Burial Rites(16)

‘I confess to fear. I do not know what to say to her. I do not feel at ease, Lord. Please guard my heart against the . . . the horror this woman inspires in me.’

Tóti remained on his knees for some time. It was only the thought of his horse standing bridled in the rain and wind that caused him to finally rise and lock the church door behind him.




MARGRéT WOKE EARLY THE NEXT day. The officer who had slept in the bed opposite to protect her from the criminal was snoring. The gargled breathing had entered her dreams and roused her.

Margrét turned in her bed to face the wall and dug the corners of her blanket into her ears, but the man’s ragged snorting filled her head. Sleep was gone from her now. She lay on her back and looked across the unlit room to where the officer lay. His rough blond hair stuck up in oily tufts, and his mouth was open upon his pillow. Margrét noticed spots along the man’s jaw.

So this is how they protect me against a murderess, she thought. They send a boy who sleeps soundly.

She cast an eye at the prisoner, lying in one of the servants’ beds at the end of the room. The woman was lying still, asleep. Her daughters were also sleeping. Margrét sat up on her elbows to take a better look.

Agnes.

Margrét silently mouthed the word.

It seems wrong to call her by a Christian name, Margrét thought. What would they have called her in Stóra-Borg, she wondered. Prisoner? Accused? Condemned? Perhaps it was the absence of a name, the silence where a name should be, that they had summoned her by.

Margrét shivered and drew the blanket about her. Agnes’s eyes were shut fast and her mouth was closed. The cap Margrét had given her had unfastened during the night, and had let loose her dark hair. It lay across the pillow like a stain.

Strange to finally see the woman after a month of anticipation, Margrét thought. A month of fear, too. A tight fear, like a fishing line, hooked upon something that must, inevitably, be dragged from the depths.

In the days and nights after Jón had returned from meeting with Bl?ndal, Margrét had tried to imagine how she would act towards the murderess, and what the woman might look like.

What sort of woman kills men?

The only murderesses Margrét had known were the women in the sagas, and even then, it was with words that they had killed men; orders given to servants to slay lovers or avenge the death of kin. Those women murdered from a distance and kept their fingers clean.

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 Hj?rdis, her favourite servant, now dead and buried in the churchyard at Undirfell. She tried to imagine Hj?rdis as a murderess. Tried to imagine Hj?rdis 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, Ingibj?rg, 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 flage í f?gru 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.