“I think, dear sir,” said Lavrans, “that Erlend would do more good here in the villages. As you said yourself—we can expect that this war levy will be met with opposition in the districts south of Namdalseid, where the people feel they have nothing to fear from the Russians. It’s possible that Erlend might be the man who could change people’s minds about these matters in some way.”
“He has such a cursed loose tongue,” Sir Erling exclaimed.
Lavrans replied with a small smile. “Perhaps that’s the language that will appeal more to people than . . . the speech of more in sightful men.” Again they looked at each other and laughed. “However that may be, he could do more harm if he went to the meeting and spoke too loudly.”
“Well, if you cannot restrain him, then . . .”
“No, I can do so only until he meets up with the kind of birds he’s used to flying around with; my son-in-law and I are too unlike each other.”
Erlend came over to them. “Have you benefited so much from the mass that you need no breakfast?”
“I haven’t heard mention of breakfast—I’m as hungry as a wolf, and thirsty.” Lavrans stroked a dirty-white horse that he had been examining. “Whoever the man is who tends to your horses, son-in-law, I would drive him off my estate before I sat down to eat, if he was
my
servant.”
“I don’t dare, because of Kristin,” said Erlend. “He has gotten one of her maids with child.”
“And do you deem it such a great achievement here in these parts,” said Lavrans, raising his eyebrows, “that you now find him irreplaceable?”
“No, but you see,” said Erlend, laughing, “Kristin and the priest want them to be married—and they want me to place the man in such a position that he’ll be able to support the two of them. The girl refuses and her guardian refuses, and Tore himself is reluctant. But I’m not allowed to drive him off; she’s afraid that then he would flee the village. But Ulf Haldorssøn is his overseer, when he’s home.”
Erling Vidkunssøn walked over toward Smid Gudleikssøn. Lavrans said to his son-in-law, “It seems to me that Kristin is looking a little pale these days.”
“I know. Can’t you talk to her, Father-in-law?” Erlend said eagerly. “That boy is sucking the marrow out of her. I think she wants to keep him at her breast until the third fast, like some kind of pauper’s wife.”
“Yes, she is certainly fond of her son,” said Lavrans with a slight smile.
“I know.” Erlend shook his head. “They can sit there for three hours—Kristin and Sira Eiliv—talking about a rash he has here or there; and for every tooth he gets, they seem to think a great miracle has occurred. I’ve never heard otherwise but that all children get teeth. And it would be more wondrous if our Naakkve should have none.”
CHAPTER 2
ONE EVENING A year later, toward the end of the Christmas holidays, Kristin Lavransdatter and Orm Erlendssøn arrived quite unexpectedly to visit Master Gunnulf at his residence in Nidaros.
The wind had raged and sleet had fallen all day long, since before noon, but now, late in the evening, the weather had grown worse until it was an actual snowstorm. The two visitors were completely covered in snow when they stepped into the room where the priest was sitting at the supper table with the rest of his household.
Gunnulf asked fearfully whether something was wrong back at the manor. But Kristin shook her head. Erlend was away on a visit in Gelmin, she said in reply to her brother-in-law’s queries, but she was so weary that she hadn’t felt like going with him.
The priest thought about how she had come all the way into town. The horses that she and Orm had ridden were exhausted; during the last part of the journey they had barely been able to struggle their way through the snowdrifts. Gunnulf sent his two servant women off with Kristin to find dry clothing for her. They were his foster mother and her sister—there were no other women at the priest’s house. He attended to his nephew himself. And all the while, Orm talked steadily.
“I think Kristin is ill. I told Father, but he got angry.”
She had been so unlike herself lately, said the boy. He didn’t know what was wrong. He couldn’t remember whether it was her idea or his for them to come here—oh yes, she had mentioned first that she had a great longing to go to Christ Church, and he had said that he would accompany her. So this morning, just as soon as his father had ridden off, Kristin told him she wanted to go today. Orm had agreed, even though the weather was threatening—but he didn’t like the look in her eyes.
Gunnulf thought to himself that he didn’t like it either, when Kristin returned to the room. She looked terribly thin in Ingrid’s black dress; her face was as pale as bast and her eyes were sunken, with dark blue circles underneath. Her gaze was strange and dark.
