The wind had raged and sleet had fallen all day long, since before noon, but now, late in the evening, the weather had grown worse until it was an actual snowstorm. The two visitors were completely covered in snow when they stepped into the room where the priest was sitting at the supper table with the rest of his household.
Gunnulf asked fearfully whether something was wrong back at the manor. But Kristin shook her head. Erlend was away on a visit in Gelmin, she said in reply to her brother-in-law’s queries, but she was so weary that she hadn’t felt like going with him.
The priest thought about how she had come all the way into town. The horses that she and Orm had ridden were exhausted; during the last part of the journey they had barely been able to struggle their way through the snowdrifts. Gunnulf sent his two servant women off with Kristin to find dry clothing for her. They were his foster mother and her sister—there were no other women at the priest’s house. He attended to his nephew himself. And all the while, Orm talked steadily.
“I think Kristin is ill. I told Father, but he got angry.”
She had been so unlike herself lately, said the boy. He didn’t know what was wrong. He couldn’t remember whether it was her idea or his for them to come here—oh yes, she had mentioned first that she had a great longing to go to Christ Church, and he had said that he would accompany her. So this morning, just as soon as his father had ridden off, Kristin told him she wanted to go today. Orm had agreed, even though the weather was threatening—but he didn’t like the look in her eyes.
Gunnulf thought to himself that he didn’t like it either, when Kristin returned to the room. She looked terribly thin in Ingrid’s black dress; her face was as pale as bast and her eyes were sunken, with dark blue circles underneath. Her gaze was strange and dark.
It had been three months since he had last seen her, when he attended the christening at Husaby. She had looked good then as she lay in bed in her finery, and she said she felt well—the birth had been an easy one. So he had protested when Ragnfrid Ivarsdatter and Erlend wanted to give the child to a foster mother; Kristin cried and begged to be allowed to nurse Bj?rgulf herself. The second son had been named after Lavrans’s father.
Now the priest asked first about Bj?rgulf; he knew that Kristin was not pleased with the wet nurse to whom they had given the child. But she said he was doing well and that Frida was fond of him and took better care of him than anyone had expected. And what about Nikulaus? asked her brother-in-law. Was he still so handsome? A little smile flitted across the mother’s face. Naakkve grew more and more handsome every day. No, he didn’t talk much, but otherwise he was ahead of his years in every way, and so big. No one would believe he was only in his second winter; even Fru Gunna said as much.
Then Kristin fell silent again. Master Gunnulf glanced at the two of them—his brother’s wife and his brother’s son—who were sitting on either side of him. They looked weary and sorrowful, and his heart felt uneasy as he gazed at them.
Orm had always seemed melancholy. The boy was now fifteen years old, and he would have been the most handsome of fellows if he hadn’t looked so delicate and weak. He was almost as tall as his father, but his body was much too slender and narrow-shouldered. His face resembled Erlend’s too, but his eyes were much darker blue, and his mouth, beneath the first downy black mustache, was even smaller and weaker, and it was always pressed tight with a sad little furrow at each corner. Even the back of Orm’s thin, tan neck under his curly black hair looked oddly unhappy as he sat there eating, slightly hunched forward.
Kristin had never sat at table with her brother-in-law in his own house. Last year she had come to town with Erlend for the springtime ting, and they had stayed at this residence, which Gunnulf had inherited from his father; but at that time the priest was living on the estate of the Brothers of the Cross, substituting for one of the canons. Master Gunnulf was now the parish priest for Steine, but he had a chaplain to assist him while he oversaw the work of copying manuscripts for the churches of the archbishopric while the cantor,1 Herr Eirik Finss?n, was ill. And during this time he lived in his own house.
The main hall was unlike any of the rooms Kristin was used to. It was a timbered building, but in the middle of the end wall, facing east, Gunnulf had had masons construct a large fireplace, like those he had seen in the countries of the south; a log fire burned between cast andirons. The table stood along one wall, and opposite were benches with writing desks. In front of a painting of the Virgin Mary burned a brass lamp, and nearby stood shelves of books.