Burial Rites(56)

‘Jóas seemed to like Geitaskard, which I was glad to see. But I didn’t care for his friends. They seemed a gang, and were slouch-faced, weedy sort of men, with stained trousers and nits in their hair. Jóas had scratched his scalp raw. Worm got rid of some of the men after no more than a week – he’d caught them sleeping behind the cowshed – and the rest didn’t last long either. I don’t know whether it was because he was a better sort of man, or if it was because he had me there with him, but Jóas let me clean him up and comb the nits out of his hair, and he worked hard. At nights, when we had time to ourselves, we’d talk. He told me he’d heard stories about me, that he’d asked around and heard I’d gone to work at Gudrúnarstadir. He said he’d tried to find me there, but I’d left when he arrived, and they couldn’t remember where I’d gone. I didn’t let him see it, but I wept over that, the thought of my brother trying to find me. He’d had a child, as well. A little girl, whose mamma was a workmaid. But he told me that the baby was stillborn, and the maid did not care for him. I told him about Helga, our poor dead sister, and he said he’d gone to her funeral and that the farmer Jónas, Helga’s father, gave him a little bit of money on account of Jóas being abandoned by a whore. Jóas insisted that our Mamma was no good, and that she could go to hell for leaving two children to the mercy of the parish, which was no kind of mercy at all, and he called her many other things besides. He spoke of Mamma as Magnús had, and we quarrelled about it one night, and when I woke up Jóas couldn’t be found. He’d taken the money that Magnús had given me. I haven’t seen him since.’

There was a loud cackle of laughter from the gathering on the bottom field. Tóti saw that two of the men had let out the cow and the others were trying in vain to herd it back into the field.

‘I’d been saving that money,’ Agnes continued. ‘For when I got married; to pay the licences and help my husband buy a plot of land so we could be decent and independent.’

‘Had you a fiancé?’ Tóti asked.

Agnes smiled. ‘Oh, there was a servant at Geitaskard. Daníel Gudmundsson. He was fond of me, and he told everyone that we were engaged to be wed. He said so in the trials, but I don’t see how he could have been serious. Neither of us had a coin to our name. I let him think what he fancied, so long as it meant that he was kind to me.

‘Daníel worked at Illugastadir when I was there, too. He was at the trials, first as a witness, then Bl?ndal decided he must have known what was to happen, and he was sentenced to time in the Rasphus in Copenhagen.’

‘Did he know what was going to happen?’ Tóti asked.

Agnes looked up from her needles and regarded him coolly.

‘If anyone knew what was going to happen do you think I’d be sitting here, talking to you? Do you think any of those others, Daníel, Fridrik’s family, would be strapped over a barrel being whipped to within an inch of their lives if they knew what was going to happen?’

There was a moment of silence.

Agnes took a deep breath. ‘After Jóas left, the best thing about working at Geitaskard was María. I never had many friends growing up; I’d been bundled along from farm to farm. To anyone who needed to do their parish duty, or who wanted a girl-stripling to watch over the grass, or sheep, or kettles. I used to keep to myself anyhow. I preferred to read than talk with the others.’ Agnes looked up. ‘Do you like reading?’ she asked Tóti.

‘Very much.’

Agnes gave a wide smile, and for the first time Tóti remembered the servant girl he had helped over the river. Her eyes were bright, and her lips parted to reveal even teeth; she suddenly looked younger, altered. He was aware of his own chest rising and falling. She is quite beautiful, he thought.

‘Me too,’ she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. ‘I like the sagas best. As they say, blíndur er bóklaus maeur. Blind is a man without a book.’

Tóti felt something rise in him, a cry, or a laugh. He gazed at Agnes, at the afternoon sun lighting the tips of her eyelashes, and wondered at Bl?ndal’s words. Agnes killed Natan because she was spurned. He saw the sentence written in his mind.

‘When I was a girl, I used to be hired out to watch over fields. Sometimes those farms had books.’ She gestured to the rocky hills behind them. ‘I used to take them and read up over Kornsá Hill. I could fall asleep there, and have some peace from the farm, and from the chores. Though sometimes I’d be caught and punished.’

‘Your confirmation said that you were well-read.’

Agnes straightened her back. ‘I liked confirmation; the Holy Communion and everyone looking at you as you walked up the aisle and knelt before the priest. The farmers and their wives couldn’t tell me not to read when they knew I was preparing for confirmation. I could go to the church and study with the Reverend there, if he had time. I was given a white dress, and there were pancakes afterwards.’

‘What about poetry?’

Agnes looked sceptical. ‘What about it?’

‘Do you like it? Do you compose?’

‘I don’t brag about my poems. Not like Rósa. Everyone knows hers.’ She shrugged.

‘That is because they are beautiful.’