Burial Rites (8 page)

But these times are not saga times, Margrét had thought. This woman is not a saga woman. She’s a landless workmaid raised on a porridge of moss and poverty.

Lying back down in her bed, Margrét thought of Hjördis, her favourite servant, now dead and buried in the churchyard at Undirfell. She tried to imagine Hjördis as a murderess. Tried to imagine Hjördis stabbing her as she slept, the same way Natan Ketilsson and Pétur Jónsson had died. Those slender fingers wrapped tightly around a hilt, the silent footsteps in the night.

It was impossible.

Lauga had asked Margrét whether she thought there would be an outward hint of the evil that drives a person to murder. Evidence of the Devil: a harelip, a snaggle tooth, a birthmark; some small outer defect. There must be a warning, some way of knowing, so that honest people could keep their guard. Margrét had said no, she thought it all superstition, but Lauga had remained unconvinced.

Margrét had instead wondered if the woman would be beautiful. She knew, like everyone else in the north, that the famous Natan Ketilsson had had a knack for discovering beauty. People had thought him a sorcerer.

Margrét’s neighbour, Ingibjörg, had heard that it was Agnes who had caused Natan to break off his affair with Poet-Rósa. They had wondered if this meant the servant would be more beautiful than her. It was not so hard to believe a beautiful woman capable of murder, Margrét thought. As it says in the sagas,
Opt er flagð í fögru skinni
. A witch often has fair skin.

But this woman was neither ugly nor a beauty. Striking perhaps,
but not the sort to inspire hungry glances from young men. She was very slender, elf-slender as the southerners would put it, and of an ordinary height. In the kitchen last night, Margrét had thought the woman’s face rather long, had noted high cheekbones and a straight nose. Bruises aside, her skin was pale, and it seemed more so because of the darkness of her hair. Unusual hair. Rare for a woman to have hair like that in these parts, thought Margrét. So long, so dark in colour: an inky brown, almost black.

Margrét drew the covers up to her chin as the officer’s snores continued their unceasing rumble. One would think an avalanche was approaching, she thought, annoyed. She felt tired, and her chest was heavy with mucus.

Images of the woman crowded behind Margrét’s closed eyelids. The animal way Agnes had drunk from the kettle. Her inability to undress herself. The woman’s hands had fumbled at the ties; her fingers had been swollen and would not bend. Margrét had been forced to help her, using her fingertips to crumble the dried mud off Agnes’s dress so that the lacings could be undone. Within the confines of the small kitchen, smoky as it was, the stench from the clothes and from Agnes’s sour body had been enough to make Margrét retch. She had held her breath as she pulled the fetid wool off Agnes’s skin, and had turned her head away when the dress fell from those thin shoulders and dropped to the floor, raising motes of dried mud.

Margrét recalled Agnes’s shoulderblades. Razor-sharp, they’d poked out from the rough cloth of her undergarment, which was yellowed around the neckline and stained a filthy brown under the armpits.

Margrét would have to burn all the woman’s clothes before breakfast. She had left them in a corner of the kitchen last night, unwilling to bring them into the badstofa. Fleas had crawled through their weave.

Somehow, she had managed to wash off most of the grime and dirt from the criminal’s body. Agnes had tried to wash herself, feebly running the damp rag over her limbs, but the grime had been so long upon her skin that it seemed ground into her pores. Eventually, Margrét, rolling up her sleeves and clenching her teeth, had snatched the rag off her and scrubbed Agnes until the cloth was soiled through. As she washed her, Margrét had – in spite of herself – looked for the blemishes Lauga had thought would be evident, a sign of the murderess. Only the woman’s eyes had hinted at something. They seemed different, Margrét thought. Very blue and clear, but too light a shade to be considered pretty.

The woman’s body was a terrain of abuse. Even Margrét, accustomed to wounds, to the inevitable maladies wrought by hard labour and accident, had been shocked.

Perhaps she’d scrubbed Agnes’s skin too hard, Margrét thought, pushing her head under the pillow in an effort to shut out the gargled snores of the officer. Some of the woman’s sores had broken and wept. The sight of fresh blood had given Margrét some secret satisfaction.

She had made Agnes soak her hair, also. The water from the kettle had been too full of silt and scum, so Margrét had requested an officer fetch more from the mountain stream. While they waited, she had dressed the woman’s wounds with an ointment of sulphur and lard.

