Burial Rites

by Hannah Kent

  This is my only wish to you,

  bound in anger and grief:

  Do not scratch my bleeding wounds,

  I’m full of disbelief.

  My soul is filled with sorrow!

  I seek grace from the Lord.

  Remember, Jesus bought us both

  and for the same accord.

  ‘HOW IS IT TO HAVE her here, in this same room as you? I should find it difficult to sleep,’ said Ingibjörg Pétursdóttir.

  Margrét looked over to where the Kornsá mowers were cutting the grass closest to the river. ‘Oh, I don’t think she’d dare set a foot wrong.’

  The two women were resting on the pile of stacked wood outside the Kornsá croft. Ingibjörg, a small, plain-looking woman from a nearby farm, had paid Margrét a visit, having heard that her friend’s cough was preventing her from participating in the haymaking. While Ingibjörg had none of Margrét’s acidity, or her forthrightness, the two women were fast friends, and often visited one other when the river that divided their farms was low enough to be forded.

  ‘Róslín seems to think you’ll all be strangled in your sleep.’

  Margrét gave a brusque laugh. ‘I can’t help but think that’s exactly what Róslín wants.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It would give that well-oiled mouth something else to wag about.’

  ‘Margrét . . .’ Ingibjörg warned.

  ‘Oh, Inga. We both know having all those children has turned her head.’

  ‘The littlest has croup.’

  Margrét raised her eyebrows. ‘Won’t be long before they all have it, then. We’ll hear them wailing at all hours of the night.’

  ‘She’s getting big, too.’

  Margrét hesitated. ‘Do you plan on helping with the birth? She’s had that many you’d think she could do it herself.’

  Ingibjörg sighed. ‘I don’t know. I have a bad feeling.’

  Margrét studied her friend’s grave expression. ‘Did you have a dream?’ she asked.

  Ingibjörg opened her mouth as if to say something, and then shook herself, changing her mind. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing. Anyway, let’s not be gloomy. Tell me about the murderess!’

  Margrét laughed in spite of herself. ‘There! You’re as bad as Róslín.’

  Ingibjörg smiled. ‘How is she really, though? In character. Are you frightened of her?’

  Margrét thought for a moment. ‘She’s nothing like how I imagined a murderess,’ she said at last. ‘She sleeps, she works, she eats. All in silence, though. Her lips might as well be sewn over for all she says to me. That young man, the Reverend Thorvardur, he’s begun to visit her again over these last few weeks, and I know she talks to him, but he doesn’t tell me what passes between them. Perhaps nothing.’ Margrét glanced over to the field. ‘I often wonder what she’s thinking.’

  Ingibjörg followed Margrét’s gaze, and the two women looked together at the bent figure of Agnes amidst the hay, hacking at the grass with her scythe. The blade flashed brightly as she swung it.

  ‘Who knows?’ Ingibjörg murmured. ‘I shudder to think of what goes on inside that dark head of hers.’

  ‘The Reverend says her mother was Ingveldur Rafnsdóttir.’

  Ingibjörg paused. ‘Ingveldur Rafnsdóttir. I knew an Ingveldur once. A loose woman.’

  ‘No doves come from ravens’ eggs,’ Margrét agreed. ‘It’s strange to think of Agnes being a daughter. I can’t imagine my girls even thinking about something so wretched and sinful as murder.’

  Ingibjörg nodded. ‘And how are your girls?’

  Margrét stood and dusted the dirt from her skirt. ‘Oh, you know.’ She started coughing again and Ingibjörg began to rub her back.

  ‘Easy, now.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Margrét croaked. ‘You know, Steina thinks she knows her.’

  Ingibjörg gave her friend a curious look.

  ‘She thinks we met her on the way to Gudrúnarstadir, way back when.’

  ‘Is Steina making up stories again?’

  Margrét winced. ‘Only the good Lord knows. I don’t remember. Actually, I’m a bit worried about her. She smiles at Agnes.’

  Ingibjörg laughed. ‘Oh, Margrét! When did a smile ever get anyone into trouble?’

