Free Burial Rites by Hannah Kent Page B

watch them, the thrill ofescape is sucked away, like water down a geyser. I would only be trading one death sentence for another. Up in the highlands blizzards howl like the widows of fishermen and the wind blisters the skin off your face. Winter comes like a punch in the dark. The uninhabited places are as cruel as any executioner.
    My knees are weak as I stumble to my bed. With my eyes closed, the silence of the room presses upon me like a hand.
    When my heart slows, I look over to where the officer slept, the coverlet twisted and the worn mattress exposed. He ought to have replaced the bed board – he’ll have bad luck. Perhaps if the bed is still warm, he is nearby. It feels intrusive to touch the bare mattress, but it’s cold. He’s gone. My bed is made. I run my hands over the thin blanket, worn smooth from use. How many other bodies have lain here before me? How many nightmares have been produced under this cloth?
    The floor is boarded, but the walls and ceiling are not, and the turf is in need of repair; slabs of dried sod have slumped inwards and thinned, leaving fissures in the wall and the room prey to draughts. It will be cold in winter.
    But I might be dead before then.
    Quickly! Push that thought away.
    Dead grass hangs sinister from the ceiling like unwashed hair. A few carved ornaments have been arranged across the rafters, and a cross is nailed to the lintel over the entrance.
    Do they sing hymns in the winter here? Maybe they recite the sagas instead – I prefer a story to a prayer. They whipped me for that at this farm, Kornsá, once, when I was young and fostered out to watch over the home field. The farmer Björn did not like that I knew the sagas better than him. You’re better off keeping company with the sheep, Agnes. Books written by man, not God, are faithless friends and not for your kind.
    I might have believed him were it not for my foster-mother Inga and the lessons she gave me, delivered in whispers as he dozed in the evening.
    Near the entrance, close to the mistress’s bed, is a grey woollen curtain that has been nailed to a slat. I suppose it serves as a door to the room beyond. The curtain falls short and in the gap above the floor the legs of a table are visible. They’re slightly splintered, as though someone has gnawed at them.
    The badstofa is almost as bare as all those years ago, although little planks have been nailed between the sloping rafters and the wall supports to serve as shelves. They hold the usual things – wooden canisters, sheep horns, a pipe, fishbones, mittens and knitting needles. There is a small painted trunk under one of the beds. An abandoned slipper wanting mending. The familiarity of day-to-day things can be comforting. I once had things like this. My white sack with the dried flowers in it. The stone Mamma gave me before she left. It will bring you good luck, Agnes. It is a magic stone. Put it under your tongue and you will be able to talk to the birds.
    That stone sat in my mouth for days. If the birds understood my questions, they never cared to answer them.
    Kornsá of Húnavatn District. I was delivered to its doorstep at six years old with a kiss and a stone from Mamma, and now I’ve been dragged here again at three and thirty winters because of two dead men and a fire. I’ve worked at more northern farms than should have been my share. But poverty scrapes these homes down until they all look the same, and they all have in common the absence of things that ought to be there. I might as well have been at one place all my life.
    This is it, then. Kornsá, my last grim corner. The last bed, the last roof, the last floor. The last of everything brings lugs of pain, as though there will be nothing left, but smoke from fires abandoned. I must pretend that I am a servant still, and that these are my newquarters and I must think of all the chores I will do, and how I will make my mistress comment on the dexterity of my fingers. I used to think that if I