The Wreath (Kristin Lavransdatter #1)(108)

His wife gave a deep, hollow moan. She threw herself down next to him in the hay. Lavrans placed his hand on her shoulder.

“But I could not,” he said with fervor and anguish. “No, I could not ... act toward you the way you wanted me to—back when we were young. I’m not the kind of man . . .”

After a moment Ragnfrid murmured, in tears, “We have lived well together all the same, Lavrans—all these years.”

“So I too have believed,” he replied gloomily.

His thoughts were tumbling and racing through his mind. That one naked glance which the groom and bride had cast at each other, the two young faces blushing with red flames—he thought it so brazen. It had stung him that she was his daughter. But he kept on seeing those eyes, and he struggled wildly and blindly against tearing away the veil from something in his own heart which he had never wanted to acknowledge—there he had concealed a part of himself from his own wife when she had searched for it.

He had not been able to, he interrupted himself harshly. In the name of the Devil, he had been married off as a young boy; he had not chosen her himself. She was older than he was. He had not desired her. He had not wanted to learn this from her—how to love. He still grew hot with shame at the thought of it—that she had wanted him to love her when he had not wanted that kind of love from her. That she had offered him everything that he had never asked for.

He had been a good husband to her; he believed that himself. He had shown her all the respect he could, given her full authority, asked her advice about everything, been faithful to her; and they had had six children. He had simply wanted to live with her without her always trying to seize what was in his heart—and what he refused to reveal.

He had never loved anyone. What about Ingunn, Karl’s wife at Bru? Lavrans blushed in the darkness. He had always visited them when he traveled through the valley. He had probably never spoken to the woman alone even once. But whenever he saw her—if he merely thought of her—he felt something like that first smell of the earth in the spring, right after the snow had gone. Now he realized: it could have happened to him too... he could have loved someone too.

But he had been married so young, and he had grown wary. Then he found that he thrived best out in the wilderness—up on the mountain plateaus, where every living creature demands wide-open space, with room enough to flee. Wary, they watch every stranger that tries to sneak up on them.

Once a year the animals of the forest and in the mountains would forget their wariness. Then they would rush at their females. But he had been given his as a gift. And she had offered him everything for which he had never wooed her.

But the young ones in the nest... they had been the little warm spot in his desolation, the most profound and sweetest pleasure of his life. Those small blonde girls’ heads beneath his hand ...

Married off—that was what had happened to him, practically unconsulted. Friends... he had many, and he had none. War... it had been a joy, but there was no more war; his armor was hanging up in the loft, seldom used. He had become a farmer. But he had had daughters; everything he had done in his life became dear to him because he had done it to provide for those tender young lives that he held in his hands. He remembered Kristin’s tiny two-year-old body on his shoulder, her flaxen soft hair against his cheek. Her little hands holding on to his belt while she pressed her hard, round forehead against his shoulder blades when he went riding with her sitting behind him on the horse.

And now she had those ardent eyes, and she had won the man she wanted. She was sitting up there in the dim light, leaning against the silk pillows of the bed. In the glow of the candle she was all golden—golden crown and golden shift and golden hair spread over her naked golden arms. Her eyes were no longer shy.

The father moaned with shame.

And yet it seemed that his heart had burst with blood—for what he had never had. And for his wife, here at his side, to whom he had been unable to give himself.

Sick with compassion, he reached for Ragnfrid’s hand in the dark.

“Yes, I thought we lived well together,” he said. “I thought you were grieving for our children. And I thought you had a melancholy heart. I never thought that it might be because I wasn’t a good husband to you.”

Ragnfrid was trembling feverishly.

“You have always been a good husband, Lavrans.”

“Hm ...” Lavrans sat with his chin resting on his knees. “And yet you might have done better if you had been married as our daughter was today.”

Ragnfrid sprang up, uttering a low, piercing cry. “You know! How did you find out? How long have you known?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Lavrans after a moment, his voice strangely dispirited.

“I’m talking about the fact that I wasn’t a maiden when I became your wife,” replied Ragnfrid, and her voice was clear and resounding with despair.

After a moment Lavrans said, in the same voice as before, “I never knew of this until now.”

Ragnfrid lay down in the hay, shaking with sobs. When the spell had passed she raised her head. A faint gray light was beginning to seep in through the holes in the wall. She could dimly see her husband as he sat there with his hands clasped around his knees, as motionless as if he were made of stone.

“Lavrans—speak to me,” she whimpered.

“What do you want me to say?” he asked, not moving.