The journey was no worse than she expected. A train from London to Liverpool; the steam packet overnight to Dublin; a slow Sunday train west to a town called Athlone.

A driver was waiting. “Mrs. Wright?”

Lib had known many Irishmen, soldiers. But that was some years ago, so her ear strained now to make out the driver’s words.

He carried her trunk to what he called the jaunting car. An Irish misnomer; nothing jaunty about this bare cart. Lib settled herself on the single bench down the middle, her boots hanging closer to the right-hand wheel than she liked. She put up her steel-frame umbrella against the drizzle. This was better than the stuffy train, at least.

On the other side of the bench, slouching so his back almost touched hers, the driver flicked his whip. “Go on, now!”

The shaggy pony stirred.

The few people on the macadamised road out of Athlone seemed wan, which Lib attributed to the infamous diet of potatoes and little else. Perhaps that was responsible for the driver’s missing teeth too.

He made some remark about the dead.

“I beg your pardon?”

“The dead centre, ma’am.”

Lib waited, braced against the juddering of the cart.

He pointed down. “We’re in the exact middle of the country here.”

Flat fields striped with dark foliage. Sheets of reddish-brown peat; wasn’t bogland known to harbour disease? The occasional grey remains of a cottage, almost greened over. Nothing that struck Lib as picturesque. Clearly the Irish Midlands were a depression where wet pooled, the little circle in a saucer.

The jaunting car turned off the road onto a narrower gravel way. The pattering on her umbrella’s canvas became a continuous thrum. Windowless cabins; Lib imagined a family with its animals in each, huddling in out of the rain.

At intervals a lane led off towards a jumble of roofs that probably constituted a village. But never the right village, evidently. Lib should have asked the driver how long the journey was likely to take. She didn’t put the question to him now in case the answer was Still a long time yet.

All Matron at the hospital had said was that an experienced nurse was required for two weeks, in a private capacity. The costs of keep and travel to and from Ireland to be furnished, as well as a daily consideration. Lib knew nothing about the O’Donnells except that they had to be a family of means if they were cosmopolitan enough to send all the way to England for a better class of nurse. It occurred to her only now to wonder how they could know that the patient would need her services for no more nor less than a fortnight. Perhaps Lib was a temporary replacement for another nurse.

In any case, she’d be quite well paid for her trouble, and the novelty of the thing held some interest. At the hospital, Lib’s training was resented as much as it was appreciated, and only the more basic of her skills were required: feeding, changing dressings, bed-making.

She resisted the impulse to reach under her cloak and pull out her watch; it wouldn’t make the time go any faster, and the rain might get into the mechanism.

Another roofless cabin now, turned away from the road, its gabled walls accusing the sky. Weeds had had no success at covering up this ruin yet. Lib glimpsed a mess of black through the door-shaped hole; a recent conflagration, then. (But how did anything manage to catch fire in this waterlogged country?) Nobody had taken the trouble to clear away the charred rafters, let alone frame and thatch a new roof. Was it true that the Irish were impervious to improvement?

A woman in a filthy frilled cap was stationed on the verge, a knot of children in the hedge behind her. The rattle of the cart brought them forward with hands cupped high as if to catch the rain. Lib looked away, awkward.

“The hungry season,” muttered the driver.

But this was high summer. How could food be scarce now, of all times?

Her boots were speckled with mud and gravel spat up by the wheel. Several times the jaunting car lurched into a dun puddle deep enough that she had to cling to the bench so as not to be flung out.

More cabins, some with three or four windows. Barns, sheds. A two-storey farmhouse, then another. Two men turned from loading a wagon, and one said something to the other. Lib looked down at herself: Was there something odd about her travelling costume? Perhaps the locals were so shiftless, they’d break off work to goggle at any stranger.

Up ahead, whitewash glared from a building with a pointed roof and a cross on top, which meant a Roman Catholic chapel. Only when the driver reined in did Lib realize that they’d arrived at the village, although by English standards it was no more than a sorry-looking cluster of buildings.

She checked her watch now: almost nine, and the sun hadn’t set yet. The pony dropped its head and chewed a tuft. This appeared to be the sole street.

“You’re to put up at the spirit grocery.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Ryan’s.” The driver nodded left to a building with no sign.

This couldn’t be right. Stiff after the journey, Lib let the man hand her down. She shook her umbrella at arm’s length, rolled the waxy canvas, and buttoned it tight. She dried her hand on the inside of her cloak before she stepped into the low-beamed shop.

The reek of burning peat hit her. Apart from the fire smouldering under a massive chimney, only a couple of lamps lit the room, where a girl was nudging a canister into its row on a high shelf.

“Good evening,” said Lib. “I believe I may have been brought to the wrong place.”

“You’ll be the Englishwoman,” said the girl slightly too loudly, as if Lib were deaf. “Would you care to step into the back for a bit of supper?”

Lib held her temper. If there was no proper inn, and if the O’Donnell family couldn’t or wouldn’t accommodate the nurse they’d hired, then complaining would be no use.

She went through the door beside the chimney and found herself in a small, windowless room with two tables. One was occupied by a nun whose face was almost invisible behind the starched layers of her headdress. If Lib flinched a little, it was because she hadn’t seen the like for years; in England religious sisters didn’t go about in such garb for fear of provoking anti-Romish sentiment. “Good evening,” she said civilly.

The nun answered with a deep bow. Perhaps members of her order were discouraged from speaking to those not of their creed, or vowed to silence, even?

Lib sat at the other table, facing away from the nun, and waited. Her stomach growled—she hoped not loudly enough to be heard. There was a faint clicking that had to be coming from under the woman’s black folds: the famous rosary beads.

When at last the girl brought in the tray, the nun bent her head and whispered; saying grace before the meal. She was in her forties or fifties, Lib guessed, with slightly prominent eyes, and the meaty hands of a peasant.

An odd assortment of dishes: oat bread, cabbage, some kind of fish. “I was rather expecting potatoes,” Lib told the girl.

“’Tis another month you’ll be waiting for them.”

Ah, now Lib understood why this was Ireland’s hungry season—potatoes weren’t harvested until the autumn.

Everything tasted of peat, but she set about clearing her plate. Since Scutari, where the nurses’ rations had been as short as the men’s, Lib had found herself incapable of wasting a bite.

Noise out in the grocery, and then a party of four squeezed into the dining room. “God save all here,” said the first man.

Not knowing the appropriate response, Lib nodded.

“And ye too.” It was the nun who murmured that, making the sign of the cross by touching her forehead, chest, left and right shoulders. Then she left the room—whether because she’d had all she wanted of her meagre portion or to surrender the second table to the newcomers, Lib couldn’t tell.

They were a raucous lot, these farmers and their wives. Had they already been drinking elsewhere all Sunday afternoon? Spirit grocery; now she understood the driver’s phrase. Not a haunted grocery, but one that served liquor.

From their chatter, which touched on some extraordinary wonder they could hardly believe although they’d seen it with their own eyes, Lib decided they must have been to a fair.

“’Tis the other crowd are behind it, I’d say,” said a bearded man. His wife elbowed him, but he persisted. “Waiting on her hand and foot!”

“Mrs. Wright?”

She turned her head.

The stranger in the doorway tapped his waistcoat. “Dr. McBrearty.”

That was the name of the O’Donnells’ physician, Lib remembered. She stood to shake his hand. Straggly white side-whiskers, very little hair above. A shabby jacket, shoulders flecked with dandruff, and a knob-headed walking stick. Seventy, perhaps?

The farmers and their wives were eyeing them with interest.

“Good of you to travel all this way,” the doctor remarked, as if Lib were paying a visit rather than taking up employment. “Was the crossing awful? If you’ve quite finished?” he went on, without giving her a chance to answer.

She followed him out into the shop. The girl, lifting a lamp, beckoned them up the narrow staircase.

The bedroom was poky. Lib’s trunk took up much of the floor. Was she expected to have a tête-à-tête with Dr. McBrearty here? Had the premises no other room free, or was the girl too uncouth to arrange things more politely?

“Very good, Maggie,” he told the girl. “How’s your father’s cough?”

“Better, nearly.”

“Now, Mrs. Wright,” he said as soon as the girl was gone, and he gestured for her to take the single rush chair.

Lib would have given a great deal for ten minutes alone first to use the chamber pot and the washstand. The Irish were notorious for neglecting the niceties.

The doctor leaned on his cane. “You’re of what age, if I may ask?”

So she had to submit to an interview on the spot, although she’d been given to understand that the job was already hers. “Not yet thirty, Doctor.”

“A widow, yes? You took up nursing when you found yourself, ah, thrown on your own resources?”

Was McBrearty checking Matron’s account of her? She nodded. “Less than a year after I was married.”

She’d happened on an article about the thousands of soldiers suffering from gunshot wounds or cholera, and no one to tend them. The Times had announced that seven thousand pounds had been raised to send a party of Englishwomen to the Crimea as nurses. That, Lib had thought, with dread but also a sense of daring, I believe I could do that. She’d lost so much already, she was reckless.

All she told the doctor now was “I was twenty-five.”

“A Nightingale!” he marvelled.

Ah, so Matron had told him that much. Lib was always shy of introducing the great lady’s name into conversation and loathed the whimsical title that had come to be attached to all those Miss N. had trained, as if they were dolls cast in her heroic mould. “Yes, I had the honour of serving under her at Scutari.”

“Noble labour.”

It seemed perverse to answer no, arrogant to say yes. It struck Lib now that the name of Nightingale was why the O’Donnell family had taken the trouble to bring a nurse all the way across the Irish Sea. She could tell the old Irishman would like to hear more about her teacher’s beauty, sternness, righteous indignation. “I was a lady nurse,” she said instead.

“A volunteer?”

She’d meant to clarify, but he’d taken her up wrong, and her face heated. Really, though, why feel the least embarrassment? Miss N. always reminded them that the fact of being paid didn’t lessen their altruism. “No, I mean that I was one of the educated nursing sisters rather than the ordinary nurses. My father was a gentleman,” she added, a little foolishly. Not a wealthy one, but still.

“Ah, very good. How long have you been at the hospital?”

“Three years come September.” Remarkable in itself, as most of the nurses stayed no more than a matter of months; irresponsible scrubbers, Mrs. Gamps in the old mould, whining for their rations of porter. Not that Lib was particularly appreciated there. She’d heard Matron describe veterans of Miss N.’s Crimean campaign as uppish. “After Scutari I worked in several families,” she added, “and saw my own parents through their final illnesses.”

“Have you ever nursed a child, Mrs. Wright?”

Lib was thrown, but only for a moment. “I would expect the principles to be the same. Is my patient a child?”

“Mm, Anna O’Donnell.”

“I’ve not been told her complaint.”

He sighed.

Something fatal, then, Lib deduced. But slow enough that it hadn’t killed the child yet. Consumption, most likely, in this wet climate.

“She’s not exactly ill. Your only duty will be to watch her.”

