Kristin Lavransdatter (Kristin Lavransdatter, #1-3)

by Sigrid Undset

She had loved her children from the first moment she held them in her womb; she had loved them even as they had tormented her with anguish, weighing her down and spoiling her looks. She had loved their small faces from the first moment she saw them, and loved them every single hour as they grew and changed, becoming young men. But no one had loved them as she had or rejoiced along with her.

There was a strange, pale light in Erlend’s handsome face when he silently moved away to stand at his wife’s side, hand in hand with her.

Lavrans opened his eyes, fixed his gaze on the crucifix in the priest’s hand, and said softly, but so clearly that almost everyone in the room could hear him: “Exsurrexi, et adhuc sum tecum.”5

But I always thought more about what I had lost than what I still had.”

He told Simon that this was the boy he loved most of all his sons.

To be truthful, he thought it unreasonable to feel this way, but up there at Husaby he had been so uneasy that now he thought he knew firsthand how cattle could sense in their bodies that a storm was brewing.

Now she understood that the lives of these two people had contained much more than love for their children. And yet that love had been strong and wide and unfathomably deep; while the love she gave them in return was weak and thoughtless and selfish, even back in her childhood when her parents were her whole world.

“I thought, Kristin, that once you had children of your own, then you would better understand. . . .” She remembered when her mother said those words. Sorrowfully, the daughter thought that she still didn’t understand her mother. But now she was beginning to realize how much she didn’t understand.

floor not far from the bed, and the

her heart seemed to shrink and harden in her breast.

Kristin was faint with weariness and sorrow; she whispered, “I wonder, Erlend, whether you even remember that time when you won my honor.

By now there was probably not much left of the boy but bones beneath the stone. Bones and hair and a scrap of the clothing he had been laid to rest in. She had seen the remains of her little sister when they dug up her grave to take her body to her father in Hamar. Dust and ashes.

Among the peasantry the rumor of King Magnus’s secret sin still held sway, and many of the parish priests in the countryside and the wandering monks were agreed about at least one thing: They believed this was the reason that Saint Olav’s Church in Nidaros had burned.

It’s a sin to brood over and dwell on the sins we have confessed to the priest and repented before God, receiving His forgiveness through the hand and the words of the priest.

But if he did it again, after he had confessed, it would be an even greater sin. He had better wait for a while.

I have betrayed you. I wouldn’t have . . . wouldn’t have done it if I had found it easier to bear those vicious words you said to me in Nidaros.

“I see that Munan Baardsøn spoke the truth,” replied his wife. “The day will never come when you will stand up and take the blame for what you have done. You should turn to God and seek redemption from Him. You need to ask His forgiveness more than you need to ask mine.”

She stepped back, struggling not to break down. Normally he never addressed her in any other way except by using her given name; his last words had shaken her to the heart. Only now did she fully understand what had happened.

They were hers, just as they had been back when she lifted them out of the cradle to her milk-filled breast and had to support their heads, which wobbled on their frail necks the way a bluebell nods on its stalk.

She had chosen him herself. She had chosen him in an ecstasy of passion, and she had chosen him again each day during those difficult years back home at Jørundgaard—his impetuous passion in place of her father’s love, which would not allow even the wind to touch her harshly. She had refused the destiny that her father had wished for her when he wanted to put her into the arms of a man who would have safely led her onto the most secure paths, even bending down to remove every little pebble that she might tread upon. She had chosen to follow the other man, whom she knew traveled on dangerous paths. Monks and priests had pointed out remorse and repentance as the road home to peace, but she had chosen strife rather than give up her precious sin.

Now she knew that her love for Erlend had rushed like a turbulent and dangerous current through her life for all these years. Now it was carrying her outward—she didn’t know where.

The fair complexion beneath the straight, flaxen hair, the big eyes, the full, firm red lips—he looked so much like her father now.

She struggled to push aside all thoughts and memories of her marriage years spent at Husaby, which had been so rich that now they seemed to her like a great calm—the way there is a kind of calm over the waves of the sea if viewed from high enough up a mountain ridge. The swells that surge after each other seem eternal, melding into one; that was the way life had rippled through her soul during that vast span of years.

Kristin too was calm—so calm that Simon held his breath with fear, waiting for the day when she would completely fall apart.

