The nuns at the convent met the first trials with a sense of desperate composure. They moved into the convent hall for good, kept a fire going day and night in the big brick fireplace, and ate and slept in there. Sira Eiliv advised everyone to keep great fires burning in the courtyards and in all the houses, but the sisters were afraid of fire. The oldest sisters had told them so often about the blaze thirty years before. Mealtimes and work regimens were no longer adhered to, and the duties of the various sisters were no longer kept separate as children began to arrive, asking for food and help. The sick were brought inside; they were mostly wealthy people who could pay for gravesites and masses for their souls in the convent, as well as those who were destitute and alone, who had no help at home. Those whose circumstances were somewhere in between stayed in their own beds and died at home. On some farms every single person perished. But in spite of everything, the nuns had still managed to keep to the schedule of prayers.
The first of the nuns to fall ill was Sister Inga, a woman Kristin’s age, almost fifty, and yet she was so terrified of death that it was a horror to see and hear. The chills came over her in church during mass; shaking, her teeth chattering, she crawled on her hands and knees as she begged and implored God and the Virgin Mary to spare her life. A moment later she lay prostrate with a burning fever, in agony, with blood seeping out of her skin. Kristin’s heart was filled with dread; no doubt she would be just as pitifully frightened when her turn came. It was not just the fact that death was certain, but it was the horrifying fear that accompanied death from the plague.
Then Fru Ragnhild herself fell ill. Kristin had sometimes wondered how this woman had come to be chosen for the high position of abbess. She was a quiet, slightly morose old woman, uneducated and apparently without great spiritual gifts. And yet when death placed its hand on her, she showed that she was a true bride of Christ. In her the illness erupted in boils. She refused to allow her spiritual daughters to unclothe her old body, but the swelling finally grew as big as an apple under one arm, and she had boils under her chin; they turned hard and blood-red, becoming black in the end. She endured unbearable agony from them and burned with fever, but each time her mind would clear, she lay in bed like an example of holy patience—sighing to God, asking forgiveness for her sins, and uttering beautiful, fervent prayers for her convent and her daughters, for all those who were sick and sorrowful, and for the peace of everyone’s soul, who would now have to leave this life. Even Sira Eiliv wept after he had given her the viaticum; his steadfast and tireless zeal in the midst of all the misery had otherwise been a thing of wonder. Fru Ragnhild had already surrendered her soul into God’s hands many times and prayed that He would take the nuns under His protection when the boils on her body began to split open. But this turned out to be a turn toward life, and later others experienced the same thing: Those who were stricken with boils gradually recovered, while those stricken with bloody vomiting all died.
Because of the example of the abbess and because they had witnessed a plague victim who did not die, the nuns seemed to find new courage. They now had to do the milking and chores in the cowshed themselves; they cooked their own food, and they brought back juniper and fresh evergreen branches for the cleansing smoke. Everyone did whatever task needed doing. They nursed the sick as best they could and handed out healing remedies: their supplies of theriac and calamus root were gone, but they doled out ginger, pepper, saffron, and vinegar against the sickness, along with milk and food. When the bread ran out, they baked at night; when the spices were gone, people had to chew on juniper berries and pine needles against the sickness. One by one the sisters succumbed and died. Night and day the bells for the dead rang from the convent church and from the parish church in the heavy air, for the unnatural fog hung on; there seemed to be a secret bond between the haze and the pestilence. Sometimes it became a frosty mist, drizzling down needles of ice and half-frozen sleet, covering the fields with rime. Then mild weather would set in, and the fog returned. People took it as an evil omen that all the seabirds had suddenly disappeared. They usually flocked by the thousands along the stream that flows through the countryside from the fjord and resembles a river in the low stretches of meadow but widens into a lake with salt water north of Rein Convent. In their place came ravens in unheard-of numbers. On every stone along the water sat the black birds in the fog, uttering their hideous shrill cries, while flocks of crows more numerous than anyone had ever seen before settled in all the forests and groves and flew with loathsome shrieks over the wretched land.