“What is it?” his mistress asked heatedly.
“Surely you must know, for I have no idea.”
“Where was he riding off to?” she asked.
“To Haugen.” Ulf paused. “Erlend came in and woke me. He said he wanted to ride there tonight, and he seemed in a great hurry. He asked me to see to it that certain things were sent to him up there later on.”
Kristin fell silent for a long time.
“He was angry?”
“He was calm.” After a moment Ulf said quietly, “I fear, Kristin . . . I wonder if you might have said what should have been best left unspoken.”
“Surely Erlend for once should be able to stand hearing me speak to him as if he were a sensible man,” said Kristin vehemently.
They walked slowly down the hill. Ulf turned toward his own house, but she followed him.
“Ulf, kinsman,” she implored him anxiously. “In the past you were the one who told me morning and night that for the sake of my sons I had to steel myself and speak to Erlend.”
“Yes, but I’ve grown wiser over the years, Kristin. You haven’t,” he replied in the same tone of voice.
“You offer me such solace now,” she said bitterly.
He placed his hand heavily on the woman’s shoulder, but at first he didn’t speak. As they stood there, it was so quiet they could both hear the endless roar of the river, which they usually didn’t notice. Out across the countryside the roosters were crowing, and the cry of Kristin’s own rooster echoed from the stable.
“Yes, I’ve had to learn to ration out the solace sparingly, Kristin. There’s been a cruel shortage of it for several years now. We have to save it up because we don’t know how long it might have to last.”
She tore herself away from his hand. With her teeth biting her lower lip, she turned her face away. And then she fled back to the hearth house.
The morning was icy cold. She wrapped her cloak tightly around her and pulled the hood up over her head. With her dew-drenched shoes tucked up under her skirts and her crossed arms resting on her knees, she huddled at the edge of the cold hearth to think. Now and then a tremor passed over her face, but she did not cry.
She must have fallen asleep. She started up with an aching back, her body frozen through and stiff. The door stood ajar. She saw that sunlight filled the courtyard.
Kristin went out onto the gallery. The sun was already high; from the fenced pasture below she could hear the bell of the horse that had gone lame. She looked toward the new storehouse. Then she noticed that Munan was standing up on the loft gallery, peering out from between the posts.
Her sons. It raced through her mind. What had they thought when they woke up and saw their parents’ bed untouched?
She ran across the courtyard and up to the child. Munan was wearing only his shirt. As soon as his mother reached him, he put his hand in hers, as if he were afraid.
Inside the loft none of the boys was fully dressed; she realized that no one had woken them. All of them looked quickly at their mother and then glanced away. She picked up Munan’s leggings and began helping him to put them on.
“Where’s Father?” asked Lavrans in surprise.
“Your father rode north to Haugen early this morning,” she replied. She saw that the older boys were listening as she said, “You know he’s been talking about it so long, that he wanted to go up there to see to his manor.”
The two youngest sons looked up into their mother’s face with wide, atonished eyes, but the five older brothers hid their gaze from her as they left the loft.
CHAPTER 3
THE DAYS PASSED. At first Kristin wasn’t worried. She didn’t want to ponder over what Erlend might have meant by his behavior—fleeing from home like that in the middle of the night in a fit of rage—or how long he intended to stay north on his upland farm, punishing her with his absence. She was furious at her husband, but perhaps most furious because she couldn’t deny that she too had been wrong and had said things she sincerely wished had not been said.
Certainly she had been wrong many times before, and in anger she had often spoken mean and vile words to her husband. But what offended her most bitterly was that Erlend would never offer to forget and forgive unless she first humbled herself and asked him meekly to do so. She didn’t think she had let her temper get the better of her very often; couldn’t he see that it was usually when she was tired and worn out with sorrows and anguish, which she had tried to bear alone? That was when she could easily lose mastery over her feelings. She thought Erlend might have remembered, after all the years of worry she had borne about the future of their sons, that during the past summer she had twice endured a terrible agony over Naakkve. Her eyes had been opened to the fact that after the burdens and toil of a young mother comes a new kind of fear and concern for the aging mother. Erlend’s carefree chatter about having no fear for the future of his sons had angered her until she felt like a wild she-bear or like a bitch with pups. Erlend could go ahead and say that she was like a female dog with her children. She would always be alert and vigilant over them for as long as she had breath in her body.