Iceland's Bell (15 page)

“He’s sold the land,” said the housekeeper Guðríður, who had been eavesdropping and now rushed excitedly up to her mistress’s loft. “I know for certain my mistress the madam in Eydalur will never forgive me for this.”

“My husband has always been a man who can get things done,” said the housewife.

“He hasn’t left you a single cow bone,” said the daleswoman. “That devil of a bailiff has come here in person to take the property and we’re to vacate today. They’re sending you out with the beggars. How can I look in the blessed madam’s face?”

“I’ve wanted to be a beggar-girl for a long time,” said the housewife. “It must be exciting sleeping up in the heather with the ewes and the lambs.”

“Most right would it be indeed if I drowned myself,” said the daleswoman, “and God knows this was the only duty she entrusted to me, to see to it you wouldn’t have to go begging; and now, at this very hour, you’re out with the beggars, and here I stand and have to answer to my mistress.”

“Maybe she’ll be the next one to have to go begging,” said Snæfríður, but the daleswoman made it a point not to respond to useless chatter.

“How many times,” she continued, “haven’t I had to take a little pinch of food, your portion of good butter, fish-strips, pickled eggs, and lamb, and stash it away like I’d stolen it, so he wouldn’t use it to pay for his rubbish about some fool from Flói or for sleeping with some tart out in Ölfus; and it wasn’t any longer ago than last winter that the coffers were ripped open and emptied out right in front of me one night, and if I hadn’t gone secretly that night over to Skálholt to talk to your sister I wouldn’t have had any breakfast for you next morning, and this is just one tiny example of the war I’ve had to wage against that tyrant whom the Lord has stricken with boils. And now it’s come down to this—you don’t own a single piece of land to stand on here in the south. I can’t see any way around it—we’ve got no choice but to ride west with you, home.”

“Anything but that,” said Snæfríður in a melancholy, temperate tone, without looking up. “Anything but that.”

“Oh how I wish my God might grant that these dreadful southern waters would take me out to sea so I wouldn’t have to enter into the sight of the blessed madam laden with shame,” said this big, strong woman, and she was about to start wailing, but at that moment the magistrate’s daughter stood up and kissed her on the forehead.

“There, there, Gudda mine,” she said. “Let’s keep ourselves dry. Now go down to the bailiff and give him my greetings and tell him that the housewife wishes to welcome her old friend.”

This was one of those old, honorable gentlemen who could be seen every spring amongst three dozen or so of his kind in the law-court at the Alþingi. His face was grooved and weatherbeaten, the expression of his eyes feeble and slightly drowsy, though his brows were uplifted like those of a man who has had long experience trying to fend off sleep while listening to the arguments of wearisome opponents; it was one of those faces that looked as if it could stand secure against most types of reasoning, but especially against the type built on reference to human frailty. The distaff side of the family of Snæfríður the magistrate’s daughter had been accustomed to the frigid protection of such men since time immemorial—she understood the nature of such men all the way down to their shriveled boots.

She received him with a smile at the doorway of her loft and bade her father’s colleague and honored guest welcome, saying it had always been a great cause of sorrow to her if distinguished gentlemen who had business on the estate did not condescend to exchange pleasantries with one slender chit—and she had hoped that she would benefit from her mother’s, Madam Eydalín’s, renown for generosity.

He entered her room and she bade him sit, then she opened her bureau, took out a bottle of voluptuous claret, and poured glasses for them both.

He stroked his long gray jawbone, rocking slowly in his seat and breathing audibly—it was difficult to tell whether he was humming or groaning.

“Goodness me,” he said, “m-m-m-I remember my darling great-grandmother. She was born during the papacy. She was slim and fair and remained that way for many years, and finally, as a fifty-year-old widow of two bailiffs, married our departed Reverend Magnús from Rip. There have always been beautiful women in Iceland; sometimes very few, goodness me, especially these last several years—since when everything dies what is beautiful dies first. But one or two were always hidden here and there. Quod felix.* Goodness me. Here’s to her.”

“And how unfortunate it is also,” said the housewife, “that fewer true knights are made now than when you were young, my dear Monsieur Vigfús Þórarinsson.”