  ‘Many a time, I should think!’ Margrét snapped. ‘Just look at Róslín. Anyway, it’s other things, too. I’ve caught Steina asking questions of Agnes, and I’ve noticed she rushes to fetch her for errands and the like. Look – she’s following her now, even while she’s raking.’ She pointed to Steina turning the hay near Agnes. ‘I don’t know, I just think of that poor girl Sigga, and I worry the same thing will happen to her.’

  ‘Sigga? The other maid at Illugastadir?’

  ‘What if Agnes has the same effect on Steina? Makes her go to the bad. Fills her head with wickedness.’

  ‘You’ve just said that Agnes hardly says a word.’

  ‘Yes, with me. But I can’t help but feel it’s another story with . . . Oh, don’t you mind.’

  ‘And Lauga?’ Ingibjörg asked thoughtfully.

  Margrét tittered. ‘Oh, Lauga hates having her here. We all do, but Lauga refuses to sleep in the next bed. Watches her like a hawk. Upbraids Steina for looking Agnes’s way.’

  Ingibjörg considered the shorter daughter, dutifully raking the hay into neat lines. Next to Lauga’s windrows, Steina’s rows looked as crooked as a child’s handwriting.

  ‘What does Jón say?’

  Margrét snorted. ‘What does Jón ever say? If I raise it, he starts on about his duty to Blöndal. I notice he’s watchful, though. He asked me to keep the girls separate.’

  ‘Hard to do on a farm.’

  ‘Exactly. I can keep them as separate as Kristín keeps the milk and cream.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Kristín’s useless,’ Margrét said, matter-of-factly.

  ‘Just as well you’ve an extra pair of women’s hands about the place, then,’ Ingibjörg said practically. The two women fell into companionable silence.

  I DREAMT OF THE EXECUTION block last night. I dreamt I was alone and crawling through the snow towards the dark stump. My hands and knees were numb from the ice, but I had no choice.

  When I came upon the block, its surface was vast and smooth. I could smell the wood. It had none of the saltiness of driftwood, but was like bleeding sap, like blood. Sweeter, heavier.

  In my dream I dragged myself up and held my head above it. It began to snow, and I thought to myself: ‘This is the silence before the drop.’ And then I wondered at the stump being there, the tree it might have been, when trees do not grow here. There is too much silence, I thought in my dream. Too many stones.

  So I addressed the wood out loud. I said: ‘I will water you as though you still lived.’ And at this last word I woke.

  The dream frightened me. Since the hay harvest I have slipped into something of my old life here, and I have forgotten to be angry. The dream reminded me of what will happen, of how fast the days are passing me by, and now, lying awake in a room full of strangers, gazing at the patterns of sticks and peat in the ceiling, I feel my heart turn over and over and over until I feel twisted in my gut.

  I need to relieve myself. Trembling, I get out of bed and look about the floor for the pot. It’s under one of the workhands’ beds and nearly full, but there’s no time to empty it. My stockings are loose and slide to my ankles without difficulty, and I squat and direct a hot stream of piss into the pail, feeling the splash of it against my thigh. Sweat breaks out on my forehead.

  I hope no one will wake up and see me, and I’m so anxious to finish and tuck the pot out of sight that I yank up my stockings before I’m quite done. A warm trickle runs down the inside of my leg as I push the pail away.

  Why am I trembling like this? My knees are as weak as a marrow jelly and it is a relief to lie down. My heart gibbers. Natan always believed dreams meant something. Strange, for a man who could so easily laugh at the wo
rd of God, to trust instead in the simmering darkness of his own sleeping hours. He built his church from wives’ tales and the secret language of weather; saw the blinking eye of God in the habits of the sea, the swooping merlin, the gnashing teeth of his ewes. When he caught me knitting on the doorstep he accused me of lengthening the winter. ‘Do not think nature is not watchful of us,’ he warned me. ‘She is as awake as you and I.’ He smiled at me. Passed the smooth breadth of his palm over my forehead. ‘And as secretive.’

  I thought I could be a servant here. Over a month has passed at Korná and already I have forgotten what will become of me. The days of work have soothed me, have given my body cause for rest, so that I’ve slept deeply, below the surface of dreams stricken with portent. Until now.

  It’s true that I’m not one of them. All but the Reverend and Steina refuse to talk to me except in the briefest of ways. But how is that any different from before, when I was a low sort of workmaid, emptying the chamber pot as I will be asked to do in a few hours? Compared to Stóra-Borg this family has been kind.

