If they knew anything about Nightingale-trained nurses, they’d realize the unlikelihood of this. Lib sped on. “Finally I tried to lift her, to put her in the chair so I could push her into the village in search of you, Dr. McBrearty, to see if she could be revived.” She fixed her eyes on his. Then she heard what she’d just said. “I mean, she was stone-dead, but I hoped against hope.”

The old man had his hand over his mouth as if he were about to vomit.

“But the lamp—my skirt must have knocked it over. I didn’t know I was in flames till they reached my waist.” Lib’s mummified hands throbbed, and she held them up in the air as evidence. “By then one of the blankets had caught fire. I dragged her body off the bed but it was too much for me, I saw flames licking the can—”

“What can?” asked O’Flaherty.

“The burning fluid,” Mr. Thaddeus told him.

“Lethal stuff,” growled Flynn. “I wouldn’t have it in the house.”

“I’d been refilling the lamp, to keep the room bright so I could see. So I could watch her every minute.” Now Lib was weeping in earnest. Odd, that it was this detail she couldn’t bear to remember: the constant light on that small sleeper. “I knew the can was going to explode, so I ran. God forgive me,” she threw in for good measure. Tears plummeted off her jawline; truth and lies so mixed up she couldn’t tell them apart. “I raced out of the cabin. I heard it blow up behind me with an awful roar and I didn’t stop to look, I just ran for my life.”

The scene was so vivid in Lib’s mind, she felt as if she’d truly lived it. But would these men believe her?

She covered her face and steeled herself against their response. Let the police not be prising up blackened rafters right now, or examining the timbers of the bed and dresser, or digging around in that ashy mess. Let them be lazy and resigned. Let them conclude that the tiny charred bones must be irretrievably buried in the ruins.

It was Sir Otway who spoke up. “If you hadn’t been so shockingly careless, Mrs. Wright, we could have gotten to the bottom of the matter, at least.”

Carelessness—was that the only charge Lib was facing? The matter—meaning the death of a child?

“A postmortem examination would surely have determined whether the intestines contained any partially digested food,” added the baronet. “Correct, Doctor?”

So the real issue was that there was no little girl they could cut up to satisfy the general curiosity.

McBrearty just nodded, as if he couldn’t speak.

“Of course there’d have been some food,” muttered Ryan. “The talk of a miracle was all nonsense.”

“On the contrary, when nothing was found in Anna’s intestines,” John Flynn burst out, “the O’Donnells’ name would have been cleared. A pair of good Christians have lost their last child—a little martyr!—and this imbecile has destroyed all evidence of their innocence.”

Lib kept her head down.

“But the nurses bear no responsibility for the child’s death.” That was Mr. Thaddeus, speaking up at last.

“Certainly not.” Dr. McBrearty found his voice. “They were only servants of this committee, working under the authority of myself as the girl’s physician.”

The priest and the doctor seemed to be trying to clear Lib and the nun of blame by calling them brainless drudges. She held her tongue, because it didn’t matter now.

“This one shouldn’t get her whole pay, though, because of the fire,” said the schoolteacher.

Lib almost screamed. If these men offered her even one Judas coin she’d fling it in their faces. “I deserve none, gentlemen.”

THE ENGLISH & IRISH MAGNETIC TELEGRAPH COMPANY

Received the following message the 23rd day of August 1859

From: William Byrne

To: Editor, Irish Times

Final article follows by post have accepted position private secretary to gentleman bound Caucasus excuse lack of notice change good as rest et cetera not ungratefully W.B.

Here follows this correspondent’s last report on the Fasting Girl of Ireland.

At seven minutes past nine on Saturday night last, while virtually the whole Roman Catholic population of her hamlet was pressed into the little white chapel to pray for her, Anna O’Donnell expired—it is to be presumed, from simple starvation. The exact physiological cause of that death cannot be determined by postmortem because of this tale’s appalling coda, which this correspondent has heard from one who attended the final meeting of the committee.

The nurse in attendance was naturally distressed on the child’s sudden death and attempted extraordinary measures to rouse her, in the course of which she accidentally dislodged the lamp. A crude device borrowed from a neighbour, it had been adapted to run not on whale oil but a cheaper product known as burning fluid or camphine. (This mixture—alcohol adulterated with turpentine in a ratio of four to one, plus a little ether—is notoriously combustible, and is reported to have caused more deaths in the United States than steamboat and railway accidents combined.) The lamp smashing to the ground, the flames engulfed the bedding and corpse of the child, and although the nurse made valiant attempts to put it out—injuring herself severely in the process—it was to no avail. The entire can of burning fluid went up in an explosion, and the nurse was forced to flee the inferno.