Kristin Lavransdatter Page 76

  Simon sent his servants off to do chores, and the room was emptied of people—neighbors and their attendants, as well as most of the children and dogs. While he asked questions and listened to her replies, Simon fastened his shirt and tunic, which were open wide, revealing his bare, hairy chest. The children had brought him to such a state, he said apologetically. He was terribly disheveled; his belt was twisted around, his clothes and hands were dirty, his face was covered with soot, and his hair was full of straw and dust.

  A few minutes later two serving women came in to take Kristin and Gaute over to Ramborg’s women’s house. A fire had been started in the fireplace, and several maids busily lit the candles, made up the beds, and helped her and the boy into dry clothes, while others set the table with food and drink. A half-grown maiden with silk-wrapped braids brought Kristin a frothy bowl of ale. The girl was Simon’s eldest daughter, Arngjerd.

  Then Simon came into the room. He had tidied himself up and now looked more as Kristin was used to seeing him, handsomely and splendidly dressed. He was leading his little daughter by the hand, and Ivar and Skule followed.

  Kristin asked about her sister, and Simon replied that Ramborg had accompanied the Sundbu women down to Ringheim; Jostein had come to get his daughter, Helga, and then he wanted Dagny and Ramborg to come along too. He was such a merry, kind old man, and he had promised to take good care of the three young wives. Ramborg might stay there all winter. She was expecting a child around Saint Matthew’s Day, and Simon had thought he might have to be away from home that winter, so she would be better off with her young kinswomen. No, it made no difference to the housekeeping here at Formo whether she was home or not, laughed Simon. He had never demanded that young Ramborg trouble herself with all that toil.

  As to Kristin’s plans, Simon said at once that he would travel south with her. He had so many kinsmen there, as well as his father’s friends and his own from the past, that he hoped to be able to serve her better than he had in Nidaros. And there it would be easier for him to determine whether it would be wise for her to pay a visit to the king himself. He could be ready to travel in three or four days.

  They attended mass together the next day, which was Sunday, and afterwards they visited Sira Eirik at his home at Romundgaard. The priest was old now. He received Kristin kindly and seemed very saddened by her troubling fate. Then they went over to Jørundgaard.

  The buildings looked the same, and the rooms held the same beds, benches, and tables. It was now her property, and it seemed most likely that her sons would grow up here; this was also where she herself would one day lie down and close her eyes. But never had she felt so clearly as at this moment that life in this home had depended on her father and mother. No matter what they had struggled with in private, from them had streamed warmth, help, peace, and security to everyone else who lived there.

  Uneasy and dejected as she now felt, it made her weary to listen to Simon talk about his own affairs: his manor and his children. She knew she was being unreasonable; he was willing to do all he could to help her. She realized how good it was of him to agree to leave his home during the Christmas season, and to be away from his wife, as things now stood. No doubt he was thinking a great deal about whether he might have a son. He had only the one child with Ramborg, even though they had been married six years. Kristin couldn’t expect that he should take Erlend’s and her misfortune so much to heart that he would forget all the joy he had from his own life. But it was strange to be there with him; he seemed so happy and warm and secure in his own home.

  Without thinking, Kristin had assumed that Ulvhild Simonsdatter would be like her own little sister, for whom the child had been named—fair and fragile and pure. But Simon’s little daughter was round and plump, with cheeks like apples and lips as red as a berry, lively gray eyes that looked like her father’s in his youth, and lovely brown curls. Simon had the greatest love for his pretty, merry child, and he was proud of her bright chatter.

  “Even though this girl is so hideous and wicked and naughty,” he said, putting his hands around her chest and tumbling her around as he lifted her up into the air. “I think she must be a changeling that the trolls up here in the hills left in the cradle for her mother and me—such an ugly and loathsome child she is.” Then he set her down abruptly and hastily made the sign of the cross over her three times, as if he were frightened by his own imprudent words.

