Burial Rites

by Hannah Kent

  Eyes shifted to Agnes. The woman looked thoughtful, and then swung her legs over the side of the bed to better face them all.

  ‘He told me that he’d dreamt he saw his body in an open grave, and he saw his soul standing at the other end. Then his body called out to his soul, and sang the psalm from Bishop Stein.’ Her voice cracked in the silence.

  No one said anything. Tóti eventually cleared his throat.

  ‘Agnes. Would you like to go on with your story? You were talking about Pétur.’

  ‘Can I come closer to the lamplight?’

  Jón glanced at Margrét, then at the rest of his family, and shook his head.

  Margrét winced. ‘Jón,’ she whispered in a low voice. ‘What harm can it do now?’

  Tóti noticed him dart his eyes towards his daughters.

  Margrét sighed. ‘It’s best if we all keep our place,’ she said to Agnes. ‘You’ve light enough for storytelling.’

  A brief flicker of anger passed over Agnes’s face, but when she resumed speaking it was in a soft voice.

  ‘Pétur was infamous in Langidalur, and also in Vatnsdalur, as you’d know. No one trusts a man who has killed so many animals. I was surprised that Natan didn’t recognise Pétur, back then at Geitaskard, because I’d guessed that Natan knew all manner of men, and so I told him that Pétur was a criminal in custody, and that he had slit the throats of more than thirty sheep, and for the fun of it too, and that he might be sent to Copenhagen. Natan gave the man a long look, but said nothing more of it.’

  ‘Perhaps he wanted to recruit him to steal some sheep,’ Lauga said sharply.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Agnes returned, from her dark corner. She turned back to Tóti. ‘That day I took Natan to Worm, and then joined María in the home field. When I told her that Natan had surprised me in the storeroom she asked me what he had wanted. I told her that he had come to Geitaskard to visit Worm. María took me by the hand then, and told me to be careful.’

  ‘Why?’ Kristín asked. Gudmundur guffawed from the shadows.

  Agnes ignored them. ‘I told her that I was a grown woman, with a head of my own. María said that that was what worried her.’

  ‘Reverend,’ Jón said suddenly. ‘Perhaps it is best you speak together away from the family.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it, Pabbi? I want to hear what happened,’ Steina said.

  ‘Get into bed, Steina.’

  ‘Excuse me, Jón,’ Tóti interrupted. ‘With respect, I am here to listen to Agnes tell me whatever she finds in her heart to tell me. As your wife and daughter have made abundantly clear, our close proximity means that our discussion cannot help but be heard by your family and servants.’

  ‘Your discussion?’ Gudmundur frowned. ‘You let her talk to you as though she’s telling a bedtime story.’

  Before Tóti could think of what to say, Margrét interrupted.

  ‘Shut your mouth, Gudmundur. Let Agnes talk to the Reverend. What difference does it make anyway, my Jón? Both of them know what happened, and what they didn’t know before, Róslín has evidently poured into their ears since.’

  ‘You have nothing to fear,’ Tóti said.

  ‘I hope that is the case,’ Jón replied. He pinched his lips together and resumed fulling his sock.

  Tóti turned to Agnes. ‘Your friend. Why did she say this to you?’

  ‘I thought she was jealous. She had so wanted to meet Natan in the first place. The thing was, we knew that he was in need of a housekeeper.’

  ‘And what of that?’ Tóti asked.

  ‘A new position with a man never short of money? A better position, where you could be more than just a servant? Run a home and a farm and do as you please with no farm mistress to answer to?’ Agnes glanced at Margrét.

  ‘Go on, Agnes,’ Margrét muttered.

  ‘News of an opportunity like that doesn’t stay hidden, Reverend. All the girls at Geitaskard knew that Natan Ketilsson was unmarried, in need of a housekeeper, and maybe more besides, and María was as keen to better herself as I was, Reverend.’ She looked over to the others. ‘I wanted Karitas’s position more than anything. I didn’t do myself any dishonour.’

  Gudmundur snorted, and Agnes’s eyes flashed.

