by Hannah Kent
‘There are several stony skerries of land that reach a little way out into the fjord, and on one of these is Natan’s workshop. You have to walk out over a narrow bed of rocks to reach it. I remember thinking it was a strange place to build a workshop, away from the croft and surrounded by water, but Natan planned it thus. Even the window of the cottage looked inland, rather than out to sea, because Natan wanted to observe who might be travelling along the mountain. He had some enemies.
‘Sigga said that she didn’t know where the key to his workshop was kept, but that the little hut was where he had his smithy, and where he made his medicines, and that he probably kept a lot of money in there. She told me this with a wild sort of giggle, and I remember thinking her as daft as Natan had told me she was.
‘Sigga told me that Natan went seal-clubbing, and there’d be seal leather shoes if I wanted them, and that they had eiderdown mattresses just like all the District Commissioners of Iceland, and that I would sleep like the dead, they were so soft. Sigga said she’d grown up at Stóra-Borg, but that her mother was no longer living, and she was new to service and had not been a housekeeper before, but that Natan had spoken highly of me and she hoped I would teach her.
‘I was surprised to hear her call herself a housekeeper. I said: “Oh, you are the mistress here? Did you take Karitas’s position?” And she nodded and said yes, she’d been working as a simple maidservant before, but when Karitas gave her notice Natan had asked her to be his housekeeper. She thanked me then for coming to be her servant, and she took me by the arm and said that we must get along well, for Natan was often away, and she grew lonely.
‘I thought there must have been a mistake. I thought that perhaps Natan had only asked her to be his housemistress until I arrived, or perhaps she was a liar. I didn’t think that Natan would lie to me.
‘We had some coffee then, and I told Sigga a little of where I’d worked before. I was careful to mention the number of farms I had lived in and Sigga seemed quite impressed, and kept saying how pleased she was to have me at Illugastadir to help her, and would I teach her how to make such a patterned shawl as I was wearing, so that all in all, I grew more easy.
‘Soon our conversation turned to Natan again, and Sigga said that she expected him after dinner. But he didn’t come home until it was late.’
‘Did you ask him about your position then?’ Tóti asked.
Agnes shook her head. ‘I was asleep when he came in.’
PERHAPS IT WAS THAT FIRST morning at Illugastadir when I understood the nature of things. Perhaps not.
I woke late to the plaintive shrieks of the gulls and stepped outside to see Natan walking down to the stream. Down by the shore, his bedclothes still flapped in the breeze. I thought, then, he had only returned that morning.
Even when Sigga later told me he had returned at midnight with two fox pelts slung over his shoulder, I did not think to ask what bed he had passed the rest of the night in.
‘I WAS SO PLEASED TO see Natan that morning that I forgot to ask him why Sigga thought herself the mistress of Illugastadir. It wasn’t until later that day, when I was following Natan across the rocks to his workshop, that I raised the matter with him.
‘I didn’t want to seem rude, so I only asked, very casually, how he liked having Sigga as a housekeeper. But Natan, as always, saw through my questioning. He stopped and raised his eyebrows.
‘“She’s not my housekeeper,” he said.
‘I was relieved to hear him say so, but explained that when I arrived Sigga had told me she’d taken Karitas’s position.
‘Natan laughed and shook his head, and reminded me that he’d warned of how young and simple she was. And then he opened the lock to his workshop, and we stepped inside. I’d never seen a room like it. There was the usual anvil, bellows and so on, but also big bunches of dried flowers and herbs along the walls, and jars filled with liquids, some cloudy, some light. There was a large pail of what looked like fat, and needles and scalpels and a glass jar that held a small animal, all pale and puckered like a boiled stomach.’
‘How horrible,’ Steina murmured from the other side of the badstofa. Agnes looked up from the mitten, as though she had forgotten the family was there.
A sudden knocking could be heard from the farm entrance.
‘Lauga,’ Margrét said. ‘Will you go and see who that is?’ Her daughter went to answer the door. She soon returned with an old man brushing snow off his shoulders. It was the Reverend Pétur Bjarnason from Undirfell.
