The Wanderer and the Way 5
The Northman's Wife
This is Chapter 5 of The Wanderer and the Way
As heir to the Lord of Iria Flavia and much besides, Theodemir could not return from such a long time away without calling on several men of importance in the district. He had supposed that this duty might have been discharged en masse with a feast of welcome at his uncle’s villa. But Witteric had made it plain that there was not to be a welcome feast for Theodemir unless and until Theodemir gave his uncle assurance that his youthful wandering and indiscretions were behind him and that his unwavering intent was to take up with vigor and resolve the part that was his to play by birth and fortune. As long as he had any thought of taking up the vocation that was his by blood, Theodemir could not afford to slight any man of influence. And as long as the vocation that was his by Divine instruction was Agnes, he could not show himself unwilling to take up the vocation of his blood lest Witteric should see this as a reason to exile him from the villa and thus from Agnes. And so, having put off the bishop with vague pieties, he had continued on through the district, making calls on men of consequence.
Everywhere he went, it seemed, the first thing that every man wished to ask him about was whether he had yet met Agnes and what he thought of her. It was a subject on which the women who had not met Agnes seemed particularly sour, but those few who had made her acquaintance seemed to have been charmed by her and to regard her with a somewhat regretful affection. On more than one occasion he had to bite his tongue and hold back his fist as men joked about how they would like to use Agnes were it not for the fear they had of her husband—a fear that none of them seemed to regard as incompatible with their manhood, so fearsome was the Northman’s reputation. There was one young man, spotty and his beard not come in, who made a particularly vile remark about Agnes, which provoked Theodemir beyond all restraint, causing him to send the boy to the ground with a bloody mouth. Fortunately, the boy’s father, either fearful of losing Theodemir’s regard, or sharing his high regard for Agnes, or perhaps simply tired of the youth’s insolence, replied to his son’s protests by knocking him to the ground again and then kicking his behind until the boy scrambled up and went running off, crying for his mother.
It was late in the day, in that part of the afternoon when the heat was most oppressive, that he turned his horse back to the road towards his uncle’s villa. And as he set his face in that direction, setting the horse at a walking pace to spare it from the heat, it felt to him as if he were returning home to Agnes, and he wondered solicitously how she was bearing up on this oppressively hot day. And yet, as he neared the gate, he recalled that Agnes was merely his uncle’s gatekeeper and that he had no reason to spend time with her or to seek her company or to engage her in conversation. His vision had convinced him that Agnes was his vocation, the reason for which God had caused him to leave Rome and his studies and pursue his long walk home. The vision had only grown in his memory. Each time he had a moment to indulge it, as he rode from house to house, its sweetness and its loveliness and its duration had increased so that it had multiplied fivefold by the time he reined in his horse a few yards short of the gate and considered how he would feel and what he would say when he saw Agnes’s much-admired face appear at the grille in the gatehouse window. Agnes was his vocation. And yet what part was he to play for Agnes? What part was Agnes to play for him? His vision, his vocation, said only, “Agnes.” And Agnes had a husband. She had a people. She had a settled place in the world. What then was he to be to Agnes, or Agnes to him?
The trouble, he thought, was that his falling sword had disturbed the vision in the church so that he had received only the noun of his commission: Agnes. He lacked the verb. Marry? Save? Counsel? Scold? Protect? Avenge? Pray for? Perhaps when he saw her face, the missing verb would be revealed to him. He swung down from his horse and led it the last few yards to the gate. He rang the bell and felt his heart thumping in his chest as he waited for her face to appear at the grille. But when a face did appear, it was not hers but the old, weathered face of Lubbo, his uncle’s gardener, a man who had been kindly to him his youth.
“She told me thee was back,” Lubbo said. “Am glad to see thee, lord.” And with this, his face disappeared from the grille, and presently, the gate swung open, and Theodemir led his horse through.
“Where is Agnes?” he asked, handing the reigns to the old man.
“The Lady Elswyth, you be meaning, lord?” Lubbo asked.
“I mean Agnes, who keeps the gate. She was here this morning when I left.”
“Aye, she calls herself that, lord,” the gardener said. “But we know her proper as the Lady Elswyth.”
“The Northman’s wife?”
“Aye, lord,” Lubbo said, his tone darkening and a shadow coming over his face. His evident affection for Agnes was clearly not given on the account of her husband.
“Where is she?” Theodemir asked again. “Her husband has not returned, has he? I saw no ship in the river.”
“No, lord. He’s been gone long, lord. Long as I remember him ever going.”
“You don’t sound sorry that he’s been away so long.”
