CHAPTER 2
ALL SUMMER LONG Kristin thought of little else but what Simon had told her about her mother’s death.
Ragnfrid Ivarsdatter had died alone; no one had been near as she drew her last breath except a servant woman, who was asleep. And it helped very little that Simon had said she was well prepared for her death. It was like the providence of God that several days earlier Ragnfrid had felt such a longing for the body of the Savior that she made her confession and was given communion by the priest of the cloister, who was her confessor. It was true that she had been granted a good death. Simon saw her body and said he thought it a wondrous sight—she had grown so beautiful in death. She was a woman of nearly sixty, and for many years her face had been greatly lined and wrinkled, and yet now it was completely changed; her face was youthful and smooth, and she looked just like a young woman asleep. She had been laid to rest at her husband’s side; there they had also brought Ulvhild Lavransdatter’s remains shortly after her father’s death. On top of the graves a large slab of stone had been placed, divided in two by a beautifully carved cross. On a winding banner a long Latin verse had been written, composed by the prior of the cloister, but Simon couldn’t remember it properly, for he understood little of that language.
Ragnfrid had lived in her own house on the estate in town where the corrodians of the cloister resided; she had a small room with a lovely loft room above. There she lived alone with a poor peasant woman who had taken lodgings with the brothers in return for a small payment, provided she would lend a hand to one of the wealthier women lodgers. But during the past half year, it had been Ragnfrid who had served the other woman, because the widow, whose name was Torgunna, had been unwell. Ragnfrid tended to her with great love and kindness.
On the last evening of her life, she had attended evensong in the cloister church, and afterwards she went into the cookhouse of the estate. She made a hearty soup with several restorative herbs and told the other women there that she was going to give the soup to Torgunna. She hoped the woman would feel well enough the next day so that they could both attend matins. That was the last time anyone saw the widow of J?rundgaard alive. Neither she nor the peasant woman came to matins or to the next service. When some of the monks in the choir noticed that Ragnfrid didn’t come to the morning mass either, they were greatly surprised—she had never before missed three services in a day. They sent word to town, asking whether the widow of Lavrans Bj?rgulfs?n was ill. When the servants went up to the loft, they found the soup bowl standing untouched on the table. In the bed, Torgunna was sleeping sweetly against the wall. But Ragnfrid Ivarsdatter lay on the edge with her hands crossed over her breast—dead and already nearly cold. Simon and Ramborg went to her funeral, which was very beautiful.
Now that there were so many people in the Husaby household and Kristin had six sons, she could no longer manage to take part in all the individual chores that had to be done. She had to have a housekeeper to assist her. The mistress of the manor would usually sit in the hall with her sewing. There was always someone who needed clothing—Erlend, Margret, or one of the boys.
The last time she had seen her mother, Ragnfrid was riding behind her husband’s bier, on that bright spring day while she herself stood in the meadow outside J?rundgaard and watched her father’s funeral procession setting off across the green carpet of winter rye beneath the hillside scree.
Kristin’s needle flew in and out as she thought about her parents and their home at J?rundgaard. Now that everything had become memories, she seemed to see so much that she hadn’t noticed when she was in the midst of it all—when she took for granted her father’s tenderness and protection, as well as the steady, quiet care and toil of her silent, melancholy mother. She thought about her own children; she loved them more than the blood of her own heart, and there was not a waking hour when she wasn’t thinking about them. And yet there was much in her soul that she brooded over more—her children she could love without brooding. While she lived at J?rundgaard, she had never thought otherwise than that her parents’ whole life and everything they did was for the sake of her and her sisters. Now she seemed to realize that great currents of both sorrow and joy had flowed between these two people, who had been given to each other in their youth by their fathers, without being asked. And she knew nothing of this except that they had departed from her life together. Now she understood that the lives of these two people had contained much more than love for their children. And yet that love had been strong and wide and unfathomably deep; while the love she gave them in return was weak and thoughtless and selfish, even back in her childhood when her parents were her whole world. She seemed to see herself standing far, far away—so small at that distance of time and place. She was standing in the flood of sunlight streaming in through the smoke vent in the old hearth house back home, the winter house of her childhood. Her parents were standing back in the shadows, and they seemed to tower over her, as tall as they had been when she was small. They were smiling at her, in the way she now knew one smiles at a little child who comes and pushes aside dark and burdensome thoughts.