‘Greetings to all in God’s name,’ the man grumbled, wiping his glasses on his inner shirt. He was breathing heavily from his walk in the ice and wind. ‘I’ve come to enter you all into the soul register of Undirfell’s parish,’ the man intoned. ‘Oh, hello, Assistant Reverend Thorvardur. Still in the valley, I see. Oh, of course. Blöndal’s got you . . .’
‘This is Agnes,’ Tóti interrupted. Agnes stepped forward.
‘I am Agnes Jónsdóttir,’ she said. ‘And I am a prisoner.’
Margrét immediately stood up in surprise, looking over to Jón, who sat on their bed, his mouth open in horror.
‘What?! She isn’t our –’ Lauga began, but Tóti cut her off.
‘Agnes Jónsdóttir is my spiritual charge. As I told you before.’ He was aware of the family gaping at him, stunned that he would agree to such a name. There was a long moment of awkward silence.
‘Duly noted.’ Reverend Pétur sat down on a stool under the flickering lamp, and took a heavy book out from under his coat. ‘And how is the family of Kornsá? Slaughter finished?’
Margrét stared at Tóti strangely, then slowly sat back down. ‘Uh, yes. Just the manure to spread over the tún, and then we’ll be making woollen goods for trade.’
The old priest nodded. ‘An industrious family. District Officer Jón, if you could please speak with me first?’
The priest conversed with each family member, one by one, examining their reading skills and ability to recite catechisms. He also asked them questions to ascertain the characters of those they lived with. After all the servants had had their time with the priest, Agnes was summoned. Tóti tried to listen to their conversation, but Kristín, relieved her reading test was over, had collapsed into giggles with Bjarni, and he couldn’t hear anything over their laughter. The priest did not take long with Agnes, but soon gave her a nod.
‘I thank you all for your time. Perhaps I’ll see you at a service soon,’ Reverend Pétur said.
‘Won’t you stay for coffee?’ Lauga asked, curtseying prettily.
‘Thank you, my dear, but I have the rest of the valley to see, and this weather’s only going to get worse.’ He set his hat atop his head and carefully bundled the book back inside his thick coat.
‘I’ll see you out,’ Tóti said, before Lauga could offer.
In the corridor, Tóti asked the priest what he had recorded about Agnes.
‘Why do you want to know?’ the man asked, curious.
‘She’s my charge,’ he said. ‘It is my responsibility to know how she behaves. How well she reads. I am invested in her welfare.’
‘Very well.’ The priest took the ministerial book out of his coat again and flicked to the new pages. ‘You may read it for yourself.’
Tóti brought the book over to a candle bracketed into the wall of the corridor and squinted in its dim light until he made out the words: Agnes Jónsdóttir. A condemned person. Sakapersona. 34 years old.
‘She reads very well,’ the priest offered, as he waited for Tóti to finish.
‘What is this you have written about her character?’ He could hardly make out the words, his eyes swimming in the gloom.
‘Oh, that says blendin, Reverend. Mixed.’
‘And how did you arrive at that answer?’
‘It was the opinion of the District Officer. And his wife.’
‘What was your opinion of Agnes, Reverend?’
The old man tucked the book back into his coat and shrugged. ‘Very
well-spoken. Educated, I should think. Surprising, considering her illegitimacy. Well brought up. But when I spoke to the District Officer, he said her behaviour was . . . Unpredictable. He mentioned hysterics.’
‘Agnes is facing a death sentence,’ Tóti said.
‘I’m aware,’ the priest retorted, opening the door. ‘Good day, Reverend Thorvardur. I wish you the best.’
‘And I you,’ Tóti mumbled, as the door slammed in his face.
AGNES JÓNSDÓTTIR. I NEVER THOUGHT it could be that easy to name yourself. The daughter of Jón Bjarnasson of Brekkukot, not the servant Magnús Magnússon. Let everyone know whose bastard I truly am.
