This is what I tell the Reverend. I try to tell the story in the best way I know how. I let the words come as I knit, and I snatch little looks at the Reverend’s face, to see if he is moved.
I can feel the others listening. I can feel Steina and Margrét and Kristín and Lauga stretching their ears towards us in the shadowy corner, eating up this story like fresh butter and bread. Margrét and Lauga maybe thinking that it served me right, perhaps feeling sorry for me. Steina thinking I am like her – miserable, ignored. At fault.
But because I know the others are listening, I can’t ask the Reverend what I want to ask. I can’t say, Reverend, do you think that I’m here because when I was a child I said I wanted to die? Because, when I said it, I meant it. I pronounced it like a prayer. I hope I die. Did I author my own fate, then?
I want to ask the Reverend if he thinks I killed the baby. Did I hold her too tightly? But there is no right way to ask this question, and I don’t want to put more thoughts into these women’s heads. There are some things they should not hear.
It seems everyone I love is taken from me and buried in the ground, while I remain alone.
Good thing, then, that there is no one left to love. No one left to bury.
‘WHAT HAPPENED THEN?’ TóTI ASKED. He realised that he had hardly breathed during Agnes’s story.
‘It’s strange,’ Agnes said, using her little finger to wind the wool about the needle head. ‘Most of the time when I think of when I was younger, everything is unclear. As though I were looking at things through smoked glass. But Inga’s death, and everything that came after it . . . I almost feel that it was yesterday.’
Across the room, a chair scraped. Margrét gave a muffled cough.
‘I remember that after Inga died Jón was sent to fetch Bj?rn’s relatives,’ Agnes continued. ‘I can remember lying in my bed, watching my foster-father sit on the stool Inga had used for her spindle work. He was too big for its seat. Kjartan was in bed with me, and he was sleeping all hot and heavy on my shoulder. The wind had dropped and it was suddenly very quiet.
‘We eventually heard the clink of harness from the yard outside. Then Bj?rn slowly rose to his feet and stepped towards my bed. He scooped my brother up with one arm so I could sit, and he told me to take the dead baby, wrap its face in a blanket and put it in the storeroom.
‘The baby seemed lighter dead than alive. I held it out from me and walked down the corridor in my stockings.
‘It was very chill in the storeroom. I could see the fog of my breath before me, and my forehead ached from cold. I covered the baby’s face with a corner of the cloth it was wrapped in and laid it upon a sack of dried cod heads. When I stepped back into the corridor, a blast of freezing air hit the side of my face, and I turned to see the door open, the faces of Bj?rn’s brother, sister-in-law and their servant appearing from the murk outside. Their cheeks were wet and shiny from sleet.
‘I remember Uncle Ragnar and Jón carefully carrying Inga down from the loft while Bj?rn was outside, attending to the sheep. It was my job to make sure they didn’t bump her head against the rungs of the ladder. They brought her into the badstofa and set her on the stripped bed. Aunt Rósa was in the kitchen heating some water, and when I asked her what she was doing, she said she was going to clean my poor foster-mamma’s body. She wouldn’t let me watch. She let Kjartan play by her feet, and she ordered me to go upstairs to the loft and help her servant, Gudbj?rg.
‘When I climbed the ladder I saw Gudbj?rg scrubbing blood off the floorboards. The smell made me feel sick and I started to cry. Gudbj?rg took me into her arms. “She’s gone to God now, Agnes. She’s safe.”