“My darling grandmother was no less a great woman,” said he. “M-m-m-. She was one of those esteemed women who have always lived in Breiðafjörður, one of those true island-women, who besides being able to understand Latin and versificaturam* inherited a hundred hundreds of land, twelve-reckoned,* and found herself a man all the way out east in Þingmúli, then sailed with him to Holland, where he learned the barber’s art and later became the governor’s proxy and the greatest Latin poet in the Nordic lands. And what’s more, she had such blue eyes and such airy shining hair—which was not, I might add, golden. When I was a boy, no one ever spoke of her otherwise than as the image that dominated the West. Goodness me. There have always been women in Iceland. Here’s to her.”

“Here’s to,” she said—“those old and wizened cavaliers who displayed to beautiful women true chivalry, eager to wade through fire and sea to do their utmost to uphold our honor.”

“My darling mother, Guðrún from Eydalur, was and is a true noblewoman though her hue does not match that of her foremothers. She is the one woman in my family who I believed would have been most suited for king’s halls in the lands where Icelanders were considered men in ancient times; she was at the same time the sort of woman of virtue, adorned with honor, who is most highly loved by the lowly. She possessed the charitable kindness of a true Christian aristocrat, but still reserved her heart for her children, as beseems only one woman: the woman who reckons as proper to her own nature nothing less than the sort of female pride that existed nowhere more than in the Nordic lands in olden times—and who possesses, on behalf of her husband, ambition, for she never would have given him any peace, even if he had been less of a man than dear old Eydalín, unless he had first made himself the greatest of the men with the name of authority here in Iceland. Proud women have upheld this land, but now it will sink. Here’s to her.”

“I have considered myself fortunate to have no daughter,” said Snæfríður. “For what shall become hereafter of Icelandic women who are born with the great misfortune to love one of those magnificent men who use their power to destroy dragons, like Sigurður Fáfnir’s-bane upon my cloth?”

“I have always known, my darling, that you are one of those great women who exist in Iceland. And the last time I stayed at your mother’s it looked to me like she was probably not sleeping too soundly at night, since she was forced to consider the possibility that maybe not all of the women in her family were born during the century—m-m-m—when Brynhildur slept on the mountain.* But now I must leave, my darling, the day is passing. And may peace be with those who provided for me. I thank my friend’s daughter for inviting me to speak with her. I am an old man and was never counted along with kindhearted folk. Goodness me. But since I see that her grace, my darling, is in possession of a most outstanding saddle, might she permit this old admirer of her mothers and foremothers to leave his most able workhorse here before her door, if she would have it? I bought it out west in Dalir last year; it knows the way back.”

Vigfús Þórarinsson lifted his glass in farewell, stood up ponderously, and stroked her in thanks with a blue paw, bidding God have mercy on them all.

Shortly afterward she heard them leave. They rode eastward, up through Tungur.* Magnús slouched up to his wife’s loft; he spoke not a word, but cast himself facedown onto her bed.

She asked: “Are we to leave today?”

“No,” said the squire. “After he came down he said we could remain here for ten days.”

“I didn’t ask for reprieve,” she said.

“Nor did I,” he said.

“Why didn’t you promise to leave immediately?” she said.

“You’ve never asked me about anything, so don’t ask me about anything,” he said.

“Forgive me,” she said.

Then she went down.

The door to the houseroom was standing ajar and she saw two columns of beautiful special-dollars standing side by side on the table, the contract close by. She walked out of the farmhouse, onto the footpath, the sun gleaming off the Tunga River, the smell of grass in the wind. A rust-colored horse stood tied to a horseblock, restless to have been left alone in this unfamiliar place. When it became aware of the woman’s presence it jerked at its reins, glanced sideways at her with its young, extraordinarily keen, glassy black eyes, and whinnied shyly; it had completely shed its winter coat, its body was sleek, its muzzle silky-soft, its neck taut, its croup stately and slender.

The two workmen were still napping beneath the homefield wall with their caps over their faces, and the spear-legged woman was still raking the field.

The housewife walked out to the men in the homefield and woke them up.

“Do this for me,” she said. “Fetch a knife from the farm and slaughter the horse standing there tied to the stone. Put its head on a pole and turn it south toward Hjálmholt.”

The men sprang up with a start and rubbed their eyes. Never before during their stay on the farm had the housewife ordered them to work.

