The Wonder by Emma Donoghue Page B

O’Donnells’, please, to put a stop to these visits this very afternoon?”
    â€œOh, certainly.” He tugged off his glasses again, folded them in half with tremulous fingers. “Fascinating letter in the latest
Telegraph
, by the by.” McBrearty stirred the papers on his desk without finding what he was looking for. “It mentions a number of previous cases of ‘fasting girls’ who’ve lived without food—have been said to do so, at least,” he corrected himself, “in Britain and abroad over the centuries.”
    Really? Lib had never heard of the phenomenon.
    â€œThe writer suggests that they might possibly have been, ah—well, not to put too fine a point on it—reabsorbing, subsisting on their own menses.”
    What a revolting theory. Besides, this child was only eleven. “In my view, Anna is a long way from being pubescent.”
    â€œMm, true.” McBrearty looked dashed. Then the corners of his mouth turned up. “To think I might have stayed in England and never had the luck to encounter such a case!”
    After leaving the doctor’s house, Lib strode away, trying to loosen her stiff legs and shake off the atmosphere of that fusty study.
    A lane led towards a clump of woodland. She noticed leaves lobed like oak but on straighter branches than English oaks. The hedges were spiky with furze, and she breathed in the bouquet of the tiny yellow blooms. There were drooping pink flowers that no doubt Anna O’Donnell could have named. Lib tried to identify some of the birds twittering in the bushes, but the low boom of the bittern was the only one she knew for sure—the foghorn of some unseen ship.
    One tree stood out at the back of a field; something odd about its dangling branches. Lib picked her way along the outside furrow—although her boots were so muddy already, she wasn’t sure why she was bothering to be careful. The tree was farther away than it seemed, a good stretch beyond where the cultivated strips ran out, past an outcropping of grey limestone cracked by sun and rain. Nearing, Lib saw that it was a hawthorn, new twigs coming in red against the glossy leaves. But what was that dangling in strips from the pinkish branches? Moss?
    No, not moss. Wool?
    Lib almost stumbled into a tiny pool in a cleft rock. Two azure dragonflies clung together a few inches above the water. Could it be a spring? Something like bladderwort fringed the edge of the pool. She was suddenly terribly thirsty, but when she crouched down, the dragonflies disappeared, and the water looked as black as the peaty soil. She cupped some in her palm. It had a whiff like creosote, so she swallowed her thirst and let it spill again.
    Not wool hanging from the hawthorn branches above her; something man-made, in strips. How peculiar. Ribbons, scarves? They’d been knotted onto the tree for so long, they were grey and vegetal.
    Back at Ryan’s, in the tiny dining room, she found a red-haired man finishing a chop and filling in a memorandum book much like hers with a rapid hand. He jumped to his feet. “You’re not from hereabouts, ma’am.”
    How could he tell? Her plain green dress, her bearing?
    The man was about her height, a few years younger, with that unmistakeably Irish milky skin under garish curls, and an accent, but an educated one. “William Byrne, of the
Irish Times.
”
    Ah, the
scribbler
the photographist had mentioned. Lib accepted his handshake. “Mrs. Wright.”
    â€œTouring the sights of the Midlands?”
    He didn’t guess why she was here, then; he took her for a lady tourist. “Are there any?” That came out too sardonic.
    Byrne chuckled. “Well, now, it depends how much your soul is stirred by the enigmatic atmosphere of stone circles, ring forts, or round barrows.”
    â€œI’m not familiar with the second or the third.”
    He made a face. “Variations on the stone