Burial Rites(94)

‘AGNES? AGNES? I AM HERE. I am with you.’ Tóti looked at Agnes anxiously. The woman was staring at the floor, breathing hard and rocking, making her stool creak. He felt the prick of tears at the back of his throat, but he was aware of Margrét, Jón, Steina and Lauga behind him, and the servants, waiting in the doorway to the kitchen, watching.

‘I think she needs some water,’ Steina said.

‘No,’ Jón said. He turned around to where the farmhands waited. ‘Bjarni! Go get some brandy, would you?’

The bottle was fetched and Margrét brought it to Agnes’s lips. ‘There,’ she said, as Agnes spluttered on the mouthful, spilling most of it on her shawl. ‘That will make you feel better.’

‘How many days?’ Agnes croaked. Tóti noticed that she was digging her fingernails into the flesh of her arm.

‘Six days,’ Tóti said gently. He reached across and took up her hands in his own. ‘But I’m here, I won’t let go.’

‘Reverend Tóti?’

‘Yes, Agnes?’

‘Perhaps I could beg them, perhaps if I go to Bl?ndal he will change his mind and we can appeal. Can you talk to him for me, Reverend? If you go and talk to him and explain I think he would listen to you. Reverend, they can’t . . .’

Tóti put his trembling hand on the woman’s shoulder. ‘I am here for you, Agnes. I am here.’

‘No!’ She pushed him away. ‘No! We have to talk to them! You have to make them listen!’

Tóti heard Margrét click her tongue. ‘It’s not right,’ she was muttering. ‘It wasn’t her fault.’

‘What?’ Tóti turned to her. ‘Did she talk to you?’ Someone was crying behind him, one of the daughters.

Margrét nodded, her eyes welling up. ‘One night. We stayed up late. It’s not right,’ she repeated. ‘Oh, Lord. Is there something we can do? Tóti? What can we do for her?’ Before he could respond, Margrét gasped and shuffled out of the room, her hands to her eyes. Jón followed her.

Agnes was shaking, staring at her hands.

‘I can’t move them,’ she said quietly. She looked up at him with wide eyes. ‘I can’t move them.’

Tóti took her stiff hands into his own again. He didn’t know who was trembling more.

‘I am here for you, Agnes.’ It was the only thing he could say.




I DO NOT CRUMBLE, I think of the small things. I concentrate my mind on the feeling of linen next to my skin.

I breathe in as deeply and as silently as I am able.

Now comes the darkening sky and a cold wind that passes right through you, as though you are not there, it passes through you as though it does not care whether you are alive or dead, for you will be gone and the wind will still be there, licking the grass flat upon the ground, not caring whether the soil is at a freeze or thaw, for it will freeze and thaw again, and soon your bones, now hot with blood and thick-juicy with marrow, will be dry and brittle and flake and freeze and thaw with the weight of the dirt upon you, and the last moisture of your body will be drawn up to the surface by the grass, and the wind will come and knock it down and push you back against the rocks, or it will scrape you up under its nails and take you out to sea in a wild screaming of snow.




REVEREND TóTI STAYED UP WITH Agnes well into the night, until finally the woman fell asleep. Margrét watched the Reverend anxiously from the corner of the badstofa. He, too, had fallen asleep, and sat slumped upright against the bedpost, shivering violently under the blanket she had carefully pulled over him. Margrét considered waking him and moving him to a spare bed, but decided against it. She didn’t believe he would be easily moved.

Margrét finally laid down her knitting. She was reminded of when Hj?rdis died. She hadn’t given so much as a thought to that dead woman since the first days of Agnes’s arrival. But this – the sombre expectation of death, the light burning too late into the night, the weeping into exhaustion. This reminded her. Margrét looked out over the rest of the sleeping household. Lauga, she noticed, was missing from her bed.

Margrét eased herself up off the chair to find her daughter, and almost immediately fell into a fit of coughing that pushed her to her knees. She hacked at the floorboards until a thick clot of blood was expelled from her lungs. It left her feeble, and she waited there on all fours, breathing hard, until she felt strong enough to rise.

It took Margrét several minutes to find Lauga. She was not by the warmth of the hearth in the kitchen, nor in the dairy. Margrét shuffled into the darkness of the pantry, holding a candle aloft.

‘Lauga?’

There was a faint noise from the corner where the barrels stood together.

‘Lauga, is that you?’

The candlelight threw shadows over the walls, before lighting on someone behind a half-filled sack of meal.

‘Mamma?’

‘What are you doing in here, Lauga?’ Margrét stepped forward and brought the candle closer to her daughter’s face.

Lauga squinted in the light and hurriedly stood up. Her eyes were red. ‘Nothing at all.’

‘Are you upset?’

Lauga blinked and quickly rubbed her eyes. ‘No, Mamma.’