Agnes Jónsdóttir. She sounds like the woman I should have been. A housekeeper in a croft that overlooks the valley, with a husband by her side, and a kip of children to help sing home the sheep at twilight. To teach and frighten with stories of ghosts. To love. She could even be the sister of Sigurlaug and Steinvör Jónsdóttir. Margrét’s daughter. Born blessed under a marriage. Born into a family that would not be ripped apart by poverty.
Agnes Jónsdóttir would not have been so foolish as to love a man who spent his life opening veins, mouths, legs. A man who was paid to draw blood. She would have been a grandmother. She would have had a host of faces to gather round her bed as she lay dying. She would have been assured of a place in heaven. She would have believed in heaven.
It is almost impossible to believe I was happy at Illugastadir, but I must have been, once. I was happy that first day, when Natan and I stayed in his workshop all afternoon. He showed me the two fox pelts. They were drying inside, the sea air too damp that morning for them to hang with the fish.
He took my hands and ran them over the white fox fur.
‘Feel that? These will fetch a pretty penny at Reykjavík this summer.’
He told me how he caught the foxes up in the mountains. ‘The trick is to find and catch a fox kit,’ he said. ‘The kit must then be made to cry out to its parents, otherwise it’s near impossible to lure them out of their hole. They’re wily things. Cunning. They smell you coming.’
‘And how do you make a fox kit cry?’
‘I break its front legs. They cannot escape then. The parents hear it mewling and come running out of their den, and they’re easily caught. They won’t leave one of their own.’
‘What do you do with the kit after you kill its parents?’
‘Some hunters leave it there to die. They are no use for market – the skins are too small.’
‘What do you do?’
‘I stove their heads in with a rock.’
‘That is the only decent thing to do.’
‘Yes. To leave them is cruelty.’
He showed me his books. He thought I might like them. ‘Sigga does not care for words,’ he said. ‘She is a terrible reader. It’s like trying to make a cow talk.’
I ran my fingers over the sheets of paper and tried to read the new words they offered.
‘Cutaneous diseases.’ He corrected my awkward tongue. ‘Cochlearia officinalis.’
‘Say it again.’
‘Cetraria islandica. Angelica archangelica. Achilla millefolium. Rumex digynus.’
It was a language I didn’t understand, so I stopped his laughs with kisses, and felt his tongue press lightly against my own. What did all these words mean? Were they the names of the things in his workshop? In the jars and bottles and clay pots? Natan kissed my neck and my thoughts were lost in a rising swarm of lust. He lifted me onto the table, and we fumbled with our clothes before he pushed himself inside me, before I knew what we were doing, before I was ready. I gasped. I felt the papers beneath me, and imagined the words lifting from the page and sinking into my skin. My legs were tight around him, and I felt the cold sea air grasp me about the throat.
Later, I stood naked, my hips pressed against the edge of his table. Natan’s books lay in front of me, the papers were wrinkled, showed eddies of our love.
‘Look at all this illness, Natan. Books and books of disease and horror.’
‘Agnes.’
He said my name softly, letting the ‘s’ carry over his tongue, as though tasting it.
‘Natan. If there is so much illness in the world . . . if there is so much that can go wrong with a person, how is it that any of us remain alive?’
Sigga must have known about us. Those first nights at Illugastadir we waited until she fell asleep. I’d hear Natan’s careful tread on the floorboards of the badstofa, and feel the gentle tug of blankets. I tried so hard to be quiet. We knotted ourselves together as though we should never become undone, but the first bar of morning light that came through the window severed our trysts as though it were a knife.
He always returned to his own bed before Sigga awoke.
AGNES SEEMED TO BE LOST in thought. It wasn’t until Tóti gently put a hand on her shoulder that she gave a start and noticed he had come back into the room.
‘I’m sorry to startle you,’ he said.
‘Oh no,’ Agnes replied, a little breathlessly. ‘I was only counting stitches.’
‘Shall we continue?’ he asked.
‘What was I saying?’
‘You were telling me about your first day at Illugastadir.’
