Burial Rites (5 page)

REVEREND THORVARDUR JÓNSSON SIGHED AS
he left the church and entered the cool, damp air of the afternoon. Just over one month had passed since he had accepted Blöndal’s offer to visit the condemned woman, and he had questioned his decision every day since. Each morning he had felt troubled, as though newly woken from a nightmare. Even as he had made his daily walk to the small church of Breidabólstadur to pray and sit awhile in the silence, his stomach had crowded with nerves, and his body had trembled as if exhausted by his mind’s ambivalence. It had been no different today. As he had sat on the hard pew, gazing into his hands, he caught himself wishing that he were ill, gravely ill, so that he might be excused for not riding to Kornsá. His reluctance, and his willingness to sacrifice his own blessed health, horrified him.

It is too late now, he thought to himself as he walked through the rather pitiful garden within the churchyard. You have given your word to man and God, and there is no turning back.

Once, before his mother had died, the church plot had been full of small plants that threw purple blossoms over the edges of the graves in summer. His mother had said that the dead made the flowers sway, to greet the churchgoers after winter. But when she died, his father ripped out the wild flowers and the graves had lain bare ever since.

The door to the Breidabólstadur croft was ajar. As Tóti let himself in, the heavy warmth from the kitchen, and the smell of melting tallow from the candle in the corridor, made him feel nauseous.

His father was bent over the bubbling kettle, poking something with a knife.

‘I ought to leave now, I think,’ Tóti announced.

His father looked up from the boiling fish and nodded.

‘I’m expected to arrive early in the evening to acquaint myself with the family at Kornsá, and be present when . . . Well, when the criminal arrives.’

His father frowned. ‘Go then, son.’

Tóti hesitated. ‘Do you think I’m ready?’

Reverend Jón sighed and lifted the kettle off its hook over the coals. ‘You know your own heart.’

‘I’ve been praying in the church. I wonder what Mamma would have thought about it all.’

Tóti’s father blinked slowly and looked away.

‘What do
you
think, father?’

‘A man must be true to his word.’

‘Is it the right decision, though? I . . . I don’t want to displease you.’

‘You should seek to please the Lord,’ Reverend Jón muttered, trying to scoop his fish from the hot water with his knife.

‘Will you pray for me, father?’

Tóti waited for a response, but none came. Perhaps he thinks
he
is better suited to meet murderesses, Tóti thought. Perhaps he is jealous she chose me. He watched his father lick a fragment of fish from where it had stuck to the blade. She chose
me
, he repeated to himself.

‘Don’t wake me when you return,’ Reverend Jón called out as his son turned and left the room.

Tóti slipped a saddle over his horse and mounted. ‘This is it, then,’ he whispered quietly. He gently squeezed his knees to urge his horse forward, and looked back at the croft. Its thin wreath of kitchen smoke dissipated into the soft drizzle of the afternoon.

Travelling through the long grasses of the valley surrounding
the church, the Assistant Reverend tried to think of what he should say. Should he be kind and welcoming, or stern and impenetrable, like Blöndal? As he rode, he rehearsed various tones of voice, different greetings. Perhaps he should wait until he saw the woman. Unexpectedly, a small thrill flickered through his body. She was only a workmaid, but she was a
murderess
. She had killed two men. Slaughtered them like animals. He silently mouthed the word to himself. Murderess.
Morðingi
. It slipped through his mouth like milk.

As he travelled over the north peninsula with its thin lip of ocean on the horizon, the clouds began to clear and the soft red light of the late June sun flooded the pass. Drops of water glittered brightly upon the ground, and the hills appeared pink and muted, shadows moving slowly across them as clouds drifted overhead. Small insects wound their way through the air, lit up like flecks of dust as they passed through the sunshine, and the sweet, damp smell of grass, almost ready to be harvested, lingered in the cool air of the valleys. The dread that Tóti had felt so firmly lining his stomach dissipated as he fell into a quiet appreciation of the countryside before him.

