He took my hands and ran them over the white fox fur.
‘Feel that? These will fetch a pretty penny at Reykjavík this summer.’
He told me how he caught the foxes up in the mountains. ‘The trick is to find and catch a fox kit,’ he said. ‘The kit must then be made to cry out to its parents, otherwise it’s near impossible to lure them out of their hole. They’re wily things. Cunning. They smell you coming.’
‘And how do you make a fox kit cry?’
‘I break its front legs. They cannot escape then. The parents hear it mewling and come running out of their den, and they’re easily caught. They won’t leave one of their own.’
‘What do you do with the kit after you kill its parents?’
‘Some hunters leave it there to die. They are no use for market – the skins are too small.’
‘What do you do?’
‘I stove their heads in with a rock.’
‘That is the only decent thing to do.’
‘Yes. To leave them is cruelty.’
He showed me his books. He thought I might like them. ‘Sigga does not care for words,’ he said. ‘She is a terrible reader. It’s like trying to make a cow talk.’
I ran my fingers over the sheets of paper and tried to read the new words they offered.
‘Cutaneous diseases.’ He corrected my awkward tongue. ‘Cochlearia officinalis.’
‘Say it again.’
‘Cetraria islandica. Angelica archangelica. Achilla millefolium. Rumex digynus.’
It was a language I didn’t understand, so I stopped his laughs with kisses, and felt his tongue press lightly against my own. What did all these words mean? Were they the names of the things in his workshop? In the jars and bottles and clay pots? Natan kissed my neck and my thoughts were lost in a rising swarm of lust. He lifted me onto the table, and we fumbled with our clothes before he pushed himself inside me, before I knew what we were doing, before I was ready. I gasped. I felt the papers beneath me, and imagined the words lifting from the page and sinking into my skin. My legs were tight around him, and I felt the cold sea air grasp me about the throat.
Later, I stood naked, my hips pressed against the edge of his table. Natan’s books lay in front of me, the papers were wrinkled, showed eddies of our love.
‘Look at all this illness, Natan. Books and books of disease and horror.’
‘Agnes.’
He said my name softly, letting the ‘s’ carry over his tongue, as though tasting it.
‘Natan. If there is so much illness in the world . . . if there is so much that can go wrong with a person, how is it that any of us remain alive?’
Sigga must have known about us. Those first nights at Illugastadir we waited until she fell asleep. I’d hear Natan’s careful tread on the floorboards of the badstofa, and feel the gentle tug of blankets. I tried so hard to be quiet. We knotted ourselves together as though we should never become undone, but the first bar of morning light that came through the window severed our trysts as though it were a knife.
He always returned to his own bed before Sigga awoke.
AGNES SEEMED TO BE LOST in thought. It wasn’t until Tóti gently put a hand on her shoulder that she gave a start and noticed he had come back into the room.
‘I’m sorry to startle you,’ he said.
‘Oh no,’ Agnes replied, a little breathlessly. ‘I was only counting stitches.’
‘Shall we continue?’ he asked.
‘What was I saying?’