‘This is Natan Ketilsson’s own medicine,’ she had said, casting an eye up to catch the woman’s reaction. Agnes had said nothing, but Margrét thought she had seen the muscles in her neck tighten. ‘God rest his soul,’ Margrét had muttered.

With Agnes’s hair washed as good as could be in the freezing water, and most of the weeping sores plugged with lard, Margrét had given her the undergarments and bedding of Hjördis. Hjördis had been wearing the underdress Agnes now slept in when she died. Margrét suspected it did not make a difference if a mite of contagion lingered. Its new owner would be dead soon enough.

How strange to imagine that, in a short while, the woman who slept in a bed not ten feet from her would be underground.

Margrét sighed and sat up in bed again. Agnes still had not moved. The officer snored on. Margrét watched him as he pushed a hand into his groin and scratched it, audibly. She averted her eyes, amused and a little annoyed that this man was her only protection.

Might as well get up and begin preparing something for the officers’ breakfast, she thought. Skyr perhaps. Or dried fish. She wondered whether she had enough butter to spare, and when the servants would return from Reykjavík with their supplies.

Loosening her nightcap, Margrét cast one last glance at the sleeping woman.

Her heart jumped into her mouth. In the dim recesses of the badstofa, Agnes lay on her side, calmly watching Margrét.

CHAPTER THREE

IT IS SAID OF THE CRIME
that Fridrik Sigurdsson, with the assistance of Agnes Magnúsdóttir and Sigrídur Gudmundsdóttir, came inside Natan Ketilsson’s home close to midnight, and stabbed and thrashed Natan and Pétur Jónsson, who was a guest there, to death with a knife and hammer. Then, due to the gushing and smearing of the bodies that was apparent, burnt them by setting fire to the farm so that their evil work would not be apparent. Fridrik came to commit this evil through hatred of Natan, and a desire to steal. The murder was eventually exposed. The District Commissioner was suspicious, and when the half-burnt bodies were revealed, he believed that those three had been a gang.

From the Supreme Court Trials of 1829.

I DID NOT DREAM IN
the storeroom at Stóra-Borg. Curled up on the wooden slats with a mouldy horse-skin for warmth, sleep came to me like a thin tide of water. It would lap against my body but never submerge me in oblivion. There would be something to wake me – the sound of footsteps, or the scrape of the chamber pot on the floor as a maid came to empty it, the heady stink of piss. Sometimes, if I lay still with my eyes tightly closed and pushed every thought out of my mind, sleep would trickle back. My mind would shift in and out of consciousness, until the briefest chink of light crept into the room, and the servants shoved me a bit of dried fish. Some days I think that I haven’t really slept since the fire, and that maybe sleeplessness is punishment from God. Or Blöndal, even: my dreams taken with my belongings to pay for my custody.

But last night, here at Kornsá, I dreamt of Natan. He was boiling herbs for a draught, and I was watching him and running my hands over the smithy’s turf wall. It was summer, and the light was tinged with pink. The herbs for the draught had a strong perfume, and it surrounded me as I stood there. I breathed in the bittersweet scent, feeling a slow wave of happiness rise over me. I was finally gone from the valley. Natan turned and smiled. He was holding a glass beaker filled with scum he had collected off the brewing herbs, and steam was rising from it. He looked like a sorcerer in his black worsted stockings
and the smoke rising from his hand. Natan stepped through the pool of sunlight and I opened my arms to him, laughing, feeling like I might die from love, but as I did the beaker slipped from his grasp and smashed on the floor and darkness poured into the room like oil.

I can’t be sure if I have slept since that dream.

Natan is dead.

I wake every morning with a blow of grief to my heart.

The only thing for it is to push my mind back underwater, back to the dream, back to the golden moment that enveloped me before the beaker broke. Or to imagine Brekkukot, when Mamma was with me. If I concentrate I can see her sleeping in the bed opposite mine, and Jóas, little Jóas scratching at his fleabites. I will use my fingernail to crush them against my thumb.

But the memories I haul up are cold. I know what comes after Brekkukot. I know what happens to Mamma, and to Jóas.