We are all God’s children, he thought to himself. This woman is my sister in Jesus, and I, as her spiritual brother, must guide her home. He smiled and brought his horse to a
tölt
. ‘I will save her,’ he whispered.

CHAPTER TWO

3rd of May 1828

Undirfell, Vatnsdalur

The convict Agnes Magnúsdóttir was born at Flaga in the parish of Undirfell in 1795. She was confirmed in 1809, at which age she was written as having ‘an excellent intellect, and strong knowledge and understanding of Christianity’.

This is what is listed in the Undirfell Ministerial Book.

P. Bjarnason

THEY HAVE TAKEN ME FROM
the room and put me in irons again. This time they sent an officer of the court, a young man with pocked skin and a nervous smile. He’s a servant from Hvammur, I recognised his face. When his lips broke apart I could see that his teeth were rotting in his mouth. His breath was awful, but no worse than my own; I know I am rank. I am scabbed with dirt and the accumulated weeping of my body: blood, sweat, oil. I cannot think of when I last washed. My hair feels like a greased rope; I have tried to keep it plaited, but they have not allowed me ribbons, and I imagine that to the officer I looked like a monstrous creature. Perhaps that was why he smiled.

He took me from that awful room, and other men joined us as he led me through the unlit corridor. They were silent, but I felt them behind me; I felt their stares as though they were cold handgrips upon my neck. Then, after months in a room filled only with my own fetid breath and the stench from the chamber pot, I was taken through the corridors of Stóra-Borg into the muddy yard. And it was raining.

How can I say what it was like to breathe again? I felt newborn. I staggered in the light of the world and took deep gulps of fresh sea air. It was late in the day: the wet mouth of the afternoon was full on my face. My soul blossomed in that brief moment as they led me out of doors. I fell, my skirts in the mud, and I turned my face upwards as if in prayer. I could have wept from the relief of light.

A man reached down and pulled me from the ground as one wrests a thistle that takes root in a place it does not belong. It was then that I noticed the crowd that had gathered. At first I did not know why these people stood about, men and women alike, each still and staring at me in silence. Then I understood that it was not me they stared at. I understood that these people did not see
me
. I was two dead men. I was a burning farm. I was a knife. I was blood.

I didn’t know what to do in front of these people. Then I saw Rósa, watching from a distance, clutching the hand of her little daughter. It was a comfort to see someone I recognised, and I smiled involuntarily. But the smile was wrong. It unlocked the crowd’s fury. The servant women’s faces twisted, and the silence was broken by a sudden, brief shriek from a child:
Fjandi
! Devil! It burst into the air like an explosion of water from a geyser. The smile dropped from my face.

At the sound of the insult, the crowd seemed to awaken. Someone gave a brittle laugh and the child was hushed and led away by an older woman. One by one, they all left to return indoors or to continue their chores, until I was alone with the officers in the drizzle, standing in stockings stiff with dried sweat, my heart burning under my filthy skin. When I looked back, I saw that Rósa had disappeared.

Now we are riding across Iceland’s north, across this island washing in its waters, sulking in its ocean. Chasing our shadows across the mountains.

They have strapped me to the saddle like a corpse being taken to the burial ground. In their eyes I am already a dead woman, destined for the grave. My arms are tethered in front of me. As we ride this awful parade, the irons pinch my flesh until it bloodies in front of my eyes. I have come to expect harm now. Some of the watchmen at Stóra-Borg compassed my body with small violences, chronicled their hatred towards me, a mark here, bruises, blossoming like star
clusters under the skin, black and yellow smoke trapped under the membrane. I suppose some of them had known Natan.

But now they take me east, and although I am tied like a lamb for slaughter, I’m grateful that I am returning to the valleys where rocks give way to grass, even if I will die there.