A curious verb. That awful nurse in Jane Eyre, charged with keeping the lunatic hidden away in the attic. “I’ve been brought here to… stand guard?”

“No, no, simply to observe.”

But observation was only the first piece of the puzzle. Miss N. had taught her nurses to watch carefully in order to understand what the ill required and provide it. Not medicine—that was the doctors’ domain—but the things she argued were equally crucial to recovery: light, air, warmth, cleanliness, rest, comfort, nourishment, and conversation. “If I understand you—”

“I doubt you do yet, and the fault’s mine.” McBrearty leaned on the edge of the washstand as if his strength were failing.

Lib would have liked to offer the old man the chair if she could have done it without insult.

“I don’t want to prejudice you in any way,” he went on, “but what I may say is that it’s a most unusual case. Anna O’Donnell claims—or, rather, her parents claim—that she hasn’t taken food since her eleventh birthday.”

Lib frowned. “She must be ill, then.”

“Not with any known disease. Known to me, that is,” said McBrearty, correcting himself. “She simply doesn’t eat.”

“You mean, no solids?” Lib had heard of that affectation of refined modern misses, to live off boiled arrowroot or beef tea for days on end.

“No sustenance of any kind,” the doctor corrected her. “She can’t take a thing but clear water.”

Can’t means won’t, as the nursery saying went. Unless… “Has the poor child some gastric obstruction?”

“None that I’ve been able to find.”

Lib was at a loss. “Severe nausea?” She’d known pregnant women too sick to stomach food.

The doctor shook his head.

“Is she melancholic?”

“I wouldn’t say that. A quiet, pious girl.”

Ah, so this was a religious enthusiasm, perhaps, not a medical matter at all. “Roman Catholic?”

The flick of his hand seemed to say What else?

She supposed they were virtually all Catholics, this far from Dublin. The doctor might well be one himself. “I’m sure you’ve impressed on her the dangers of fasting,” said Lib.

“I have, of course. So did her parents, at the start. But Anna’s immoveable.”

Had Lib been dragged across the sea for this, a child’s whim? The O’Donnells must have panicked the first day their daughter turned up her nose at her breakfast and shot off a telegram to London demanding not just any nurse, but one of the new, irreproachable kind: Send a Nightingale!

“How long has it been since her birthday?” she asked.

McBrearty plucked at his whiskers. “April, this was. Four months ago today!”

Lib would have laughed aloud if it weren’t for her training. “Doctor, the child would be dead by now.” She waited for some sign that they agreed on the absurdity: a knowing wink, a tap of the nose.

He only nodded. “It’s a great mystery.”

That wasn’t the word Lib would have chosen. “Is she… bedridden, at least?”

He shook his head. “Anna walks around like any other girl.”

“Emaciated?”

“She’s always been a mite of a thing, but no, she seems hardly to have altered since April.”

He spoke sincerely, but this was ludicrous. Were they half blind, his rheumy eyes?

“And she’s in full possession of all her faculties,” added McBrearty. “In fact, the vital force burns so strong in Anna that the O’Donnells have become convinced she can live without food.”

“Incredible.” The word came out too caustic.

“I’m not surprised you’re sceptical, Mrs. Wright. I was too.”

Was? “Are you telling me, in all seriousness, that—”

He interrupted, his papery hands shooting up. “The obvious interpretation is that it’s a hoax.”

“Yes,” said Lib in relief.

“But this child… she’s not like other children.”

She waited for more.

“I can tell you nothing, Mrs. Wright. I have only questions. For the past four months I’ve been burning with curiosity, as I’m sure you are now.”

No, what Lib burnt with was a desire to end this interview and get the man out of her room. “Doctor, science tells us that to live without food is impossible.”

“But haven’t most new discoveries in the history of civilization seemed uncanny at first, almost magical?” His voice shook a little with excitement. “From Archimedes to Newton, all the greats have achieved their breakthroughs by examining the evidence of their senses without prejudice. So all I ask is for you to keep an open mind when you meet Anna O’Donnell tomorrow.”

Lib lowered her eyes, mortified for McBrearty. How could a physician let himself be snared in a little girl’s game and fancy himself among the greats as a consequence? “May I ask, is the child under your sole care?” She phrased it politely, but what she meant was, had no better authority been called in?

“She is,” said McBrearty reassuringly. “In fact, it was I who took a notion to work up an account of the case and send it to the Irish Times.”

Lib had never heard of it. “A national paper?”

“Mm, the most lately established one, so I hoped its proprietors might be somewhat less blinded by sectarian prejudice,” he added, wistful. “More open to the new and the extraordinary, wherever it may arise. I thought to share the facts with a broader public, don’t you know, in the hope that someone could explain them.”

“And has anyone done so?”

A stifled sigh. “There’ve been several fervent letters proclaiming Anna’s case to be an out-and-out miracle. Also a few intriguing suggestions that she might be drawing on some as-yet-undiscovered nutritive qualities of, say, magnetism, or scent.”

Scent? Lib sucked in her cheeks so as not to smile.

“One bold correspondent proposed that she might be converting sunlight into energy, as vegetation does. Or living on air, even, as certain plants do,” he added, his wrinkled face brightening. “Remember that crew of shipwrecked sailors said to have subsisted for several months on tobacco?”

Lib looked down so he wouldn’t read the scorn in her eyes.

McBrearty found his thread again. “But the vast majority of the replies have consisted of personal abuse.”

“Of the child?”

“The child, the family, and myself. Comments not just in the Irish Times but in various British publications that seem to have taken up the case for the sole purpose of satire.”

Lib saw it now. She’d travelled a long way to hire herself out as a nursemaid-cum-gaoler, all because of a provincial doctor’s injured pride. Why hadn’t she pressed Matron for more details before she accepted the job?

“Most correspondents presume that the O’Donnells are cheats, conspiring to feed their daughter secretly and make fools of the world.” McBrearty’s voice was shrill. “The name of our village has become a byword for credulous backwardness. Several of the important men hereabouts feel that the honour of the county—possibly of the whole Irish nation—is at stake.”

Had the doctor’s gullibility spread like a fever among these important men?

“So a committee’s been formed and a decision taken to mount a watch.”

Ah, then it wasn’t the O’Donnells who’d sent for Lib at all. “With a view to proving that the child subsists by some extraordinary means?” She tried to keep even a hint of the sardonic out of her voice.

“No, no,” McBrearty assured her, “simply to bring the truth to light, whatever the truth may be. Two scrupulous attendants will stay by Anna turn and turnabout, night and day, for a fortnight.”

So it wasn’t Lib’s experience of surgical or infectious cases that was called for here, only the rigour of her training. Clearly the committee hoped, by importing one of the scrupulous new breed of nurses, to give some credence to the O’Donnells’ mad story. To make this primitive backwater a wonder to the world. Anger throbbed in Lib’s jaw.

Fellow feeling, too, for the other woman lured into this morass. “The second nurse, I don’t suppose I know her?”

The doctor frowned. “Didn’t you make Sister Michael’s acquaintance at supper?”

The almost speechless nun; Lib should have guessed. Strange how they took the names of male saints, as if giving up womanhood itself. But why hadn’t the nun introduced herself properly? Was that what that deep bow had been supposed to signify—that she and the Englishwoman were in this mess together? “Was she trained in the Crimea too?”

“No, no, I’ve just had her sent up from the House of Mercy in Tullamore,” said McBrearty.

One of the walking nuns. Lib had served alongside others of that order in Scutari. They were reliable workers, at least, she told herself.

“The parents requested that at least one of you be of their own, ah…”

So the O’Donnells had asked for a Roman Catholic. “Denomination.”

“And nationality,” he added, as if to soften it.

“I’m quite aware that there’s no love for the English in this country,” said Lib, summoning a tight smile.

McBrearty demurred: “You put it too strongly.”

What about the faces that had turned towards the jaunting car as Lib was driven down the village street? But those men had spoken about her because she was expected, she realized now. She wasn’t just any Englishwoman; she was the one being shipped in to watch over their squire’s pet.

“Sister Michael will provide a certain sense of familiarity for the child, that’s all,” said McBrearty.

The very idea that familiarity was a necessary or even helpful qualification for a watcher! But for the other nurse, he’d picked one of Miss N.’s own famous brigade, she thought, to make this watch look sufficiently scrupulous, especially in the eyes of the British press.

Lib thought of saying, in a very cool voice, Doctor, I see that I’ve been brought here in hopes that my association with a very great lady might cast a veneer of respectability over an outrageous fraud. I’ll have no part in it. If she set off in the morning, she could be back at the hospital in two days.

The prospect filled her with gloom. She imagined herself trying to explain that the Irish job had proved objectionable on moral grounds. How Matron would snort.

So Lib suppressed her feelings, for now, and concentrated on the practicalities. Simply to observe, McBrearty had said. “If at any point our charge were to express the slightest wish, even in veiled terms, for something to eat—” she began.

“Then bring it to her.” The doctor sounded shocked. “We’re not in the business of starving children.”

She nodded. “We nurses are to report to you, then, in two weeks?”

He shook his head. “As Anna’s physician—and having been dragged into this unpleasantness in the papers—I could be considered an interested party. So it’s to the assembled committee that you’re to testify on oath.”

Lib looked forward to it.

“Yourself and Sister Michael separately,” he added, holding up one knobby finger, “without any conferring. We wish to hear to what view each of you comes, quite independently of the other.”

“Very good. May I ask, why is this watch not being conducted in the local hospital?” Unless there was none in this all too dead centre of the island.

“Oh, the O’Donnells balked at the very idea of their little one being taken off to the county infirmary.”

That clinched it for Lib; the squire and his lady wanted to keep their daughter at home so they could carry on slipping food to her. It wouldn’t take two weeks of supervision to catch them out.

She chose her words tactfully because the doctor was clearly fond of the young faker. “If, before the fortnight’s up, I were to find evidence indicating that Anna has taken nourishment covertly—should I make my report to the committee straightaway?”

His whiskery cheeks crumpled. “I suppose, in that case, it would be a waste of everyone’s time and money to carry on any longer.”

Lib could be on the ship back to England in a matter of days, then, but with this eccentric episode closed to her satisfaction.

What’s more, if newspapers across the kingdom were to give Nurse Elizabeth Wright the credit for exposing the hoax, the whole staff of the hospital would have to sit up and take notice. Who’d call her uppish then? Perhaps better things might come of it; a position more suited to Lib’s talents, more interesting. A less narrow life.

Her hand shot up to cover a sudden yawn.

“I’d better leave you now,” said McBrearty. “It must be almost ten.”

Lib pulled the chain at her waist and turned her watch up. “I make it ten eighteen.”

“Ah, we’re twenty-five minutes behind here. You’re still on English time.”

Lib slept well, considering.

The sun came up just before six. By then she was in her uniform from the hospital: grey tweed dress, worsted jacket, white cap. (At least it fit. One of the many indignities of Scutari had been the standard-issue costume; short nurses had waded around in theirs, whereas Lib had looked like some pauper grown out of her sleeves.)