3

On the next day Snæfríður rode to Skálholt to speak to her sister Jórunn, the wife of the bishop. Madam Jórunn was accustomed to traveling west to Eydalur every year at the start of the Alþingi, to take her leisure with her mother for ten days, and this year was no different.

“Perhaps you should ride west as well, sister,” said the bishop’s wife. “Mother would be much happier to see you for one spring than to see me for ten.”

“Mother and I were much the same in many ways, but there was never any love lost between us,” said Snæfríður. “And I doubt very much that the story about the prodigal son will be twisted onto the female line of our family as long as there is a woman who resembles her mother in that family, sister Jórunn. There’s a certain small matter that I would like to discuss with my father this spring, but I’m afraid it’s not enough to justify my riding to meet him at Þingvellir. By the way, sister, will you be passing by the Alþingi?”

She said that this was so, that she would ride as usual to Þingvellir with her husband the bishop and remain there for one night, then continue westward with her attendants.

“I really would prefer to ask my father to ride east to meet me,” said Snæfríður, “but since the magistrate is supposedly tottering from old age and isn’t up for running odd errands, and since we in Bræðratunga have very little means to entertain great men, I would like to ask you, sister, for both these reasons, to bring him a message from me.”

She then willingly told her sister what had happened: her husband Magnús had sold his estate to the wealthy Vigfús Þórarinsson the bailiff and his son-in-law Jón the brennivín-dealer at Vatn, and the new owners had given them notice to quit without further delay. At these tidings the bishop’s wife went over to her sister and kissed her tearfully, but Snæfríður bade her be still and continued her narrative: she said that what she wanted to discuss with her father was whether he would talk over the matter with Vigfús Þórarinsson and buy the land back from him; she herself, she said, did not have enough of a grip on the bailiff to be able to get him to resell the land, but the authorities in Iceland, she said, knew each other well and had always been able to persuade the others to agree to all sorts of deals.

“Beloved sister, I know you could not possibly be referring to our father,” said the bishop’s wife. “When has anyone ever heard that another authority in this land was able to persuade him to agree to something he knew in his heart to be unjust?”

Snæfríður said that it would be best if they kept their opinions on such matters to themselves for the moment. She did, however, insist that their father had the power of several authorities in his own hands, more than anyone else, and was far more successful at convincing the others of his will—as much now as ever before. She was certain he could buy the land back from wealthy Fúsi if he wanted to, she said, and for any price he set. After their father retook control of the estate, she herself would buy it from him with the farms she owned in the west and the north; farms that had not been paid out as part of her dowry when she had married without the consent of her kinsfolk before she reached the age of twenty.

The bishop’s wife looked over her sister for a moment, with a slight expression of pity for the fact that a certain agreeable slackness of body and soul, obtainable through long acquaintance with affluence, was not also to be found in her—instead this thirty-two-year-old woman was still fair and slender, with a hidden savageness in her blood and a tautness to her body, like a maiden.

“Why, sister, why?” asked the bishop’s wife finally.

“Why what?”

“Oh, I don’t know, good sister. But in any case, if I were in your shoes—I would thank my Redeemer if Magnús in Bræðratunga left me a beggar, so that I could not be blamed for leaving him.”

“To go where?”

“Anywhere. Our mother—”

“Yes, and next you’re going to tell me that she would slaughter the calf. Thanks indeed. Go home to your mother, Jórunn, after the bishop sells Skálholt out from under you.”

“Forgive me, sister, if I speak wrongly to you—I know you are more like our foremothers than I. And that is precisely the reason why, Snæfríður, that is why it is such a grave sin, that is why it is too grievous for tears, that is why it cries out to heaven.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I did not think I would have to spell out for you that which everyone in this country has been talking about for a long time now. You know that our mother’s health is failing—the proud woman.”

“Oh, hush now, she’ll outlive all of us,” said Snæfríður. “The diocese of Skálholt is a good daughter—it keeps her in good health, even if the cottage at Bræðratunga gives her a touch of rheumatism now and then.”

“This I do know, my dear Snæfríður: the Lord always combines mercy with trial,” said the bishop’s wife. “To those who meet with misfortune he gives strength of spirit. But more than anything else, we must defend ourselves against dangers of this sort: hardening of the soul in place of the Lord’s mercy, and contempt for God and men, even for one’s own parents, in place of a humble heart.”