  Arngjerd, the daughter born of his maid, was not beautiful, but she looked kind and sensible, and Simon took her with him whenever he could. He was constantly praising her cleverness. Kristin had to look at everything in Arngjerd’s marriage chest, at all she had spun and woven and stitched as part of her dowry.

  “When I place the hand of my daughter into the hand of a faithful husband,” said Simon as he gazed after the child, “it will be one of the happiest days of my life.”

  To spare expenses and so that the journey might proceed faster, Kristin was to take along no maids, nor any servant other than Ulf Haldorssøn. Two weeks before Christmas they left Formo, accompanied by Simon Andressøn and his two young, vigorous men.

  When they arrived in Oslo, Simon learned at once that the king would not be coming to Norway—he would apparently celebrate Christmas in Stockholm. Erlend was being held in the castle at Akersnes; the chieftain was away, so for the time being it would be impossible for any of them to see him. But the deputy royal treasurer, Olav Kyrning, promised to let Erlend know that they had come to town. Olav was quite friendly toward Simon and Kristin because his brother was married to Ramborg Aasmundsdatter of Skog, which made him distantly related to the daughters of Lavrans.

  Ketil of Skog came to town and invited them to spend Christmas with him, but Kristin had no wish for noisy feasting as matters now stood for Erlend. And then Simon too refused to go, no matter how earnestly she begged him. Simon and Ketil knew each other, but Kristin had only met her uncle’s son once since he had grown up.

  Kristin and Simon had taken lodgings at the same residence where she had once been the guest of his parents, back when the two of them were betrothed, but this time they were staying in a different building. There were two beds in the main room; Kristin slept in one of them, Simon and Ulf slept in the other. The servants bedded down in the stable.

  On Christmas Eve Kristin wanted to attend midnight mass at Nonneseter’s church; she said it was because the sisters sang so beautifully. All five of them decided to go. The night was starry and clear, mild and lovely; it had snowed a little in the evening, so it was quite bright. When the bells began to ring from the churches, people came streaming out of all the houses, and Simon had to give Kristin his hand. Now and then he would cast a sidelong glance at her. She had grown terribly thin in the autumn, but her tall, erect figure seemed to have regained some of its maidenly softness and quiet grace. Her pale face had assumed the expression from her youth of calm and gentleness, which hid a deep, tense wariness. She had taken on an oddly phantomlike resemblance to the young Kristin from that Christmastime so long ago. Simon gripped her hand hard, unaware that he was doing so until she squeezed his fingers in return. He looked up. She smiled and nodded, and he understood that she had interpreted the pressure of his hand as a reminder that she must remain brave—and now she was trying to show him that she would.

  When the holy days were over, Kristin went out to the convent and asked to be allowed to pay her respects to the abbess and to those sisters who were still living there since she had left. She then spent a little time in the abbess’s parlatory. Afterwards she went into the church. She realized that there was nothing for her to gain inside the walls of the convent. The sisters had received her kindly, but she saw that for them she was merely one of the many young maidens who had spent a year there. If they had heard any talk about her distinguishing herself from the rest of the young daughters in any way, and not for the better, they made no mention of it. But that year at Nonneseter, which loomed so large in her own life, meant so little in the life of t
he cloister. Her father had bought for himself and his family a place in the convent’s prayers of intercession for their souls. The new abbess, Fru Elin, and the sisters said that they would pray for her and for her husband’s salvation. But Kristin saw that she had no right to force her way in and disturb the nuns with her visits. Their church stood open to her, as it did to everyone; she could stand in the north aisle and listen to the singing of the pure women’s voices from the choir; she could look around the familiar room, at the altars and pictures. And when the sisters left the church through the door to the convent courtyard, she could go up and kneel before the gravestone of Abbess Groa Guttormsdatter and think about the wise, powerful, and dignified mother whose words she had neither understood nor heeded. She had no other rights in this women’s residence for Christ’s servants.