She breakfasted alone in the room behind the grocery. The eggs were fresh, yolks sun yellow.

Ryan’s girl—Mary? Meg?—wore the same stained apron as the evening before. When she came back to clear away, she said Mr. Thaddeus was waiting. She was out of the room again before Lib could tell her she knew no one by that name.

Lib stepped into the shop. “You wished to speak to me?” she asked the man standing there. She wasn’t quite sure whether to add sir.

“Good morning, Mrs. Wright, I hope you slept well.” This Mr. Thaddeus was more well-spoken than she’d have expected from his faded coat. A pink, not quite youthful snub-nosed face; a shock of black hair sprang out as he lifted his hat. “I’m to bring you over to the O’Donnells’ now, if you’re ready.”

“Quite ready.”

But he must have heard the query in her voice, because he added, “The good doctor thought maybe a trusted friend of the family should make the introductions.”

Lib was confused. “I had the impression Dr. McBrearty was such a friend.”

“That he is,” said Mr. Thaddeus, “but I suppose the O’Donnells repose a special confidence in their priest.”

A priest? This man was in mufti. “I beg your pardon. Should it be Father Thaddeus?”

A shrug. “Well, that’s the new style, but we don’t bother our heads much about it in these parts.”

It was hard to imagine this amiable fellow as the confessor of the village, the holder of secrets. “You don’t wear a clerical collar, or—” Lib gestured at his chest, not knowing the name of the buttoned black robe.

“I’ve all the gear in my trunk for holy days, of course,” said Mr. Thaddeus with a smile.

The girl hurried back in, wiping her hands. “There’s your tobacco now,” she told him, twisting the ends of a paper package and sliding it over the counter.

“Bless you, Maggie, and a box of matches too. Right, so, Sister?”

He was looking past Lib. She spun around and found the nun hovering; when had she crept in?

Sister Michael nodded at the priest and then at Lib with a twitch of the lips that could have been meant for a smile. Crippled by shyness, Lib supposed.

Why couldn’t McBrearty have sent for two Nightingales while he was at it? It occurred to Lib now that perhaps none of the fifty-odd others—lay or religious—had been available at such short notice. Was Lib the only Crimean nurse who’d failed to find her niche half a decade on? The only one sufficiently at loose ends to take the poisoned bait of this job?

The three of them turned left down the street through a watery sunlight. Ill at ease between the priest and the nun, Lib gripped her leather bag.

Buildings turned different ways, giving one another the cold shoulder. An old woman in a window at a table stacked with baskets—a huckster peddling produce of some sort out of her front room? There was none of the Monday-morning bustle Lib would have expected in England. They passed one man laden with a sack who exchanged blessings with Mr. Thaddeus and Sister Michael.

“Mrs. Wright worked with Miss Nightingale,” the priest remarked in the nun’s direction.

“So I heard.” After a moment Sister Michael said to Lib, “You must have a power of experience with surgical cases.”

Lib nodded as modestly as she could. “We also dealt with a great deal of cholera, dysentery, malaria. Frostbite in the winter, of course.” In fact the English nurses had spent much of their time stuffing mattresses, stirring gruel, and standing at washtubs, but Lib didn’t want the nun to mistake her for an ignorant menial. That was what nobody understood: saving lives often came down to getting a latrine pipe unplugged.

No sign of a market square or green, as any English village would have possessed. The garish white chapel was the only new-looking building. Mr. Thaddeus cut right just before it, taking a muddy lane that led around a graveyard. The mossy, skewed tombstones seemed to have been planted not in rows but at random. “Is the O’Donnells’ house outside the village?” Lib asked, curious as to why the family hadn’t been courteous enough to send a driver, let alone put the nurses up themselves.

“A little way,” said the nun in her whispery voice.

“Malachy keeps shorthorns,” added the priest.

There was more power to this weak sun than Lib would have thought; she was perspiring under her cloak. “How many children have they at home?”

“Just the girl now, since Pat’s gone over, God bless him,” said Mr. Thaddeus.

Gone where? America seemed most likely to Lib, or Britain, or the Colonies. Ireland, an improvident mother, seemed to ship half her skinny brood abroad. Two children only for the O’Donnells, then; that seemed a paltry total to Lib.

They passed a shabby cabin with a smoking chimney. A path slanted off the lane towards another cottage. Lib’s eyes scanned the bogland ahead for any sign of the O’Donnells’ estate. Was she allowed to ask the priest for more than plain facts? Each of the nurses had been hired to form her own impressions. But then it struck Lib that this walk might be the only chance she’d get to talk to this trusted friend of the family. “Mr. Thaddeus, if I may—can you attest to the honesty of the O’Donnells?”

A moment went by. “Sure I’ve no reason to doubt it.”

Lib had never had a conversation with a Roman Catholic priest before and couldn’t read this one’s politic tone.

The nun’s eyes stayed on the green horizon.

“Malachy’s a man of few words,” Mr. Thaddeus went on. “A teetotaler.”

That surprised Lib.

“Not a drop since he took the Pledge, before the children were born. His wife’s a leading light of the parish, very active in the Sodality of Our Lady.”

These details meant little to Lib, but she got the drift. “And Anna O’Donnell?”

“A wonderful little girl.”

In what sense? Virtuous? Or exceptional? Clearly the chit had them all charmed. Lib looked hard at the priest’s curved profile. “Have you ever advised her to refuse nourishment, perhaps as some sort of spiritual exercise?”

His hands spread in protest. “Mrs. Wright. I don’t think you’re of our faith?”

Picking her words, Lib said, “I was baptized in the Church of England.”

The nun seemed to be watching a passing crow. Avoiding contamination by staying out of the conversation?

“Well,” said Mr. Thaddeus, “let me assure you that Catholics are required to do without food for only a matter of hours, for instance from midnight to the taking of Holy Communion the following morning. We also abstain from meat on Wednesdays and Fridays and during Lent. Moderate fasting mortifies the cravings of the body, you see,” he added as easily as if he were speaking of the weather.

“Meaning the appetite for food?”

“Among others.”

Lib moved her eyes to the muddy ground in front of her boots.

“We also express sorrow over the agonies of Our Lord by sharing them even a little,” he continued, “so fasting can be a useful penance.”

“Meaning that if one punishes oneself, one’s sins will be forgiven?” asked Lib.

“Or those of others,” said the nun under her breath.

“Just as Sister says,” the priest answered, “if we offer up our suffering in a generous spirit to be set to another’s account.”

Lib pictured a gigantic ledger filled with inky debits and credits.

“But the key is, fasting is never to be carried to an extreme or to the point of harming the health.”

Hard to spear this slippery fish. “Then why do you think Anna O’Donnell has gone against the rules of her own church?”

The priest’s broad shoulders heaved into a shrug. “Many’s the time I’ve reasoned with her over the past months, pleaded with her to take a bite of something. But she’s deaf to all persuasion.”

What was it about this spoiled miss that she’d managed to enrol all the grown-ups around her in this charade?

“Here we are,” murmured Sister Michael, gesturing towards the end of a faint track.

This couldn’t be their destination, surely? The cabin was in need of a fresh coat of whitewash; pitched thatch brooded over three small squares of glass. At the far end, a cow byre stooped under the same roof.

Lib saw all at once the foolishness of her assumptions. If the committee had hired the nurses, then Malachy O’Donnell was not necessarily prosperous. It seemed that all that marked the family out from the other peasants scratching a living around here was their claim that their little girl could live on air.

She stared at the O’Donnells’ low roofline. If Dr. McBrearty hadn’t been so rash as to write to the Irish Times, she saw now, word would never have spread beyond these sodden fields. How many important friends of his were investing their hard cash, as well as their names, in this bizarre enterprise? Were they betting that after the fortnight, both nurses would obediently swear to the miracle and make this puny hamlet a marvel of Christendom? Did they think to buy the endorsement, the combined reputability, of a Sister of Mercy and a Nightingale?

The three walked up the path—right past a dung heap, Lib noticed with a quiver of disapproval. The thick walls of the cabin sloped outwards to the ground. A broken pane in the nearest window was stopped up with a rag. There was a half-door, gaping at the top like a horse’s stall. Mr. Thaddeus pushed the bottom open with a dull scrape and gestured for Lib to go first.

She stepped into darkness. A woman cried out in a language Lib didn’t know.

Her eyes started to adjust. A floor of beaten earth under her boots. Two females in the frilled caps that Irishwomen always seemed to wear were clearing away a drying rack that stood before the fire. After piling the clothes into the younger, slighter woman’s arms, the elder ran forward to shake hands with the priest.

He answered her in the same tongue—Gaelic, it had to be—then moved into English. “Rosaleen O’Donnell, I know you met Sister Michael yesterday.”

“Sister, good morning to you.” The woman squeezed the nun’s hands.

“And this is Mrs. Wright, one of the famous nurses from the Crimea.”

“My!” Mrs. O’Donnell had broad, bony shoulders, stone-grey eyes, and a smile holed with dark. “Heaven bless you for coming such a distance, ma’am.”

Could she really be ignorant enough to think that war still raged in that peninsula and that Lib had just arrived, bloody from the battlefront?

“’Tis in the good room I’d have ye this minute”—Rosaleen O’Donnell nodded towards a door to the right of the fire—“if it wasn’t for the visitors.”

Now Lib was listening, she could make out the faint sound of singing.

“We’re grand here,” Mr. Thaddeus assured her.

“Let ye sit down till we have a cup of tea, at least,” Mrs. O’Donnell insisted. “The chairs are all within, so I’ve nothing but creepies for you. Mister’s off digging turf for Séamus O’Lalor.”

Creepies had to mean the log stools the woman was shoving practically into the flames for her guests. Lib chose one and tried to inch it farther away from the hearth. But the mother looked offended; clearly, right by the fire was the position of honour. So Lib sat, putting down her bag on the cooler side so her ointments wouldn’t melt into puddles.

Rosaleen O’Donnell crossed herself as she sat down and so did the priest and the nun. Lib thought of following suit. But no, it would be ridiculous to start aping the locals.

The singing from the so-called good room seemed to swell. The fireplace opened into both parts of the cabin, Lib realized, so sounds leaked through.

While the maid winched the hissing kettle off the fire, Mrs. O’Donnell and the priest chatted about yesterday’s drop of rain and how unusually warm the summer was proving on the whole. The nun listened and occasionally murmured assent. Not a word about the daughter.

Lib’s uniform was sticking to her sides. For an observant nurse, she reminded herself, time need never be wasted. She noted a plain table, pushed against the windowless back wall. A painted dresser, the lower section barred, like a cage. Some tiny doors set into the walls; recessed cupboards? A curtain of old flour sacks nailed up. All rather primitive, but neat, at least; not quite squalid. The blackened chimney hood was woven of wattle. There was a square hollow on either side of the fire, and what Lib guessed was a salt box nailed high up. A shelf over the fire held a pair of brass candlesticks, a crucifix, and what looked like a small daguerreotype behind glass in a black lacquer case.

