Burial Rites(64)

Jón was thoughtful. ‘Let Reverend Thorvardur speak with his charge without your interference.’

‘My interference!’ Lauga laughed and threw her knitting on her bed. ‘How about her interference! She’s in our home! Always breathing over my shoulder in the kitchen! Speaking lies in our badstofa!’ Lauga turned to her parents. ‘Mamma, Pabbi, forgive me, but you told Steina and I to close our ears to this woman. And now you let her spin stories not five feet away from us? “Oh, pity me, I’m a pauper!”’

‘We can hardly send her and Reverend Tóti out into the snow,’ Steina reasoned.

‘Well then, Pabbi, if one of us may tell fairy stories at night, why not all of us?’

Margrét was stony-faced. ‘Pick up your knitting, Lauga.’

‘Yes, pick up your knitting, Lauga,’ Steina scoffed.

‘Enough of the both of you,’ Margrét barked. ‘Reverend Tóti, you should know that we cannot help but hear –’

‘What did Róslín tell you about Natan’s dreams, Lauga?’ Agnes interrupted. She had stopped knitting and was looking at the sisters intently.

Everyone fell silent.

‘Well,’ Lauga murmured, clearing her throat. She threw a glance of uncertainty at Agnes, then looked over to her father, who lowered his eyes. ‘Róslín said that Natan told lots of people about a dream he had where an evil spirit was stabbing him in the belly. And he had another where he dreamt he was in a graveyard. She told me that, in this dream, he saw a body, or a corpse or something in an open grave, and three lizards were eating it. Then a man appeared at his side, and when Natan asked him whose corpse it was, the man replied: “Do you not know your own body?”’

‘Sweet Jesus,’ Kristín murmured.

‘What happened then?’ Bjarni asked, from his bed.

Lauga shrugged. ‘I suppose he woke up. But Róslín said that he told a lot of people about that dream, and they all agree that’s what happened. She heard it from ósk, who heard it from her brother, who heard it from Natan himself.’

Eyes shifted to Agnes. The woman looked thoughtful, and then swung her legs over the side of the bed to better face them all.

‘He told me that he’d dreamt he saw his body in an open grave, and he saw his soul standing at the other end. Then his body called out to his soul, and sang the psalm from Bishop Stein.’ Her voice cracked in the silence.

No one said anything. Tóti eventually cleared his throat.

‘Agnes. Would you like to go on with your story? You were talking about Pétur.’

‘Can I come closer to the lamplight?’

Jón glanced at Margrét, then at the rest of his family, and shook his head.

Margrét winced. ‘Jón,’ she whispered in a low voice. ‘What harm can it do now?’

Tóti noticed him dart his eyes towards his daughters.

Margrét sighed. ‘It’s best if we all keep our place,’ she said to Agnes. ‘You’ve light enough for storytelling.’

A brief flicker of anger passed over Agnes’s face, but when she resumed speaking it was in a soft voice.

‘Pétur was infamous in Langidalur, and also in Vatnsdalur, as you’d know. No one trusts a man who has killed so many animals. I was surprised that Natan didn’t recognise Pétur, back then at Geitaskard, because I’d guessed that Natan knew all manner of men, and so I told him that Pétur was a criminal in custody, and that he had slit the throats of more than thirty sheep, and for the fun of it too, and that he might be sent to Copenhagen. Natan gave the man a long look, but said nothing more of it.’

‘Perhaps he wanted to recruit him to steal some sheep,’ Lauga said sharply.

‘Perhaps,’ Agnes returned, from her dark corner. She turned back to Tóti. ‘That day I took Natan to Worm, and then joined María in the home field. When I told her that Natan had surprised me in the storeroom she asked me what he had wanted. I told her that he had come to Geitaskard to visit Worm. María took me by the hand then, and told me to be careful.’

‘Why?’ Kristín asked. Gudmundur guffawed from the shadows.

Agnes ignored them. ‘I told her that I was a grown woman, with a head of my own. María said that that was what worried her.’

‘Reverend,’ Jón said suddenly. ‘Perhaps it is best you speak together away from the family.’

‘What’s wrong with it, Pabbi? I want to hear what happened,’ Steina said.

‘Get into bed, Steina.’

‘Excuse me, Jón,’ Tóti interrupted. ‘With respect, I am here to listen to Agnes tell me whatever she finds in her heart to tell me. As your wife and daughter have made abundantly clear, our close proximity means that our discussion cannot help but be heard by your family and servants.’

‘Your discussion?’ Gudmundur frowned. ‘You let her talk to you as though she’s telling a bedtime story.’

Before Tóti could think of what to say, Margrét interrupted.

‘Shut your mouth, Gudmundur. Let Agnes talk to the Reverend. What difference does it make anyway, my Jón? Both of them know what happened, and what they didn’t know before, Róslín has evidently poured into their ears since.’