  But soon winter will come like a freak wave upon the shore – suddenly, with speed, obliterating the sun and warmth and leaving the land frozen to the core. Everything will be over so quickly. And the Reverend: how young he is, and how I still don’t know what to say to him. I thought he could help me as he helped me over the river. But talking to him only reminds me of how everything in my life has worked against me, and how unloved I have been.

  I expected him to understand me from the start. I want him to understand me, but I’m a fool to think we speak the same tongue. I may as well be talking to him with a stone in my mouth, trying to find a language that we both understand.

  The Reverend will not arrive from Breidabólstadur for another few hours – it’s still too early to rise. I fold my hands on top of the blanket and tell the strings of my heart to slacken, and think of what I will tell him.

  Tóti wishes to hear about my family, but what I have told him has not been what he wants to hear. He must not be used to the gnarled family trees that grow in this valley, where the branches rope about one another, studded with thorns.

  I haven’t told him about Jóas, or Helga. He might be interested to hear I have siblings. I can imagine his questions: Where are they now? Why don’t they visit you, Agnes?

  Why, Reverend, I would say, the blood tie is not strong: they have different fathers apiece, and Helga is dead and buried. Jóas? Well, he’s not a man who can be put to anything, even a visit to a doomed sister.

  Oh, Jóas. I cannot reconcile the dull-eyed man to the sweet blur of boy I was once allowed to love.

  We were lugged along in the arms of a common mother. Which farms? Countless badstofas belonging to other men and their red-eyed wives, kind or desperate enough to hire a woman with three mouths, two of which screamed at night in hunger because they did not know it was useless.

  Beinakelda first. Until I was three, they tell me. Just Mamma and I. I remember nothing. It’s all shadow.

  Then Litla-Giljá. I don’t remember the farm, but I remember the man. Illugi the Black, they called him, my brother’s father. Sitting on the floor, rubbing my hands in the dirt, and then the man beside me, his eyes rolled back into his head and his body writhing on the ground like a landed fish, and all the women screaming to see the foam spurt from his mouth. Then, afterwards, the groans that came from his bed, and his sour-skinned wife pushing my face into her bony neck and saying, ‘Pray for him. Pray for him.’ Where was my mother? No doubt squatting over a chamber pot, searching for blood that would not come.

  I remember the screaming. Illugi, healthy again, his great bear face roaring at his wife, who would not stop crying, and amidst them my Mamma in long skirts, throwing up on the ground.

  Illugi died of that shaking sickness while he was fishing. They say he was drinking, then fell into a fit, upset the boat and drowned, tangled in his nets. Others say it was a fit punishment for a man who fished from elfish pools, but those were folks that had been at the wrong end of his drinking and fighting.

  What would the Reverend make of all this?

  Jóas Illugason, born at Brekkukot, the third farm. Five years old, I was allowed to hold the rag soaked in milk to his tiny salmon gums. The married folk there wanted to keep him and raise him with their own two children, and Mamma explained that I would be fostered to them too, that it would be for the best. For the next year we seven were a family, and I helped feed life into the small boy with hair as light as mine was dark. He smelt of snowmelt and fresh cream.

  They must have changed their minds. One morning I was shaken awake by Mamma, who looked at me with swollen eyes. I asked why she was crying, but she said nothing. She climbed into bed with Jóas and me, and I fell asleep against the hot curve of her body, until the caw of the house ravens woke me and I saw my belongings bundled in a sack on the floor.

  That morning we started on foot and returned to the valley through an ill-tempered day full of spasms of snow. I thought I would faint from hunger. We stopped in the yard of Kornsá and before I could finish the whey given to me by the woman there, Mamma whispered in my ear, pressed a stone into my mitten and left with Jóas on her back.

  I tried to follow her. I screamed. I didn’t want to be left behind. But as I ran I tripped and fell. When I got back on my feet my mother and brother had vanished, and all I could see were two ravens, their black feathers poisonous against the snow.