“And how’s Anna today?” Mr. Thaddeus finally asked when they were all sipping the strong tea, the maid included.

“Well enough in herself, thanks be to God.” Mrs. O’Donnell cast another anxious glance towards the good room.

Was the girl in there singing hymns with these visitors?

“Perhaps you could tell the nurses her history,” suggested Mr. Thaddeus.

The woman looked blank. “Sure what history has a child?”

Lib met Sister Michael’s eyes and took the lead. “Until this year, Mrs. O’Donnell, how would you have described your daughter’s health?”

A blink. “Well, she’s always been a delicate flower, but not a sniveller or tetchy. If ever she had a scrape or a stye, she’d make it a little offering to heaven.”

“What about her appetite?” asked Lib.

“Ah, she’s never been greedy or clamoured for treats. Good as gold.”

“And her spirits?” asked the nun.

“No cause for complaint,” said Mrs. O’Donnell.

These ambiguous answers didn’t satisfy Lib. “Does Anna go to school?”

“Oh, Mr. O’Flaherty only doted on her.”

“Didn’t she win the medal, sure?” The maid pointed at the mantel so suddenly that the tea sloshed in her cup.

“That’s right, Kitty,” said the mother, nodding like a pecking hen.

Lib looked for a medal and found it, a small bronzed disc in a presentation case beside the photograph.

“But after she caught the whooping cough when it came through the school last year,” Mrs. O’Donnell went on, “we thought to keep our little colleen home, considering the dirt up there and the windows that do be always getting broken and letting draughts in.”

Colleen; that was what the Irish seemed to call every young female.

“Doesn’t she study just as hard at home anyway, with all her books around her? The nest is enough for the wren, as they say.”

Lib didn’t know that maxim. She pushed on, because it had occurred to her that Anna’s preposterous lie might be rooted in truth. “Since her illness, has she suffered from disturbances of the stomach?” She wondered if violent coughing might have ruptured the child internally.

But Mrs. O’Donnell shook her head with a fixed smile.

“Vomiting, blockages, loose stools?”

“No more than once in a while in the ordinary course of growing.”

“So until she turned eleven,” Lib asked, “you’d have described your daughter as delicate, nothing more?”

The woman’s flaking lips pressed together. “The seventh of April, four months ago yesterday. Overnight, Anna wouldn’t take bite nor sup, nothing but God’s own water.”

Lib felt a surge of dislike. If this were actually true, what kind of mother would report it with such excitement?

But of course it wasn’t true, she reminded herself. Either Rosaleen O’Donnell had had a hand in the hoax or the daughter had managed to pull the wool over the mother’s eyes, but in any case, cynical or gullible, the woman had no reason to feel afraid for her child.

“Before her birthday, had she choked on a morsel? Eaten anything rancid?”

Mrs. O’Donnell bristled. “There does be nothing rancid in this kitchen.”

“Did you plead with her to eat?” asked Lib.

“I might as well have saved my breath.”

“And Anna gave no reason for her refusal?”

The woman leaned a little closer, as if imparting a secret. “No need.”

“She didn’t need to give a reason?” asked Lib.

“She doesn’t need it,” said Rosaleen O’Donnell, her smile revealing her missing teeth.

“Food, you mean?” asked the nun, barely audible.

“Not a crumb. She’s a living marvel.”

This had to be a well-rehearsed performance. Except that the gleam in the woman’s eyes looked remarkably like conviction to Lib. “And you claim that during the last four months, your daughter’s continued in good health?”

Rosaleen O’Donnell straightened her frame, and her sparse eyelashes fluttered. “No false claims, no impostures, will be found in this house, Mrs. Wright. ’Tis a humble home, but so was the stable.”

Lib was puzzled, thinking of horses, until she realized what the woman meant: Bethlehem.

“We’re simple people, himself and myself,” said Rosaleen O’Donnell. “We can’t explain it, but our little girl is thriving by special providence of the Almighty. Sure aren’t all things possible to him?” She appealed to the nun.

Sister Michael nodded. Faintly: “He moves in mysterious ways.”

This was why the O’Donnells had asked for a nun, Lib was almost sure of it. And why the doctor had gone along with their request. They were all assuming that a spinster consecrated to Christ would be more likely than most people to believe in miracles. More blinkered by superstition, Lib would call it.

Mr. Thaddeus’s eyes were watchful. “But you and Malachy are willing to let these good nurses sit with Anna for the full fortnight, aren’t you, Rosaleen, so they can testify before the committee?”

Mrs. O’Donnell flung her skinny arms so wide, her plaid shawl almost fell. “Willing and more than willing, so we’ll have our characters vindicated that are as good as any from Cork to Belfast.”

Lib almost laughed. To be as concerned for reputation in this meagre cabin as in any mansion…

“What have we to hide?” the woman went on. “Haven’t we already thrown our doors open to well-wishers from the four corners of the earth?”

Her grandiloquence put Lib’s back up.

“Speaking of which,” said the priest, “I believe your guests may be leaving.”

The singing had ended without Lib noticing. The inner door hung open a crack, shifting in the draught. She walked over and looked through the gap.

The good room was distinguished from the kitchen mostly by its bareness. Apart from a cupboard with a few plates and jugs behind glass and a cluster of rope chairs, there was nothing in it. Half a dozen people were turned towards the corner of the room that Lib couldn’t see, their eyes wide, lit as if they were watching some dazzling display. She strained to catch their murmurs.

“Thank you, miss.”

“A couple of holy cards for your collection.”

“Let me leave you this vial of oil our cousin had blessed by His Holiness in Rome.”

“A few flowers is all, cut in my garden this morning.”

“A thousand thank-yous, and would you ever kiss the baby before we go?” That last woman hurried towards the corner with her bundle.

Lib found it tantalizing not to be able to glimpse the extraordinary wonder—wasn’t that the phrase the farmers had used at the spirit grocery last night? Yes, this must have been what they were raving about: not some two-headed calf but Anna O’Donnell, the living marvel. Evidently hordes were let in every day to grovel at the child’s feet; the vulgarity of it!

There was that one farmer who’d said something malign about the other crowd, how they were waiting on her hand and foot. He must have meant the visitors who were so eager to caress the child. What did they think they were doing, setting a little girl up for a saint because they imagined her to have risen above ordinary human needs? It reminded Lib of parades on the Continent, statues in fancy dress promenaded through the reeking alleys.

Though in fact the visitors’ voices all sounded Irish to Lib; Mrs. O’Donnell had to be exaggerating about the four corners of the earth. The door swung wide now, so Lib stepped back.

The visitors shuffled out. “Missus, for your trouble.” A man in a round hat was offering a coin to Rosaleen O’Donnell.

Aha. The root of all evil. Like those well-heeled tourists who paid a peasant to pose with a half-strung fiddle by the door of his mud cabin. The O’Donnells had to be party to this fraud, Lib decided, and for the most predictable of motives: cash.

But the mother flung her hands behind her back. “Sure hospitality’s no trouble.”

“For the sweet girleen,” said the visitor.

Rosaleen O’Donnell kept shaking her head.

“I insist,” he said.

“Put it in the box for the poor, sir, if you must leave it.” She nodded at an iron safe set on a stool by the door.

Lib rebuked herself for not having spotted that earlier.

The visitors all slipped their tips into its slot on their way out. Some of those coins sounded heavy to Lib. Clearly the minx was as much of a paying attraction as any carved cross or standing stone. Lib very much doubted that the O’Donnells would pass a penny on to those even less fortunate than themselves.

Waiting for the crowd to clear, Lib found herself close enough to the mantelpiece to study the daguerreotype. Murky-toned and taken before the son had emigrated. Rosaleen O’Donnell, like some imposing totem. The skinny adolescent boy rather incongruously leaning back in her lap. A small girl sitting upright on the father’s. Lib squinted through the glare of the glass. Anna O’Donnell had hair about as dark as Lib’s own, down to the shoulders. Nothing to distinguish her from any other child.

“Go on into her room now till I fetch her,” Rosaleen O’Donnell was telling Sister Michael.

Lib stiffened. How was the woman planning to prepare her daughter for their scrutiny?

All at once she couldn’t bear the smoulder of turf. She muttered something about needing a breath of air and stepped out into the farmyard.

Putting her shoulders back, Lib breathed in and smelled dung. If she did stay, it would be to accept the challenge: to expose this pitiful swindle. The cabin couldn’t have more than four rooms; she doubted it would take her more than one night here to catch the girl sneaking food, whether Anna was doing it alone or with help. (Mrs. O’Donnell? Her husband? The slavey, who seemed to be their only servant? Or all of them, of course.) That meant the whole trip would earn Lib just one day’s wage. Of course, a less honest nurse wouldn’t speak up till the fortnight was gone, to be sure of being paid for all fourteen. Whereas Lib’s reward would be seeing it through, making sure sense prevailed over nonsense.

“I’d better be looking in on some others of my flock,” said the pink-cheeked priest behind her. “Sister Michael’s offered to take the first watch, as you must be feeling the effects of your journey.”

“No,” said Lib, “I’m quite ready to begin.” Itching to meet the girl, in fact.

“As you prefer, Mrs. Wright,” said the nun in her whispery voice behind him.

“You’ll come back in eight hours, then, Sister?” asked Mr. Thaddeus.

“Twelve,” Lib corrected him.

“I believe McBrearty proposed shifts of eight hours, as less tiring,” he said.

“Then Sister and I would both be up and down at irregular hours,” Lib pointed out. “In my experience of ward nursing, two shifts are more conducive to sleep than three.”

“But to fulfil the terms of the watch, you’ll be obliged to stay by Anna’s side every single minute of the time,” said Mr. Thaddeus. “Eight hours sounds long enough.”

Just then Lib realized something else: if they worked twelve-hour shifts and she took the first, it would always be Sister Michael on duty during the night, when the girl would have more opportunity to steal food. How could Lib rely on a nun who’d spent most of her life in some provincial convent to be quite as attentive as herself? “Very well, eight hours, then.” Calculating in her head. “We might change over at, say, nine in the evening, five in the morning, one in the afternoon, Sister? Those times would seem rather less disruptive to the household.”

“Until one o’clock, then?” asked the nun.

“Oh, as we’re only beginning now, midmorning, I’m happy to stay with the girl until nine tonight,” Lib told her. A long first day would allow her to set up the room and establish the procedures of the watch to her liking.

Sister Michael nodded and glided away down the path back towards the village. How did nuns learn that distinctive walk? Lib wondered. Perhaps it was just an illusion created by the black robes brushing the grass.

“Good luck, Mrs. Wright,” said Mr. Thaddeus, tipping his hat.

Luck? As if she were off to the races.

Lib gathered her forces and stepped back inside the house, where Mrs. O’Donnell and the maid were lifting what looked like a massive grey gnome onto a hook. Lib’s eyes puzzled it out: an iron crock.

