The wish exploded in him when he noticed that there actually was someone in the bushes. He caught just a glimpse. A shadow! Light-colored fabric? For a moment he scarcely dared to look around. Then, trembling all over, he began to put on his clothes.
The whole summer, she was in his blood. She flowed through all his thoughts. Like a torrential river.
I am Dina. I do not like raspberries. They are picked in the thicket where
the washhouse stood. Thickets like that hurt more than nettles.
Hjertrud stands in the middle of the pond, where water lilies are floating. I walk into the pond toward her. Then she disappears. At first I swallow much water, until I notice that she is holding me afloat. Now I can float in the lakes and sea, because she holds me. Tomas cannot do that. Nobody holds him.
Dagny let out her waistband before she had been the sheriff’s wife for even a month.
The cook remarked that the sheriff obviously had not spared gunpowder when he fired his cannon. To her close friends, she expressed a hope that he had fired so well that from now on the servant girls would be left in peace. And she would no longer need to find new maids both in and out of season.
The sheriff became downright cheerful. He took strolls through the woods on the estate and held Dagny’s parasol high above her head. So high that she complained because sunlight reached her and birch branches tore holes in the silk.
Dina laid traps. After much serious thought.
Sometimes the door to Dagny’s room would get locked and the key would disappear without a trace. Only to be found, later, inside the room!
She slipped into the room unseen when Dagny was downstairs, locked the door, and left the key inside. Then crawled through the open window.
She made her body a pendulum, as on the old grandfather clock. After six or seven vigorous swings, she gained a footing in the large weeping birch tree outside.
It was always Tomas who had to fetch a ladder and climb through the pale, valanced curtains to open the door.
Suspicion focused on Dina.
Dagny’s shrill, offended voice fell like winter snow over the entire estate.
But Dina said nothing. She looked straight into her father’s furious eyes and said nothing.
He pulled her hair and thumped her shoulders.
She denied everything, until he was completely exasperated. And the sheriff gave up. Until the next time.
Sometimes Dagny’s book or sewing disappeared. And everyone in the house searched for it. To no avail.
But after a day or two, the book or sewing lay exactly where it belonged.
If Dina said she had been with Tomas or the young kitchen maid, it was so. They lied, for reasons they hardly understood themselves. The boy because, once, Dina had torn off his blanket and seen him naked. And because, since then, he burned with a fire he could not quench. He intuitively knew he would lose all chance of quenching that fire if he denied she was in the barn when Dagny’s things disappeared.
Large, long-legged Dina had solid knuckles and a hot temper. She had never used them against the kitchen maid. But still, the girl was afraid.
Dagny gave birth to a son. In contrast to the quiet wedding in Bergen, the christening was a royal event.
For days, the sideboard and the buffet were covered with gifts of silver mugs and silver candlesticks and crocheted blankets.
The maids wondered if they were expected to set the food and serving dishes on the floor.
The child, who was named Oscar, cried a great deal. And that was something the sheriff had not foreseen. His delicate nerves could not tolerate crying.
But Dagny had gained weight attractively and became beautifully buxom and blithe as soon as a nanny was hired. She ordered stylish clothes and children’s outfits from Trondheim and Bergen.
At first the sheriff generously denied her nothing. But when the shipments and packages continued to arrive, he grew impatient. Reminded her that their financial situation was not so good at the moment. He had not yet received full payment for the fish he had sent to Bergen.
Dagny began to cry. Oscar cried too. And when the next shipment arrived from Trondheim, the sheriff sighed and kept to himself for a few hours.
But that evening he emerged from his study quite transformed and was like his old self. Those in the main house could swear to that. Because there was a rhythmic creaking in the wooden floor between Mistress Hjertrud’s bedroom and the room below.
“They could have waited until we had gone to bed,” the eldest maid said, sniffing disdainfully.
However, the sheriff limited himself to the one woman. He left all the others in peace. So they did not complain. Some even found it entertaining to listen to the unmistakable sounds from upstairs.
They had never heard sounds like that in Mistress Hjertrud’s time. She was an angel. A saint. No one would ever think she had done such things with the lewd, vulgar sheriff. But after all, they begot this girl … this poor Dina, who bore such a heavy sin. What an unfortunate soul!
The women did not feel it was beneath them to talk about dear, departed Hjertrud. In whispers. Yet loud enough that Dagny heard them. But not the sheriff.
They described her. Her tall, proud figure. Her bright smile and remarkably narrow waist. They quoted her wise words.
When Dagny appeared in the doorway, the room grew silent. As if someone had blown out the candles. But by then nearly everything had been said and heard.
Dagny tolerated the portraits of Hjertrud. For several months. One picture gazed at her with a slight smile from the velvet wallcovering above the wainscoting in the main parlor. Another looked at her somberly from the stairwell. And one stood on the sheriff’s desk.
But one day she could tolerate them no longer. She removed the portraits from the walls herself, put them into an old pillowcase, and placed them in a chest containing things from Hjertrud’s room.
Dina came upon her as she was taking down the last picture from the wall. The moment was an open crock of sour whey.
