Free The Wonder by Emma Donoghue Page A

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.
    â€œGood night, Mammy,” said Anna.
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œGood 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.

CHAPTER TWO
Watch
    watch
    to observe
    to guard someone, as a keeper
    to be awake, as a sentinel
    a division of the night

In her dream the men were calling for tobacco, as always. Underfed, unwashed, hair crawling, ruined limbs seeping through slings into stump pillows, but all their pleas were for something to fill their pipes. The men reached out to Lib as she swept down the ward. Through the cracked windows drifted the Crimean snow, and a door kept banging, banging—
    â€œMrs. Wright!”
    â€œHere,” Lib croaked.
    â€œA quarter past four, you asked to be waked.”
    This was the room above the spirit grocery, in the dead centre of Ireland. So the voice in the crack of the door was Maggie Ryan’s. Lib cleared her throat. “Yes.”
    Once dressed, she took out
Notes on Nursing
and let it fall open, then put her finger on a random passage. (Like that fortune-telling game Lib and her sister used to play with the Bible on dull Sundays.) Women, she read, were often more
exact and careful
than the stronger sex, which enabled them to avoid
mistakes of inadvertence.
    But for all the care Lib had taken yesterday, she hadn’t managed to uncover the mechanism of the fraud yet, had she? Sister Michael had been there all night; would she have solved the puzzle? Lib doubted it somehow. The nun had probably sat there with eyes half closed, clacking her beads.
    Well, Lib refused to be gulled by a child of eleven. Today she’d have to be even more
exact and careful,
proving herself worthy of the