The mother swivelled the pot over the fire and jerked her head towards a half-open door to Lib’s left. “I’ve told Anna all about you.”

Told her what, that Mrs. Wright was a spy from across the sea? Coached the brat in the best means of hoodwinking the Englishwoman as she had so many other grown-ups?

The bedroom was an unadorned square. A tiny girl in grey sat on a straight-backed chair between the window and the bed as if listening to some private music. The hair a dark red that hadn’t shown in the photograph. At the creak of the door, she looked up, and a smile split her face.

A humbug, Lib reminded herself.

The girl stood and held out her hand.

Lib shook it. Plump fingers cool to the touch. “How are you feeling today, Anna?”

“Very well, missus,” said the girl in a small, clear voice.

“Nurse,” Lib corrected her, “or Mrs. Wright, or ma’am, if you prefer.” She found she couldn’t think of anything else to say. She reached into her bag for her miniature memorandum book and measuring tape. She began making notes, to impose something of the systematic on this incongruous situation.

Monday, August 8, 1859, 10:07 a.m.

Length of body: 46 inches.

Arm span: 47 inches.

Girth of skull measured above brows: 22 inches.

Head from crown to chin: 8 inches.

Anna O’Donnell was perfectly obliging. Standing very straight in her plain dress and curiously large boots, she held each position for Lib to measure her, as if learning the steps of a foreign dance. Her face could almost have been described as chubby, which put paid to the fasting story right away. Large hazel eyes bulging a little under puffy eyelids. The whites were porcelain, the pupils dilated, although that could be explained by the faintness of the light coming in. (At least the small pane was open to the summer air. At the hospital, no matter what Lib said, Matron clung to the antiquated notion that windows had to be kept closed against noxious effluvia.)

The girl was very pale, but then Irish skin was generally so, especially on redheads, until the weather coarsened it. Now there was an oddity: a very fine, colourless down on the cheeks. And after all, the girl’s lie about not eating didn’t preclude her from having some real disorder. Lib wrote it all down.

Miss N. thought some nurses relied on note-taking too much, laming their powers of recall. However, she never went so far as to forbid an aide-mémoire. Lib didn’t mistrust her own memory, but on this occasion, she’d been hired more as a witness, which called for impeccable case notes.

Something else: Anna’s earlobes and lips had a bluish tint to them, and so did the beds of the fingernails. She was chilly to the touch, as if she’d just come in from walking in a snowstorm. “Do you feel cold?” Lib asked.

“Not especially.”

Breadth of chest across level of mammae: 10 inches.

Girth of ribs: 24 inches.

The girl’s eyes followed her. “What’s your name?”

“As I mentioned, it’s Mrs. Wright, but you may address me as Nurse.”

“Your Christian name, I mean.”

Lib ignored that bit of cheek and continued writing.

Girth of hips: 25 inches.

Girth of waist: 21 inches.

Girth of middle of arm: 5 inches.

“What are the numbers for?”

“They’re… so we can be sure you’re in good health,” said Lib. An absurd answer, but the question had flustered her. Surely it was a breach of protocol to discuss the nature of her surveillance with its object?

So far, as Lib had expected, the data in her notebook indicated that Anna O’Donnell was a false little baggage. Yes, she was thin in places, shoulder blades like the stubs of missing wings. But not the way a child would be after a month without food, let alone four. Lib knew what starvation looked like; at Scutari, skeletal refugees had been toted in, bones stretching the skin like tent poles under canvas. No, this girl’s belly was rounded, if anything. Fashionable belles tight-laced these days in hopes of a sixteen-inch waist, and Anna’s was five more than that.

What Lib really would have liked to know was the child’s weight, because if it went up even an ounce over the course of the fortnight, that would constitute proof of covert feeding. She took two steps towards the kitchen to fetch a weighing scales before she remembered that she was obliged to keep this child in sight at all times until nine o’clock tonight.

A strange sensation of imprisonment. Lib thought of calling to Mrs. O’Donnell from inside the bedroom, but she didn’t want to come off as high-handed, especially so early in her first shift.

“Beware of spurious imitations,” murmured Anna.

“I beg your pardon?” Lib said.

One round fingertip traced the words stamped into the ribbed leather cover of the memorandum book.

Lib gave the girl a hard look. Spurious imitations, indeed. “The manufacturers are claiming that their velvet paper is unlike any other.”

“What’s velvet paper?”

“It’s been coated to take the mark of a metallic pencil.”

The girl stroked the tiny page.

“Anything written on that will be indelible, like ink,” said Lib. “Do you know what indelible means?”

“A stain that won’t come off.”

“Correct.” Lib took back the memorandum book and tried to think of what other information she needed to extract from the girl. “Are you troubled by any pain, Anna?”

“No.”

“Dizziness?”

“Maybe the odd time,” Anna admitted.

“Does your pulse pause or skip?”

“Some days it might flutter a bit.”

“Are you nervous?”

“Nervous of what?”

Being found out, you swindler. But what Lib said was “Sister Michael and myself, perhaps. Strangers in your home.”

Anna shook her head. “You seem kind. I don’t think you’d do me any harm.”

“Quite right.” But Lib felt uncomfortable, as if she’d promised more than she ought. She wasn’t here to be kind.

The child had her eyes shut now and was whispering. After a moment Lib realized it had to be a prayer. A show of piety, to make this fast of Anna’s more plausible?

The girl finished and looked up, her expression as placid as ever.

“Open your mouth, please,” said Lib.

Mostly milk teeth; one or two large adult ones, and several gaps where a replacement had not yet come through. Like the mouth of a much younger child.

Several carious? Breath a little sour.

Clean tongue, rather red and smooth.

Tonsils slightly enlarged.

No cap covered Anna’s dark auburn hair, parted in the centre and pulled back in a small bun. Lib undid it now and worked her fingers through the strands, dry and frizzy to the touch. She felt the scalp for anything hidden but found nothing except a scaly patch behind one ear. “You may put it up again.”

Anna’s fingers fumbled with the hairpins.

Lib went to help—then held back. She wasn’t here to tend the girl or be her maid. She was being paid just to stare.

Somewhat clumsy.

Reflexes normal, if a little slow.

Fingernails rather ridged, spotted with white.

Palms and fingers distinctly swollen.

“Step out of your boots for me, please.”

“They were my brother’s,” said Anna as she obeyed.

Feet, ankles, and lower legs very swollen, Lib recorded; no wonder Anna had resorted to the emigrant’s discarded boots. Possibly dropsy, water collecting in the tissues? “How long have your legs been so?”

The girl shrugged.

Where the stockings had been tied below Anna’s knees, the marks stayed concave. The same with the backs of her heels. Lib had seen this kind of swelling in pregnant women and the occasional old soldier. She pushed her finger into the girl’s calf, like a sculptor forming a child out of clay. The pit remained when she removed her finger. “Does that pain you?”

Anna shook her head.

Lib stared at the indented leg. Perhaps it wasn’t too serious, but something was wrong with this child.

She carried on lifting one piece of clothing at a time. Even if Anna was a fraud, there was no need to mortify her. The girl shivered, but not as if embarrassed, only as if it were January rather than August. Few signs of maturity, Lib jotted down; Anna seemed more like eight or nine than eleven. Smallpox vaccination on upper arm. The milk-white skin was dry to the touch, brownish and rough in places. Bruises on the knees, typical in children. But those tiny spots on the girl’s shins, blue-red—Lib had never encountered them before. She noticed that same fine down on the girl’s forearms, back, belly, legs; like a baby monkey. Was this hairiness common among the Irish, by any chance? Lib recalled cartoons in the popular press depicting them as apish pygmies.

She remembered to check the calf again, the left one. It was as flat as the other now.

Lib glanced through her notes. A few troubling anomalies, yes, but nothing that lent weight to the O’Donnells’ grandiose claims of a four-month fast.

Now, where could the child be hiding her food? Lib compressed every seam of Anna’s dress and petticoat, feeling for pockets. The clothes had been darned often but well; a decent kind of poverty. She checked each part of the girl’s body that could possibly hold the tiniest store, from the armpits down to the crevices (cracked in places) between the swollen toes. Not a crumb.

Anna made no protest. She was whispering to herself again now, lashes resting on cheeks. Lib couldn’t make out any of the words except for one that came up over and over and sounded like… Dorothy, could it be? Roman Catholics were always begging various intermediaries to take up their petty causes with God. Was there a Saint Dorothy?

“What’s that you’re reciting?” Lib asked when the girl seemed to have finished.

A shake of the head.

“Come now, Anna, aren’t we to be friends?”

Lib regretted her choice of word at once, because the round face lit up. “I’d like that.”

“Then tell me about this prayer I hear you muttering on and off.”

“That one, ’tis… not for talking about,” said Anna.

“Ah. A secret prayer.”

“Private,” she corrected Lib.

Little girls—even honest ones—did love their secrets. Lib remembered her own sister keeping a diary hidden under their mattress. (Not that it stopped Lib reading every anodyne word of it.)

Lib screwed the sections of her stethoscope together. She pressed the flat base to the left side of the child’s chest, between the fifth and sixth rib, and put the other end to her own right ear. Lub-dub, lub-dub; she listened for the minutest variation in the sounds of the heart. Then for a full minute, by the watch that hung at her waist, she counted. Pulse distinct, she wrote, 89 beats per minute. That was within the expected range. Lib moved the stethoscope to different positions on the child’s back. Lungs healthy, 17 respirations per minute, she recorded. No crackles or wheezes; despite her odd symptoms, Anna seemed healthier than half her compatriots.

Sitting down on the chair—Miss N. always began by breaking her trainees of the habit of perching on a patient’s bed—Lib put the device on the child’s belly. She listened for the least gurgle that would betray the presence of food. Tried another spot. Silence. Digestive cavity hard, tympanitic, drumlike, she wrote. She percussed the belly lightly. “How does that feel?”

“Full,” said Anna.

Lib stared. Full, when the belly sounded so empty? Was this defiance? “Uncomfortably full?”

“No.”

“You may dress yourself now.”

Anna did, slowly and a little awkwardly.

Reports sleeping well at night, seven to nine hours.

Intellectual faculties seem unimpaired.

“Do you miss going to school, child?”

A shake of the head.

The O’Donnells’ pet apparently wasn’t expected to help with the housework, Lib noticed. “Perhaps you prefer to be idle?”

“I read and sew and sing and pray.” The child’s voice undefensive.

Confrontation was beyond Lib’s remit. But she might at least be frank, she decided. Miss N. always recommended it, since nothing preyed on a patient’s health like uncertainty. Lib could do this little faker real good by setting an example of candour, holding up a lamp for the girl to follow out of the wilderness into which she’d strayed. Snapping shut her memorandum book, Lib asked, “Do you know why I’m here?”

“To make sure I don’t eat.”

