Burial Rites(54)

‘Not joining the party, Agnes?’ he asked quietly.

She didn’t turn around. ‘I am better use in here,’ she said, continuing to raise the plunger and push it through the cream. Tóti thought it was a good sound, the dull splash of the churn.

‘I hope you don’t mind me interrupting you.’

‘No. But if you don’t mind, I won’t stop until the butter takes.’

Tóti leant against the doorframe as Agnes continued to raise and drop the plunger. After a moment he became aware of Agnes’s breath, fast and hard in the small room. It seemed intimate somehow; the rhythm of the plunger and the sound of quickened breathing. He felt himself blushing. Eventually a thud could be heard inside the small barrel, and Agnes stopped and deftly strained the butter from the buttermilk. Tóti blinked as Agnes washed it then formed and slapped the paddle, skilfully forcing out the remaining liquid, and thought of what Bl?ndal had said. Someone plunged the knife into Natan Ketilsson’s belly.

Once the butter had been shaped and covered with a cloth, Tóti suggested that they go outside to take the air. Agnes looked nervous, but after fetching some knitting from the badstofa, followed Tóti outside. They sat down on the turf pile by the croft and looked across at the group of adults and children, the farmers getting steadily drunker on their brandy, and the women gossiping in tight clusters of dark clothes. Several were taking turns to hold a baby, clucking into its face. It broke into a wail.

‘I have been to Bl?ndal,’ Tóti said eventually.

Agnes blanched. ‘What did he want?’

‘He thinks I should spend more time engaging you in prayers and sermons, and less time letting you speak.’

‘Bl?ndal likes only one thing better than religious chastisement, and that is the sound of his own voice.’ Agnes’s words were crabbed.

‘Is it true Bl?ndal hired Natan to heal his wife?’

Agnes gave him a wary look. ‘Yes,’ she said slowly. ‘Yes, that’s true. Natan visited Hvammur some years back to give her poultices and bleed her.’

Tóti nodded. ‘Bl?ndal also told me a little about Fridrik. Apparently he is doing very well under the guardianship of Birni Olsen and the counsel of Reverend Jóhann.’ He looked at Agnes to measure her reaction. She narrowed her eyes.

‘Will they get up an appeal for him too?’ she asked.

‘He did not say.’ Tóti cleared his throat. ‘Agnes, a servant called Karitas sends her regards. She asked if you had spoken to me about Natan.’

Agnes stopped knitting and clenched her jaw.

‘Karitas?’ Her voice cracked.

‘She asked to speak with me after I had met with Bl?ndal. She wanted to tell me about Natan.’

‘And what did she say about him?’

Tóti rummaged for his snuff horn, poured a little on his hand and snorted it. ‘She said that she could not bear working for him. She said that he toyed with people.’

Agnes said nothing.

‘I have met others here in this valley who say he was a sorcerer, that he got his name from Satan,’ Tóti said.

‘That’s a very popular story. And plenty believe it too.’

‘Do you believe it?’

Agnes smoothed the length of the unfinished stocking out across her knees. ‘I don’t know,’ she said finally. ‘Natan believed in dreams. His mother had foresight and her dreams often came true. His family is famous for it. He made me tell him my dreams and put a lot of store by them.’

Agnes stopped running her palm over the stocking and looked up. ‘Reverend,’ she said quietly. ‘If I tell you something, will you promise to believe me?’

Tóti felt his heart leap in his chest. ‘What is it you want to tell me, Agnes?’

‘Remember when you first visited me here, and you asked me why I had chosen you to be my priest, and I told you that it was because of an act of kindness, because you had helped me across the river?’ Agnes cast a wary glance out to the group of people on the edge of the field. ‘I wasn’t lying,’ she continued. ‘We did meet then. But what I didn’t tell you was that we had met before.’

Tóti raised his eyebrows. ‘I’m sorry, Agnes. I don’t remember.’

‘You wouldn’t have. We met in a dream.’ She stared at Tóti, as if worried he would laugh.

‘A dream?’ The Reverend was struck again by the contrast of her dark lashes against the lightness of her eyes. She is unlike anyone else, he thought.

Satisfied that he wasn’t going to laugh, Agnes resumed her knitting. ‘When I was sixteen years old I dreamt that I was walking barefoot in a lava field. It was covered with snow and I was lost and scared – I didn’t know where I was, and there was no one to be seen. In every direction there was nothing but rock and snow, and great chasms and cracks in the ground. My feet were bleeding, but I had to keep going – I didn’t know where, but I was walking as fast as I could. Just when I thought I would die from fear, a young man appeared. He was bareheaded, but wore a priest’s collar, and he gave me his hand. We kept going in the same direction as before – we didn’t know where else to go – and even though I was still terrified, I had his hand in mine, and it was a comfort.

‘Then suddenly, in my dream, I felt the ground give way beneath my feet, and my hand was wrenched out of the young man’s, and I fell into a chasm. I remember looking up as I fell into the darkness, and seeing the ground close back up over my head. It shut out the light and the face of the man who had appeared. I was dropped into the earth, buried in silence, and it was unbearable, and then I woke.’