“Haven’t you and Sister been called in? At ten o’clock, they’re gathering in the back room here”—he jerked his head towards the peeling wallpaper—“at the doctor’s behest.”
Perhaps McBrearty had taken in something of what Lib had told him yesterday after all. “No,” she said, sardonic, “we’re only the nurses, why would they want to hear from us?” She leaned her chin on her knotted hands. “Perhaps if I went to him now and told him about the manna trick—”
Byrne shook his head. “Better to march into the meeting and announce to the whole committee that you’ve succeeded in the task for which they hired you.”
Success? It felt more like a hopeless failure. “But how will that help Anna?”
His hands flailed. “Once the watch is over, she’ll have room—time—out of the public eye. A chance to change her mind.”
“She’s not keeping up her fast to impress the readers of the Irish Times,” Lib told him. “It’s between her and your greedy God.”
“Don’t blame him for the follies of his followers. All he asks us to do is live.”
The two of them eyed each other.
Then a grin lit Byrne’s face. “D’you know, I’ve never met a woman—a person—quite as blasphemous as you.”
As he watched Lib, a slow heat spread right through her.
Sun in her eyes. Lib’s uniform was glued to her sides already. By the time she reached the cabin, she’d decided she had to go to this committee meeting tonight, invited or not.
Silence as she let herself in the door. Rosaleen O’Donnell and the maid were plucking a scrawny chicken at the long table. Had they been working in tense quiet or had they been talking—perhaps about the English nurse—until they’d heard her come in?
“Good day,” said Lib.
“Good day,” they both said, eyes on the carcass.
Lib looked at Rosaleen O’Donnell’s long back and thought: I’ve found you out, you fiend. There was almost a sweetness to it, this sense of holding in her hand the one weapon that could demolish the woman’s shoddy imposture.
Not yet, though. There’d be no going back from that point; if Rosaleen threw her out of the cabin, Lib would have no more chances to change Anna’s mind.
In the bedroom, the child lay curled up, facing the window, ribs rising and falling. Her cracked mouth gulped air. Nothing at all in the chamber pot.
The nun’s face was drawn. Worse, she mouthed as she gathered her cloak and bag.
Lib put a hand on her arm to stop her from leaving. “Anna confessed,” she said in the nun’s ear, barely voicing the words.
“To the priest?”
“To me. Until last Saturday, the mother was feeding her chewed-up food under cover of kisses and convincing the girl that it was manna.”
Sister Michael blanched, and crossed herself.
“The committee will be at Ryan’s at ten this evening,” Lib went on, “and we must speak to them.”
“Has Dr. McBrearty said so?”
Lib was tempted to lie. Instead she said, “The man’s delusional. He thinks Anna’s turning cold-blooded! No, we must make our report to the rest of the committee.”
“On Sunday, as instructed.”
“Three more days is too long! Anna may not last,” she whispered, “and you know it.”
The nun averted her face, big eyes blinking.
“I’ll do the talking, but you must stand with me.”
Haltingly: “My place is here.”
“Surely you can find someone else to watch Anna for an hour,” said Lib. “The Ryan girl, even.”
The nun shook her head.
“Instead of spying on Anna, we should all be doing everything we can to induce her to eat. To live.”
The smoothly wimpled head kept swinging like a bell. “Those aren’t our orders. ’Tis all dreadfully sad, but—”
“Sad?” Lib’s voice too loud, scathing. “Is that the word?”
Sister Michael’s face crumpled in on itself.
“Good nurses follow rules,” Lib growled, “but the best know when to break them.”
The nun fled from the room.
Lib took a long, ragged breath and sat down beside Anna.
When the child woke, her heartbeat was like a violin string vibrating just under the skin. Thursday, August 18, 1:03 p.m. Pulse at 129, thready, Lib noted down, her hand as legible as ever. Straining for breath.
She called Kitty in and told her to gather all the pillows in the house.
Kitty stared, then rushed off to do it.
Lib banked them up behind Anna so the girl could lie almost upright, which seemed to ease her breathing a little.
“Thou that liftest me up from the gates,” murmured Anna, eyes shut. “Deliver me out of the hands of my enemies.”
How gladly Lib would have done that if she’d known how, delivered Anna, set her free from her bonds. The way a message was delivered, or a blow, or a baby. “More water?” She offered the spoon.
Anna’s eyelids flickered but didn’t open; she shook her head. “Be it done to me.”
“You may not feel thirst, but you need to drink all the same.”
The lips clung together stickily as they opened and let in a spoonful of water.
It would be easier to talk frankly outdoors. “Would you like to go out in the chair again? It’s a lovely afternoon.”
“No, thank you, Mrs. Lib.”
Lib put that down too: Too weak to be wheeled in chair. Her memorandum book wasn’t just to supplement her memory anymore. It was evidence of a crime.
“This boat’s big enough for me,” mumbled Anna.
Was that a whimsical metaphor for the bed, the child’s one inheritance from her brother? Or was her brain becoming affected by her fast? Lib wrote, Slight confusion? Then it struck her that perhaps she’d misheard bed, slurred, as boat.
“Anna.” She took one of the bloated hands between her two. Cold, like a china doll’s. “You know of the sin called self-murder.”
The hazel-brown eyes opened, but angled away from her.
“Let me read you something from The Examination of Conscience,” said Lib, snatching up the missal and finding the page she’d marked yesterday. “Have you done anything to shorten your life, or to hasten death? Have you desired your own death, through passion or impatience?”
Anna shook her head. Whispering: “I will fly and be at rest.”
“Are you sure of that? Don’t suicides go to hell?” Lib forced herself on. “You won’t be buried with Pat, even, but outside the wall of the churchyard.”
Anna turned her cheek to her pillow like a small child with an earache.
Lib thought of the first riddle she’d ever told the girl: I neither am nor can be seen. She leaned closer and whispered: “Why are you trying to die?”
“To give myself.” Anna corrected her instead of denying it. She began muttering her Dorothy prayer again, over and over: “I adore thee, O most precious cross, adorned by the tender, delicate and venerable members of Jesus my Saviour, sprinkled and stained with his precious blood.”
By the last light of the afternoon, Lib helped the child into a chair so she could air the bedclothes and smoothen the sheets. Anna sat with her knees up under her chin. She hobbled to the pot but produced only a dark drip. Then back to bed, moving like an old woman, the old woman she’d never grow up to be.
Lib paced as the child dozed. Nothing to do but call for more hot bricks, because all the heat of the day couldn’t stop Anna’s shivers.
The slavey’s eyes were rimmed with scarlet a quarter of an hour later when she brought four bricks in—still ashy from the fire—and tucked them under Anna’s blankets. The child was deep in slumber now.
“Kitty,” said Lib, before she knew she was going to speak. Her pulse hammered. If she was wrong—if the maid was as bad as Mrs. O’Donnell and in on the plot with her—then this attempt would do more harm than good. How to begin? Not with accusation, or even information. Compassion—that’s what Lib needed to rouse in the young woman. “Your cousin’s dying.”
Water brimmed in Kitty’s eyes at once.
“All God’s children need to eat,” Lib told her. She lowered her voice further. “Until a few days ago, Anna’s been kept alive by means of a wicked trick, a criminal swindle practiced on the whole world.” She regretted criminal, because fear was flaring in the maid’s eyes now. “Do you know what I’m about to tell you?”