Of all the skewed ways of putting it… “Not at all, Anna. My job is to find out whether it’s true that you aren’t eating. But I would be most relieved if you’d take your meals as other children—other people—do.”

A nod.

“Is there anything at all you could fancy? Broth, sago pudding, something sweet?” Lib was only putting a neutral question to the child, she told herself, not pressing food on her in such a way as to influence the outcome of the watch.

“No, thank you.”

“Why not, do you suppose?”

A trace of a smile. “I can’t say, Mrs.—ma’am,” Anna corrected herself.

“Why? Is that private too?”

The girl looked back at her mildly. Sharp as a pin, Lib decided. Anna must have realized that giving any explanation would get her into difficulties. If she claimed that her Maker had ordered her not to eat, she’d be comparing herself to a saint. But if she boasted of living by any particular natural means, then she’d be obliged to prove it to the satisfaction of science. I’m going to crack you like a nut, missy.

Lib looked around. Until today it must have been child’s play for Anna to sneak food from the kitchen next door in the night or for one of the adults to bring it in without the others hearing a thing. “Your maid—”

“Kitty? She’s our cousin.” Anna took a plaid shawl out of the dresser; its rich reds and browns lent a little colour to her face.

A slavey who was also a poor relation, then; hard for such a subordinate to refuse to take part in a plot. “Where does she sleep?”

“On the settle.” Anna nodded towards the kitchen.

Of course; the lower classes often had more family members than they had beds, so they were obliged to improvise. “And your parents?”

“They sleep in the outshot.”

Lib didn’t know that word.

“The bed built off the cabin, behind the curtain,” explained the child.

Lib had noticed the flour-sack drape in the kitchen but assumed it covered a pantry of some kind. How ridiculous for the O’Donnells to leave their good room standing empty and lie down in a makeshift chamber. But Lib supposed they had just enough respectability to aspire to a little more.

The first thing was to make this narrow bedroom proof against subterfuge. Lib touched her hand to the wall, and whitewash flaked off on her fingers. Plaster of some kind, dampish; not wood, brick, or stone, like an English cottage. Well, at least that meant any recess where food might be cached would be easy to discover.

Also, she had to make sure there was nowhere the child could hide from Lib’s gaze. That rickety old wooden screen would have to go, for starters; Lib folded its three sections together and carried it to the door.

She looked through without leaving the bedroom. Mrs. O’Donnell was stirring a three-legged pot over the fire, and the maid was mashing something at the long table. Lib set down the screen just inside the kitchen and said, “We won’t be needing this. Also, I’d like a basin of hot water and a cloth, please.”

“Kitty,” said Mrs. O’Donnell to the maid, jerking her head.

Lib’s eyes flicked to the child, who was whispering her prayers again.

She moved back to the narrow bed that stood against the wall and began stripping it. The bedstead was wood, and the tick was a straw one, covered in stained canvas. Well, at least it wasn’t a feather bed; Miss N. anathemized feathers. A new horsehair mattress would have been more hygienic, but Lib could hardly demand the O’Donnells drum up the money to buy one. (She thought of that strongbox full of coins, nominally destined for the poor.) Besides, she reminded herself, she wasn’t here to improve the girl’s health, only to study it. She felt the tick all over for any lumps or gaps in the stitching that might reveal hidey-holes.

A strange tinkling in the kitchen. A bell? It sounded once, twice, three times. Calling the family to the table for the noon meal, perhaps. But of course Lib would have to wait to be served in this narrow bedroom.

Anna O’Donnell was on her feet, hovering. “May I go say the Angelus?”

“You need to stay where I can see you,” Lib reminded her, testing the flock-stuffed bolster with her fingers.

A voice raised in the kitchen. The mother’s?

The child dropped down on her knees, listening hard. “And she conceived of the Holy Spirit,” she answered. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee…”

Lib thought she recognized that one. This clearly wasn’t a private prayer; Anna sang out the words so they carried into the next room.

Behind the wall, the women’s muffled voices matched the child’s. Then a lull. Rosaleen O’Donnell’s single voice again. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.”

“Be it done to me according to thy word,” chanted Anna.

Lib tugged the bedstead well away from the wall so that from now on she’d be able to approach it from three sides. She laid the tick over the footboard to air it out and did the same with the bolster. The ritual was still going on, with its calls, responses, choruses, and occasional chiming of the bell.

“And dwelt amongst us,” intoned the girl.

Crouching at each corner of the bed in turn, Lib ran her hand under every bar, felt each knob and angle for scraps. She pawed the floor looking for any patch of beaten earth that might have been gouged up to bury something.

Finally the prayers seemed to be over, and Anna got to her feet. “Do you not say the Angelus, Mrs. Wright?” she asked, a little breathless.

“Is that the name of what you just did?” asked Lib instead of answering.

A nod, as if everyone knew that.

Lib shook the worst of the dust off her skirt and rubbed her hands on her apron. Where was the hot water? Was Kitty just lazy, or was she defying the English nurse?

Anna took something large and white out of her workbag and began hemming it, standing in the corner by the window.

“Sit down, child,” Lib told her, waving her to the chair.

“I’m very well here, ma’am.”

What a paradox: Anna O’Donnell was a shammer of the deepest dye—but with nice manners. Lib found she couldn’t treat her with the harshness she deserved. “Kitty,” she called, “could you bring in another chair as well as the hot water?”

No answer from the kitchen.

“Take this one for now,” she urged the girl. “I don’t want it.”

Anna crossed herself, sat down on the chair, and sewed on.

Lib inched the dresser away from the wall to make sure there was nothing hollowed out behind it. Tugging out each drawer—the wood was warped from damp—she went through the girl’s small stock of clothes, fingering every seam and hem.

On top of the dresser sat a drooping dandelion in a jar. Miss N. approved of flowers in sickrooms, scorning the old wives’ tale about them poisoning the air; she said the brilliancy of colour and variety of form uplifted not only the mind but the body. (In Lib’s first week at the hospital, she’d tried to explain that to Matron, who’d called her la-di-da.)

It occurred to Lib that the flower might be a source of nourishment hiding in plain sight. What about the liquid—was it really water or some kind of clear broth or syrup? Lib sniffed at the jar, but all her nose registered was the familiar tang of dandelion. She dipped her finger in the liquid, then put it to her lips. As tasteless as it was colourless. But might there be some kind of nutritive element that had those qualities?

Lib could tell without looking that the girl was watching her. Oh, come now, Lib was falling into the trap of the old doctor’s delusions. This was just water. She wiped her hand on her apron.

Beside the jar, nothing but a small wooden chest. Not even a mirror, it struck Lib now; did Anna never want to look at herself? She opened the box.

“Those are my treasures,” said the girl, jumping up.

“Lovely. May I see?” Lib’s hands already busy inside the chest, in case Anna was going to claim that these were private too.

“Certainly.”

Pious gimcrackery: a set of rosary beads made of—seeds, was it?—with a plain cross on the end, and a painted candlestick in the shape of the Virgin and Child.

“Isn’t it beautiful?” Anna reached out for the candlestick. “Mammy and Dadda gave it to me on my confirmation.”

“An important day,” murmured Lib. The statuette was too sickly-sweet for her taste. She felt it all over to make sure it was really porcelain, not something edible. Only then did she let the girl take it.

Anna held it to her chest. “Confirmation’s the most important day.”

“Why’s that?”

“’Tis the end of being a child.”

Darkly comic, Lib found it, this slip of a thing thinking of herself as a grown woman. Next she peered at the writing on a tiny silvery oval, no bigger than the top of her finger.

“That’s my Miraculous Medal,” said Anna, lifting it out of Lib’s hand.

“What miracles has it done?”

That came out too flippant, but the girl didn’t take offence. “Ever so many,” she assured Lib, rubbing it. “Not this one, I mean, but all the Miraculous Medals in Christendom together.”

Lib didn’t comment. At the bottom of the box, in a glass case, she found a tiny disc. Not metal but white, this one, stamped with a lamb carrying a flag and a coat of arms. It couldn’t be the bread from Holy Communion, could it? Surely that would be sacrilege, to keep the Host in a toy box? “What’s this, Anna?”

“My Agnus Dei.”

Lamb of God; Lib knew that much Latin. She flipped up the lid of the case and grated the disc with her nail.

“Don’t break it!”

“I won’t.” It wasn’t bread, she realized, but wax. She laid the box in Anna’s cupped hand.

“Each one’s been blessed by His Holiness,” the child assured her, clicking the lid shut. “Agnus Deis make floods go down and put out fires.”

Lib puzzled over the origin of this legend. Considering how fast wax melted, who could imagine it any use against fire?

Nothing left in the chest but a few books. She inspected the titles: all devotional. A Missal for the Use of the Laity; The Imitation of Christ. She plucked an ornamented rectangle about the size of a playing card out of the black Book of Psalms.

“Put it back where it lives,” said Anna, agitated.

Ah, could there be food hidden in the book? “Just a moment.” Lib riffled through the pages. Nothing but more little rectangles.

“Those are my holy cards. Each one has its own place.”

The one Lib held was a printed prayer with a fancy-cut border, like lace, and it had another of those tiny medals tied onto it with a ribbon. On the back, in saccharine pastels, a woman cuddled a sheep. Divine Bergère, it said at the top. Divine something?

“See, this one matches Psalm One Hundred and Eighteen: I have gone astray like a sheep that is lost,” Anna recited, tapping the page without needing to check what it said.

Very “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” Lib thought. She saw now that all the books in the chest were studded with these rectangles. “Who gave you these cards?”

“Some were prizes at school or at the mission. Or presents from visitors.”

“Where’s this mission?”

“It’s gone now. My brother left me some of the loveliest ones,” said Anna, kissing the sheep card before tucking it into its place and closing the book.

What a curious child. “Do you have a favourite saint?”

Anna shook her head. “They all have different things to teach us. Some of them were born good, but others were very wicked until God cleaned their hearts.”

“Oh yes?”

“He can pick anyone to be holy,” Anna assured her.

When the door burst open, Lib jumped.

Kitty, with the basin of hot water. “Sorry to keep you. I’m after bringing himself his meal,” the young woman said, panting.

Malachy O’Donnell, presumably. Off cutting turf for a neighbour, wasn’t he—as a favour? Lib wondered. Or a job of work to supplement the pittance the farm made? It struck her that perhaps only the men got food at midday here.

“What’ll I be scrubbing for you?” asked the slavey.

“I’ll do that,” Lib told her, taking the basin. She couldn’t allow any of the family access to this room. Kitty might have food for the child tucked in her apron right now, for all Lib knew.

The maid frowned; confusion or resentment?

“You must be busy,” said Lib. “Oh, and could I trouble you for another chair, as well as fresh bedding?”

“A sheet?” asked Kitty.

“A pair of them,” Lib corrected her, “and a clean blanket.”

“We’ve none,” said the maid, shaking her head.

Such a vacant expression on the broad face; Lib wondered if Kitty was quite all there.

