Now and then, if all three of them happened to fall asleep for a while, she would stretch out on the bed beside them, fully dressed. Erlend came and went, looking helplessly at his three small sons. He tried to sing to them, but they didn’t care for their father’s fine voice—they wanted their mother to sing, even though she didn’t have the voice for it.
The servant women would come in, wanting their mistress to rest; the men would come in to inquire about the boys; and Orm tried to play with his young brothers. At Kristin’s advice, Erlend had sent Margret over to ?sterdal, but Orm wanted to stay—he was grown up now, after all. Sira Eiliv sat at the children’s bedside whenever he wasn’t out tending to the sick. Through work and worry the priest had shed all the corpulence he had acquired at Husaby; it grieved him greatly to see so many fair young children perish. And some grownups had died too.
By the evening of the sixth day, all the children were so much better that Kristin promised her husband to undress and go to bed that night. Erlend offered to keep watch along with the maids and to call Kristin if need be. But at the supper table she noticed that Orm’s face was bright red and his eyes were shiny with fever. He said it was nothing, but he jumped up abruptly and rushed out. When Erlend and Kristin went out to him, they found him vomiting in the courtyard.
Erlend threw his arms around the youth.
“Orm, my son. Are you ill?”
“My head aches,” complained the boy, and he let his head sink heavily onto his father’s shoulder.
That night they kept vigil over Orm. Most of the time he lay there muttering in delirium—then screaming loudly and flailing his long arms about, seeming to see hideous things. What he said they could not understand.
In the morning Kristin collapsed. It turned out that she must have been with child again; now it went very badly for her, and afterwards she lay as if immersed in a deathlike sleep; later she was seized by a terrible fever. Orm had been in the grave for more than two weeks before she learned of her stepson’s death.
At the time she was so weak that she couldn’t properly grieve. She felt so bloodless and faint that nothing seemed to reach her—she was content to lie in bed, only half-alive. There had been a dreadful time when the women hardly dared touch her or tend to her cleanliness, but that had all merged with the confusion of the fever. Now it felt good to submit to the care of others. Around her bed hung many fragrant wreaths of mountain flowers which were meant to keep the flies away—the people from the mountain pastures had sent them, and they smelled especially sweet whenever there was rain in the air. One day Erlend brought the children to her. She saw that they were haggard from their illness, and that Gaute didn’t recognize her, but even that didn’t trouble her. She merely sensed that Erlend seemed always to be at her side.
He went to mass every day, and he knelt at Orm’s grave to pray. The cemetery was next to the parish church at Vinjar, but some of the infants in the family had been given a resting place inside the manor church at Husaby—Erlend’s two brothers and one of Munan Biskopss?n’s little daughters. Kristin had often felt sorry for these little ones who lay so alone under the flagstones. Now Orm Erlendss?n had his final resting place among these children.
While the others feared for Kristin’s life, processions of beggars on their way to Nidaros just before Saint Olav’s Day began to pass through the region. They were mostly the same wandering men and women who had made the journey the year before; the pilgrims in Nidaros were always generous to the poor, since intercessions of this kind were considered particularly powerful. And they had learned to travel by way of Skaun during the years since Kristin had settled at Husaby. They knew that there on the estate they would be given shelter, alms, and an abundance of food before they continued on. This time the servants wanted to send them away because the mistress was ill. But when Erlend, who had been up north the last two summers, heard that his wife was accustomed to receiving the beggars so kindly, he ordered that they should be given food and lodging, just as they had before. And in the morning he himself tended to the wanderers, helping the servants to pour the ale and bring in food for them; he gave them alms as he quietly asked for their prayers of intercession for his wife. Many of the beggars wept when they heard that the gentle young woman lay close to death.
All of this Sira Eiliv had told Kristin when she began to regain her health. Not until Christmastime was she strong enough to take up her keys again.
Erlend had sent word to her parents as soon as she fell ill, but at the time they were in the south, attending a wedding at Skog. Later they came to Husaby; she was better by then, but so tired that she had little energy to talk to them. What she wanted most was simply to have Erlend at her bedside.
Weak and pale and always cold, she would cling to his healthy body. The old fire in her blood had gone. It had disappeared so completely that she could no longer remember how it felt to love in that way, but with it had also vanished the worry and bitterness from the past few years. She felt that things were better now, even though the sorrow over Orm’s death lay heavily on both of them, and even though Erlend didn’t realize how frightened she was for little Gaute. But things were so good between them. She saw that he had feared terribly that he might lose her.
And so it was difficult and painful for her to speak to him, to touch on matters that might destroy the peace and joy they now shared.
She was standing outside in the bright summer night, in front of the entrance to the main house, when the servants returned from the dance. Margret was clinging to her father’s arm. She was dressed and adorned in a fashion that would have been more suited to a wedding feast than to a dance out on the green, where all manner of folk came together. But her stepmother had stopped interfering in the maiden’s upbringing. Erlend could do as he pleased in raising his own daughter.
Erlend and Margret were both thirsty, so Kristin brought ale for them. The girl sat and talked with them for a while; she and her stepmother were good friends now that Kristin no longer attempted to instruct her. Erlend laughed at everything his daughter said about the dance. But finally Margret and her maid went up to the loft to sleep.
Erlend continued roaming around the hall; he stretched, yawned, but claimed he wasn’t tired. He ran his fingers through his long black hair.
“There wasn’t time for it after we were in the bathhouse. Because of the dance. I think you’ll have to cut my hair, Kristin; I can’t walk around like this during the holy days.”
Kristin protested that it was too dark, but Erlend laughed and pointed to the vent hole in the ceiling; it was already daylight again. Then she relit the candle, told him to sit down, and draped a cloth around his shoulders. As she worked, he squirmed from the tickling, and laughed when the scissors came too close to his neck.
Kristin carefully gathered up the hair clippings and burned them in the hearth; she shook out the cloth over the fire as well. Then she combed Erlend’s hair straight down from his scalp and snipped here and there, wherever the ends weren’t quite even.
Erlend grabbed her hands tightly as she stood behind him, placed them at his throat, and smiled as he tilted his head back to look up at her.
But then he let her go, saying, “You’re tired.” And he stood up with a little sigh.
Erlend sailed to Bj?rgvin right after Midsummer. He was disconsolate because his wife was again unable to travel with him. She smiled wearily; all the same, she wouldn’t have been able to leave Gaute.