The next day, which was Ash Wednesday, the people of Husaby had to go to the parish church at Vinjar. But at vespers Kristin asked the curate to let her into the church at Husaby.
She could still feel the ashes on her head as she knelt beside her stepson’s grave and said the Pater noster for his soul.
By now there was probably not much left of the boy but bones beneath the stone. Bones and hair and a scrap of the clothing he had been laid to rest in. She had seen the remains of her little sister when they dug up her grave to take her body to her father in Hamar. Dust and ashes. She thought about her father’s handsome features; about her mother’s big eyes in her lined face, and Ragnfrid’s figure which continued to look strangely young and delicate and light, even though her face seemed old so early. Now they lay under a stone, falling apart like buildings that collapse when the people have moved away. Images swirled before her eyes: the charred remains of the church back home, and a farm in Silsaadal which they rode past on their way to Vaage—the buildings were deserted and caving in. The people who worked the fields didn’t dare go near after the sun went down. She thought about her own beloved dead—their faces and voices, their smiles and habits and demeanor. Now that they had departed for that other land, it was painful to think about their figures; it was like remembering your home when you knew it was standing there deserted, with the rotting beams sinking into the earth.
She sat on the bench along the wall of the empty church. The old smell of cold incense kept her thoughts fixed on images of death and the decay of temporal things. And she didn’t have the strength to lift up her soul to catch a glimpse of the land where they were, the place to which all goodness and love and faith had finally been moved and now endured. Each day, when she prayed for the peace of their souls, it seemed to her unfair that she should pray for those who had possessed more peace in their souls here on earth than she had ever known since she became a grown woman. Sira Eiliv would no doubt say that prayers for the dead were always good—good for oneself, since the other person had already found peace with God.
But this did not help her. It seemed to her that when her weary body was finally rotting beneath a gravestone, her restless soul would still be hovering around somewhere nearby, the way a lost spirit wanders, moaning, through the ruined buildings of an abandoned farm. For in her soul sin continued to exist, like the roots of a weed intertwined in the soil. It no longer blossomed or flared up or smelled fragrant, but it was still there in the soil, pale and strong and alive. In spite of all the tenderness that welled up inside her when she saw her husband’s despair, she didn’t have the will to silence the inner voice that asked, hurt and embittered: How can you speak that way to me? Have you forgotten when I gave you my faith and my honor? Have you forgotten when I was your beloved friend? And yet she understood that as long as this voice spoke within her, she would continue to speak to him as if she had forgotten.
In her thoughts she threw herself down before Saint Olav’s shrine, she reached for Brother Edvin’s moldering bones over in the church at Vatsfjeld, she held in her hands the reliquaries containing the tiny remnants of a dead woman’s shroud and the splinters of bone from an unknown martyr. She reached for protection to the small scraps which, through death and decay, had preserved a little of the power of the departed soul—like the magical powers residing in the rusted swords taken from the burial mounds of ancient warriors.
On the following day Erlend rode to Nidaros with only Ulf and one servant to accompany him. He didn’t return to Husaby during all of Lent, but Ulf came to get his armed men and then left to meet him at the mid-Lenten ting in Orkedal.
Ulf drew Kristin aside to tell her that Erlend had arranged with Tiedeken Paus, the German goldsmith in Nidaros, for Margret to marry his son Gerlak just after Easter.
Erlend came home for the holy day. He was quite calm and composed now, but Kristin thought she could tell that he would never recover from this misfortune the way he had recovered from so much else. Perhaps this was because he was no longer young, or because nothing had ever humiliated him so deeply. Margret seemed indifferent to the arrangements her father had made on her behalf.
One evening when Erlend and Kristin were alone, he said, “If she had been my lawful child—or her mother had been an unmarried woman—I would never have given her to a stranger, as things now stand with her. I would have granted shelter and protection to both her and any child of hers. That’s the worst of it—but because of her birth, a lawful husband can offer her the best protection.”