Burial Rites(17)

Margrét recalled Agnes’s shoulderblades. Razor-sharp, they’d poked out from the rough cloth of her undergarment, which was yellowed around the neckline and stained a filthy brown under the armpits.

Margrét would have to burn all the woman’s clothes before breakfast. She had left them in a corner of the kitchen last night, unwilling to bring them into the badstofa. Fleas had crawled through their weave.

Somehow, she had managed to wash off most of the grime and dirt from the criminal’s body. Agnes had tried to wash herself, feebly running the damp rag over her limbs, but the grime had been so long upon her skin that it seemed ground into her pores. Eventually, Margrét, rolling up her sleeves and clenching her teeth, had snatched the rag off her and scrubbed Agnes until the cloth was soiled through. As she washed her, Margrét had – in spite of herself – looked for the blemishes Lauga had thought would be evident, a sign of the murderess. Only the woman’s eyes had hinted at something. They seemed different, Margrét thought. Very blue and clear, but too light a shade to be considered pretty.

The woman’s body was a terrain of abuse. Even Margrét, accustomed to wounds, to the inevitable maladies wrought by hard labour and accident, had been shocked.

Perhaps she’d scrubbed Agnes’s skin too hard, Margrét thought, pushing her head under the pillow in an effort to shut out the gargled snores of the officer. Some of the woman’s sores had broken and wept. The sight of fresh blood had given Margrét some secret satisfaction.

She had made Agnes soak her hair, also. The water from the kettle had been too full of silt and scum, so Margrét had requested an officer fetch more from the mountain stream. While they waited, she had dressed the woman’s wounds with an ointment of sulphur and lard.

‘This is Natan Ketilsson’s own medicine,’ she had said, casting an eye up to catch the woman’s reaction. Agnes had said nothing, but Margrét thought she had seen the muscles in her neck tighten. ‘God rest his soul,’ Margrét had muttered.

With Agnes’s hair washed as good as could be in the freezing water, and most of the weeping sores plugged with lard, Margrét had given her the undergarments and bedding of Hj?rdis. Hj?rdis had been wearing the underdress Agnes now slept in when she died. Margrét suspected it did not make a difference if a mite of contagion lingered. Its new owner would be dead soon enough.

How strange to imagine that, in a short while, the woman who slept in a bed not ten feet from her would be underground.

Margrét sighed and sat up in bed again. Agnes still had not moved. The officer snored on. Margrét watched him as he pushed a hand into his groin and scratched it, audibly. She averted her eyes, amused and a little annoyed that this man was her only protection.

Might as well get up and begin preparing something for the officers’ breakfast, she thought. Skyr perhaps. Or dried fish. She wondered whether she had enough butter to spare, and when the servants would return from Reykjavík with their supplies.

Loosening her nightcap, Margrét cast one last glance at the sleeping woman.

Her heart jumped into her mouth. In the dim recesses of the badstofa, Agnes lay on her side, calmly watching Margrét.





CHAPTER THREE





IT IS SAID OF THE CRIME that Fridrik Sigurdsson, with the assistance of Agnes Magnúsdóttir and Sigrídur Gudmundsdóttir, came inside Natan Ketilsson’s home close to midnight, and stabbed and thrashed Natan and Pétur Jónsson, who was a guest there, to death with a knife and hammer. Then, due to the gushing and smearing of the bodies that was apparent, burnt them by setting fire to the farm so that their evil work would not be apparent. Fridrik came to commit this evil through hatred of Natan, and a desire to steal. The murder was eventually exposed. The District Commissioner was suspicious, and when the half-burnt bodies were revealed, he believed that those three had been a gang.

From the Supreme Court Trials of 1829.





I DID NOT DREAM IN the storeroom at Stóra-Borg. Curled up on the wooden slats with a mouldy horse-skin for warmth, sleep came to me like a thin tide of water. It would lap against my body but never submerge me in oblivion. There would be something to wake me – the sound of footsteps, or the scrape of the chamber pot on the floor as a maid came to empty it, the heady stink of piss. Sometimes, if I lay still with my eyes tightly closed and pushed every thought out of my mind, sleep would trickle back. My mind would shift in and out of consciousness, until the briefest chink of light crept into the room, and the servants shoved me a bit of dried fish. Some days I think that I haven’t really slept since the fire, and that maybe sleeplessness is punishment from God. Or Bl?ndal, even: my dreams taken with my belongings to pay for my custody.

But last night, here at Kornsá, I dreamt of Natan. He was boiling herbs for a draught, and I was watching him and running my hands over the smithy’s turf wall. It was summer, and the light was tinged with pink. The herbs for the draught had a strong perfume, and it surrounded me as I stood there. I breathed in the bittersweet scent, feeling a slow wave of happiness rise over me. I was finally gone from the valley. Natan turned and smiled. He was holding a glass beaker filled with scum he had collected off the brewing herbs, and steam was rising from it. He looked like a sorcerer in his black worsted stockings and the smoke rising from his hand. Natan stepped through the pool of sunlight and I opened my arms to him, laughing, feeling like I might die from love, but as I did the beaker slipped from his grasp and smashed on the floor and darkness poured into the room like oil.