  ‘The truth is that Natan and I became friends because we were fond of speaking with one another. He came to Geitaskard every few weeks, and we would talk.’ She glared at Lauga. ‘He offered me friendship, and I was pleased to have it, for I had precious few friends about me. María soon ignored me, and the more Natan saw of me, the less inclined everyone else was to be friendly. But they were just servants.’ She spat these words towards the farmhands slouching in the corner of the badstofa. ‘Natan was a clever man, a doctor, and he knew arithmetic, and he was generous with his money. He healed more than one cough among the Geitaskard workmen that autumn, and were they grateful? Not at all. They knew he was oftentimes only visiting to see me, and they punished me for it. What fault was that of mine? When I told them that Natan had finally asked me to work for him at Illugastadir, I thought they might be pleased for me. But they accused me of bragging, and thinking myself better than the pauper I really was. And that winter brought a new kind of loneliness, and I was grateful for the diversion Natan brought. I was pleased I was leaving Geitaskard. My brother had gone. María had spurned me. I had nothing to keep me there.’

  Agnes fell silent, and knitted furiously. Tóti noticed that Lauga and Gudmundur were exchanging small, furtive glances. There were several moments of uncomfortable silence, broken only by the click of knitting needles, and a muffled giggle from Kristín. Eventually, as the wind gathered force outside, Jón stood and suggested they go to sleep. Tóti, suddenly weary, took the offer of a spare bed. A malaise had crept over him while Agnes had told of Natan, and his throat felt tight and painful. As the lamp was extinguished, he wondered if he was right in letting her speak.

  SOMETIMES, AFTER TALKING TO THE Reverend, my mouth aches. My tongue feels so tired; it slumps in my mouth like a dead bird, all damp feathers, in between the stones of my teeth.

  What did I say to him? What did the others make of what I said? It doesn’t matter. No one could understand what it was like to know Natan. In those early visits it was as though we were building something sacred. We’d place words carefully together, piling them upon one another, leaving no spaces. We each created towers, two beacons, the like of which are built along roads to guide the way when the weather comes down. We saw one another through the fog, the suffocating repetition of life.

  At Geitaskard we walked in the evenings upon the snow, and it squeaked under our tread. Once, when I slipped on the ice, I grasped his arm and he lost his balance. We fell together, laughing, and on the ground he pushed me back so that we gazed up at the hazard of stars above us. He named the constellations for me.

  ‘Do you think that’s where we go when we die?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t believe in heaven,’ Natan said.

  I was shocked. ‘How can you not believe in heaven?’

  ‘It’s a lie. Man has created God out of fear of dying.’

  ‘How can you say such a thing?’

  He turned his head, ice crystals caught in his hair. ‘Agnes. Don’t pretend you disagree. This is all there is and you know it. Life, here, in our veins. There is the snow, and the sky, and the stars and the things they tell us, and that’s all. Everyone else – they’re blind. They don’t know if they’re living or dead.’

  ‘They’re not so bad.’

  ‘Agnes. You pretend you don’t understand me, but you do. We’re the same kind.’ Natan propped himself up on his elbows and the moonlight poured over his face. ‘We’re better than this.’ He nodded towards the farmhouse. ‘This life of mud and struggle. Accepting everything as it is.’ He leaned closer and then he kissed me, gently. ‘You don’t belong in this valley, Agnes. You’re different. You’re not scared of everything.’

  I laughed. ‘I’m certainly not scared of you.’

  Natan smiled
. ‘I’ve got a question for you.’

  My heart throbbed. ‘Oh yes? What’s that?’

  He lay back down on the snow. ‘What’s the name for the space between stars?’

  ‘No such name.’

  ‘Make one up.’

  I thought about it. ‘The soul asylum.’

  ‘That’s another way of saying heaven, Agnes.’

  ‘No, Natan. It’s not.’

  It was only later that I suffocated under the weight of his arguments, and his darker thoughts articulated. It was only later that our tongues produced landslides, that we became caught in the cracks between what we said and what we meant, until we could not find each other, did not trust the words in our own mouths.

  That night we went to the cowshed. I filled the hollow of his hands with my mouth, my breasts; I met his body against my own. His hands bunched the cloth of my skirt and lifted it up, and I felt the cool air address my skin. I was worried we would be discovered; worried they would call me a whore. Then there was the first touch of skin on skin, and that was the gunshot, the freefall. The bands of my stockings were loose about my knees as the softness of his hair caressed my neck.

