Hannah Kent - Burial Rites

In the days and nights after Jón had returned from meeting with Blöndal, Margrét had tried to imagine how she would act towards the murderess, and what the woman might look like.

What sort of woman kills men?

The only murderesses Margrét had known were the women in the sagas, and even then, it was with words that they had killed men; orders given to servants to slay lovers or avenge the death of kin. Those women murdered from a distance and kept their fingers clean.

But these times are not saga times, Margrét had thought. This woman is not a saga woman. She’s a landless workmaid raised on a porridge of moss and poverty.

Lying back down in her bed, Margrét thought of Hjördis, her favourite servant, now dead and buried in the churchyard at Undirfell. She tried to imagine Hjördis as a murderess. Tried to imagine Hjördis stabbing her as she slept, the same way Natan Ketilsson and Pétur Jónsson had died. Those slender fingers wrapped tightly around a hilt, the silent footsteps in the night.

It was impossible.

Lauga had asked Margrét whether she thought there would be an outward hint of the evil that drives a person to murder. Evidence of the Devil: a harelip, a snaggle tooth, a birthmark; some small outer defect. There must be a warning, some way of knowing, so that honest people could keep their guard. Margrét had said no, she thought it all superstition, but Lauga had remained unconvinced.

Margrét had instead wondered if the woman would be beautiful. She knew, like everyone else in the north, that the famous Natan Ketilsson had had a knack for discovering beauty. People had thought him a sorcerer.

Margrét’s neighbour, Ingibjörg, had heard that it was Agnes who had caused Natan to break off his affair with Poet-Rósa. They had wondered if this meant the servant would be more beautiful than her. It was not so hard to believe a beautiful woman capable of murder, Margrét thought. As it says in the sagas, Opt er flagð í fögru skinni . A witch often has fair skin.

But this woman was neither ugly nor a beauty. Striking perhaps, but not the sort to inspire hungry glances from young men. She was very slender, elf-slender as the southerners would put it, and of an ordinary height. In the kitchen last night, Margrét had thought the woman’s face rather long, had noted high cheekbones and a straight nose. Bruises aside, her skin was pale, and it seemed more so because of the darkness of her hair. Unusual hair. Rare for a woman to have hair like that in these parts, thought Margrét. So long, so dark in colour: an inky brown, almost black.

Margrét drew the covers up to her chin as the officer’s snores continued their unceasing rumble. One would think an avalanche was approaching, she thought, annoyed. She felt tired, and her chest was heavy with mucus.

Images of the woman crowded behind Margrét’s closed eyelids. The animal way Agnes had drunk from the kettle. Her inability to undress herself. The woman’s hands had fumbled at the ties; her fingers had been swollen and would not bend. Margrét had been forced to help her, using her fingertips to crumble the dried mud off Agnes’s dress so that the lacings could be undone. Within the confines of the small kitchen, smoky as it was, the stench from the clothes and from Agnes’s sour body had been enough to make Margrét retch. She had held her breath as she pulled the fetid wool off Agnes’s skin, and had turned her head away when the dress fell from those thin shoulders and dropped to the floor, raising motes of dried mud.

Margrét recalled Agnes’s shoulderblades. Razor-sharp, they’d poked out from the rough cloth of her undergarment, which was yellowed around the neckline and stained a filthy brown under the armpits.

Margrét would have to burn all the woman’s clothes before breakfast. She had left them in a corner of the kitchen last night, unwilling to bring them into the badstofa. Fleas had crawled through their weave.

Somehow, she had managed to wash off most of the grime and dirt from the criminal’s body. Agnes had tried to wash herself, feebly running the damp rag over her limbs, but the grime had been so long upon her skin that it seemed ground into her pores. Eventually, Margrét, rolling up her sleeves and clenching her teeth, had snatched the rag off her and scrubbed Agnes until the cloth was soiled through. As she washed her, Margrét had — in spite of herself — looked for the blemishes Lauga had thought would be evident, a sign of the murderess. Only the woman’s eyes had hinted at something. They seemed different, Margrét thought. Very blue and clear, but too light a shade to be considered pretty.

The woman’s body was a terrain of abuse. Even Margrét, accustomed to wounds, to the inevitable maladies wrought by hard labour and accident, had been shocked.

Perhaps she’d scrubbed Agnes’s skin too hard, Margrét thought, pushing her head under the pillow in an effort to shut out the gargled snores of the officer. Some of the woman’s sores had broken and wept. The sight of fresh blood had given Margrét some secret satisfaction.

She had made Agnes soak her hair, also. The water from the kettle had been too full of silt and scum, so Margrét had requested an officer fetch more from the mountain stream. While they waited, she had dressed the woman’s wounds with an ointment of sulphur and lard.

‘This is Natan Ketilsson’s own medicine,’ she had said, casting an eye up to catch the woman’s reaction. Agnes had said nothing, but Margrét thought she had seen the muscles in her neck tighten. ‘God rest his soul,’ Margrét had muttered.

With Agnes’s hair washed as good as could be in the freezing water, and most of the weeping sores plugged with lard, Margrét had given her the undergarments and bedding of Hjördis. Hjördis had been wearing the underdress Agnes now slept in when she died. Margrét suspected it did not make a difference if a mite of contagion lingered. Its new owner would be dead soon enough.

How strange to imagine that, in a short while, the woman who slept in a bed not ten feet from her would be underground.

Margrét sighed and sat up in bed again. Agnes still had not moved. The officer snored on. Margrét watched him as he pushed a hand into his groin and scratched it, audibly. She averted her eyes, amused and a little annoyed that this man was her only protection.

Might as well get up and begin preparing something for the officers’ breakfast, she thought. Skyr perhaps. Or dried fish. She wondered whether she had enough butter to spare, and when the servants would return from Reykjavík with their supplies.

Loosening her nightcap, Margrét cast one last glance at the sleeping woman.

Her heart jumped into her mouth. In the dim recesses of the badstofa, Agnes lay on her side, calmly watching Margrét.

IT IS SAID OF THE CRIME that Fridrik Sigurdsson, with the assistance of Agnes Magnúsdóttir and Sigrídur Gudmundsdóttir, came inside Natan Ketilsson’s home close to midnight, and stabbed and thrashed Natan and Pétur Jónsson, who was a guest there, to death with a knife and hammer. Then, due to the gushing and smearing of the bodies that was apparent, burnt them by setting fire to the farm so that their evil work would not be apparent. Fridrik came to commit this evil through hatred of Natan, and a desire to steal. The murder was eventually exposed. The District Commissioner was suspicious, and when the half-burnt bodies were revealed, he believed that those three had been a gang.

From the Supreme Court Trials of 1829.

I DID NOT DREAM IN the storeroom at Stóra-Borg. Curled up on the wooden slats with a mouldy horse-skin for warmth, sleep came to me like a thin tide of water. It would lap against my body but never submerge me in oblivion. There would be something to wake me — the sound of footsteps, or the scrape of the chamber pot on the floor as a maid came to empty it, the heady stink of piss. Sometimes, if I lay still with my eyes tightly closed and pushed every thought out of my mind, sleep would trickle back. My mind would shift in and out of consciousness, until the briefest chink of light crept into the room, and the servants shoved me a bit of dried fish. Some days I think that I haven’t really slept since the fire, and that maybe sleeplessness is punishment from God. Or Blöndal, even: my dreams taken with my belongings to pay for my custody.