It had been three months since he had last seen her, when he attended the christening at Husaby. She had looked good then as she lay in bed in her finery, and she said she felt well—the birth had been an easy one. So he had protested when Ragnfrid Ivarsdatter and Erlend wanted to give the child to a foster mother; Kristin cried and begged to be allowed to nurse Bjørgulf herself. The second son had been named after Lavrans’s father.
Now the priest asked first about Bjørgulf; he knew that Kristin was not pleased with the wet nurse to whom they had given the child. But she said he was doing well and that Frida was fond of him and took better care of him than anyone had expected. And what about Nikulaus? asked her brother-in-law. Was he still so handsome? A little smile flitted across the mother’s face. Naakkve grew more and more handsome every day. No, he didn’t talk much, but otherwise he was ahead of his years in every way, and so big. No one would believe he was only in his second winter; even Fru Gunna said as much.
Then Kristin fell silent again. Master Gunnulf glanced at the two of them—his brother’s wife and his brother’s son—who were sitting on either side of him. They looked weary and sorrowful, and his heart felt uneasy as he gazed at them.
Orm had always seemed melancholy. The boy was now fifteen years old, and he would have been the most handsome of fellows if he hadn’t looked so delicate and weak. He was almost as tall as his father, but his body was much too slender and narrow-shouldered. His face resembled Erlend’s too, but his eyes were much darker blue, and his mouth, beneath the first downy black mustache, was even smaller and weaker, and it was always pressed tight with a sad little furrow at each corner. Even the back of Orm’s thin, tan neck under his curly black hair looked oddly unhappy as he sat there eating, slightly hunched forward.
Kristin had never sat at table with her brother-in-law in his own house. Last year she had come to town with Erlend for the springtime
ting,
and they had stayed at this residence, which Gunnulf had inherited from his father; but at that time the priest was living on the estate of the Brothers of the Cross, substituting for one of the canons. Master Gunnulf was now the parish priest for Steine, but he had a chaplain to assist him while he oversaw the work of copying manuscripts for the churches of the archbishopric while the cantor,
1
Herr Eirik Finssøn, was ill. And during this time he lived in his own house.
The main hall was unlike any of the rooms Kristin was used to. It was a timbered building, but in the middle of the end wall, facing east, Gunnulf had had masons construct a large fireplace, like those he had seen in the countries of the south; a log fire burned between cast andirons. The table stood along one wall, and opposite were benches with writing desks. In front of a painting of the Virgin Mary burned a brass lamp, and nearby stood shelves of books.
This room seemed strange to her, and her brother-in-law seemed strange too, now that she saw him sitting at the table with members of his household—clerics and servant men who looked oddly priestlike. There were also several poor people: old men and a young boy with thin, reddish eyelids clinging like membranes to his empty eye sockets. On the women’s bench next to the old housekeepers sat a young woman with a two-year-old child on her lap; she was hungrily gulping down the stew and stuffing her child’s mouth so that his cheeks were about to burst.
It was the custom for all priests at Christ Church to give supper to the poor. But Kristin had heard that fewer beggars came to Gunnulf Nikulaussøn than to any of the other priests, and yet—or perhaps this was the very reason—he seated them on the benches next to him in the main hall and received every wanderer like an honored guest. They were served food from his own platter and ale from the priest’s own barrels. The poor would come whenever they felt in need of a supper of stew, but otherwise they preferred to go to the other priests, where they were given porridge and weak ale in the cookhouse.
As soon as the scribe had finished the prayers after the meal, the poor guests wanted to leave. Gunnulf spoke gently to each of them, asking whether they would like to spend the night or whether they needed anything else; but only the blind boy remained. The priest implored in particular the young woman with the child to stay and not take the little one out into the night, but she murmured an excuse and hurried off. Then Gunnulf asked a servant to make sure that Blind Arnstein was given ale and a good bed in the guest room. He put on a hooded cape.
“You must be tired, Orm and Kristin, and want to go to bed. Audhild will take care of you. You’ll probably be asleep when I return from the church.”
Then Kristin asked to go with him. “That’s why I’ve come here,” she said, fixing her despairing eyes on Gunnulf. Ingrid lent her a dry cloak, and she and Orm joined the small procession departing from the parsonage.
