This room seemed strange to her, and her brother-in-law seemed strange too, now that she saw him sitting at the table with members of his household—clerics and servant men who looked oddly priestlike. There were also several poor people: old men and a young boy with thin, reddish eyelids clinging like membranes to his empty eye sockets. On the women’s bench next to the old housekeepers sat a young woman with a two-year-old child on her lap; she was hungrily gulping down the stew and stuffing her child’s mouth so that his cheeks were about to burst.
It was the custom for all priests at Christ Church to give supper to the poor. But Kristin had heard that fewer beggars came to Gunnulf Nikulauss?n than to any of the other priests, and yet—or perhaps this was the very reason—he seated them on the benches next to him in the main hall and received every wanderer like an honored guest. They were served food from his own platter and ale from the priest’s own barrels. The poor would come whenever they felt in need of a supper of stew, but otherwise they preferred to go to the other priests, where they were given porridge and weak ale in the cookhouse.
As soon as the scribe had finished the prayers after the meal, the poor guests wanted to leave. Gunnulf spoke gently to each of them, asking whether they would like to spend the night or whether they needed anything else; but only the blind boy remained. The priest implored in particular the young woman with the child to stay and not take the little one out into the night, but she murmured an excuse and hurried off. Then Gunnulf asked a servant to make sure that Blind Arnstein was given ale and a good bed in the guest room. He put on a hooded cape.
“You must be tired, Orm and Kristin, and want to go to bed. Audhild will take care of you. You’ll probably be asleep when I return from the church.”
Then Kristin asked to go with him. “That’s why I’ve come here,” she said, fixing her despairing eyes on Gunnulf. Ingrid lent her a dry cloak, and she and Orm joined the small procession departing from the parsonage.
The bells were ringing as if they were right overhead in the black night sky—it wasn’t far to the church. They trudged through deep, wet, new snow. The weather was calm now, with a few snowflakes still drifting down here and there, shimmering faintly in the dark.
Dead tired, Kristin tried to lean against the pillar she was standing next to, but the stone was icy cold. She stood in the dark church and stared up at the candles in the choir. She couldn’t see Gunnulf up there, but he was sitting among the priests, with a candle beside his book. No, she would not be able to speak to him, after all.
Tonight it seemed to her that there was no help to be found anywhere. Back home Sira Eiliv admonished her because she brooded so much over her everyday sins—he said this was the temptation of pride. She should simply be diligent with her prayers and good deeds, and then she wouldn’t have time to dwell on such matters. “The Devil is no fool; he’ll realize that he will lose your soul in the end, and he won’t feel like tempting you as much.”
She listened to the antiphony and remembered the nuns’ church in Oslo. There she had raised her poor little voice with others in the hymn of praise—and down in the nave stood Erlend, wrapped in a cape up to his chin, and the two of them thought only of finding a chance to speak to each other in secret.
And she had thought that this heathen and burning love was not so terrible a sin. They couldn’t help themselves—and they were both unmarried. It was at most a transgression against the laws of men. Erlend wanted to escape from a terrible life of sin, and she imagined that he would have greater strength to free himself from the old burden if she put her life and her honor and her happiness into his hands.
The last time she knelt here in this church she had fully realized that when she said such things in her heart she had been trying to deceive God with tricks and lies. It was not because of their virtue but because of their good fortune that there were still commandments they had not broken, sins they had not committed. If she had been another man’s wife when she met Erlend . . . she would not have been any more sparing of his salvation or his honor than she was of the man she had so mercilessly spurned. It seemed to her now that there was nothing that wouldn’t have tempted her back then, in her ardor and despair. She had felt her passion temper her will until it was sharp and hard like a knife, ready to cut through all bonds—those of kinship, Christianity, and honor. There was nothing inside her except the burning hunger to see him, to be near him, to open her lips to his hot mouth and her arms to the deadly sweet desire which he had taught her.