“Oh, I don’t mind him so much, lord. He’s an upright man by his own law. But the Lady Elswyth is more easy in her mind when he’s away.”
Oh, what lightening of the heart there was in these words! Agnes was easier in her mind when her husband was away! Was this the harbinger of the verb he sought?
“So why is she not keeping the gate?” he asked. “I am told it is her custom to do so when her husband is at sea.”
“Aye, lord. But she’s a northern lady. A lady of Northumbria, which, to hear it told, is near to the end of the world where it is always cold and blowy and the waters grow hard as rocks, and the rain falls like flower petals and piles up on the ground the height of a man or more. This heat is a trial to her, lord. She can hardly bear it. So when the day grows warm, and I’ve no mind to go turning a spade under the sun, I come here to mind the gate, and I send her down to the river to rest herself in the shade of the willow. She don’t want to go, lord. Never knew one so diligent to do her duty. But she came near to killing herself carrying on in the heat last year, so we have to be firm with her when it gets too warm. She’s a lamb, lord, when she’s made to see sense.”
Theodemir thanked Lubbo and made his way down to the riverbank where a large age-bent white willow trailed its branches over the water. Beneath its low canopy was one of the coolest places on the estate on a warm day, and there he found her, her back leaning against the trunk of the tree while a small child tottered about on unsteady feet, picking up sticks and fallen leaves and starting at them studiously before putting them in its mouth and then throwing them to the ground in annoyance before repeating the process with the next piece of detritus it found. The sight of the child alarmed him. If she was in possession of a child as well as a husband, his God-granted vocation seemed wholly purposeless. But then, he had no notion what he was called to do, only that she was at the heart of it.
As he pushed his way into the coolness beneath the branches, she turned her head and looked at him. Her face seemed listless and enervated, though this in no wise deprived it of any part of its loveliness. It occurred to him in that moment that he was perhaps making a fool of himself. She was a beauty, certainly. Everyone he had spoken to that day had remarked on her beauty with enthusiasm. But no woman could be quite as lovely as she seemed in his eyes. No, coming has he had, weary and in pain to his uncle’s door, she had won his heart—no, say his infatuation—with acts of simple kindness that, combined with an uncommon but human beauty, had made her for a moment seem angelic to him.
“Your pardon for disturbing you, Lady Elswyth,” he said, turning to withdraw and reconsider his wits, his heart, and his vocation.
“I am Agnes,” she said simply and flatly.
The sound of her voice called him back, and he turned to her again. “Lubbo tells me you are also the Lady Elswyth of Northumbria.”
“Not of Northumbria,” she replied, a look of pain coming across her face. “Not of all Northumbria. Just of one small village. A thegn’s estate. I am a lady of Twyford. That is all. Or I was. Not the lady, though, but the lady’s daughter. I am Agnes now.”
“But Lubbo calls you ‘the Lady Elswyth,’” he said.
“They will not let me be Agnes,” she replied. “They know I am not properly one of them, and so they call me Lady Elswyth. It was the same in …” But here she trailed off sadly and did not name the place in which, if he understood her complaint, the servants had failed to accept her as one of their own but had thrust her upward again when she sought to bow down.
He was too intrigued now to leave her so he went and took a knee before her slumped figure that they might speak as equals. “Even if you wish to lay down the rank of your birth,” he said, “surely you must bear your husband’s rank. And so I think I must call you Lady Elswyth all the same.”
“I am Agnes,” she said dully, turning away from him.
“The child is very bonny, lady,” he said. “I see something of your look in him.”
“You imagine it then,’ she said. “He’s not mine.”
His heart leapt up.
Her eyes turned to the child for a moment, and a fond smile crossed her face. It was a small thing, that smile of affection, but in that moment his vision returned to him again and with it his vocation and his adoration.
“It is my husband’s child,” she said. “By his concubine.”
This startled Theodemir, for he could not imagine why any man married to a woman such as this would ever wish for a concubine. But he had wit enough to know that he should not say this to her.
“His first?” he asked.
“First child or first concubine?” she asked. “Anyway, he is both.”
She said this all so flatly, without any hint of jealousy or opprobrium, that he wished to ask if pagan ways had become accepted among the Christian people of Northumbria. But it did not seem to him that the question would please her.
“You have no child of your own then, lady?” he asked.
She turned her face to him and looked into his eyes for a moment, then something seemed to go slack in her, much as a warrior who has held a position through a long and weary fight might suddenly conclude that it was untenable to hold it longer, or that the tide of battle had, in any case, passed it by, making his courage moot, and would suddenly shrug, put up his sword, and walk away.