  At the end of the holy days, Sir Munan came to see Kristin. He said he had just learned that she was in Oslo. He greeted her heartily, as he did Simon Andressøn and Ulf, whom he kept calling his kinsman and dear friend. He thought it would be difficult for them to win permission to see Erlend; he was being kept under tight guard. Munan himself had not succeeded in gaining access to his cousin. But after the knight had ridden off, Ulf said with a laugh that he thought Munan probably hadn’t tried very hard—he was so deathly afraid of being mixed up in the case that he hardly dared hear mention of it. Munan had aged greatly; he was quite bald and gaunt, and his skin hung loosely on his large frame. He was living out at Skogheim, with one of his unlawful daughters, who was a widow. Munan would have liked to be rid of her because none of his other children, lawful or unlawful, would come near him as long as this half-sister was managing his household. She was a domineering, avaricious, and sharp-tongued woman. But Munan didn’t dare ask her to leave.

  Finally, around New Year’s, Olav Kyrning obtained permission for Kristin and Simon to see Erlend. It was again Simon’s lot to escort the sorrowful wife to these heartbreaking meetings. The guards were much more careful here than they were in Nidaros not to let Erlend speak to anyone without the chieftain’s men being present.

  Erlend was calm, as before, but Simon could see that the situation was now beginning to wear him down. He never complained; he said he suffered no privations and was treated as well as was allowed, but he admitted that the cold bothered him a good deal; there was no hearth fire in the room. And there was little he could do to keep himself clean—although, he jested, if he hadn’t had the lice to fight with, the time might have passed much more slowly out there.

  Kristin too was calm—so calm that Simon held his breath with fear, waiting for the day when she would completely fall apart.

  King Magnus was making his royal tour of Sweden, and there was little prospect that he would return to his homeland anytime soon, or that there would be any change in Erlend’s situation.

  On Saint Gregor’s Day Kristin and Ulf Haldorssøn had been to church at Nonneseter. On their way home, as they crossed the bridge over the convent creek, she did not take the road to their hostel, which lay near the bishop’s citadel; instead, she turned east toward the lane near Saint Clement’s Church and headed along the narrow alleyways between the church and the river.

  The day was hazy and gray, and a thaw had set in, so their footwear and the hems of their cloaks grew quickly soaked and heavy from the yellow mud near the river. They reached the fields along the riverbank. Once their eyes met. Ulf laughed softly and a kind of smirk appeared on his lips, but his eyes were sad; Kristin gave him an odd, sickly smile.

  A moment later they were standing on the ridge of a hill; the earth had given way out here sometime before, and the farm now lay right below the hill—so close to the dirty-yellow slope, covered with tufts of black, dried weeds, that the rank stench from the pigsty, which they were looking down at, rose up toward them. Two fat sows were wallowing around in the dark muck. The riverbank was only a narrow strip here; the gray, murky current of the river, filled with careening ice floes, ran right up to the dilapidated buildings with the faded rooftops.

  As they stood there, a man and a woman came walking over to the fenced area and looked at the pigs; the man leaned over and scratched one of the sows with the haft of the silver-chased, thin-bladed axe he was using as a staff. It was Munan Baardsøn himself, and the woman was Brynhild Fluga. He looked up and noticed them. He stood there gaping, until Kristin shouted a merry greeting down to him.

  Sir Munan began to bellow with laughter.

  “Come down and have a hot ale in this vile weather,” he called.

  On their way down to the farmyard fence, Ulf told Kristin that Brynhild Jonsdatter no longer kept an inn or an alehouse. She had been in trouble several times and was finally threatened with flogging, but Munan had come to her rescue and vouched for her; she promised to stop all her unlawful activities. And her sons now held such positions that, for their sake, their mother had to think about improving her reputation. After the death of his wife, Munan Baardsøn had taken up with Brynhild again and was often over at Flugagaard.

  He met them at the gate.

  “All four of us are kinsmen, after a fashion,” he chuckled. He was slightly drunk, but not overly so. “You’re a good woman, Kristin Lavransdatter, pious but not at all haughty. Brynhild is now an honorable and respectable woman too. And I was an unmarried man when I produced the two sons we have together—and they’re the most splendid of all my children. That’s what I’ve told you every single day in all these years, Brynhild. I’m more fond of Inge and Gudleik than any of my other children. . . .”