When I open my eyes I see Margrét lying awake in her bed. She tosses and turns, and picks absently at her blanket. Her nightcap is a little loose, and I can see her grey hair scraped over her head and twisted into tight plaits, even as she rests. I can almost make out the contours of her skull.

Her face is a blotch, half-hidden by the blanket she has drawn about her. She’s turned to study the sleeping officer lying in the cot opposite.

The officer is snoring and the farm mistress clicks her tongue in disapproval. I hear you, old woman. You’ve had enough already? Try a year of them and their hard hands, hard looks.

The dried seaweed in her pillow rustles as she turns her head. She sees me. She sucks in a quick breath and snatches a hand to her heart.

I should have been more careful. Never be caught staring at someone. They’ll think you want something from them.

‘You’re awake. Good.’ The farm mistress smoothes her hair
across her forehead, and regards me for a moment, unsure, perhaps, of how long I have been watching her.

‘Get up,’ she says.

I obey. The wooden slats are cool under my feet.

Margrét hands me a servant’s garb of blue wool and we dress in silence. She keeps a nervous eye on the snoring officer. I pull the rough cloth down over my head, and look about the room. There are other people asleep in the beds. Servants, perhaps. There is no time to find out who they might be – Margrét leads me down the dank corridor of the cottage, pausing only to tug at a strip of turf that has come loose and hangs in threads across a beam.

‘Falling to pieces,’ she mutters.

She moves too fast for me to look into the other rooms of the croft. It’s not a large dwelling, but I remember from my first time here a storeroom for barrels, and that little room there, with the buckets and pans and a milking tray, must be the dairy, or perhaps they have turned it into a pantry. We pass the kitchen. My clothes from Stóra-Borg lie heaped in one corner.

It is already a fine day outside. The grass is wet from a night rain, and the blades look bright in the light of the rising sun. There is a brisk wind and it blows ripples across the puddles in the yard. I notice the small things, now.

‘As you can see,’ Margrét begins, pausing when she trips on a piece of driftwood that has tumbled off the pile outside the croft. ‘As you can see, there is a great amount of work that must be done about this place.’

This is the first thing she has said since bidding me dress. I say nothing and keep my eyes lowered. I notice that her skirt hem is stained from years of brushing the ground.

Margrét stands up straight and puts her hands on her hips, as though trying to make herself bigger. Her nails are bitten to the quick.

‘I shall make no secret of my displeasure to you. I don’t want you in my home. I don’t want you near my children.’

Those sleeping bodies were her children.

‘I have been forced to keep you here, and you . . .’ She falters a little. ‘You are forced to be kept.’

Our shoulders are tensed against the morning wind, which buffets our dresses against our legs. When I was little my foster-mamma, Inga, showed me how to spread the material of my skirt out against a gale and pretend I had wings. It was a feeling of flying. One day, she told me, the wind would pick me up and I would be blown along in its path, and everyone in the valley would look up and see my shift. I used to laugh at that.

‘My husband Jón is at Hvammur, but he will return this morning. Our farmhands will be returning any day to begin the haymaking. It won’t do to act up. I don’t know what you did at Stóra-Borg, but let me tell you, you will have no opportunity to take advantage of us here.’

She knows nothing.

‘Now.’ She clasps her hands tightly against her waist. ‘It is my understanding that you were in a serving position before . . .’ She pauses.

Before what? Before Natan Ketilsson and Pétur Jónsson had their skulls hammered in?

‘Yes, mistress.’

It alarms me to hear my voice aloud. It seems a lifetime ago that I spoke freely at all.

‘A servant?’ She hasn’t heard me over the wind.

‘Yes, a servant. Since I was fifteen. A hireling before that.’

She is relieved.

‘You know how to spin and knit, and cook, and tend the animals?’

I could do it in my sleep.

‘Can you wield a knife?’

My stomach drops. ‘Pardon, mistress?’

‘Can you cut hay? Can you wield a scythe? God knows how many servants have never cut grass in their lives, I understand it’s not common practice these days for women to mow, but we are a farm of few hands and –’

‘I can wield a scythe.’

‘Good. Well, as far as I’m concerned, you shall work for your keep. Yes, you shall pay for my inconvenience. I have no use for a criminal, only a servant.’

Criminal. The word hangs in the air. Heavy, unmoved by the bluster of the wind.