“Can you trust your men?” she asked.
“Ulv and Haftor, I think I can. I don’t know Jon very well, or the man who came with Eline.”
“You realize,” said Fru Aashild, “that if it comes out that you and Kristin were here together, and that you were alone with Eline when she died, then you might as well have let Kristin drink Eline’s brew. And if there’s any talk of poison, people will remember what
I
have been accused of in the past. Did she have any kinsmen or friends?”
“No,” said Erlend in a subdued voice. “She had no one but me.”
“Even so,” said Fru Aashild, “it’ll be difficult to cover this up and remove the body without the deepest suspicion falling on you.”
“She must be buried in consecrated ground,” said Erlend, “if it costs me Husaby to do it. What do you say, Kristin?”
Kristin nodded.
Fru Aashild sat in silence. The more she thought about it, the more impossible it seemed to find a solution. In the cookhouse sat four men; could Erlend bribe all of them to keep quiet? Could any of them, could Eline’s man, be paid to leave the country? That would always be risky. And at Jørundgaard they knew that Kristin had been here. If Lavrans found out about it, she couldn’t imagine what he might do. They would have to take the body away. The mountain road to the west was unthinkable now; there was the road to Raumsdal or across the mountain to Nidaros or south down the valley. And if the truth came out, it would never be believed—even if it were accepted.
“I have to discuss this with Bjørn,” she said, standing up and going out.
Bjørn Gunnarsøn listened to his wife’s account without changing expression and without taking his eyes off Erlend.
“Bjørn,” said Aashild desperately, “someone has to swear that he saw her lay hands on herself.”
The life slowly darkened in Bjørn’s eyes; he looked at his wife, and his mouth twisted into a crooked smile.
“You mean that someone should be me?”
Fru Aashild clasped her hands and raised them toward him. “Bjørn, you know what it means for these two. . . .”
“And you think it’s all over for me anyway?” he asked slowly. “Or do you think there’s enough left of the man I once was that I’ll dare to swear falsely to save this boy from going under? I, who was dragged under myself . . . all those years ago. Dragged under, I say,” he repeated.
“You say this because I’m old now,” whispered Aashild.
Kristin burst into sobs that cut through the room. Rigid and silent, she had been sitting in the corner near Aashild’s bed. Now she began to weep out loud. It was as if Fru Aashild’s voice had torn open her heart. This voice, heavy with memories of the sweetness of love, seemed to make Kristin fully realize for the first time what the love between her and Erlend had been. The memory of burning, passionate happiness washed over everything else, washed away the cruel despairing hatred from the night before. She felt only her love and her will to survive.
All three of them looked at her. Then Herr Bjørn went over, put his hand under her chin, and gazed down at her. “Kristin, do you say that she did it herself?”
“Every word you’ve heard is true,” said Kristin firmly. “We threatened her until she did it.”
“She had planned a worse fate for Kristin,” said Aashild.
Herr Bjørn let go of the girl. He went over to the body, lifted it onto the bed where Eline had slept the night before, and laid it close to the wall with the blankets pulled over it.
“You must send Jon and the man you don’t know back to Husaby with the message that Eline will accompany you to the south. Have them ride off around noon. Tell them that the women are asleep in here; they’ll have to eat in the cookhouse. Then speak to Ulv and Haftor. Has she threatened to do this before? Can you bring witnesses forward if anyone asks about this?”
“Everyone who has been at Husaby during the last years we lived together,” said Erlend wearily, “can testify that she threatened to take her own life—and sometimes mine too—whenever I talked about leaving her.”
Bjørn laughed harshly. “I thought so. Tonight we’ll dress her in traveling clothes and put her in the sleigh. You’ll have to sit next to her—”
Erlend swayed where he stood. “I can’t do that.”