“I don’t take instructions for happiness from prayer books, good sister. And I doubt that there are many women in Iceland more fortunate than I,” said Snæfríður. “Least of all would I trade shoes with you, madam.”

“You are scarcely in your right mind, dear Snæfríður—we should end this conversation at once,” said the bishop’s wife.

“The widow in Lækur,” said Snæfríður, “killed her seventh child at Mary-mass last year.* It was her third illegitimate child. Now she’s to be drowned at the Alþingi at Öxará in just a few days. Last summer her children survived on horsemeat and chickweed porridge. But one Sunday in the spring, three of them, skinny and swollen, were standing in the rain on the pavements at Bræðratunga along with their ancient grandmother, staring at me as I stood there at my window. The other three were dead. I am a fortunate woman, good sister.”

“It is true, we humans cannot comprehend the Lord, my dear Snæfríður,” said the bishop’s wife. “And there is no doubt that folk in this country have lived in carelessness throughout the centuries and are now paying the penalty for it, as we hear our blessed clerics say so often. Nevertheless, God is not served when those whom he has willed to be born into a higher class subject themselves freely to his punishing rod.”

“It was in springtime—since everything here in Iceland happens in springtime—in a grassy hollow here, not far from Hvítá—they found two little girls and a pillow of cotton grass. Their household had been broken up, the estate divided, and this pillow was allotted to these twins. They had both leaned their little heads on their pillow and died. The vermin got to them. No one wanted to do anything with their bones—it was I who stepped in to have them buried. They could have been my girls. No, good sister, I am a very fortunate woman.”

“Why do you trouble yourself with tales of woe, dearest sister?” said the bishop’s wife, and by now a blush of impatience had replaced her normally cheerful-looking demeanor.

“Recently, at Cross-mass,* they finally decided to hang the sheep-thief in Krókur. He’d been sentenced many times before and had once had a hand cut off, but of course that solved nothing—he simply stole as many more sheep as he had fewer hands. The men up in Biskupstungur rode him home from the gallows to his wife and children—they threw his body across a saddle and shoved it down before his door as they rode by. No, good sister, if there is a fortunate woman in Iceland, it is I, for I weave ancient images into my fabric and sew altar cloths and priests’ copes for the churches and collect silver in my little coffer, and what’s more, God has made me barren, which is perhaps the greatest fortune that can fall to the lot of an Icelandic woman.”

“We are not going to quarrel about that, sister; though it seems to me that it is the Creator’s will that every good woman should desire to bear a healthy son. I myself took such great delight in my two sons when they were small. But if a woman is childless in her marriage, then she is not to be blamed, since God has ordained it. But if she is a high-class woman, then she does wrong, and in fact blasphemes God, if she reduces her life to the same level as beggar-folk and criminals. And you are much changed, sister, from what you once were, if even the worst suits you now.”

“I’ve always been the kind of woman who is never satisfied,” said Snæfríður. “That’s why I’ve chosen my lot—and have learned to live with it.”

“Those who live in strange fantasies never know whose playthings they are until it is too late,” said the older sister. “You married without your kinsmen’s consent, against the laws of God and the land, and the only reason that our father did not formally annul the marriage was to save you from even more disgrace. Now I do not think it unlikely that he would think twice before buying out Magnús Sigurðsson’s estate for you in exchange for the farms he had no desire to entrust you with as part of your dowry. I do know of one man, however, our devoted though reserved friend who never tires of discussing your welfare and who commends you to the Lord’s guidance night and day. The bailiff Vigfús and his brother-in-law owe this man no less a debt than they do our father. He is the man who administers to you your pastoral care, the great Latin poet and doctor, the righteous man of God, Reverend Sigurður Sveinsson, the single most wealthy man in the diocese.”

“I had been thinking of something else, that is, if my father were to fail me in this matter,” said Snæfríður.

The bishop’s wife wanted to know what her sister’s proposed alternative might be.

“I have heard rumor,” she said, “that a friend who has been away for a long time has returned.”

The elder sister’s gracious and enduring smile disappeared in an instant, involuntarily. She turned blood red. A violent look appeared in her eyes. She became another woman. She tried to speak, then stopped. She was silent for several moments, and then asked, in a musicless voice:

“How do you know he has returned?”

