiding place. When Lib undid the paper, all she found was a lock of hair; dark, but not red like Anna’s. The yellowing paper had been torn, apparently at random, out of something called the Freeman’s Journal towards the end of the preceding year.
She’d broken one of the child’s treasures for nothing, like some clumsy novice on her first shift. Lib set the pieces back in the box with the hair packet between them.
Anna slept on. There was nowhere else for Lib to look, nothing else to do except stare at the girl like some worshipper venerating an icon. Even if the child was somehow stealing the odd bite, how could it be enough to dull the pangs of hunger? Why weren’t they racking her till she woke?
Lib angled the hard-backed rope chair so it faced the bed directly. Sat and squared her shoulders. She looked at her watch: 10:49. No need to press the button to learn the hour, but she did anyway, just for the sensation—the dull thud against her thumb, ten times, rapid and strong at first, then getting slower and fainter.
Lib rubbed her eyes and fixed them on the girl. Could you not watch one hour with me? She remembered that line from the Gospels. But she wasn’t watching with Anna. Nor watching over her, to keep her safe from harm. Just watching her.
Anna seemed restless at times. She rolled herself up in the blanket like a fern furling. Was she cold? There wasn’t another blanket; something else Lib should have asked for while Kitty was still up. She draped a plaid shawl over the child. Anna muttered as if saying prayers, but that didn’t prove she was awake. Lib didn’t make a sound, just in case. (Miss N. never let her nurses wake a patient, because the jarring effect could do great mischief.) The lamp needed trimming twice and refilling once; it was a cumbersome, stinking thing. For a while after midnight, it sounded as if the O’Donnells were talking by the fire next door in the kitchen. Refining their plots? Or just chatting in the desultory way people often did between their first sleep and their second? Lib couldn’t make out Kitty’s voice; perhaps the maid was exhausted enough to sleep through it all.
At five in the morning, when the nun tapped on the bedroom door, Anna was taking the long, regular breaths that meant the deepest slumber.
“Sister Michael.” Lib leapt up, stiff-legged.
The nun nodded pleasantly.
Anna stirred and rolled over. Lib held her breath, waiting to be sure the child was still asleep. “I couldn’t find a Bible,” she whispered. “What was this manna, exactly?”
A small hesitation; clearly the nun was deciding whether or not this was the kind of conversation their instructions allowed. “If I remember right, it fell every day to feed the children of Israel when they were fleeing across the desert from their persecutors.” As she spoke, Sister Michael took a black volume out of her bag and leafed through the shimmering onionskin. She peered at one page, then the one before, then the one before that. She put one broad fingertip to the paper.
Lib read over her shoulder.
In the morning, a dew lay round about the camp. And when it had covered the face of the earth, it appeared in the wilderness small, and as it were beaten with a pestle, like unto the hoar frost on the ground. And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another: Manhu! which signifieth: What is this! for they knew not what it was. And Moses said to them: This is the bread, which the Lord hath given you to eat.
“A grain, then?” asked Lib. “Solid, even though it’s described as a dew?”
The nun’s finger shifted down the page and came to rest at another line: And it was like coriander seed, white, and the taste thereof like to flour with honey.
It was the simplicity of it that struck Lib, the silliness: a child’s dream of picking up sweet stuff from the ground. Like finding a gingerbread house in the woods. “Is that all there is?”
“And the children of Israel ate manna forty years,” the nun read. Then she slid the book shut.