  For a long time I thought those two birds were my Mamma and my brother. But they never answered my questions, even when I put the stone under my tongue. Years later I learnt that Mamma gave me a new half-sister, Helga, to the farmer at Kringla, and that Jóas was now a pauper, a child of the parish. But by that time I had convinced myself I no longer loved them. I thought I had found a better family, my foster-family: Inga and Björn, the tenants of Kornsá.

  ‘HOW DID YOU SLEEP, AGNES?’ Steina had found the woman out by the patch of lovage, where she was tossing the contents of the chamber pot in the ash pit.

  ‘You’ll get wet out here,’ Agnes said, without looking at her. She had been using a rock to flick out the stickier contents of the pot, and was now wiping it against the grass. ‘It’s going to rain.’

  ‘I don’t mind. I thought I’d keep you company.’ Steina lifted her shawl over her head. ‘There, dry as a mouse.’

  Agnes glanced at her and gave a small smile.

  ‘Look, Agnes,’ Steina said. She pointed out towards the mouth of the valley where a mass of low grey clouds was surging in from the north.

  Agnes put her hand out to the sky. ‘It’s getting worse. It will be bad for the hay.’

  ‘I know. Pabbi’s cross. He snapped at Lauga for burning his breakfast and he never does that to her.’

  Agnes turned to face Steina. ‘Does he know you’re out here with me?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I think you should go back inside,’ Agnes said.

  ‘And do what? Have Lauga blame me for building the fire up too high? No thank you. I’m happier outside anyway.’

  ‘Even in the rain?’

  ‘Even in the rain.’ Steina yawned and looked out at the field, its haycocks bundled into stacks to prevent the damp. ‘All that work for nothing.’

  ‘What do you mean for nothing? Come the next fine day we’ll get on and then it will be finished.’ Agnes glanced up at the croft. ‘I think you ought to return to your mother,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, she doesn’t mind.’

  ‘She does. She doesn’t like you being alone with me,’ Agnes said carefully.

  ‘You’ve been here for weeks and weeks now.’

  ‘Even so.’ Agnes began to walk slowly down to the river and Steina turned to keep pace with her.

  ‘Do you think the Reverend will come today?’

  Agnes didn’t respond.

  ‘What does he talk to you about?’

  ‘That’s my business,’ she snapped.

  ‘What?’


  ‘I said that it’s my business. It has nothing to do with you or your family.’

  Steina was taken aback, and paused in her step as Agnes marched on down the hill, holding the chamber pot stiffly at her side.

  ‘Have I put you out of temper?’ she asked.

  Agnes stopped and turned to Steina. ‘How could a young woman like you put me out of temper?’

  Steina bristled. ‘Because my family is holding you prisoner, and my father doesn’t want anyone to speak with you.’

  ‘He said that?’ Agnes asked.

  ‘He thinks we’re better off leaving you to your chores.’

  ‘He’s right.’

  Steina caught up to Agnes and gently took her arm. ‘Lauga’s scared of you, you know. She’s been listening to Róslín and her lies. But I don’t believe a word that gossip says. I remember you from before. I remember how kind you were, giving us your food like that.’ Steina leaned in closer. ‘I don’t think you killed them,’ she whispered. Agnes’s body went rigid under her grip. ‘Maybe I can help you,’ Steina suggested quickly.

  ‘How?’ Agnes asked. ‘Would you help me escape?’

  Steina let go of her arm. ‘I thought maybe a petition,’ she murmured.

  ‘A petition.’

  Steina tried again. ‘An appeal, then. You know, like the one they’ve got up for Sigga.’

  Agnes’s eyes flashed. ‘What?’

  ‘The appeal. Blöndal has got one up for the other one,’ Steina stammered.

  ‘The other who?’

  ‘Sigga . . . you know, the other Illugastadir maid. Fridrik’s sweetheart.’

  Agnes’s face had grown pale. She slowly placed the chamber pot on the wet grass, then stepped towards Steina. ‘Blöndal has made an appeal for Sigrídur Gudmundsdóttir?’ she asked gravely.

  Steina nodded, a little afraid. She glanced down to the rock that Agnes still held in her hand. ‘I heard Pabbi tell Mamma,’ she explained. ‘The District Officers were discussing it at Hvammur, with Blöndal. On the same day you arrived here.’

  Agnes shook her head.

  ‘I thought you knew,’ Steina whispered.