Kristin Lavransdatter (Kristin Lavransdatter #1-3)

On Christmas Eve Kristin wanted to attend midnight mass at Nonneseter’s church; she said it was because the sisters sang so beautifully. All five of them decided to go. The night was starry and clear, mild and lovely; it had snowed a little in the evening, so it was quite bright. When the bells began to ring from the churches, people came streaming out of all the houses, and Simon had to give Kristin his hand. Now and then he would cast a sidelong glance at her. She had grown terribly thin in the autumn, but her tall, erect figure seemed to have regained some of its maidenly softness and quiet grace. Her pale face had assumed the expression from her youth of calm and gentleness, which hid a deep, tense wariness. She had taken on an oddly phantomlike resemblance to the young Kristin from that Christmastime so long ago. Simon gripped her hand hard, unaware that he was doing so until she squeezed his fingers in return. He looked up. She smiled and nodded, and he understood that she had interpreted the pressure of his hand as a reminder that she must remain brave—and now she was trying to show him that she would.

When the holy days were over, Kristin went out to the convent and asked to be allowed to pay her respects to the abbess and to those sisters who were still living there since she had left. She then spent a little time in the abbess’s parlatory. Afterwards she went into the church. She realized that there was nothing for her to gain inside the walls of the convent. The sisters had received her kindly, but she saw that for them she was merely one of the many young maidens who had spent a year there. If they had heard any talk about her distinguishing herself from the rest of the young daughters in any way, and not for the better, they made no mention of it. But that year at Nonneseter, which loomed so large in her own life, meant so little in the life of the cloister. Her father had bought for himself and his family a place in the convent’s prayers of intercession for their souls. The new abbess, Fru Elin, and the sisters said that they would pray for her and for her husband’s salvation. But Kristin saw that she had no right to force her way in and disturb the nuns with her visits. Their church stood open to her, as it did to everyone; she could stand in the north aisle and listen to the singing of the pure women’s voices from the choir; she could look around the familiar room, at the altars and pictures. And when the sisters left the church through the door to the convent courtyard, she could go up and kneel before the gravestone of Abbess Groa Guttormsdatter and think about the wise, powerful, and dignified mother whose words she had neither understood nor heeded. She had no other rights in this women’s residence for Christ’s servants.

At the end of the holy days, Sir Munan came to see Kristin. He said he had just learned that she was in Oslo. He greeted her heartily, as he did Simon Andress?n and Ulf, whom he kept calling his kinsman and dear friend. He thought it would be difficult for them to win permission to see Erlend; he was being kept under tight guard. Munan himself had not succeeded in gaining access to his cousin. But after the knight had ridden off, Ulf said with a laugh that he thought Munan probably hadn’t tried very hard—he was so deathly afraid of being mixed up in the case that he hardly dared hear mention of it. Munan had aged greatly; he was quite bald and gaunt, and his skin hung loosely on his large frame. He was living out at Skogheim, with one of his unlawful daughters, who was a widow. Munan would have liked to be rid of her because none of his other children, lawful or unlawful, would come near him as long as this half-sister was managing his household. She was a domineering, avaricious, and sharp-tongued woman. But Munan didn’t dare ask her to leave.

Finally, around New Year’s, Olav Kyrning obtained permission for Kristin and Simon to see Erlend. It was again Simon’s lot to escort the sorrowful wife to these heartbreaking meetings. The guards were much more careful here than they were in Nidaros not to let Erlend speak to anyone without the chieftain’s men being present.

Erlend was calm, as before, but Simon could see that the situation was now beginning to wear him down. He never complained; he said he suffered no privations and was treated as well as was allowed, but he admitted that the cold bothered him a good deal; there was no hearth fire in the room. And there was little he could do to keep himself clean—although, he jested, if he hadn’t had the lice to fight with, the time might have passed much more slowly out there.

Kristin too was calm—so calm that Simon held his breath with fear, waiting for the day when she would completely fall apart.

King Magnus was making his royal tour of Sweden, and there was little prospect that he would return to his homeland anytime soon, or that there would be any change in Erlend’s situation.





On Saint Gregor’s Day Kristin and Ulf Haldorss?n had been to church at Nonneseter. On their way home, as they crossed the bridge over the convent creek, she did not take the road to their hostel, which lay near the bishop’s citadel; instead, she turned east toward the lane near Saint Clement’s Church and headed along the narrow alleyways between the church and the river.

The day was hazy and gray, and a thaw had set in, so their footwear and the hems of their cloaks grew quickly soaked and heavy from the yellow mud near the river. They reached the fields along the riverbank. Once their eyes met. Ulf laughed softly and a kind of smirk appeared on his lips, but his eyes were sad; Kristin gave him an odd, sickly smile.

A moment later they were standing on the ridge of a hill; the earth had given way out here sometime before, and the farm now lay right below the hill—so close to the dirty-yellow slope, covered with tufts of black, dried weeds, that the rank stench from the pigsty, which they were looking down at, rose up toward them. Two fat sows were wallowing around in the dark muck. The riverbank was only a narrow strip here; the gray, murky current of the river, filled with careening ice floes, ran right up to the dilapidated buildings with the faded rooftops.

As they stood there, a man and a woman came walking over to the fenced area and looked at the pigs; the man leaned over and scratched one of the sows with the haft of the silver-chased, thin-bladed axe he was using as a staff. It was Munan Baards?n himself, and the woman was Brynhild Fluga. He looked up and noticed them. He stood there gaping, until Kristin shouted a merry greeting down to him.

Sir Munan began to bellow with laughter.

“Come down and have a hot ale in this vile weather,” he called.

On their way down to the farmyard fence, Ulf told Kristin that Brynhild Jonsdatter no longer kept an inn or an alehouse. She had been in trouble several times and was finally threatened with flogging, but Munan had come to her rescue and vouched for her; she promised to stop all her unlawful activities. And her sons now held such positions that, for their sake, their mother had to think about improving her reputation. After the death of his wife, Munan Baards?n had taken up with Brynhild again and was often over at Flugagaard.

He met them at the gate.

“All four of us are kinsmen, after a fashion,” he chuckled. He was slightly drunk, but not overly so. “You’re a good woman, Kristin Lavransdatter, pious but not at all haughty. Brynhild is now an honorable and respectable woman too. And I was an unmarried man when I produced the two sons we have together—and they’re the most splendid of all my children. That’s what I’ve told you every single day in all these years, Brynhild. I’m more fond of Inge and Gudleik than any of my other children. . . .”

Brynhild was still beautiful, but her skin was sallow and looked as if it would be clammy to the touch, thought Kristin—the way it does after standing over a pot of grease all day long. But her house was well-kept, the food and drink she set on the table were excellent, and the crockery was pleasing and clean.

“Yes, I drop by over here whenever I have business in Oslo,” said Munan. “A mother likes to hear news of her sons, you see. Inge writes to me himself, because he’s a learned man, Inge—a bishop’s envoy has to be, you know. . . . I found him a good match too: Tora Bjarnesdatter from Grjote. Do you think many men could have acquired such a woman for their bastard son? So we sit here and talk about that, and Brynhild brings in the food and ale for me, just like in the old days, when she wore my keys at Skogheim. It’s hard to sit out there now and think about my blessed wife . . . So I ride over here to find some solace—when Brynhild here has a mind to grant me a little kindness and warmth.”

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