Burial Rites (30 page)

AGNES JÓNSDÓTTIR
.
I NEVER THOUGHT
it could be that easy to name yourself. The daughter of Jón Bjarnasson of Brekkukot, not the servant Magnús Magnússon. Let everyone know whose bastard I truly am.

Agnes Jónsdóttir. She sounds like the woman I should have been. A housekeeper in a croft that overlooks the valley, with a husband by her side, and a kip of children to help sing home the sheep at twilight. To teach and frighten with stories of ghosts. To love. She could even be the sister of Sigurlaug and Steinvör Jónsdóttir. Margrét’s daughter. Born blessed under a marriage. Born into a family that would not be ripped apart by poverty.

Agnes Jónsdóttir would not have been so foolish as to love a man who spent his life opening veins, mouths, legs. A man who was paid to draw blood. She would have been a grandmother. She would have had a host of faces to gather round her bed as she lay dying. She would have been assured of a place in heaven. She would have believed in heaven.

It is almost impossible to believe I was happy at Illugastadir, but I must have been, once. I was happy that first day, when Natan and I stayed in his workshop all afternoon. He showed me the two fox pelts. They were drying inside, the sea air too damp that morning for them to hang with the fish.

He took my hands and ran them over the white fox fur.

‘Feel that? These will fetch a pretty penny at Reykjavík this summer.’

He told me how he caught the foxes up in the mountains. ‘The trick is to find and catch a fox kit,’ he said. ‘The kit must then be made to cry out to its parents, otherwise it’s near impossible to lure them out of their hole. They’re wily things. Cunning. They smell you coming.’

‘And how do you make a fox kit cry?’

‘I break its front legs. They cannot escape then. The parents hear it mewling and come running out of their den, and they’re easily caught. They won’t leave one of their own.’

‘What do you do with the kit after you kill its parents?’

‘Some hunters leave it there to die. They are no use for market – the skins are too small.’

‘What do you do?’

‘I stove their heads in with a rock.’

‘That is the only decent thing to do.’

‘Yes. To leave them is cruelty.’

He showed me his books. He thought I might like them. ‘Sigga does not care for words,’ he said. ‘She is a terrible reader. It’s like trying to make a cow talk.’

I ran my fingers over the sheets of paper and tried to read the new words they offered.

‘Cutaneous diseases.’ He corrected my awkward tongue. ‘Cochlearia officinalis.’

‘Say it again.’

‘Cetraria islandica. Angelica archangelica. Achilla millefolium. Rumex digynus.’

It was a language I didn’t understand, so I stopped his laughs with kisses, and felt his tongue press lightly against my own. What
did all these words mean? Were they the names of the things in his workshop? In the jars and bottles and clay pots? Natan kissed my neck and my thoughts were lost in a rising swarm of lust. He lifted me onto the table, and we fumbled with our clothes before he pushed himself inside me, before I knew what we were doing, before I was ready. I gasped. I felt the papers beneath me, and imagined the words lifting from the page and sinking into my skin. My legs were tight around him, and I felt the cold sea air grasp me about the throat.

Later, I stood naked, my hips pressed against the edge of his table. Natan’s books lay in front of me, the papers were wrinkled, showed eddies of our love.

‘Look at all this illness, Natan. Books and books of disease and horror.’

‘Agnes.’

He said my name softly, letting the ‘s’ carry over his tongue, as though tasting it.

‘Natan. If there is so much illness in the world . . . if there is so much that can go wrong with a person, how is it that any of us remain alive?’

Sigga must have known about us. Those first nights at Illugastadir we waited until she fell asleep. I’d hear Natan’s careful tread on the floorboards of the badstofa, and feel the gentle tug of blankets. I tried so hard to be quiet. We knotted ourselves together as though we should never become undone, but the first bar of morning light that came through the window severed our trysts as though it were a knife.

He always returned to his own bed before Sigga awoke.

AGNES SEEMED TO BE LOST
in thought. It wasn’t until Tóti gently put a hand on her shoulder that she gave a start and noticed he had come back into the room.

‘I’m sorry to startle you,’ he said.

