He bent down over a dark body curled up on the wet patches of ice. Kristin knelt down and touched the man. It was young Haakon of Gimsar, and he was either senseless or dead. Her hands were at once covered with blood. With Ulf’s help she straightened out his body and turned him over. The blood was gushing out of his right arm, where his hand had been lopped off.
Involuntarily Kristin glanced at the window hatch of Margret’s chamber as it slammed shut in the wind. She couldn’t discern any face up there, but it was quite dark.
As she knelt in the rain puddles, clamping her hand as tight as she could around Haakon’s wrist to stop the spurting blood, she was aware of Erlend’s men standing half-dressed all around her. Then she noticed Erlend’s gray, contorted face. With a corner of his tunic he wiped off his bloody sword. He was naked underneath and his feet were bare.
“One of you . . . find me something to bind this with. And you, Bj?rn, go and wake up Sira Eiliv. We’ll carry him over to the parsonage.” She took the leather strap that they gave her and wrapped it around the stump of the man’s arm.
Suddenly Erlend said, his voice harsh and wild, “Nobody touch him! Let the man lie where he fell!”
“You must realize, husband, we can’t do that,” said Kristin calmly, although her heart was pounding so loud that she thought she would suffocate.
Erlend rammed the tip of his sword hard against the ground.
“Yes—she’s not your flesh and blood—you’ve made that quite clear to me every single day, for all these years.”
Kristin stood up and whispered quietly to him, “And yet for her sake I want this to be concealed—if it can be done. You men . . .” she turned to the servants who were standing around them. “If you’re loyal to your master, you won’t speak of this until he has told you how this quarrel with Haakon arose.”
All the men agreed. One of them dared step forward and explained: They had been awakened by the sound of a woman screaming, as if she were being taken by force. And then someone ran along their roof, but he must have slipped on the icy surface. They heard a scrambling noise and then a thud on the ground. But Kristin told the man to be silent. At that moment Sira Eiliv came running.
When Erlend turned on his heel and went inside, his wife ran after him and tried to force her way past him. When he headed for the ladder to the loft, she sprang in front of him and grabbed him by the arm.
“Erlend—what will you do to the child?” she gasped, looking up into his wild, gray face.
Without replying, he tried to fling her aside, but she held on tight.
“Wait, Erlend, wait—your child! You don’t know . . . The man was fully clothed,” she cried urgently.
He gave a loud wail before he answered. She turned as pale as a corpse with horror—his words were so raw and his voice unrecognizable with desperate anguish.
Then she wrestled mutely with the raging man. He snarled and gnashed his teeth, until she managed to catch his eye in the dim light.
“Erlend—let me go to her first. I haven’t forgotten the day when I was no better than Margret. . . .”
Then he released her and staggered backwards against the wall to the next room; he stood there, shaking like a dying beast. Kristin went to light a candle, then came back and went past him up to Margret in her bedchamber.
The first thing the candlelight fell on was a sword lying on the floor not far from the bed, and the severed hand beside it. Kristin tore off the wimple which she, without thinking, had wrapped loosely over her flowing hair before she went out to the men in the courtyard. Now she dropped it over the hand lying on the floor.
Margret was huddled up on the pillows at the headboard, staring at Kristin’s candle, wide-eyed and terrified. She was clutching the bedclothes around her, but her white shoulders shone naked under her golden curls. There was blood all over the room.
The strain in Kristin’s body erupted into violent sobs; it was such a terrible sight to see that fair young child amidst such horror.
Then Margret screamed loudly, “Mother—what will Father do to me?”
Kristin couldn’t help it: In spite of her deep sympathy for the girl, her heart seemed to shrink and harden in her breast. Margret didn’t ask what her father had done to Haakon. For an instant she saw Erlend lying on the ground and her own father standing over him with the bloody sword, and she herself . . . But Margret hadn’t budged. Kristin couldn’t stem her old feeling of scornful displeasure toward Eline’s daughter as Margret threw herself against her, trembling and almost senseless with fear. She sat down on the bed and tried to soothe the child.
That was how Erlend found them when he appeared on the ladder. He was now fully dressed. Margret began screaming again and hid her face in her stepmother’s arms. Kristin glanced up at her husband for a moment; he was calm now, but his face was pale and strange. For the first time he looked his age.
But she obeyed him when he said calmly, “You must go downstairs now, Kristin. I want to speak to my daughter alone.” Gently she laid the girl down on the bed, pulled the covers up to her chin, and went down the ladder.
She did as Erlend had done and got properly dressed—there would be no more sleep at Husaby that night—and then she set about reassuring the frightened children and servants.
The next morning, in a snowstorm, Margret’s maid left the manor in tears, carrying her possessions in a sack on her back. The master had chased her out with the harshest words, threatening to flay her bloody because she had sold her mistress in such a fashion.
Then Erlend interrogated the other servants. Hadn’t any of the maids suspected anything when all autumn and winter Ingeleiv kept coming to sleep with them instead of with Margret in her chamber? And the dogs had been locked up with them too. But all of them denied it, which was only to be expected.
Finally, he took his wife aside to speak to her alone. Sick at heart and deathly tired, Kristin listened to him and tried to counter his injustice with meek replies. She didn’t deny that she had been worried; but she didn’t tell him that she had never spoken to him of her fears because she received nothing but ingratitude every time she attempted to counsel him or Margret about the maiden’s best interests. And she swore by God and the Virgin Mary that she had never realized or even imagined that this man might come to Margret up in the loft at night.
“You!” said Erlend scornfully. “You said yourself that you remember the time when you were no better than Margret. And the Lord God in Heaven knows that every day, in all these years we’ve lived together, you’ve made certain I would see how you remember the injustice I did to you—even though your desire was as keen as mine. And it was your father, not I, who caused much of the unhappiness when he refused to give you to me as my wife. I was willing enough to rectify the sin from the very outset. When you saw the Gimsar gold . . .” He grabbed his wife’s hand and held it up; the two rings glittered which Erlend had given her while they were together at Gerdarud. “Didn’t you know what it meant? When all these years you’ve worn the rings I gave you after you let me take your honor?”
Kristin was faint with weariness and sorrow; she whispered, “I wonder, Erlend, whether you even remember that time when you won my honor. . . .”
Then he covered his face with his hands and flung himself down on the bench, his body writhing and convulsing. Kristin sat down some distance away; she wished she could help her husband. She realized that this misfortune was even harder for him to bear because he himself had sinned against others in the same way as they had now sinned against him. And he, who had never wanted to take the blame for any trouble he might have caused, couldn’t possibly bear the blame for this unhappiness—and there was no one else but her for him to fault. But she wasn’t angry as much as she was sad and afraid of what might happen next.