‘Oh, yes. Natan was glad to see me, and made sure I was settled, and he told me stories about the folk and farms about the place. Nothing very remarkable occurred in those first few weeks. I worked every day with Sigga from dawn to dusk, and we’d spend each night together telling stories, or laughing at one thing or another. All in all, my time at Illugastadir for the first few months was a happy one. Sigga told me that it was unusual for Natan to spend as much time at home as he had been doing, and I thought it was my company that kept him with us. He spent most days out in his workshop, preferring to tinker and mend tools than actually tend the farm. He would rather hire men to come and see to the grass, or horses, than do it himself. Not that he was lazy. He showed me how he let blood, and told me about all the diseases that could befall a person. I think he was glad to have someone interested in his work; Sigga was pretty, and good at laundry, and she had a deft hand with a gutting knife and cleaned the fish we caught, but she did not care for what Natan called the things of the intellect. I was allowed to read as much as I wanted, and to discover something of the study of science. Do you know, Reverend, that it is necessary for someone with spots on their legs and bleeding gums to eat cabbages?’
Tóti smiled. ‘No, I didn’t.’
‘I thought he was making fun at first, but I saw with my own eyes how something as simple as a tea made from leaves, or a poultice from lard and sulphur, or gum squeezed out of roots, or even a cabbage, could heal a person.
‘I thought it was sheer good fortune, moving to Illugastadir. Natan made me new shoes from sealskin, and gave me a shawl, and there were as many duck eggs as you could fit in your stomach. When he did leave the farm, he always returned with gifts for Sigga and me. That was why I had thought Sigga his daughter when I first saw her. Natan kept her well dressed, and when I arrived, he gave me gifts too. Lace, and silk, and a little handkerchief he said had come all the way from France. It seemed a luxurious existence, despite the isolation, despite the close, cramped quarters. We did not often have visitors. But I had Natan, and Sigga wasn’t too insufferable.’ Agnes lowered her voice. ‘Have you seen her, Reverend? Has she been granted her appeal?’
Tóti shook his head slowly. ‘I don’t know yet.’
Agnes was thoughtful. ‘She has probably changed. She’s probably as pious as they come now. But at Illugastadir she had a saucy little manner when it suited her. She was forever speculating about folks, and Natan would ask her who she thought should marry whom, and what their children would look like and so forth. It was harmless sport for him; he found her simplicity amusing. I didn’t even mind it when Sigga kept calling herself the housekeeper, or ordered me to do the tasks she ought to have been doing herself – emptying the chamber pot, mucking out the cowshed, d
rying the fish Natan caught. She was, like Natan said, only a child, with a child’s way of thinking.
‘Fridrik Sigurdsson visited Illugastadir soon after I arrived. I’d never met him before, but Sigga had told me about him, and she’d said that he and Natan were acquaintances of sorts. She was always as pink as a skinned lamb when she spoke of him. But Fridrik unsettled me. There was something off-balance in Fridrik. And Natan, too. They both got into moods and the feel of a room would fall from high spirits to a glowering in an instant. It was contagious, too. With them you’d feel every small injustice done against you like a thorn in your side. Fridrik, I thought, was a daring sort of boy, desperate to prove himself a man. He was easily offended. I suppose he thought the world against him, and raged at it. I did not like that in him, the way he looked for a reason to anger. He liked to fight. Liked to keep his knuckles bruised.
‘Natan was different. He did not think he had to prove himself to anyone. But superstitious signs troubled him. And, what I admired in him, his way of seeing the world, and yearning for knowledge, and his easy way with those he liked, had a darker underbelly. It was a matter of enjoying the bright skies all the more, so as to endure the sloughs when they came.’
Agnes paused as Tóti grimaced, stroking his neck with his hand.
‘Does something trouble you?’ she asked.
The Reverend cleared his throat. ‘The air is rather close in here, is all,’ he said. ‘Go on. I’ll fetch some water in a little while.’
‘You look pale.’
‘It is only a slight chill from going to and fro in the weather.’
‘Perhaps you ought not return to Breidabólstadur tonight.’
Tóti shook his head, smiling. ‘I’ve felt worse,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to interrupt you. Please go on.’