As the horses struggle through the tussocks, I wonder when they will kill me. I wonder where they will store me, cellar me like butter, like smoked meat. Like a corpse, waiting for the ground to unfreeze before they can pocket me in the earth like a stone.

They do not tell me these things. Instead, they set me in iron cuffs and lead me around, and like a cow I go where I am led, and there’s no kicking or it’s the knife. It’s the rope and a grim end. I put my head down, go where they take me and hope it’s not to the grave, not yet.

The flies are bad. They crawl on my face and into my eyes, and I feel the tiny ticking of their legs and wings. It’s the sweat that draws them. These irons are too heavy for me to swat them away. They were built for a man, although they screw tight enough against my skin.

Still, it is a consolation to have movement, to have the warmth of a horse under my legs: to feel the life in something and to not be so cold. I’ve been half-frozen for so long, it is as though the winter has set up home in my marrow. Endless days of dark indoors and hateful glances are enough to set a rime on anyone’s bones. So yes, it’s better to be outside now. Even with the air full of flies it’s better to be going somewhere than rotting slowly in a room like a body in a coffin.

Beyond the hum of insects and the rhythm of the horses at their walk, I hear a distant roar. Maybe it’s the ocean – the constant thundering of waves hitting the sands of Thingeyrar. Or perhaps I am imagining it. The sea gets into your head. Like Natan used to say, once you let it in, it doesn’t leave you alone. Like a woman, he said. The sea is a nag.

It was that first spring at Illugastadir. The light had arrived like a hunted thing, all wide-eyed and trembling. The sea was blank – Natan pushed the boat along its silvered skin, plunged his oars in its side.

‘As quiet as a churchyard,’ he had said, smiling, his arms heaving with the pull of water. I heard the creak of wood and the whispered cuss of the oars slapping the surface of the sea. ‘Be good when I’m gone.’

Don’t think of him.

How long have we been riding? An hour? Two? Time’s as slippery as oil. But it can’t have been more than two hours. I know these parts. I know we are now heading south, perhaps towards Vatnsdalur. Strange, how my heart grips to my ribs in an instant. How long has it been since I last saw this part of the country? A few years? More? Nothing has changed.

This is as close to home as I’ll ever be now.

We are passing through the strange hills at the mouth of the valley and I hear the caw of ravens. Their dark shapes look like omens against the brilliant blue of the sky. All those nights at Stóra-Borg, in that damp, miserable bed, I imagined I was outside, feeding the ravens at Flaga. Cruel birds, ravens, but wise. And creatures should be loved for their wisdom if they cannot be loved for kindness. As a child, I watched the ravens gather on the roof of Undirfell church, hoping to learn who was going to die. I sat on the wall, waiting for one to shake out his feathers, waiting to see which direction his beak turned. It happened once. A raven settled upon the wooden gable and jerked his beak towards the farm of Bakki, and a little boy drowned later that week, found swollen and grey downriver. The raven had known.

Sigga was unschooled in nightmares and ghosts. One night, knitting together at Illugastadir, we heard a raven’s shriek coming from the sea that chilled us to the core. I told her never to call out to,
nor feed a raven at night. Birds heard cawing in the dark are spirits, I said, and they would murder you soon as look at you. I scared her, I’m sure, or she wouldn’t have said the things she said later.

I wonder where Sigga might be now. Why they refused to keep her with me at Stóra-Borg. They took her away one morning when I was in irons, not telling me where she was held, although I asked more than once. ‘Away from you,’ they said, ‘and that is enough.’

‘Agnes Magnúsdóttir!’

The man riding beside me has a hard look on his face.

‘Agnes Magnúsdóttir. I’m to inform you that you’re to be held at Kornsá, until the time of your execution.’ He is reading something. His eyes flicker down to his gloves. ‘As a criminal condemned by the court of this land, you have forfeited your right to freedom.’ He folds the piece of paper and slips it in his glove. ‘You’d do well to wipe that scowl off your face. They’re gentle people at Kornsá.’