Tóti gazed down at the horses now gathered at the edge of the home field. The men had begun to dismount and attend to their packs. Only one figure remained mounted. He bent closer to the man.
‘Is there a proper name? What should I call —?’
‘Just Agnes,’ the man interrupted. ‘She’ll answer to Agnes.’
WE’VE ARRIVED. THE MEN FROM Stóra-Borg are dismounting at a little distance from the crooked farmhouse of Kornsá. Two figures stand outside the croft, a woman and a man, and the rider who announced my forfeited rights is walking up to them. No one is coming to unscrew my irons. Perhaps they have forgotten me. The woman ducks her head to go back indoors, coughing and spitting like a crone, but the man remains to talk with the Stóra-Borg officer.
To my left is laughter — two officers are pissing on the ground. I can smell it on the warm air. As usual, no one has noticed that I haven’t eaten or had a sip of water all day; my lips are as split as firewood. I feel the same as when I was little and hungry, as though my bones are growing larger in my body, as if my skeleton is about to shiver out of me. I have stopped bleeding. I am no longer a woman.
One of the men is walking towards me, taking quick, long strides over the home field. Don’t look at him.
‘Hello, Agnes. My… my name is Reverend Thorvardur Jónsson. I am the Assistant Reverend from Breidabólstadur in Vesturhóp.’ He is out of breath.
Don’t look up. It’s him. It is the same voice.
He coughs, then bends as if to kiss me according to custom, but hesitates, stepping backwards and nearly tripping over a tussock. He surely smells the dried piss on my stockings.
‘You asked for me?’ His voice is uncertain.
I look up.
He doesn’t recognise me. I don’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. His hair is as red as before, as red as the midnight sun. It looks as though his locks have soaked up the light as a skein of wool suffers the dye. But his face is older. It has thinned.
‘You asked for me?’ he says again. When I look him in the eye he glances away, then nervously wipes the sweat off his upper lip, leaving a trail of dark specks. Snuff? He doesn’t want to be here.
My tongue has swollen in my mouth and it cannot be moved to form words. What would I say to him anyway, now that it has come to this? I pick at the scabs on my wrists where the irons chafe the skin, and blood bubbles up to the surface. He notices.
‘Well. I must… I’m glad to have met you, but… it’s late. You must be… uh, I will call again soon.’ He bows awkwardly, then turns and walks away, tripping in his haste. He goes before I can let him know I understand. I smear the fresh blood across my arm as I watch him stumble to his horse.
Now I am alone. I watch the ravens, and listen to the horses eat.
ONCE THE MEN FROM STÓRA-BORG had eaten and retired to their tents for the night, Margrét picked up the dirty wooden bowls and returned inside. She smoothed the blankets over her sleeping daughters, and walked slowly around the small room, bending down to pick up the strands of dry grass that had fallen from the turf layered between the rafters. She despaired at the dust in the room. The walls had once been panelled with Norwegian wood, but Jón had removed the boards to pay a debt owed to a farmer across the valley. Now the bare walls of turf collapsed their dirt and grass onto the beds in summer, and grew dank in winter, issuing moulds that dripped onto the woollen blankets and infested the lungs of the household. The home had begun to disintegrate, a hovel that had spread its own state of collapse to its inhabitants. Last year two servants had died from diseases wrought by the damp.
Margrét thought of her own cough, and instinctively raised a hand to her mouth. Ever since the news brought by the District Commissioner, her lungs had issued rot with increased regularity. She rose each morning with a weight upon her chest. Margrét could not tell whether it was dread of the criminal’s arrival, or the night’s accumulated dross in her lungs, but it made her think of the grave. Everything’s collapsing inward, she thought.
One of the officers had gone to fetch Agnes from where they had left her tied with the horses. Margrét had only caught a distant glimpse of the woman when she had left the dim rooms of the farmhouse to bring the men their supper — a slight blur of blue, a smudge of skirt being hauled off a horse. Now her heart thumped. Soon the murderess would be in front of her. She would see the woman’s face; feel her warmth in the small confines. What was to be done? How to behave in front of such a woman?
If only Jón were here, she thought. He could tell me what I should say to her. It takes a man, a good man, to know how to manage a woman who has made her bed among stones.
Margrét sat down and absently picked at the grass in her hand. She had managed the servants who had drifted through her husband’s household for almost four decades, across as many farms, and yet she felt sluggish with her own uncertainty and apprehension. This woman, this Agnes, was not a servant, certainly no guest, and no pauper. She deserved no charity, and yet, she was condemned to die. Margrét shuddered. The light from the lamp played her shadow across the floorboards.
Dull footsteps sounded from the farmhouse doorway. Margrét stood quickly, the gathered grass fluttering to the ground as she released her clenched fists. The officer’s voice boomed from the shadows of the corridor.
‘Mistress Margrét of Kornsá? I have the prisoner. May we enter?’
Margrét took a deep breath and straightened her posture. ‘This way,’ she commanded.
The officer entered the badstofa first, smiling broadly at Margrét, who stood stiffly, her hands gripping the cloth of her apron. She glanced to where her daughters lay sleeping and felt the blood pulse in her throat.
There was a moment of silence as the officer blinked to accustom his eyes to the low light, and then, abruptly, he pulled the woman into the room.
Margrét was unprepared for the filth and wretchedness of the woman’s appearance. The criminal wore what seemed to be a servant’s common working dress of roughly woven wool, but one so badly stained and caked with dirt that the original blue dye was barely discernible under the brown grease that spread across the neckline and arms. A thick weight of dried mud pulled the fabric awkwardly from the woman’s body. Her faded blue stockings were soaked through, sunk about the ankles, and one was torn, exposing a slice of pale skin. Her shoes, of sealskin it seemed, had split at the seam, but were so covered in mud that it was impossible to see how damaged they were. Her hair was uncovered by a cap and matted with grease. It hung in two dark braids down her back. Several strands had come loose and fell limply about the woman’s neck. She looked as if she’d been dragged from Stóra-Borg, Margrét thought. The woman’s face was hidden; she stared at the floor.
‘Look at me.’
Agnes slowly raised her head. Margrét winced at the smear of dried blood across the woman’s mouth, and the grime that lay in streaks across her forehead. There was a yellow bruise that spread from her chin down to the side of her neck. Agnes’s eyes flickered from the ground to Margrét’s own, and she felt unnerved by their intensity, their colour made lighter and sharper by the dirt on her face. Margrét turned to the officer.
‘This woman has been beaten.’ The officer searched Margrét’s face for amusement, and, finding none, lowered his eyes. ‘Where are her things?’
‘Only the clothes on her back,’ the officer said. ‘The clerks took what she had to cover her vittles.’
Invigorated by a sudden curl of anger, Margrét pointed to the irons about the woman’s wrists.