“You and I are both women, good sister,” said Snæfríður. “And we women have the gift of divination in certain matters. We learn things though we don’t hear them with our ears.”

“And you have thought about going south to Bessastaðir to meet him, or, if it were possible, to meet him here in Skálholt, to ask him to buy back Bræðratunga on behalf of you and Magnús Sigurðsson? Are you such a child? Is the world and everything worldly just a closed book before you? Or are you mocking me, beloved sister?”

“No, I’m not going to ask him to buy the estate for me,” said Snæfríður. “But I’ve heard rumors that he is here to investigate the conduct of the authorities. The contract that those two kinsmen, the bailiff and the brennivín-dealer, made with my husband might not be such a worthless piece of paper in the hands of a man who collects documents about Icelanders.”

“Do you know what kind of a man Arnas Arnæus is, sister?” asked the bishop’s wife, gravely.

“I know,” said Snæfríður, “that I despise the next-best, which you and my other kinfolk desired for me, more than the worst. That is my nature.”

“I shall make no attempt to decipher your mysterious expressions, sister. And I find it hard to believe that a woman of your stock here in Iceland would choose to plead the cause of criminals in direct opposition to her irreproachable old father, to defend the condemned rather than to stand with their true judge, to support those who wish to incite the commoners to confrontation with His Lordship and to tear apart the public, Christian, and proper order of the people of this land.”

“Who is doing all this?”

“Arnas Arnæus and those who support him.”

“It was my understanding that Arnæus has returned only because he carries a higher mandate than any other authority who has ever lived in Iceland.”

“Of course he is said to be riding to the Alþingi with a letter supposedly signed by the king,” said the bishop’s wife. “And that he claims to have been appointed as judge over the merchants, and is investigating them at their trading stations in the south and either casting their wares into the sea or placing them under the king’s seal, so that poor folk are forced to come running in tears to him to get a fistful of flour or a plug of tobacco in their dire need. He proclaims himself the advocate of rogues and the prosecutor of the authorities. But those who know better truly believe him to be an operative of those in Copenhagen who have driven out the aldermen and the illustrious noblemen from the king’s council, to replace them with apprentice craftsmen, beer-brewers, and vagabonds. And report of his arrival here is hardly out and about before you express yourself more than ready to place yourself in his service, in opposition to our good father. May I remind you, dear sister, that Didrik of Münden,* who also claimed to have letters from the king, is lying under a pile of stones in Söðulholt just there on the other side of the stream.”

Snæfríður was unmoved. She stared at her sister and noticed that the madam’s cheeks were covered with seemingly permanent red flecks.

“Say nothing more to me about Arnæus, good sister,” said Snæfríður. “And nothing about Magistrate Eydalín either. And forgive me, madam, if I find in your words little love for our father, to measure his irreproachability against the pranks of a brennivín-dealer, and to call the man who impugns the deeds of wealthy Fúsi the enemy of Magistrate Eydalín.”

“I never said that the authorities can do no wrong,” said the bishop’s wife. “We know that all men are sinners. But I do say, as do all good folk, that if the Icelandic authorities are to be subjugated and castigated at Bremerholm, and the better men of this destitute land laid low, then Iceland will no longer be able to stand. The man who comes to disrupt and destroy the standards of decency and order that have up until now kept our wretched folk from being lumped all together into a single mob of vagrant thieves and arsonists, and who imprints the commoners’ flour and tobacco with the king’s seal and calls into question our good merchants’ scales and balances, when they put themselves to so much trouble to sail over the wild sea— what should such a man be called? Do not disdain me if I find myself at a loss for words when you presume to put your trust in such a man. And when you make intimations that you know him as well as you know your own father, then forgive me for asking: how can it be that you know this man so well? Granted, he did spend part of a summer with our parents out west, while he made arrangements to have the books he found, containing stories of our renowned forefathers, gathered together and transported abroad, and I recall the autumn when he accompanied us, myself, the bishop, and you, to Skálholt on his way to his ship. Can he have confounded you so completely? I rebuffed anyone who perpetrated any rumors about it—you were really nothing more than a child, with no more knowledge of men than a cat has of the Seven Sisters—he, of course, had married a rich hunchback in Denmark before the year was through. But I am eager to hear, sister, how things really went for you, since you now, after sixteen years, place your trust in this traitor rather than accept the certain support of your true and devoted friends.”