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.