The bells were ringing as if they were right overhead in the black night sky—it wasn’t far to the church. They trudged through deep, wet, new snow. The weather was calm now, with a few snowflakes still drifting down here and there, shimmering faintly in the dark.
Dead tired, Kristin tried to lean against the pillar she was standing next to, but the stone was icy cold. She stood in the dark church and stared up at the candles in the choir. She couldn’t see Gunnulf up there, but he was sitting among the priests, with a candle beside his book. No, she would not be able to speak to him, after all.
Tonight it seemed to her that there was no help to be found anywhere. Back home Sira Eiliv admonished her because she brooded so much over her everyday sins—he said this was the temptation of pride. She should simply be diligent with her prayers and good deeds, and then she wouldn’t have time to dwell on such matters. “The Devil is no fool; he’ll realize that he will lose your soul in the end, and he won’t feel like tempting you as much.”
She listened to the antiphony and remembered the nuns’ church in Oslo. There she had raised her poor little voice with others in the hymn of praise—and down in the nave stood Erlend, wrapped in a cape up to his chin, and the two of them thought only of finding a chance to speak to each other in secret.
And she had thought that this heathen and burning love was not so terrible a sin. They couldn’t help themselves—and they were both unmarried. It was at most a transgression against the laws of men. Erlend wanted to escape from a terrible life of sin, and she imagined that he would have greater strength to free himself from the old burden if she put her life and her honor and her happiness into his hands.
The last time she knelt here in this church she had fully realized that when she said such things in her heart she had been trying to deceive God with tricks and lies. It was not because of their virtue but because of their good fortune that there were still commandments they had not broken, sins they had not committed. If she had been another man’s wife when she met Erlend . . . she would not have been any more sparing of his salvation or his honor than she was of the man she had so mercilessly spurned. It seemed to her now that there was nothing that wouldn’t have tempted her back then, in her ardor and despair. She had felt her passion temper her will until it was sharp and hard like a knife, ready to cut through all bonds—those of kinship, Christianity, and honor. There was nothing inside her except the burning hunger to see him, to be near him, to open her lips to his hot mouth and her arms to the deadly sweet desire which he had taught her.
Oh, no. The Devil was probably not so convinced that he was going to lose her soul. But when she lay here before, crushed with sorrow over her sins, over the hardness of her heart, her impure life, and the blindness of her soul . . . then she had felt the saintly king take her in under his protective cloak. She had gripped his strong, warm hand; he had pointed out to her the light that is the source of all strength and holiness. Saint Olav turned her eyes toward Christ on the cross—see, Kristin: God’s love. Yes, she had begun to understand God’s love and patience. But she had turned away from the light again and closed her heart to it, and now there was nothing in her mind but impatience and anger and fear.
How wretched, wretched she was. Even she had realized that a woman like herself would need harsh trials before she could be cured of her lack of love. And yet she was so impatient that she felt her heart would break with the sorrows that had been imposed on her. They were small sorrows, but there were many of them, and she had so little patience. She glanced at her stepson’s tall, slender figure over on the men’s side of the church.
She couldn’t help it. She loved Orm as if he were her own child; but it was impossible for her to be fond of Margret. She had tried and tried and even commanded herself to like the child, ever since that day last winter when Ulf Haldorssøn brought her home to Husaby. She thought it was dreadful; how could she feel such ill will and anger toward a little maiden only nine years old? And she knew full well that part of it was because the child looked so fearfully like her mother Eline. She couldn’t understand Erlend; he was simply proud that his little golden-haired daughter with the brown eyes was so pretty. The child never seemed to arouse any bad memories in the father. It was as if Erlend had completely forgotten the mother of these children. But it wasn’t
only
because Margret resembled the other woman that Kristin lacked affection for her stepdaughter. Margret would not tolerate anyone instructing her; she was arrogant and treated the servants badly. She was dishonest too, and she fawned over her father. She didn’t love him the way Orm did; she would snuggle up to Erlend with affection and caresses only because she wanted something. And Erlend showered her with gifts and gave in to the maiden’s every whim. Orm wasn’t fond of his sister, either—that much Kristin had noticed.