The Consorts of Death

36

She took me with her to Trodalen during the fateful summer of 1839. ‘The story about Trodalen Mads, the alternative version,’ as she called it, with a tiny smile. She told it in such a vivid way that I could see it unrolling before me, like a film: a flashback of almost one hundred and fifty years.

Mads Andersen was twenty-one years old that year. He was medium-height with a strong build, dark hair and melancholic predisposition, not unnatural for a young man who had grown up on an isolated farm in Trodalen with no one else except his parents, his sister and an adult serving maid. When he went to the priest, he got to know the eldest son of a family from Angedalen whose name was Jens Hansen, and Jens had a sister, Maria, who was four years younger. She was a quiet girl, a willing worker, industrious, who from early childhood had worked with her mother in the fields in the summer. She was at home in the mountains and could, even on Sundays, walk there on her own without any fear of what she might meet. After getting to know Mads, she used to walk all the way to Trodalen; not often, perhaps every other month, and they didn’t always bump into each other. How could they? There was no one to whom they could entrust messages, and she didn’t dare send a letter the few times the post went all the way up to Trodalsstrand.

According to what was passed down from Grethe’s ancestors, a romance sprang up between Maria and Mads that winter and the spring of 1839; and the winter up in Trodalen was long, the snow didn’t begin to clear until the end of April, even in June there were still great drifts left along the sunless mountainsides by the black mirror of Lake Trodalsvatn. There was something ominous and compelling about the lake, as though it, even at that time, concealed secrets it would not give up, memories of the past that were forever sunk beneath the depths. Mads often roamed in the mountains, hunting birds, deer or other game. He had set snares which he checked at regular intervals, and on not so few occasions during these wanderings he came to the mountain ridge at the end of the lake whence he could look down on Angedalen, at the farm where Jens and Maria had grown up. Sometimes they met there, he and Maria, and when May arrived and the sun began to warm, they embraced each other tenderly and vowed eternal fidelity

…

‘… My mother told me,’ Grethe said, still with her hand on the bible, as if the images were growing directly from the thin page where the family line had been drawn up.

‘Did she also tell you what happened on that June day when Ole Olsen Ottern?s was killed up there?’

‘That’s precisely the point of all this, Varg, my love. Now listen to the valley drama…

‘When there is a confession it very soon becomes the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth about past events. But in this case there was another version, hidden and clutched to the bosom of six generations of women, like a secret shame, kept alive by the family’s bad conscience about what really took place.

‘The second version of the Trodalen murder went as follows. On this particular Wednesday Maria Hansdottir had fled her life on the farm. Perhaps she was hoping to meet Mads again on this beautiful sunny summer’s day. The heat was making her blood pump extra hard through her veins, so much so that she could hardly bear being down on the farm, she just had to be up in the mountains where the person who was in her thoughts day and night was to be found. But ill luck was to have it that when she had climbed up to Trodalen and was on her way down to the lake, she bumped into Ole Ottern?s, the dealer who only a short time before had taken his leave of Mads Andersen in Trodalsstrand. They stood and exchanged a few words, then she tried to move on. The dealer would not budge. Perhaps it was the summer heat that had gone to his head, too; perhaps it was the long period of abstinence that caused him to make a grab with lustful hands for the young girl. He was strong, strengthened from walking in the mountains. She struggled, screamed for help, the way the Arctic loon screeches at the steep faces of the mountains. But he would not let go. He burrowed up under her clothes with his strong hands until she screamed with fear and pain. Then she seized a rock lying on the ground and brought it down hard on the dealer’s head — once, twice, three times! His rough hands let go of her body and he began to slip to the ground. Once again she struck, in fear and fury, until Ole Olsen Ottern?s lay lifeless before her.

‘Then she was gripped by a fear greater than anything she had ever felt before. She knew now that she had committed a deadly sin, and that the gates of hell would open and swallow her up as soon as her time had come. She was sentenced to eternal unrest, eternal fire, and the fear she felt now was so strong that she thought she would drop down dead on the path she was treading with such quaking feet. There was only one way to go she knew of: down to the water, down to a certain death.

‘However, Mads Andersen was coming to meet her. He had heard the cry of the Arctic loon, and he recognised the sound. Now he took her in his arms, held her tight, let her tears flow and ebb, and eventually followed her to where Ole Olsen lay, to see what wretched state he was in.

‘She stood at a distance watching Mads examine the lifeless body, and when he came back down to her, she realised from his posture that all hope was gone.

‘But then he gave her fresh hope, indeed he redeemed her, took her sin upon himself and said: Let me take care of this, Maria. Just go home. I’ll drop Ole Olsen Ottern?s into the depths of the lake, and may he never return! Maria left him there and then, and that was the last time they spoke together. Later she was to see him only once, when after five days he was taken to the village by men from the neighbouring farm and from there to Forde with the bailiff and his assistants the following day.’

‘He confessed to the murder,’ I said. ‘For her sake.’

Her eyes met mine. ‘Does that sound familiar?’

‘What happened then?’

‘The rest of the story is well-known. He had taken a few banknotes and valuables from Ole Olsen and they were found on him. He confessed and was given his punishment. Not until many years afterwards, in 1881, was he released from Akershus prison. By then Maria had been dead for twenty-two years. She died in 1859, unmarried and without any heirs, apart from her apparently fatherless daughter, Kristine, who herself had a daughter after what we today would call a gang-bang, in 1863. My great grandmother, who was given the name Margrethe.’

‘And Maria never came forward with what she knew about the Trodalen murder?’

‘Not to anyone’s knowledge. She confided it to this.’ She gently patted the opened book with her hand. ‘The truth follows our family down from woman to woman.’

‘And now to me…’

‘But you swore an oath!’

‘Yes… and I stand by it. So many years afterwards, Mads Andersen’s reputation doesn’t count for so much, so long as his only descendant…’ With a flourish of my hand I indicated her. ‘… is happy to leave it like that.’

‘But the upshot of this, Varg, did you catch it?’

I nodded. ‘Never rely on what is said. A case is rarely what it seems at first glance.’

‘Then I’ve achieved what I set out to do,’ she said, closing the book with care and putting it on the bedside table. A fragrance arose from her body like mountain and sun, a scent of mothers past.

‘Is that everything?’

She rolled onto her side and slid open her thighs. ‘But I could easily handle a repeat performance,’ she said with a pert smile, pulling me close.