Burial Rites(59)

The round-up had been a day of disquiet. The farmhands had left first, before light, riding horses up beyond the Vididals mountain with other men of the valley, and some of the women of the district had followed on foot not long after. Margrét had stayed behind with Agnes to prepare the meal for their return. As soon as it had grown light that day, Margrét had felt uneasy. The sky had dawned grey and foreboding, and she had known something would happen. It was the way the clouds had crouched too close to the ground. The smell of iron in the air. All morning she’d been thinking of the people who had been lost on the mountains. Only the year before a maidservant had gone missing in a sudden snowstorm during round-up, and they hadn’t found her bones until the next spring, miles away from where she’d last been seen. Worry pressed on Margrét’s mind to the point where she found herself talking to Agnes just for the relief of expressing concern. Together they listed the people they had known who had died on the mountains. A bleak conversation to have, thought Margrét, but there was some comfort in talking about death aloud, as though in naming things, you could prevent them from happening. Perhaps that was why Agnes spoke more to the Reverend than he to her, she thought.

She’d been right, of course; something had happened. Soon after midday, with no one yet returned from the mountain, there had come a rapid knocking on the farm door, and Ingibj?rg had burst in. ‘It’s Róslín,’ she had said.

The farm at Gilsstadir was overrun with children. Margrét had noticed that despite the chaos, the smoking kitchen filled with burning pots and kettles left to boil over, Róslín’s horde of children seemed bored at the fact of their mother’s labour. After the three women had entered, Róslín had staggered to the badstofa, pale and sweating. Something was wrong, she kept repeating. Of course, she was horrified to see Agnes standing quietly in the doorway, but as Ingibj?rg had calmly pointed out, where else was Margrét supposed to put her?

The baby had been wayward. It was Agnes who had told them that, suddenly stepping forward to place her hands on Róslín’s belly. Róslín had screamed, had demanded the others get Agnes off her, but neither Margrét nor Ingibj?rg had moved. Even as Róslín batted at her hands and scratched her arms, Agnes had continued to gently press her thin fingers against the swollen round.

It’s in breech, she had said. Róslín had groaned then, and stopped fighting. Agnes had not moved either, but told Róslín to lie down on the floor, and remained by her side throughout the ordeal. Margrét remembered how Agnes had not taken her hands off the woman. Throughout the whole birth she had stroked Róslín with those slender palms of hers, soothing her, telling the children to get out of the way, to fetch cloth, to boil water. She had one of them run back to Kornsá to fetch some of the wild angelica collected by the girls on their berrying trip. ‘It’s in a tray of sand in the pantry,’ she had said, and Margrét had wondered at how Agnes seemed so familiar with her home. ‘Don’t bruise the root. Run back with a little handful.’ She’d asked Ingibj?rg to make a tea of the root, told her it would let it come more easily. When the hot liquid was brought to her lips, Róslín clenched her jaw, refused to drink it.

‘It’s not poison, Róslín,’ Margrét had said. ‘Save us the tantrum.’ There had been a moment then. A shared look with Agnes. A quick, taut smile.

The baby had come in breech, like Agnes said. Legs first, bloody toes peeping through, then the body, and finally, the head, with the cord wound about its arm and neck. But it was alive, and that was all Róslín needed to know.

Agnes had refused to deliver it. She had asked Ingibj?rg to help it into the world, and would not touch it, even later, when Róslín had fallen asleep, and the sound of the herded, bleating sheep began to resound throughout the valley. Margrét had thought it strange – the way Agnes would not cradle the newborn. What is it she had said? ‘It ought to live.’ As though it would die if Agnes took it into her arms.

There had been double cause to celebrate that evening. Sn?bj?rn was elated, plied with rum and brandy by the other farmers, so that when he climbed into the sorting pen to drag his sheep into his family’s hold, he staggered and slipped in the mud, and received a sharp butt to the head from a ram. Margrét heard Páll tell the story to his recovering mother, brightly recalling how Sn?bj?rn had to be dragged out to lie on the grass while the others sorted the rest of the animals.

They hadn’t eaten until late. Margrét’s daughters had rescued what they could of the neglected cooking and served it to the ravenous workhands that night. ‘It was snowing a little,’ Steina said, after they had heard about Róslín’s childbirth. She glanced over at Agnes. ‘It must have been a good sign.’

‘I did very little,’ Agnes said. ‘Ingibj?rg delivered it.’

‘No,’ Margrét had corrected. ‘That tea of angelica root – where did you learn such a thing?’

‘It’s common knowledge,’ Agnes had murmured.

‘Probably Natan,’ Lauga suggested sourly.

Margrét wondered at how, even for an hour, Agnes had seemed part of the family. She’d found herself speaking with Agnes the following day, asking her about what dyes she was used to making, and they’d gone on like mistress and servant, until Lauga had come into the room and complained that she was sick of Agnes staring at her clothes and belongings. Lauga knew as well as Margrét that if Agnes were a thief, they would have noticed something missing by now. Not even the silver brooch had shifted from its place in the dust underneath the bed. Margrét briefly wondered if Lauga was jealous of Agnes, before putting the thought out of her mind. Why on earth would Lauga be envious of a woman who would be dead before the weather turned again? Yet, there was an intensity to her revulsion that seemed fired by something more than resentment.