‘Oh no,’ Agnes replied, a little breathlessly. ‘I was only counting stitches.’

‘Shall we continue?’ he asked.

‘What was I saying?’

‘You were telling me about your first day at Illugastadir.’

‘Oh, yes. Natan was glad to see me, and made sure I was settled, and he told me stories about the folk and farms about the place. Nothing very remarkable occurred in those first few weeks. I worked every day with Sigga from dawn to dusk, and we’d spend each night together telling stories, or laughing at one thing or another. All in all, my time at Illugastadir for the first few months was a happy one. Sigga told me that it was unusual for Natan to spend as much time at home as he had been doing, and I thought it was my company that kept him with us. He spent most days out in his workshop, preferring to tinker and mend tools than actually tend the farm. He would rather hire men to come and see to the grass, or horses, than do it himself. Not that he was lazy. He showed me how he let blood, and told me about all the diseases that could befall a person. I think he was glad to have someone interested in his work; Sigga was pretty, and good at laundry, and she had a deft hand with a gutting knife and cleaned the fish we caught, but she did not care for what Natan called the things of the intellect. I was allowed to read as much as I wanted, and to discover something of the study of science. Do you know, Reverend, that it is necessary for someone with spots on their legs and bleeding gums to eat cabbages?’

Tóti smiled. ‘No, I didn’t.’

‘I thought he was making fun at first, but I saw with my own eyes how something as simple as a tea made from leaves, or a poultice from lard and sulphur, or gum squeezed out of roots, or even a cabbage, could heal a person.

‘I thought it was sheer good fortune, moving to Illugastadir. Natan made me new shoes from sealskin, and gave me a shawl, and there were as many duck eggs as you could fit in your stomach. When he did leave the farm, he always returned with gifts for Sigga and me. That was why I had thought Sigga his daughter when I first saw her. Natan kept her well dressed, and when I arrived, he gave me gifts too. Lace, and silk, and a little handkerchief he said had come all the way from France. It seemed a luxurious existence, despite the isolation, despite the close, cramped quarters. We did not often have visitors. But I had Natan, and Sigga wasn’t too insufferable.’ Agnes lowered her voice. ‘Have you seen her, Reverend? Has she been granted her appeal?’

Tóti shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t know yet.’

Agnes was thoughtful. ‘She has probably changed. She’s probably as pious as they come now. But at Illugastadir she had a saucy little manner when it suited her. She was forever speculating about folks, and Natan would ask her who she thought should marry whom, and what their children would look like and so forth. It was harmless sport for him; he found her simplicity amusing. I didn’t even mind it when Sigga kept calling herself the housekeeper, or ordered me to do the tasks she ought to have been doing herself – emptying the chamber pot, mucking out the cowshed, drying the fish Natan caught. She was, like Natan said, only a child, with a child’s way of thinking.

‘Fridrik Sigurdsson visited Illugastadir soon after I arrived. I’d never met him before, but Sigga had told me about him, and she’d said that he and Natan were acquaintances of sorts. She was always as pink as a skinned lamb when she spoke of him. But Fridrik unsettled me. There was something off-balance in Fridrik. And Natan, too. They both got into moods and the feel of a room would fall from high spirits to a glowering in an instant. It was contagious, too. With
them you’d feel every small injustice done against you like a thorn in your side. Fridrik, I thought, was a daring sort of boy, desperate to prove himself a man. He was easily offended. I suppose he thought the world against him, and raged at it. I did not like that in him, the way he looked for a reason to anger. He liked to fight. Liked to keep his knuckles bruised.

‘Natan was different. He did not think he had to prove himself to anyone. But superstitious signs troubled him. And, what I admired in him, his way of seeing the world, and yearning for knowledge, and his easy way with those he liked, had a darker underbelly. It was a matter of enjoying the bright skies all the more, so as to endure the sloughs when they came.’

Agnes paused as Tóti grimaced, stroking his neck with his hand.

‘Does something trouble you?’ she asked.

The Reverend cleared his throat. ‘The air is rather close in here, is all,’ he said. ‘Go on. I’ll fetch some water in a little while.’

