Finally she had to wake him. She threw on some clothes and walked out onto the gallery with him. He leaped over the railing on the side of the house facing another building. Then he disappeared around the corner. Kristin went back inside and crawled into bed again; then she let herself go and wept for the first time since she had become Erlend’s possession.
CHAPTER 5
AT NONNESETER the days passed as they had before. Kristin spent her time in the dormitory and the church, the weaving room, the library, and the refectory. The nuns and the convent servants harvested the crops of the herb garden and orchard, Holy Cross Day arrived in the fall with its procession, and then came the time of fasting before Michaelmas. Kristin was astonished that no one seemed to notice anything different about her. But she had always been quiet in the company of strangers, and Ingebj?rg Filippusdatter, who was her companion day and night, managed to talk enough for both of them.
So no one noticed that her thoughts were far away from everything around her. Erlend’s mistress. She told herself this: now she was Erlend’s mistress. It was as if she had dreamed it all—the evening of Saint Margareta’s Day, the time in the barn, the nights in her bedchamber at Skog. Either she had dreamed all that or she was dreaming now. But one day she would have to wake up; one day it would all come out. Not for a moment did she doubt that she was carrying Erlend’s child.
But she couldn’t really imagine what would happen to her when this came to light—whether she would be thrown into a dark cell or be sent home. Far off in the distance she glimpsed the faint images of her father and mother. Then she would close her eyes, dizzy and sick, submerged by the imagined storm, trying to steel herself to bear the misfortune, which she thought would inevitably end with her being swept into Erlend’s arms for all eternity—the only place where she now felt she had a home.
So in this sense of tension there was just as much anticipation as there was terror; there was sweetness as well as anguish. She was unhappy, but she felt that her love for Erlend was like a plant that had been sown inside her, and for every day that passed it sprouted a new and even lusher abundance of flowers, in spite of her misery. She had experienced the last night that he had slept with her as a delicate and fleeting sweetness, and a passion and joy awaited her in his embrace which she had never known before. Now she trembled at the memory; it felt to her like the hot, spicy gust from the sun-heated gardens. Wayside bastard—those were the words that Inga had flung at her. She reached out for the words and held them tight. Wayside bastard—a child that had been conceived in secret in the woods or meadows. She remembered the sunshine and the smell of the spruce trees in the glade. Every new, trickling sensation, every quickened pulse in her body she took to be the unborn child, reminding her that now she had ventured onto new paths; and no matter how difficult they might be to follow, she was certain that in the end they would lead her to Erlend.
She sat between Ingebj?rg and Sister Astrid, embroidering on the great tapestry with the knights and birds beneath the twining leaves. All the while she was thinking that she would run away once her condition could no longer be concealed. She would walk along the road, dressed as a poor woman, with all the gold and silver she owned knotted into a cloth in her hand. She would pay for a roof over her head at a farm somewhere in an isolated village. She would become a servant woman, carrying water buckets on a yoke across her shoulders. She would tend to the stables, do the baking and washing, and suffer curses because she refused to name the father of her child. Then Erlend would come and find her.
Sometimes she imagined that he would come too late. Snow-white and beautiful, she would be lying in the poor peasant bed. Erlend would lower his head as he stepped through the doorway. He was wearing the long black cape he had worn when he came to her on those nights at Skog. The farm woman had led him to the room where she lay. He sank down and took her cold hands in his, his eyes desperate with grief. “Is this where you are, my only joy?” Then, bowed with sorrow, he would leave, with his infant son pressed to his breast inside the folds of his cape.
No, that’s not how she wanted things to end. She didn’t want to die, and Erlend must not suffer such a sorrow. But she was so despondent, and it helped to think such things.
Then all of a sudden it became chillingly clear to her—the child was not something she had merely imagined, it was something inevitable. One day she would have to answer for what she had done, and she felt as if her heart had stopped in terror.
But after some time had passed, she realized it was not as certain as she had thought that she was with child. She didn’t understand why this did not make her happy. It was as if she had been lying under a warm blanket, weeping; now she had to get up and step into the cold. Another month passed, then another. Finally she was convinced—she had escaped that misfortune. Freezing and empty, she now felt more unhappy than ever, and in her heart a tiny bitterness toward Erlend was brewing. Advent was approaching and she had not heard a word, either about him or from him; she had no idea where he was.