The Wreath (Kristin Lavransdatter #1)(15)

The bishop reined in his horse and greeted them in return, beckoning Lavrans to approach, and he spoke with him for a moment.

Then Lavrans came back to the priest and the child and said, “I have been invited to dine at the bishop’s citadel. Do you think, Father Martein, that one of the canons’ servants could accompany this little maiden home to Shoemaker Fartein’s house and tell my men that Halvdan should meet me here with Guldsvein at the hour of midafternoon prayers?”

The priest replied that this could easily be arranged. Then the barefoot monk who had spoken to Kristin in the tower stairway stepped forward and greeted them.

“There’s a man over in our guest house who has business with the shoemaker anyway; he can take your message, Lavrans Bj?rg ulfs?n. And then your daughter can either go with him or stay at the cloister until you return. I’ll see to it that she’s given food over there.”

Lavrans thanked him and said, “It’s a shame that you should be troubled with this child, Brother Edvin.”

“Brother Edvin gathers up all the children he can,” said Father Martein with a laugh. “Then he has someone to preach to.”

“Yes, I don’t dare offer you learned gentlemen here in Hamar my sermons,” said the monk, smiling, and without taking offense. “I’m only good at talking to children and farmers, but that’s no reason to tie a muzzle on the ox that threshes.”

Kristin gave her father an imploring look; she thought there was nothing she would like better than to go with Brother Edvin. So Lavrans thanked him, and as her father and the priest followed the bishop’s entourage, Kristin put her hand in the monk’s and they walked down toward the monastery, which was a cluster of wooden houses and a light-colored stone church all the way down near the water.

Brother Edvin gave her hand a little squeeze, and when they glanced at each other, they both had to laugh. The monk was tall and gaunt but quite stoop-shouldered. The child thought he looked like an old crane because his head was small, with a narrow, shiny, smooth pate above a bushy white fringe of hair, and perched on a long, thin, wrinkled neck. His nose was also as big and sharp as a beak. But there was something about him that made Kristin feel at ease and happy just by looking up into his long, furrowed face. His old watery-blue eyes were red-rimmed, and his eyelids were like thin brown membranes with thousands of wrinkles radiating from them. His hollow cheeks, with their reddish web of veins, were crisscrossed with wrinkles that ran down to his small, thin-lipped mouth. But it looked as if Brother Edvin had become so wrinkled simply from smiling at people. Kristin thought she had never seen anyone who looked so cheerful or so kind. He seemed to carry within him a luminous and secret joy, and she was able to share it whenever he spoke.

They walked along the fence of an apple orchard where a few yellow and red fruits still hung on the trees. Two friars wearing black-and-white robes were raking withered beanstalks in the garden.

The monastery was not much different from any other farm, and the guest house into which the monk escorted Kristin closely resembled a humble farmhouse, although there were many beds. In one of the beds lay an old man, and at the hearth sat a woman wrapping an infant in swaddling clothes; two older children, a boy and a girl, stood near her.

They complained, both the man and the woman, because they had not yet received their lunch. “But they don’t want to bring food to us twice, so here we sit and starve while you run around in town, Brother Edvin.”

“Don’t be so angry, Steinulv,” said the monk. “Come over here, Kristin, and say hello. Look at this pretty maiden who is going to stay here today and eat with us.”

He told Kristin that Steinulv had fallen ill on his way home from a meeting, and he had been allowed to stay in the cloister’s guest house instead of the hospice because a kinswoman who was living at the hospice was so mean that he couldn’t stand to be there.

“But I can tell they’re getting tired of having me here,” said the old man. “When you leave, Brother Edvin, no one will have time to take care of me, and then they’ll probably make me go back to the hospice.”

“Oh, you’ll be well long before I’m done with my work at the church,” said Brother Edvin. “Then your son will come to get you.” He took a kettle of hot water from the hearth and let Kristin hold it as he attended to Steinulv. Then the old man grew more tractable, and a moment later a monk came in, bringing food and drink for them.

Brother Edvin said a prayer over the food and then sat down next to Steinulv on the edge of the bed so he could help the old man eat. Kristin sat down near the woman and fed the little boy, who was so small that he couldn’t reach the porridge bowl, and who spilled whenever he tried to dip into the bowl of ale. The woman was from Hadeland and had come with her husband and children to visit her brother who was a monk at the cloister. But he was out wandering among the villages, and she complained bitterly about having to sit there wasting time.

Brother Edvin spoke gently to the woman. She must not say that she was throwing her time away when she was here in the bishop’s Hamar. Here were all the splendid churches, and all day long the monks and canons celebrated mass and chanted the offices of the day. And the town was so beautiful, even lovelier than Oslo itself, although it was somewhat smaller. But here, nearly every farm had a garden. “You should have seen it when I arrived in the springtime,” the monk said. “The whole town was white with flowers. And since then the sweetbriar roses have bloomed ...”