Read Online The Wonder by Emma Donoghue - Free Book Online

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.
    â€œScribbler been and gone, has he?” asked the lank-haired, disheveled man inside.
    Lib narrowed her eyes.
    â€œThe journalist who’s writing the girl up.”
    â€œI know nothing of any journalist, Mr. Reilly.”
    His frock coat was blotched. “Stand by the pretty flowers, now, would you,” he said to Anna.
    â€œMightn’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.
    â€œLook 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.
    â€œWhy 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?”
    â€œNo, 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?”
    â€œSo 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.
    â€œNo, thank you, Mammy.”
    Dinner,
Lib said silently,
that’s what every child needs.
Wasn’t feeding what defined a mother from the