‘You look pale.’

‘It is only a slight chill from going to and fro in the weather.’

‘Perhaps you ought not return to Breidabólstadur tonight.’

Tóti shook his head, smiling. ‘I’ve felt worse,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt you. Please go on.’

Agnes gave him a careful look, and then nodded. ‘Well, then. The first time I met Fridrik Sigurdsson I was hauling water from the stream. I heard a shout, and saw a red-headed young man and his horse trotting along the mountain path. There was a woman also. Natan peered out of his workshop window at the noise, and didn’t waste time stepping out and locking the door behind him. Not many folks visited Illugastadir, and Natan seemed to prefer it that way.

‘Natan introduced the boy as Fridrik, and Fridrik told me he was the son of the farmer Sigurdur at Katadalur, a farm just up over the mountain. He said he’d been away for the winter, and then he
introduced his companion, Thórunn, a servant woman with very bad teeth, who grinned at everyone. I noticed that Sigga was anxious when she first saw Thórunn. To tell you the truth, Reverend, I didn’t like either of the pair on first meeting. I thought Fridrik a braggart and a show-off. He talked aimlessly, speaking of how he was going to make his father a rich man, and he’d fought three men in Vesturhóp and given them all black eyes and worse. All the dull lies you’d expect to hear from a boy of that age. I don’t know why Natan bothered to listen to Fridrik’s boasting – he didn’t often care to hear that sort of thing, although he wasn’t shy about trumpeting his own good fortune. But I supposed that he was a mentor to Fridrik, as he told me he was trying to be to Sigga.

‘That day Natan invited Fridrik and Thórunn inside. I was not particularly interested in my new neighbours, but I gathered that Fridrik’s family was quite poor. He gobbled down his fish like a starveling. I thought him an odd friend for Natan.

‘When Fridrik left, Thórunn trailing like a puppy after him, Natan disappeared. When I found him again, I asked him where he’d been, and he smiled and said that he’d gone to check his belongings. When I asked him why, he told me that Fridrik had long fingers, and only ever called on him to try and discover where he kept his money.

‘I asked Natan why on earth he let Fridrik step foot inside his house if that was the case, and Natan laughed and said he never kept his money in the croft anyway, and besides, he liked the game of it. Theirs was not a true friendship, but a strange rivalry with one another, borne out of boredom. Fridrik thought Natan rich and wanted to take a little of what he had, and Natan encouraged him for his own private amusement, knowing all the while that Fridrik would never find his money. At the time I told Natan I thought it dangerous to provoke a man like that, but Natan laughed and said Fridrik was hardly a man,
only a foolhardy boy. But it troubled me. I argued that Fridrik was twice his size, and could easily overpower him if it came to it. Natan did not like that. We had our first row, then.’

‘What did Natan say?’

‘Oh, he grabbed me by the arm and pulled me outside and told me to never speak of him in that way in front of Sigga. I said that I’d only told the truth, and hadn’t meant to embarrass him, and that Sigga only thought the best of him, as did I. This appeased him a little, but I was frightened at the way his mood changed so quickly. I learnt later that he was as changeable as the ocean, and God help you if you saw his expression shift and darken. One day he might call you friend, and the next threaten to throw you into the night if you so much as dropped a pail of water on the ground. As folks say, for every mountain there is a valley.’

‘Perhaps if you’d known that you would never have agreed to be his servant?’ Tóti suggested.

Agnes paused, and then shook her head. ‘I wanted to leave Vatnsdalur,’ she said quietly.

‘Tell me about what Sigga is like,’ Tóti suggested gently.

‘Well, that night, after Fridrik’s visit, Sigga began speaking of marriage. I asked her if she did not find Fridrik Sigurdsson a most attractive man with such inviting prospects. I was making fun, of course. Fridrik is freckled, and ginger-haired and as mottled as a sausage, and his family are so poor you might call them barrel-lickers. But when I asked Sigga this, her cheeks turned as bright as new blood, and she asked me if I thought Fridrik was engaged to that Thórunn. It was then that I knew she held some hope for him.