“No clean sheets yet, she means,” Anna put in. “Wash day’s Monday next, unless ’tis too wet.”

“I see,” said Lib, suppressing her irritation. “Well, just the chair, then, Kitty.”

She added chlorinated soda from a bottle in her bag to the basin of water and wiped every surface; the smell was harsh, but clean. She made the child’s bed again, with the same tired sheets and grey blanket. Straightening up, she wondered where else a mouthful of food could possibly be stashed.

This was nothing like the cluttered sickrooms of the upper classes. Apart from the bed, dresser, and chair, there was only a woven mat on the floor, with a pattern of darker lines. Lib lifted it up; nothing underneath. The room would be very cheerless if she took the mat away, as well as chill underfoot. Besides, the most likely place to hide a crust or an apple was in the bed, and surely the committee didn’t mean to make the girl sleep on bare boards like a prisoner? No, Lib would just have to inspect the room at frequent and unpredictable intervals to make sure no food had been sneaked in.

Kitty brought in the chair at last, and thumped it down.

“You might take this mat and beat the dust out when you have a moment,” said Lib. “Tell me, where would I find a scales to weigh Anna?”

Kitty shook her head.

“In the village, perhaps?”

“We use fists,” said Kitty.

Lib frowned.

“Fistfuls of flour, like, and pinches of salt.” The slavey mimed them in the air.

“I don’t mean household scales,” Lib told her. “Something big enough to weigh a person, or an animal. Perhaps on one of the neighbouring farms?”

Kitty shrugged tiredly.

Anna, watching the curling dandelion, gave no sign of hearing any of this, as if it were some other girl’s weight that was in question.

Lib sighed. “A jug of cold water, please, then, and a teaspoon.”

“Did you want a bit of something?” Kitty asked on her way out.

The phrase confused Lib.

“Or can you wait for your dinner?”

“I can wait.”

Lib regretted her words the moment the maid was gone, because she was hungry. But somehow, in front of Anna, she couldn’t declare that she was desperate for food. Which was absurd, she reminded herself, since the girl was nothing but a shammer.

Anna was whispering her Dorothy prayer again. Lib did her best to ignore it. She’d put up with far more irksome habits before. There was that boy she’d nursed through scarlet fever who kept hawking up on the floor, and that demented old lady who’d been convinced her medicine was poison and had shoved it away, spilling it all down Lib.

The girl was singing under her breath now, hands folded on her finished needlework. Nothing furtive about this hymn; the Dorothy prayer was the only secret Anna seemed to be keeping. The high notes were a little cracked, but sweet.

Hark! the loud celestial hymn,

Angel choirs above are raising,

Cherubim and seraphim,

In unceasing chorus praising.

When Kitty brought in the jug of water, Lib said, “What’s this, may I ask?” Patting the flaking whitewash.

“A wall,” said Kitty.

A tiny giggle escaped from the child.

“I mean, of what is it made?” asked Lib.

The slavey’s face cleared. “Mud.”

“Just mud? Really?”

“’Tis stone at the base, anyways, for keeping the rats out.”

When Kitty was gone, Lib used the tiny bone spoon to taste the water in the jug. No hint of any flavour. “Are you thirsty, child?”

Anna shook her head.

“Hadn’t you better take a sip?”

Overstepping her mark; the habits of a nurse died hard. Lib reminded herself that it was nothing to her whether the little fraud drank or not.

But Anna opened her mouth for the spoon and swallowed without difficulty. “O forgive me, that I may be refreshed,” she murmured.

Talking not to Lib, of course, but to God.

“Another?”

“No, thank you, Mrs. Wright.”

Lib wrote down, 1:13 p.m., 1 tsp. water. Not that the quantity mattered, she supposed, except that she wanted to be able to give a full account of anything the child ingested on her watch.

Now there really was nothing left to do. Lib took the second chair. It was so close to Anna’s that their skirts were almost touching, but there was nowhere else to place it. She considered the long hours ahead with a sense of awkwardness. She’d spent months on end with other private patients, but this was different, because she was eyeing this child like a bird of prey, and Anna knew it.

A soft knock at the door made her leap up.

“Malachy O’Donnell, ma’am.” The farmer tapped his faded waistcoat where it buttoned.

“Mr. O’Donnell,” said Lib, putting her hand into his leathery one. She would have thanked him for his hospitality except that she was here as a sort of spy on his whole household, so it hardly seemed fitting.

He was short and wiry, as lean as his wife, but with a far narrower frame. Anna took after her father’s side. But no spare flesh on any of this family; a troupe of marionettes.

He bent down to kiss his daughter somewhere near the ear. “How are you, pet?”

“Very well, Dadda.” Beaming up at him.

Malachy O’Donnell stood there, nodding.

Disappointment weighed on Lib. She’d been expecting something more from the father. The grand showman behind the scenes—or at least a coconspirator, as prickly as his wife. But this yokel… “You keep, ah, shorthorns, Mr. O’Donnell?”

“Well. A few now,” he said. “I have the lease on a couple of water meadows for the grazing. I sell the, you know, for fertilizer.”

Lib realized he meant manure.

“Cattle, now, sometimes…” Malachy trailed off. “With their straying and breaking legs and getting stuck when they come out wrong, see—you might say they do be more trouble than they’re worth.”

What else had Lib seen outside the farmhouse? “You also have poultry, yes?”

“Ah, they’d be Rosaleen’s, now. Mrs. O’Donnell’s.” The man gave one last nod, as if something had been settled, and stroked his daughter’s hairline. He headed out, then doubled back. “Meant to say. That fellow from the paper’s here.”

“I beg your pardon?”

He gestured towards the window. Through the smeary glass Lib saw an enclosed wagon. “To take Anna.”

“Take her where?” she snapped. Really, what did the committee men think they were doing, setting up the watch in this cramped and unhygienic cabin and then changing their minds and shipping the child off somewhere else?

“Take her face, just,” said her father. “Her likeness.”

REILLY & SONS, PHOTOGRAPHISTS, the van said on the side in pompous type. Lib could hear a stranger’s voice in the kitchen. Oh, this was too much. She took a few steps before remembering that she wasn’t allowed to leave the child’s side. She roped her arms around herself instead.

Rosaleen O’Donnell bustled in. “Mr. Reilly’s ready to do your daguerreotype, Anna.”

“Is this really necessary?” asked Lib.

“’Tis to be engraved and put in the paper.”

Printing a portrait of the young chancer, as if she were the queen. Or a two-headed calf, more like. “How far off is his studio?”

“Sure he does it right there in the van.” Mrs. O’Donnell jabbed her finger towards the window.

Lib let the child go outside in front of her but tugged her out of the way of an uncovered bucket, pungent with chemicals. Alcohol, she recognized, and… was it ether or chloroform? Those fruity stenches brought Lib back to Scutari, where the sedatives always seemed to run out halfway through a run of amputations.

As she handed Anna up the folding steps, Lib wrinkled her nose against a more complicated reek. Something like vinegar and nails.

“Scribbler been and gone, has he?” asked the lank-haired, disheveled man inside.

Lib narrowed her eyes.

“The journalist who’s writing the girl up.”

“I know nothing of any journalist, Mr. Reilly.”

His frock coat was blotched. “Stand by the pretty flowers, now, would you,” he said to Anna.

“Mightn’t she sit instead, if she’ll have to hold position for very long?” asked Lib. On the one occasion when she’d posed for a daguerreotype—in the ranks of Miss N.’s nurses—she’d found it a wearisome business. After the first few minutes one of the flightier young women had shifted and blurred the image, so they’d had to start all over again.

Reilly let out a chuckle and manoeuvred the camera a few inches on the wheeled foot of its tripod. “You’re looking at a master of the modern wet process. Three seconds, that’s all. The whole thing takes me no more than ten minutes from shutter to plate.”

Anna stood where Reilly had put her, beside a spindly table, with her right hand resting next to a vase of silk roses.

He tilted a mirror on a stand so a square of light hit her face, then ducked under the black drape that covered his camera. “Eyes up now, girlie. To me, to me.”

Anna’s gaze wandered around the room.

“Look to your public.”

That meant even less to the child. Her eyes found Lib instead, and she almost smiled, although Lib wasn’t smiling.

Reilly emerged and slotted a wooden rectangle into the machine. “Hold that, now. Still as stone.” He rolled the brass circle off the lens. “One, two, three…” Then he flicked it shut and shook the greasy hair out of his eyes. “Out you go, ladies.” He pushed the door open and jumped down from the van, then climbed back in with his reeking bucket of chemicals.

“Why do you keep that outside?” Lib asked, taking Anna by the hand.

Reilly was tugging at cords to let blinds fall over one window after another and darken the interior of the van. “Risk of explosion.”

Lib yanked Anna to the door.

Outside the wagon, the child took a long breath, looking towards the green fields. In sunlight Anna O’Donnell had an almost transparent quality; a blue vein stood out at the temple.

It was a long afternoon back in the bedroom. The girl whispered her prayers and read her books. Lib applied herself to a not-uninteresting article on fungus in All the Year Round. At one point Anna accepted another two spoonfuls of water. They sat just a few feet apart, Lib occasionally glancing at the girl over the top of her page. Strange to feel so yoked to another person.

Lib wasn’t even free to go out to the privy; she had to make do with the chamber pot. “Do you need this, Anna?”

“No, thank you, ma’am.”

Lib left the pot by the door with a cloth over it. She repressed a yawn. “Would you care for a walk?”

Anna brightened. “May we, really?”

“So long as I’m with you.” She wanted to test the girl’s stamina; did the swelling in Anna’s limbs impede her movement? Besides, Lib couldn’t bear to stay cooped up in this room any longer.

In the kitchen, side by side, Rosaleen O’Donnell and Kitty were skimming cream off pans with saucer-shaped strainers. The maid looked half the size of the mistress. “Anything you need, pet?” asked Rosaleen.

“No, thank you, Mammy.”

Dinner, Lib said silently, that’s what every child needs. Wasn’t feeding what defined a mother from the first day on? A woman’s worst pain was to have nothing to give her baby. Or to see the tiny mouth turn away from what she offered.

“We’re just stepping out for a walk,” Lib told her.

Rosaleen O’Donnell swatted away a fat bluebottle and went back to her work.

There were only two possible explanations for the Irishwoman’s serenity, Lib decided: either Rosaleen was so convinced of divine intervention that she had no anxiety for her daughter, or, more likely, she had reason to believe the girl was getting plenty to eat on the sly.

Anna shuffled and clumped along in those boy’s boots with an almost undetectable lurch as she shifted her weight from one leg to another. “Perfect thou my goings in thy paths,” she murmured, “that my footsteps be not moved.”

“Do your knees hurt you?” Lib asked as they followed the track past fretful brown hens.

“Not particularly,” said Anna, tilting her face up to catch the sun.

“Are these all your father’s fields?”

“Well, he rents them,” said the girl. “We’ve none of our own.”

Lib hadn’t seen any hired men. “Does he do all the work himself?”