“God only knows how much of a man there will be left of
you
when you take stock of yourself twenty years from now,” said Bjørn. “Do you think you can drive the sleigh, then? I’ll sit next to her. We’ll have to travel by night and on back roads until we reach Fron. In this cold no one will know how long she’s been dead. We’ll drive to the monks’ hostel at Roaldstad. There you and I will testify that the two of you came to words in the back of the sleigh. It’s well attested that you haven’t wanted to live with her since the ban was lifted from you and that you have asked for the hand of a maiden who is your equal. Ulv and Haftor must keep their distance during the whole journey so that they can swear, if necessary, that she was alive the last time they saw her. You can get them to do that, can’t you? At the monks’ hostel you can have her placed in a casket; and then you must negotiate with the priests for peace in the grave for her and peace of the soul for yourself.
“I know it’s not pleasant, but you haven’t handled matters so that it could be pleasant. Don’t stand there like a child bride who’s about to swoon away. God help you, my boy—I suppose you’ve never tried feeling the edge of a knife at your throat, have you?”
A biting wind was coming down off the mountain. Snow was blowing, fine and silvery, from the drifts up toward the moon-blue sky as the men prepared to set off.
Two horses were hitched up, one in front of the other. Erlend sat in the front of the sleigh. Kristin went over to him.
“This time, Erlend, you must take the trouble to send me word about how the journey goes and where you end up.”
He squeezed her hand so hard she thought the blood would burst from her fingernails.
“Do you still dare stand by me, Kristin?”
“Yes, I still do,” she said, and after a moment, “We both bear the blame for this deed. I urged you on because I wanted her dead.”
Fru Aashild and Kristin stood and watched them go. The sleigh dipped down and rose up over the drifts. It vanished in a hollow, to appear farther down on a white meadow. But then the men passed into the shadow of a slope and disappeared for good.
The two women were sitting in front of the fireplace, their backs to the empty bed; Fru Aashild had taken out the bedclothes and straw. They both knew that it was standing there empty, gaping at them.
“Do you want us to sleep in the cookhouse tonight?” Fru Aashild asked.
“It makes no difference where we sleep,” said Kristin.
Fru Aashild went outside to look at the weather.
“No, it doesn’t matter whether a storm blows in or a thaw comes; they won’t get far before the truth comes out,” said Kristin.
“It always blows here at Haugen,” replied Fru Aashild. “There’s no sign of a break in the weather.”
Then they sat in silence again.
“You mustn’t forget what fate she had intended for the two of you,” said Fru Aashild.
Kristin said softly, “I keep thinking that in her place I might have wanted to do the same.”
“You would never have wanted to cause another person to become a leper,” said Fru Aashild staunchly.
“Do you remember, Aunt, you once told me that it’s a good thing when you don’t dare do something if you don’t think it’s right. But it’s not good when you think something’s not right because you don’t dare do it.”
“You didn’t dare because it was a sin,” said Fru Aashild.
“No, I don’t think so,” said Kristin. “I’ve done many things that I thought I would never dare do because they were sins. But I didn’t realize then that the consequence of sin is that you have to trample on other people.”
“Erlend wanted to mend his ways long before he met you,” replied Aashild vehemently. “It was over between those two.”
“I know that,” said Kristin, “but she probably never had reason to believe that Erlend’s plans were so firm that she wouldn’t be able to change them.”
“Kristin,” pleaded Fru Aashild fearfully, “you won’t give up Erlend now, will you? The two of you can’t be saved unless you save each other.”
“That’s hardly what a priest would say,” said Kristin, smiling coldly. “But I know that I won’t let go of Erlend—even if I have to trample on my own father.”
Fru Aashild stood up.
“We might as well keep ourselves busy instead of sitting here like this,” she said. “It would probably be useless for us to try to go to bed.”
She brought the butter churn from the storeroom, carried in some basins of milk, and filled it up; then she took up her position to churn.
“Let me do that,” begged Kristin. “I have a younger back.”
They worked without talking. Kristin stood near the storeroom door and churned, and Aashild carded wool over by the hearth. Not until Kristin had strained out the churn and was forming the butter did she suddenly say, “Aunt Aashild—aren’t you ever afraid of the day when you have to face God’s judgment?”
