They don’t know me.
I remain quiet. I am determined to close myself to the world, to tighten my heart and hold on to what has not yet been stolen from me. I cannot let myself slip away. I will hold what I am inside, and keep my hands tight around all the things I have seen and heard, and felt. The poems composed as I washed and scythed and cooked until my hands were raw. The sagas I know by heart. I am sinking all I have left and going underwater. If I speak, it will be in bubbles of air. They will not be able to keep my words for themselves. They will see the whore, the madwoman, the murderess, the female dripping blood into the grass and laughing with her mouth choked with dirt. They will say ‘Agnes’ and see the spider, the witch caught in the webbing of her own fateful weaving. They might see the lamb circled by ravens, bleating for a lost mother. But they will not see me. I will not be there.
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 Bl?ndal’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.