Andres Gudmundssøn, Simon Andressøn, Andres Simons søn.

Whenever he said his prayers, he had always shied away from adding any of his own words, whether wishes or words of gratitude. But Christ and Mary knew full well what he meant when he had said double the number of Pater noster s and Ave Mariaslately.

“Don’t you understand, Simon, that the man who took such great plans onto his shoulders—and no one knows how important they might have been to the welfare of all of us here in Norway, and to our descendants for many years to come—he set them all aside, along with his breeches, on the bed of a wanton woman.

As they entered the hall, Erling Vidkunssøn touched Simon’s shoulder, as if by accident. But both of them knew that they dared not look at each other.

He was and yet he was not the same man as that young Simon Darre, the alert and courtly son of a knight who had carried towels and candles for King Haakon in the Oslo castle an endless number of winters ago. He was and was not Simon the owner of Formo who had lived a free and merry life in the valley for all these years—largely without sorrows, although he had always known that within him resided that smoldering ember; but he turned his thoughts away from this. A stifled, ominous sense of revolt rose up inside the man—he had never willfully sinned or caused any trouble that he knew of, but fate had fanned the blaze, and he had to struggle to keep his composure while he was being roasted over a slow fire.

In God’s name, then, let them talk. No doubt they were already talking about her and her family.

Down in the valley in the dusk the shadows were deepening across the bare brown fields. But the air of the spring evening seemed sated with light. The first stars were sparkling, wet and white, high up in the sky, where the limpid green was turning blue, moving toward darkness and night.

“I wouldn’t know,” replied his wife in the same tone of voice. “It has never been your habit, Simon, to talk to me about important matters.”

Bjørgulf was the only one of their sons who didn’t warm to Erlend’s attention the way a meadow receives the sunlight.

She understood that as he stood there, gazing down at her, he was repeating without words what he had just affirmed, as if he wanted to give her strength.

It murmured and gurgled with the tiny sounds of ice crystals breaking apart.

But now she no longer felt any light inside her when she did so. She knew that the light outside did exist, but it felt as if shutters had closed her off inside. That must be what Gunnulf had spoken of: spiritual drought. Sira Eiliv said that was why no soul should lose courage; remain faithful to your prayers and good deeds, the way the farmer plows and spreads manure and sows. God would send the good weather for growing when it was time.

May he never see the day when he realizes that he has placed his trust in a hand that lets everything run through its fingers like cold water and dry sand.

The scree and the rocky slopes glistened as hideously as death as they rode along beneath the cliffs.

Mont Saint Michel,

But she had struck at the only moment when she ever saw him on the verge of breaking down; she had seized hold of that moment and carried it off. She would share that secret with him, the knowledge that she had also witnessed him when he once stood unsteady on his feet.

It was probably Brother Edvin who once said that those condemned to Hell had no wish to give up their torment: hatred and sorrow were their pleasures.

Simon and Ramborg were not going to lose him. Even though she had done it out of a need to prove herself to Simon, to show him that she could do something other than take from him.

Whenever he and Arngjerd happened to laugh together in this way, he needed no further proof of his paternity.

. It suddenly dawned on Simon that his young daughter was probably the only person at Formo with whom he sometimes spoke in earnest.

Whenever he woke up from these sinful dreams, he felt as if he himself had been violated in his sleep.

Simon couldn’t see that Erlend gave much thought to anything at all.

But I wouldn’t have given away my goods with both hands, the way he did, and then walk around with red eyes and white cheeks every time I’d been to see the priest to confess my sins. And Lavrans went to confession every month.”

But when he was cleaning up his father-in-law’s belongings, he had found a small, oblong wooden box in the bottom of his book chest, and inside lay a silk whip that the cloisters called a flagellum. The braided strips of leather bore dark spots, which might have been blood. Simon had burned it, with a feeling of sad reverence. He realized that he had come upon something in the other man’s life that Lavrans had never wanted a living soul to see.

Then Erlend hesitantly stretched out his hand to the other man. Simon took it. They clasped each other’s fingers tightly, then let go and huddled back in their seats, a little embarrassed.

“But you must remember, Simon,” he said in a low voice, “the old saying: Many a man is given what was intended for another, but no one is given another man’s fate.”