  Brynhild was still beautiful, but her skin was sallow and looked as if it would be clammy to the touch, thought Kristin—the way it does after standing over a pot of grease all day long. But her house was well-kept, the food and drink she set on the table were excellent, and the crockery was pleasing and clean.

  “Yes, I drop by over here whenever I have business in Oslo,” said Munan. “A mother likes to hear news of her sons, you see. Inge writes to me himself, because he’s a learned man, Inge—a bishop’s envoy has to be, you know. . . . I found him a good match too: Tora Bjarnesdatter from Grjote. Do you think many men could have acquired such a woman for their bastard son? So we sit here and talk about that, and Brynhild brings in the food and ale for me, just like in the old days, when she wore my keys at Skogheim. It’s hard to sit out there now and think about my blessed wife . . . So I ride over here to find some solace—when Brynhild here has a mind to grant me a little kindness and warmth.”

  Ulf Haldorssøn was sitting with his chin in his hand and gazing at the mistress of Husaby. Kristin sat and listened, answering quietly and gently and courteously—just as calm and refined as if she were a guest at one of the grand estates back home in Trøndelag.

  “Well, Kristin Lavransdatter, you won honor and the name of wife,” said Brynhild Fluga, “even though you came willingly enough to meet Erlend up in my loft. But I was called a wanton and loose woman all my days; my stepmother sold me into the hands of that man there—I bit and fought, and the scratches from my fingernails marked his face before he had his way with me.”

  “Are you going to bring that up again?” fretted Munan. “You know full well . . . I’ve told you so many times before . . . I would have let you go in peace if you had behaved properly and begged me to spare you, but you rushed at my face like a wildcat before I had even stepped inside the door.”

  Ulf Haldorssøn chuckled to himself.

  “And I’ve treated you well ever since,” said Munan. “I gave you everything you wanted . . . and our children . . . well, they’re in a better and more secure position than those poor sons of Kristin. May God protect the poor boys, the way Erlend has left things for his children! I think that must be more important to a mother’s heart than the name of wife—and you know how many times I wished that you had been highborn so that I might marry you—I’ve never liked any other woman as much as you, even though you were seldom gentle or kind to me . . . and the wife I did have, may God reward h
er. I’ve established an altar for my Katrin and me in our church, Kristin—I’ve thanked God and Our Lady every day for my marriage. . . . no man has had things better. . . .” He sniffed and began to cry.

  A little later Ulf Haldorssøn said they would have to leave. He and Kristin didn’t exchange a single word on the way home. But outside the main door, she took Ulf’s hand.

  “Ulf—my kinsman and my friend!”

  “If it would help,” he said quietly, “I would gladly go to the gallows in Erlend’s place—for his sake and for yours.”

  In the evening, a little before bedtime, Kristin was sitting alone in the room with Simon. Suddenly she began to tell him where she had been that day. She recounted the conversation they had had out there.

  Simon was sitting on a small stool a short distance away. Bending forward slightly, with his arms resting on his thighs and his hands hanging down, he sat and gazed up at her with a peculiar, searching look in his small, sharp eyes. He didn’t say a word, and not a muscle twitched in his heavy, broad face.

  Then Kristin mentioned that she had told her father everything, and what his response had been.

  Simon sat in the same position, without moving. But after a while he said calmly, “That was the only request I have ever made of you in all the years we’ve known each other . . . if I remember right . . . that you should . . . but if you couldn’t keep that to yourself to spare Lavrans, then . . .”

  Kristin’s body trembled violently. “Yes. But . . . Oh, Erlend, Erlend, Erlend!”

  At her wild cries, the man leaped to his feet. Kristin had flung herself forward, and with her head in her arms she was rocking from side to side, calling to Erlend over and over in between the quavering, racking sobs that seemed to be wrung from her body, filling her mouth with moans that welled up and spilled out.