Fru Aashild stood up and went over to stand in front of Kristin in the light.
“Perhaps I’ll have the courage to ask the one who created me, such as I am, whether He will have mercy on me when the time comes. For I have never asked for His mercy when I went against His commandments. And I have never asked God or man to return one
penning
of the fines I’ve had to pay here in my earthly home.”
A moment later she said quietly, “Munan, my eldest son, was twenty years old. Back then he wasn’t the way I know him to be now. They weren’t like that then, those children of mine . . .”
Kristin replied softly, “And yet you’ve had Herr Bjørn by your side every day and every night all these years.”
“Yes,” said Aashild, “that I have.”
A little later Kristin was done with forming the butter. Then Fru Aashild said that they ought to try lying down for a while.
In the dark bed she put her arm around Kristin’s shoulder and pulled the girl’s head toward her. And it wasn’t long before she could hear by her even and quiet breathing that Kristin was asleep.
CHAPTER 4
THE FROST HUNG ON. In every stable of the village the starving animals lowed and complained, suffering from the cold. But the people were already rationing the fodder as best they could.
There was not much visiting done during the Christmas season that year; everyone was staying at home.
At Christmas the cold grew worse; each day felt colder than the one before. People could hardly remember such a harsh winter. And while no more snow fell, even up in the mountains, the snow that had fallen on Saint Clement’s Day froze as hard as stone. The sun shone in a clear sky, now that the days were growing lighter. At night the northern lights flickered and sputtered above the mountain ridges to the north; they flickered over half the sky, but they didn’t bring a change in the weather. Once in a while it would cloud over, sprinkling a little dry snow, but then the clear skies and biting cold would return. The Laag murmured and gurgled lazily beneath the bridges of ice.
Each morning Kristin would think that now she could stand it no longer; that she wouldn’t be able to make it through the day, because each day felt like a duel between her father and herself. And was it right for them to be so at odds with each other right now, when every living thing, every person and beast in the valleys, was enduring a common trial? But when evening came she had made it through after all.
It was not that her father was unfriendly. They never spoke of what lay between them, but Kristin could feel that in everything he left unsaid he was steadfastly determined to stand by his refusal.
And she burned with longing for his affection. Her anguish was even greater because she knew how much else her father had to bear; and if things had been as they were before, he would have talked to her about his concerns. It’s true that at Jørundgaard they were better prepared than most other places, but even here they felt the effects of the bad year, every day and every hour. In the winter Lavrans usually spent time breaking and training his foals, but this year, during the autumn, he had sold all of them in the south. His daughter missed hearing his voice out in the courtyard and watching him tussle with the lanky, shaggy two-year-old horses in the game that he loved so much. The storerooms, barns, and bins on the farm had not been emptied after the harvest of the previous year, but many people came to Jørundgaard asking for help, either as a purchase or a gift, and no one asked in vain.
Late one evening a very old man, dressed in furs, arrived on skis. Lavrans spoke to him out in the courtyard, and Halvdan took food to him in the hearth room. No one on the farm who had seen him knew who he was, but it was assumed that he was one of the people who lived in the mountains; perhaps Lavrans had run into him out there. But Kristin’s father didn’t speak of the visit, nor did Halvdan.
Then one evening a man arrived with whom Lavrans Bjørgulf søn had had a score to settle for many years. Lavrans went out to the storeroom with him. But when he returned to the house, he said, “Everyone wants me to help them. And yet here on my farm you’re all against me. Even you, wife,” he said angrily to Ragnfrid.
Then Ragnfrid lashed out at Kristin.
“Do you hear what your father is saying to me? I’m not against you, Lavrans. You know full well, Kristin, what happened south of here at Roaldstad late in the fall, when he traveled through the valley in the company of that other whoremonger, his kinsman from Haugen—she took her own life, that unfortunate woman he had enticed away from all her kinsmen.”
Her face rigid, Kristin replied harshly, “I see that you blame him as much for the years when he was striving to get out of sin as for those when he was living in it.”