  I craved his weight, then. I craved the breath of him: the quickening inhalation and the warm pressure of his mouth. His smell, the slippery buck of his body, he was nothing like the others. I arched my neck until my face was wet with the drifting damp. I could feel him, the heat of him, the very quick of him. He groaned and the sound lingered in the air like a cloud of ash over a volcano.

  I wanted to weep afterwards. It was too real. I felt too much to see it for what it was.

  Natan smiled as he tucked his shirt in. His tousled hair was lit at the ends with tiny drops of water. He smoothed my cheek, asked me if he’d hurt me, if I had bled. Laughed when I told him no. Was he relieved? Annoyed?

  ‘You don’t have to go so soon.’

  ‘Get up out of the straw, Agnes. Go to bed.’

  ‘Will you come back?’

  He came back. He returned to me again and again throughout that long winter. There were nights shivering in the powdery snow and evenings in the cowshed while the others slept. And though the snow smothered the valley and the milk froze in the dairy, my soul thawed. A fire raged in the wake of his lips, while the wind shrieked outside. When everything froze we met in the storeroom, with a constellation of drying meat above our heads. The smell of straw soaked us in the perfume of summer. I remember feeling too full with blood. The famous Natan Ketilsson, a man who could bleed the sap of sickness from the limbs of the ill, who had been with the famous Poet-Rósa, who had heard the bells of Copenhagen, and taught himself Latin – an extraordinary man, a saga man – had chosen me. For the first time in my life, someone saw me, and I loved him because he made me feel I was enough.

  To think of how I slid my hand in through the folds of my skirt to find and press the bruises he left there, feeling the start of pain across my skin. Bruises as echoes of his touch, proof of his hands on mine, his hips against mine: the exultant exhalation, the clamber of our limbs in the dark. Throughout a dull-eyed cycle of work, nights slept alone, waking to nothing but chores, chores, those hidden bruises suggested something more – an end to the stifling ordinariness of existence.

  I hated it when they faded. They were all I had of his to keep for myself until he came again. All those weeks, all those nights, I was rotted through with hunger. In the cowshed, my head hard against the floor, Natan broke the very yolk of my soul. I concealed my true feelings from the servants. All that willpower to contain that which I wanted to cry into the wind, and scratch into the dirt, and burn into the grass.

  We had agreed that I would come live with him. He would haul me out of the valley, out of the husk of my miserable, loveless life, and everything would be new. He would give me springtime.

  And all that while, there was Sigga.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Handar-vagna-Freyjum fljóð

  Flytur sagnir ljóða.

  Kennd við Magnús, blessað blóð,

  Búrfells-Agnes góða.

  Leading the way for women

  A poet, named for Magnús.

  His blessed blood flows in her veins:

  The good Búrfell-Agnes.

  Anonymous, c. 1825.

  ‘HAVE YOU EVER BEEN TO Illugastadir, Reverend?’

  Tóti shook his head. ‘I don’t have much need to travel north of Breidabólstadur.’

  The next day had broken in the embrace of more wet and snowy weather, and Margrét had persuaded Tóti to delay his return home until the skies cleared. He was relieved. His dreams had been troubled, and he had woken with an aching head.

  With the sheep rounded up, slaughter done, and the hay brought home, the household of Kornsá was spending the day indoors, attending to spinning, knitting and rope-making.

  Agnes was sitting on her bed, trying to find stitches Steina had lost on a mitten. ‘Illugastadir is almost on the edge of the world,’ she said, inclining her head, as though to point out where the farm stood. ‘I didn’t know the way, and everyone had been telling me how lonely it would be, how it was nothing like the valley, where there are folk you know wherever you look. But I wanted to work for Natan.’

  ‘When did you go there?’

  ‘As soon as I was able. The Flitting Days, at the end of May.’

  ‘What year was this?’ Tóti asked.