The girl followed her, step by step. To the linen cupboard in the upstairs hallway to get the pillowcase. Into the dark corner where the Hjertrud chest stood. Dagny acted as though the girl were air.
Not a word was spoken.
They had eaten a good dinner.
The sheriff was leaning back in his green plush wing chair. He had not noticed that the portraits were gone.
Then Dina struck.
She was the leader of an army sweeping across the battlefield. The banner she carried was the old pillowcase with its rattling contents.
“What’s that?” asked the sheriff, clearly annoyed.
“I’m just going to hang the portraits,” Dina replied in a loud voice, looking pointedly at Dagny.
She stood before the sheriff and drew one picture after another from its hiding place.
“Why did you take them down?” the sheriff asked brusquely.
“I didn’t take them down. I’m going to hang them up!”
The room became very, very quiet. The footsteps in the house became mice scratching in the pantry.
Finally, Dagny spoke. Because the sheriff had discovered that Dina’s eyes were fastened on her like live coals.
“I took them down,” she said cheerfully.
“And why did you do that?”
He had not meant to be so gruff. But something about women irritated him to the bone.
The sheriff believed an unwritten rule: Address servants and women as if speaking to an intelligent dog. If that does not work, “chain” the dog. Then talk to the creature as if to an intelligent horse. In other words, do not raise your voice, but lower it an octave. So it resounds from your chest and fills the entire room.
But he seldom managed to follow his own rule. He did not manage this time either.
“I refuse to explain!” Dagny declared.
The sheriff understood the yelp of a tormented dog and ordered Dina to leave the room.
She took her time, arrang
ed the three portraits at her father’s feet, tucked the pillowcase under her arm, and left quietly.
The next morning, the portraits were back in their usual places. Dagny stayed in bed with a headache, so little Oscar had to be downstairs the whole day.
The sheriff grew weary of the quarrels between his wife and daughter. He found himself wanting to be somewhere else. On a solitary voyage in his boat, with a few crew members, his pipe, and a dram. He caught himself wishing his daughter were far away. Married. But she was only fifteen years old, after all.
Future prospects did not look particularly bright either. Not that Dina was bad-looking. She was not. She was tall and solid for her age. Well developed.
But there was a wildness about her that did not exactly attract men who were looking for a wife.
Still, the sheriff did not despair. He took it as a mission. Whenever he met unmarried men from good families, he immediately thought: Could this be something for Dina?
Dagny eventually had enough of being sheriff’s wife, mother, and stepmother. She wanted to go to Bergen to visit “her own,” as she put it. At that point, the sheriff realized something must be done, and done quickly.
He tried to send Dina to school in Troms0. But no one who knew the family was willing to provide housing. People offered a multitude of good excuses. Everything from tuberculosis to emigration. And the girl was too young to live alone in a boardinghouse.
It made him furious to think of all those for whom he had done favors at one time or another. Obviously, they had forgotten. He grumbled about this to anyone who would listen.
Dagny declared in exasperation that it was impossible to have “that one” in the house.
So the sheriff’s daughter was “that one,” eh?! He burned with rage and injured pride. Wasn’t she the only girl who could play the cello? Didn’t she wear shoes? Didn’t she ride better than anyone in the whole parish? Couldn’t she add figures faster than the best store clerk? Was there anything wrong with her?
No, there was nothing wrong with Dina, except that she was wild and malicious and difficult to the core!
Dagny hurled her judgment at the sheriff straight between the eyes, and clutched her little son, who was whimpering in fright from all the uproar.
“And who’s going to take her mother’s place?” the sheriff demanded. By now his temper had reached the boiling point.
“Not me,” Dagny replied firmly. She plunked the baby on the floor by his feet and stood with arms akimbo.
At that, the sheriff left. Walked out of the sitting room, down the wide, elegant front steps, across the yard, and down to his beloved storehouses by the wharf.
He longed for Hjertrad’s gentle presence and her cool hand on his forehead. Since her death, her reserved angelic serenity had increased, if that was possible.
The sheriff stood in the twilight and prayed that dear, departed Hjertrud would take her daughter, because things were too difficult for him. Surely she saw that. He hurriedly explained that he did not want the girl to die; he just wanted her to learn some good manners.
“Talk to her, please!” he prayed earnestly.
He blew his nose with his monogrammed handkerchief, lit his pipe, and sat down heavily on a mooring buoy.
When the dinner bell rang, he realized he felt hungry. Nevertheless, he waited a long time.
No one could begin the meal before the sheriff was seated at the head of the table. That was the law when he was at home.
Dina did not come to the table at all. She sat in the old birch tree behind the small stabbur storehouse. From there she had a falcon’s view. And she could easily hear the sounds from the courtyard.
She could sit there unseen.
In the treetop hung Dagny’s light-blue knitting. Twisted in all directions, with gaps where the stitches had unraveled.
Her knitting needles lay in the magpie nest high under the stabbur roof. They gleamed and glistened when the sun struck them.
