‘Perhaps you might tell me a little more of your history. Of your family.’
Agnes took a deep breath and began to wind the wool from the spool slowly about her fingers. ‘I have no family.’
‘That’s impossible.’
She drew the wool tightly about her knuckles and the tips of her fingers grew darker from the trapped blood. ‘You might have seen their names in that book of yours, Reverend, but I may as well have been listed as an orphan.’
‘Why is that?’
There was a cough from outside the curtain, and a pair of fish-skin shoes could be seen shuffling under its hem.
‘Come in,’ Tóti announced. Agnes quickly unwound the wool from her fingers as the curtain was drawn to one side and Steina’s freckled face peeped through.
‘Sorry to disturb you, Reverend, but Mamma’s asking for her.’ She hastily gestured towards Agnes, who began to rise out of her chair.
‘We are talking,’ Tóti said.
‘Sorry, Reverend. It’s the harvest. I mean, it’s high July, so it’s haymaking today and onwards. Well, at least while the sun holds.’
‘Steina, I’ve come all this —’
Agnes put a hand lightly on his shoulder and gave him a hard look that silenced him. He stared at her hand, her long, pale fingers, the pinking blister on her thumb. Noting his gaze, Agnes removed her hand as swiftly as she had placed it there. ‘Come again tomorrow, Reverend. If you care to. We can talk as the dew dries from the hay.’
PERHAPS IT IS A SHAME that I have vowed to keep my past locked up within me. At Hvammur, during the trial, they plucked at my words like birds. Dreadful birds, dressed in red with breasts of silver buttons, and cocked heads and sharp mouths, looking for guilt like berries on a bush. They did not let me say what happened in my own way, but took my memories of Illugastadir, of Natan, and wrought them into something sinister; they wrested my statement of that night and made me seem malevolent. Everything I said was taken from me and altered until the story wasn’t my own.
I thought they might believe me. When they beat the drum in that tiny room and Blöndal announced ‘Guilty’, the only thing I could think of was, if you move, you will crumble. If you breathe, you will collapse. They want to disappear you.
After the trial, the priest from Tjörn told me that I would burn if I did not cast my mind back over the sin of my life and pray for forgiveness. As though prayer could simply pluck sin out. But any woman knows that a thread, once woven, is fixed in place; the only way to smooth a mistake is to let it all unravel.
Natan did not believe in sin. He said that it is the flaw in the character that makes a person. Even nature defies her own rules for the sake of beauty, he said. For the sake of creation. To keep her own blood hot. You understand, Agnes.
He told me this after the two-headed lamb was born at Stapar. One of the servants had run to Illugastadir to tell of it, but by the time Natan and I arrived the lamb was dead. The farmer had killed it on sight because he thought it cursed. Natan asked to take the body so that he might dissect it and learn how it had been formed, but as he unburied the lamb, one of the women walked up to him and spat: ‘Let the Devil take care of his own.’ I watched as he laughed in her face.
We carried the strange thing to his workshop, and, covered with blood and dirt and sickened to the heart, I left Natan alone to butcher it. Sigga and I did not eat the scraps of meat he cut from it, and although he called us ungrateful, although he reminded us of the number of coins he’d exchanged for the twisted corpse, his appetite was not great either. We left the meat for fox bait. The twinned skull he kept in his workshop, the bone the colour of new cream.
I wonder if the Reverend sees me like that lamb. A curiosity. Cursed. How do men ever see women like me?
But the priest is hardly like a man at all. He is as fragile as a child without the bluster and idiocy of youth. I had remembered him as taller than he is. I hardly know what to think of him.
Perhaps he is merely a gifted liar. God knows I have met enough men to know that once weaned off the breast they begin to lie through their teeth.
I will have to think of what to say to him.
THE FOG HAD DISPERSED INTO the blue of the day, and the wet baubles on the grass had dried by the time the family of Kornsá gathered at the edge of the home field to begin cutting the hay. District Officer Jón stood to one side with the two male farmhands recently returned from Reykjavík — Bjarni and Gudmundur — both with long blond hair and beards, and Kristín, Margrét and Lauga to the other. They were all waiting silently for Steina and Agnes to join the circle. Steina stumbled along the yard, Agnes following her, tying a scarf over her braided hair.
‘We’re here,’ Steina said cheerfully. Agnes nodded at Jón and Margrét. The farmhands glanced at her and then at each other.
Jón bowed his head. ‘Our good Lord. We thank you for the good weather you have sent for our harvest. We pray that you see fit to preserve us in this time, to keep us from danger and accident, and to provide us with the hay we need to live. In Jesus’ name, amen.’
The farmhands mumbled their amens, and picked up their long-handled scythes. They had been recently hammered and sharpened, and the iron blades shone brightly. Gudmundur, a short muscular man of twenty-eight, tested the edge of his scythe on the hair of his wrist, then, satisfied the edge was sufficiently honed, swiftly turned it the right way round and scraped it against the grass at his foot. He looked up and noticed Agnes watching him.
‘Gudmundur and Bjarni,’ the District Officer was saying. ‘You’ll be cutting with Kristín and…’ Jón hesitated, then briefly glanced at Agnes. The farmhands followed his look, and stared.
‘You’re giving her a scythe?’ Bjarni asked casually, a sallow-looking man. He laughed nervously.
Margrét cleared her throat. ‘Agnes and Kristín will be cutting with you three and Jón. Steina, Lauga and I will rake and turn.’ She glared at Gudmundur, who was smirking at Bjarni, and spat on the ground near his feet.
‘Give them scythes,’ Jón said quietly, and Gudmundur dropped his own on the ground. He turned and picked up another two scythes and handed one to Kristín, who gave a confused curtsey, and then he reached forward to pass the other to Agnes. She extended her arm to take it, but Gudmundur refused to let go. For a brief moment they both stood there, clasping the handle of the scythe together, before Gudmundur suddenly released his hold. Agnes stumbled backwards and the scythe grazed her ankle. Bjarni stifled a laugh.
‘Go fetch your rakes, girls,’ Jón said, ignoring the grins of the farmhands and Lauga, who could not help but smile at Agnes’s panicked glance at her leg.
‘Are you hurt?’ Steina whispered to Agnes as she walked past. Agnes shook her head, her jaw clenched. Margrét looked at her daughter and frowned.
I LET MY BODY FALL into a rhythm. I sway back and forth and let gravity bring the scythe down and through the grass, until I rock steadily. Until I feel that I am not moving myself, and that the sun is driving me. Until I am a puppet of the wind, and of the scythe, and of the long, slow strokes that propel my body forward. Until I couldn’t stop if I wanted to.
It’s a good feeling, not quite being in control. Of being gently swung back and forth, until I forget what it is to be still. Like being with Natan in those first months, when my heartbeat shuddered through me and I could have died, I was so happy to be desired. When the smell of him, of sulphur and crushed herbs, and horse-sweat and the smoke from his forge, made me dizzy with pleasure. With possibility.