  ‘1827. I saw through Yuletide and the new year at Geitaskard, and then waited for the Golden Plover to arrive and sing the snow away. I packed up my possessions, and set off on foot. There were lots of servants moving up and down the valley, but no one was going to Vatnsnes, and no one was headed to Illugastadir. As I started walking northwards on the peninsula a fog came down and I was worried I would be lost. But I could hear the sea in the distance, and I knew I was going in the right direction. When the fog cleared I saw that I wasn’t far from the church of Tjörn. I asked to sleep the night there and the next day the priest gave me directions to Illugastadir.

  ‘It didn’t take me long to reach the farm from Tjörn. That morning was the first time I had ever seen sea so wide and far. The wind was coming from the north, blowing spray off the waves that scudded against the shore, and there were hundreds of seabirds screaming in circles above the surface. I could even see the west fjords over the grey swell of water. Like a shadow of themselves.

  ‘It made an impression. The priest from Tjörn had told me to watch for a croft by a rocky bay, and I soon came across this very place. There was a little boat upon the shore, and bedclothes tied to fish-drying racks, which were waving madly about in the wind. At the time I took it as a good sign; I thought it seemed that they were waving to me in welcome.

  ‘I hadn’t gone very far down the slope when someone appeared out of the croft, and started to trip up the hill. As the figure grew closer I saw that it was a young girl, no more than fifteen winters old. She was waving at me, and seemed exhilarated. When I came within speaking distance she cried out a welcome, and ran towards me. She seemed even younger as she drew closer, Reverend. She had a snub-nose and very red lips, and her hair was fair and tangled in the wind. She was too pretty for a peasant girl, and I remember wondering whether she was some daughter of Natan’s. Her clothes were too fine for her to be a servant.

  ‘The girl took my sack of belongings and kissed me. She asked if I was Agnes Magnúsdóttir, and she introduced herself as Sigrídur, but said that everyone called her Sigga.’

  ‘This was the girl-servant Natan had mentioned to you at Geitaskard?’

  Agnes nodded. ‘Sigga exclaimed she’d been expecting me all week, and was I hungry, and had I come very far, and wasn’t I frightened of highwaymen or outlaws, walking alone on the mountain paths. She spoke so fast that I barely had time to provide her with answers, and before I knew it she had ushered me inside and showed me my bed, which she had only made up that morning. The badstofa was very small, with only four bunks, and no space to speak of. There was a t
iny window over one of the beds, but I supposed that Sigga had taken that bunk for herself. Illugastadir was more cramped and dirtier than I’d imagined. But I reassured myself that it was better to be mistress of a croft than a servant in the home of the governor. Sigga said that she would give me some time to arrange my things about my bed, and went and made coffee for us. When I told her she needn’t go to any expense, that whey and water would be plenty, she smiled and assured me that Natan was fond of coffee and that they drank it at all hours. It seemed a great luxury to me.

  ‘I waited until Sigga had left the room before looking at my surroundings. Only two beds were made up – hers and mine – and I wondered where Natan slept, and if there was a loft I hadn’t noticed.

  ‘When Sigga returned, I asked her where Natan was. I’d expected him to be there to greet me. Sigga looked embarrassed and blushed, and said that Natan was out.

  ‘It was a Sunday, so I asked if Natan was at church, but Sigga shook her head. Natan was not a church-going man. She said that he was the only man she’d ever known who refused to read the evening blessings, and said that if I had a book of psalms I should hide it under my pillow otherwise Natan might kindle the hearth with it. No, Natan was fox-hunting on the mountain, she said, but she would show me the farm in his place.

  ‘I can’t remember what my first impression of the farm was, Reverend. I was tired from my journey and overwhelmed from seeing so much water on the horizon. But I can certainly tell you what Illugastadir is like after spending a year or so trapped upon that corner of God’s earth.’

  ‘I should like to hear you describe it,’ Tóti prompted.

  ‘It’s not much more than the base of the mountain, and the shore of the sea. It’s a long line of rocky ground, with one or two smooth fields where winter fodder is grown, and all the rest is wild grass, growing around the stones. The shore is of pebbles, and huge tangles of seaweed float in the bay and look like the hair of the drowned. Driftwood appears overnight like magic, and eider ducks nest upon nearby banks of rocks near seal colonies. On a clear day it’s beautiful, and on others it’s as miserable as grave-digging in the rain. Sea fog plagues the place, and the nearest farm is Stapar, which is a fair distance away.