Chapter 3
And she said, “I will surely go with you; nevertheless, the road on which
you are going will not lead to your glory, for the Lord will sell Sisera into
the hand of a woman.”
— Judges 4 : 9
Jacob Gronelv from Reinsnes was the sheriff’s close friend. They went hunting together in the winter and traveled to Bergen in the summer.
Nearly twenty years before, Jacob had come from Trondheim to help the widow at Reinsnes, Mistress Ingeborg, with her cargo boats.
At that time, Reinsnes was already one of the best trading centers in the county and had two splendid small sailing vessels.
It was not long before Jacob moved into the large bedroom on the second floor. But Ingeborg married her young seaman all the same.
This proved to be a good choice. Jacob Gronelv was a capable young man. Soon afterward, he applied for an innkeeper’s license. And to the envy of many, the license was granted.
Everyone spoke highly of Ingeborg Gronelv. And of Jacob’s mother, Karen. The women at Reinsnes had always been distinctive. Although the family lineage had gradually changed, the women were always those one remembered best.
People said you could never walk through the door at Reinsnes without being served refreshments, regardless of your social status. If the women of the estate had any defect, it was that they did not get pregnant every year. On the other hand, they kept their delicate, youthful complexion.
The southwest wind and the great western sea seemed to have cleansed them of wrinkles and old age. It must have been something about the place itself. Because it was nothing inherited. The bloodlines shifted constantly at Reinsnes.
* * *
Jacob Gronelv was a hard worker and a man about town. He had come from the outside world with sea winds in his hair. Had married Ingeborg, fifteen years his senior, along with all her possessions. But he squandered nothing.
Since Ingeborg was forty years old when Jacob arrived, no one expected heirs.
But that was a miscalculation.
Ingeborg, who had been barren with her first husband, began to bloom.
Like Sarah in the Old Testament, she became fruitful in maturity. At forty-three, Ingeborg of Reinsnes gave birth to a son! He was named Johan, after Jacob’s father.
Jacob’s mother, Karen, came from Trondheim to see her grandchild. Before long, she had sent for her bookshelves and her rocking chair and had settled for good at Reinsnes.
No mother-in-law could have been better to have in the house. So the Reinsnes women’s rule entered a fine new phase. A gentle, all-incorporating rule. The entire household developed tolerance and good working habits. To be under Reinsnes’s domestic discipline was a blessing.
The fact that Ingeborg had two foster sons living with her could have presented problems. But they grew up and conducted themselves well. Niels, the eldest, was dark-haired and serious and managed the general store. Anders was blond, lighthearted, and restless. He sailed with the cargo boats.
Ingeborg negotiated business dealings and divided the work. Always in a congenial manner.
Jacob possessed the legal rights of husband and master, but In-geborg’s talents directed and decided. She asked Jacob for advice. And sometimes she followed it.
Nobody minded that Jacob was actually a stranger. And it seemed natural that he wanted to sail to Bergen with the cargo each year and always liked to be on the move.
Abusive language was never heard between Jacob and Ingeborg. They had separate lives.
Jacob’s life was the cargo boats. Anders became his apprentice in everything.
Thus Jacob and Ingeborg each had a foster son. Tasks and responsibilities were unwritten laws. Carefully defined according to what was best for the large estate. Anything else was unthinkable.
The crystals dangling from the chandelier were not jarred by noise and commotion in the house. Voices were calm and cultivated.
Ingeborg’s spirit spread even into the barn and the warehouses. Swearing was never
heard.
Jacob got that out of his system when he was at sea. It had all blown away by the time he felt the solid ground of Reinsnes under his feet.
Before entering Ingeborg’s bed, he always made himself presentable. Both inside and out. And he was never rejected.
Although sometimes he might satisfy his appetite at inns along the shipping lane, he still sought the mature woman on his return to Reinsnes. Was always glad to be home in the high bed with its curtains and white canopy.
People saw a slight blush spread across Ingeborg’s freckled cheeks when the cargo boat sailed into the sound. The blush might last for weeks. Until Jacob left again.
Early evenings and late mornings became the rule. But nobody minded the new rhythm. It meant longer nights for everyone.
Jacob Gronelv did not spit in his liqueur glass. Nor did the sheriff.
When the sheriff became a widower, it was Jacob who comforted him. Who introduced him in good society in Trondheim and Bergen. And who arranged a meeting with Dagny.
They were mutually helpful. In business and with regard to women. For a short time, each in turn visited the same bedchambers in Helgeland county, without causing the least disagreement between them.
Then one day Ingeborg died as she leaned down to pet her black cat under the larch tree in the garden. She fell to the ground like an apple. And was no more.
No one had imagined that Ingeborg would pass away, although death regularly visited all generations. At any rate, no one had imagined that Our Lord would deny her the chance to see her son ordained in the church. She who cared about every frail person along the coast and always came to the defense of others.
From the day of Ingeborg’s death, the larch tree and the black cat were regarded as sacred relics.
Jacob could not be comforted. He was like many people who are bereaved suddenly. Realized that love cannot be weighed, neither with scales nor with steelyards. It appears when one least expects it.
Dina's Book Page 5