The Snake Pit (The Master of Hestviken, #2)

by Sigrid Undset

sæter

Mountain farm where he killed Teit

Miserere

Psalm begging for mercy, such as psalm 51

blithely.

Cheerful or callous indifference seen as callous or improper

debonair

Of good disposition

He had always greeted the sisters with a kiss when they met or parted. But he realized with a faint, sweet tremor that this was not the kiss that belongs to courtesy between near kinsfolk who count themselves something more than cottagers. He let his lips dwell upon the fresh, cool, maidenly mouth, unwilling to let go, and he held her slender form to him and felt a subtle, fleeting pleasure in it.

vendible

Prostitute

Michaelmas

September 29, so the churching would have been in very early October

Limbus Puerorum,

Limbo, which was never officially part of Catholic doctrine.

She lifted the boy down, hugged him in her arms, kissed and kissed again his face and neck and shoulder, while he struggled, making himself long and heavy in her embrace. When he began to kick her as hard as he could, his mother took a firm hold of his smooth bare calves—feeling with painful joy how firm and strong his little body was. At last she sank into a crouching attitude, and as she wept and muttered wild endearments over the child, she strove to coax and force him to sit in her lap. When she was obliged for a moment to loosen her grip of him, the boy managed to wriggle away from her. He darted like a hare across the little clearing, was lost among the bushes—then she heard the gate close. Ingunn stood up—she wailed aloud with pain. Then she staggered forward, bent double by sobs, with drooping arms. She came to a hedge, saw Eirik running over the turf so fast that his heels nearly reached his neck. The mother stood there, weeping and weeping, as she bent over the hedge. The withered, rust-red branches of spruce had been felled to fence in a little field, where the corn had just begun to shoot—still soft and pinched like some kind of new-born life, it appeared ever after to her inner vision, when she thought of her sorrow, though now she had no idea of what her tear-blinded eyes looked upon.

Hallveig wept a little, Torgal lifted him up when he said farewell, the brothers and sisters stood staring at him who was to go away with the two strange men. Eirik felt a little clutch at the heart when he saw his mother cry; he put his arms about her neck, and his lips began to quiver—

young master,

By this time Olav would be in his early thirties, well into middle age by the standards of the time.

Now Olav saw that Ingunn loved another, and he guessed how often she had wished him out of the way, so that she might freely shed her affection upon Eirik—as one smuggles food to an outlawed friend behind the back of the master of the house.