“Pat helped, when he was still with us. This one’s for oats,” said Anna, pointing.

A bedraggled scarecrow in brown trousers leaned sideways. Were these Malachy O’Donnell’s old clothes? Lib wondered.

“And over there is hay. The rain usually spoils it, but not this year, it’s been so fine,” said Anna.

Lib thought she recognized a wide square of low green: the longed-for potatoes.

When they reached the lane, she turned in the direction she hadn’t yet been, away from the village. A sun-browned man was mending a stone wall in a desultory way.

“God bless the work,” called Anna.

“And you too,” he answered.

“That’s our neighbour Mr. Corcoran,” she whispered to Lib. She bent down and tugged up a brownish stalk topped with starry yellow. Then a tall grass, dull purple at the top.

“You like flowers, Anna?”

“Oh, ever so much. Especially the lilies, of course.”

“Why of course?”

“Because they’re Our Lady’s favourite.”

Anna spoke about the Holy Family as if they were her relations. “Where would you have seen a lily?” asked Lib.

“In pictures, lots of times. Or water lilies on the lough, though they’re not the same.” Anna crouched and stroked a minute white flower.

“What’s this one?”

“Sundew,” Anna told her. “Look.”

Lib peered at the round leaves on stalks. They were covered with what looked like sticky fuzz, with the odd black speck.

“It catches insects and sucks them in,” said Anna under her breath, as if she feared to disturb the plant.

Could she be right? How interesting, in a gruesome way. It seemed the child had some capacity for science.

When Anna stood up, she wobbled and drew in a deep breath.

Light-headed? Unused to exercise, Lib wondered, or weak from underfeeding? Just because the fast was a hoax of some sort didn’t mean that Anna had been getting all the nourishment a growing girl needed; those bony shoulder blades suggested otherwise. “Perhaps we should turn back.”

Anna didn’t object. Was she tired or just obedient?

When they got to the cabin, Kitty was in the bedroom. Lib was about to challenge her, but the slavey stooped for the chamber pot—perhaps to give herself an excuse for being there. “You’ll have a bowl of stirabout now, missus?”

“Very well,” said Lib.

When Kitty brought it in, Lib saw that stirabout meant porridge. She realized that this was probably her dinner. A quarter past four—country hours.

“Take some salt,” said Kitty.

Lib shook her head at the pot with its little spoon.

“Go on,” said Kitty, “it keeps the little ones off.”

Lib looked askance at the maid. Was she referring to flies?

As soon as Kitty had left the room, Anna spoke up in a whisper. “She means the little people.”

Lib didn’t understand.

Anna formed dancers out of her plump hands.

“Fairies?” Incredulous.

The child made a face. “They don’t like to be called that.” But then she smiled again, as if she and Lib both knew there were no tiny beings floundering around in the porridge.

The oatmeal wasn’t half bad; it had been boiled in milk rather than water. Lib had trouble swallowing it in front of the child; she felt like some uncouth peasant stuffing herself in the presence of a fine lady. This is only a smallholder’s daughter, Lib reminded herself, and a cheat to boot.

Anna busied herself darning a torn petticoat. She didn’t ogle Lib’s dinner, nor did she avert her gaze as if struggling with temptation. She just kept on forming her neat little stitches. Even if the girl had eaten something last night, Lib thought, she had to be hungry now, after at least seven hours under the nurse’s scrutiny, during which Anna had taken in nothing but three teaspoons of water. How could she bear to sit in a room fragrant with warm porridge?

Lib scraped the bowl clean, partly so that the remains wouldn’t be sitting there between the two of them. She was missing baker’s bread already.

Rosaleen O’Donnell came in a while later to show off the new photograph. “Mr. Reilly’s kindly made us a present of this copy.”

The image was astonishingly sharp, though the tints were all wrong; the grey dress had bleached to the white of a nightdress, while the plaid shawl was pitch-black. The girl in the picture was looking sideways, towards the unseen nurse, with a ghost of a smile.

Anna glanced at the photograph as if only for politeness’s sake.

“Such a smart case too,” said Mrs. O’Donnell, stroking the moulded tin.

This was not an educated woman, Lib thought. Could someone who took such naïve pleasure in a cheap case really be responsible for an elaborate conspiracy? Perhaps—Lib glimpsed Anna out of the corner of her eye—the studious little pet was the only guilty party. After all, until the watch had begun this morning, it would have been easy for the child to snatch all the food she wanted without her family’s knowledge.

“It’ll go on the mantel beside poor Pat,” added Rosaleen O’Donnell, admiring the picture at arm’s length.

Was the O’Donnell boy in distressed circumstances now, overseas? Or perhaps his parents had no idea how he was; sometimes emigrants were never heard from again.

When the mother had gone back into the kitchen, Lib stared out at the grass left flattened by Reilly’s wagon wheels. Then she turned, and her eye fell on Anna’s awful boots. It occurred to Lib that Rosaleen O’Donnell might have said poor Pat because he was a natural; simpleminded. That would explain the boy’s curious lolling posture in the photograph. But in that case, how could the O’Donnells have brought themselves to ship the unfortunate abroad? Either way, a subject better not raised with his little sister.

For hours on end, Anna sorted her holy cards. Played with them, really; the tender movements, dreamy air, and occasional murmurings reminded Lib of other girls with their dolls.

She read up on the effects of damp in the small volume she always carried in her bag. (Notes on Nursing, a gift from its author.) At half past eight she suggested it might be time for Anna to get ready for bed.

The girl crossed herself and changed into her nightdress, eyes down as she did the buttons at the front and wrists. She folded her clothes and laid them on the dresser. She didn’t use the pot, so there was still nothing for Lib to measure. A girl of wax instead of flesh.

When Anna undid her bun and combed her hair, masses of dark strands came out on the teeth. That troubled Lib. For a child to be losing her hair like a woman past the prime… She’s doing this to herself, Lib reminded herself. It’s all part of an elaborate trick she’s playing on the world.

Anna made the sign of the cross again as she got into bed. She sat up against the bolster, reading her Psalms.

Lib stayed by the window, watching orange streaks scrape the western sky. Was there any tiny cache of crumbs she could have missed? Tonight was when the girl would seize her chance; tonight, when the nun would be here in place of Lib. Were Sister Michael’s ageing eyes sharp enough? Her wits?

Kitty carried in a taper in a stubby brass candlestick.

“Sister Michael will need more than that,” said Lib.

“I’ll bring another, so.”

“Half a dozen candles won’t be enough.”

The maid’s mouth hung a little open.

Lib tried for a conciliatory tone. “I know it’s a lot of trouble, but I wonder whether you could get hold of some lamps?”

“Whale oil do be a shocking price these days.”

“Then some other kind of oil.”

“I’ll have to see what I can find tomorrow,” said Kitty with a yawn.

She came back in a few minutes with some milk and oatcakes for Lib’s supper.

As Lib buttered the oatcakes, her eyes slid to Anna, still lost in her book. Quite a feat, to go all day on an empty stomach and give the impression of not noticing food, let alone caring about it. Such control in one so young; dedication, ambition, even. If these powers could be turned to some good purpose, how far might they take Anna O’Donnell? From having nursed alongside a variety of women, Lib knew that self-mastery counted for more than almost any other talent.

She kept one ear open to the clinks and murmurings around the table on the other side of the half-open door. Even if the mother proved to be blameless as far as the hoax went, she was relishing the fuss, at the very least. And there was the money box by the front door. How did the old proverb go? Children are the riches of the poor. Metaphorical riches—but sometimes the literal kind too.

Anna turned the pages, her mouth forming silent words.

A stir in the kitchen. Lib put her head out and saw Sister Michael taking off her black cloak. She gave the nun a courteous nod.

“You’ll kneel down with us, won’t you, Sister?” asked Mrs. O’Donnell.

The nun murmured something about not liking to keep Mrs. Wright waiting.

“That’s quite all right,” Lib felt obliged to say.

She turned back to Anna. Who was standing so close behind—spectral in her nightdress—that Lib flinched. That string of brown seeds ready in the child’s hand.

Anna slipped past Lib to kneel between her parents on the earth floor. The nun and the maid were down already, each fingering the little cross at the end of her rosary beads. “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth.” The five voices rattled out the words.

Lib could hardly leave now, because Sister Michael’s eyes were shut and her face in its obstructive headdress was bent over her joined hands; nobody was keeping a sharp eye on Anna. So Lib went and sat by the wall, with a clear view of the girl.

The gabbling changed to the Lord’s Prayer, which Lib remembered from her own youth. How little she retained of all that. Perhaps faith had never had much of a hold on her; over the years it had fallen away, with other childish things.

“And forgive us our trespasses”—here they all thumped their chests in unison, startling Lib—“as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

She thought perhaps they’d stand up and say their good nights now. But no, the group plunged into a Hail Mary, and then another, and another. This was ridiculous; was Lib to be stuck here all evening? She blinked to moisten her tired eyes but kept them focused on Anna and on the parents, their solid bodies bracketing their daughter’s. It would take only the briefest meeting of hands for a scrap to be passed over. Lib squinted, making sure nothing touched Anna’s red lips.

A full quarter of an hour had gone by when she checked the watch hanging at her waist. The child never swayed, never sank down, during all this wearisome clamour. Lib let her eyes flick around the room for a moment, just to relieve them. A fat muslin bag was tied between two chairs, dripping into a basin. What could it be?

The words of the prayer had changed. “To thee do we cry, poor banished children of Eve…”

At last the whole palaver seemed to be over. The Catholics were standing up, rubbing life back into their legs, and Lib was free to go.

“Good night, Mammy,” said Anna.

“I’ll be in to say good night in a minute,” Rosaleen told her.

Lib picked up her cloak and bag. She’d missed her chance for a private conference with the nun; somehow she couldn’t bear to say out loud in front of the child, Don’t take your eyes off her for a second. “I’ll see you in the morning, Anna.”

“Good night, Mrs. Wright.” Anna led Sister Michael into the bedroom.

Strange creature; she showed no sign of resenting the watch that had been set over her. Behind that calm confidence, surely her mind had to be scurrying like a mouse?

Lib turned left where the O’Donnells’ track met the lane, heading back to the village. It wasn’t quite dark yet, and red still stained the horizon behind her. The mild air was scented with livestock and the smoke from peat fires. Her limbs ached from sitting for so long. She really needed to talk to Dr. McBrearty about the unsatisfactory conditions at the cabin, but it was too late to go seeking him out tonight.

What had she learned so far? Little or nothing.

A silhouette on the road ahead, a long gun over one shoulder. Lib stiffened. She wasn’t used to being out in the countryside at nightfall.

The dog came up first, sniffing at Lib’s skirts. Then his owner passed, with barely a nod.

A cock called urgently. Cows filed out of a byre, the farmer behind them. Lib would have thought they’d put their animals outdoors by day and indoors (to keep them safe) by night, rather than the other way around. She understood nothing about this place.