“I could not have a child of my own,” she said, “I am a virgin.”
He frowned at this, once again fearing that she was making game of him.
“Do you mean,” he asked, “that while Lady Elswyth is a wife, Agnes is a virgin.”
She smiled listlessly. “I am not a madwoman, sir,” she said. “I may give myself two names, but I am of one mind and one flesh. Yes, Agnes is a virgin. And Elswyth is a virgin also.”
“But,” he said gently, not entirely trusting her declaration of sanity. “Lady Elswyth is a wife, and Agnes is a nun.”
“Not quite,” she replied. “Elswyth is not quite a wife, and Agnes is not quite a nun. I am a woman torn in two. I have had two husbands, yet I have never been a wife.”
“Two husbands and yet a virgin?” he asked. “Lady, I have heard it said that the Anglish people have a great love of riddles, but I had not thought to find one who was a riddle in the flesh.”
“I suppose that is what I am,” she said. “A riddle in the flesh.”
Was this the task to which God called him then? To solve a riddle in the flesh?”
“Oh, catch him!” she cried suddenly.
He looked around, confused, and then saw the Northman’s child tottering on the brink of the lazy current. Before he could rise to arrest him, the child tottered over into the river. Theodemir leapt to his feet, and in two strides, he had the child by the scruff of the neck and hauled him from the water. The child seemed untroubled by his dunking, but the Lady Elswyth had struggled to her feet, and she came and took the soaking child from him, speaking soothing words. The child, however, struggled and pointed urgently to the ground, so she placed him on his feet, saying, “Don’t do that again. What would your father say if I let you drown?”
This was not an eventuality that seemed to trouble the child, who tottered off in the direction of the house until he was distracted by a low-hanging willow branch, where he started to pull leaves off one by one, screeching with delight each time a leaf stem broke and sent the branch leaping up and quivering.
Agnes lowered herself down against the trunk of the tree again, looking flushed.
“If I might take your wimple, lady,” he said, “and wet it in the river, it would cool your head and give you much relief.”
She looked at him a moment, and then, as before, something seemed to go slack in her as if the heat had sapped all resistance and all propriety from her soul. She put her hand up to the pin that held the wimple in place but then paused and looked at him again.
“I don’t know if the customs are the same among your people,” he said, “but if you are neither quite a wife nor quite a nun, then I do not think you are quite required to cover your hair from the sight of men.”
“You already make very free with your eyes, sir,” she said.
“I am sorry for that,” he said. He had been trying valiantly, he thought, to look only at her face and to make no consideration of the rest of her. “But if my eyes do trespass, upon my honor and my life, no other part of me shall do so.”
She shrugged and undid the pin, allowing the wimple to fall about her shoulders. Her head was not quite bare. The glossy black hair that now framed her face was perhaps an inch long, and it gave her an elfin aspect that was enrapturing. Her neck too, seen now for the first time and fully on view due to the shortness of her hair, was elegant and white, a reminder of her northern birth. Wishing to keep her trust, he forced himself to look away and went down to the river and soaked the wimple as he had promised and rung it out lightly before returning it to her. She wrapped it loosely around her head and then smiled at him.
“Thank you,” she said. “That is cooling.”
It was the first unalloyed smile she had given him, and he knew in that moment that he had walked a thousand miles and more to see her smile.
But he did not allow himself to stare at that Platonically perfect face nor at the white neck that supported it. Instead, he sat down facing the river so that he could turn and look at her if the conversation should demand, it but could otherwise spare her his gaze by looking out over the water.
“Lady,” he began after they had sat in this posture for several minutes in silence while the child continued to denude the hanging willow branch.
“It is not so much a riddle, really,” she said. “More a matter of circumstance. I can tell you. I know that you will ask all over the district until you find it all out. In Northumbria it is a secret that lives depend upon. But here, everyone knows because my husband has told them all.”
“I should like to know, lady,” he said. “If it does not pain you to tell it.”
“I would as soon get it out of the way,” she said.
“Then I am ready to listen,” he said.
“Do you remember a boy named Leif who used to come here with his father, Harrald, in the summer for trade?”
“I remember. He was a few years my junior and used to follow me around and question everything I did, though he had no Latin, and there was little enough in common between his Norsk and what I know of the Visigothic tongue. But we managed well enough by signs and noises. I liked the lad.”
“So did I,” she said. “I was to be married to an ealdorman’s son and become lady of Bamburgh. But from childhood, I had watched for ships, dreaming of Spain, of the bright warmth of Spain, of lounging with sailor men far from home on the shaded verandas of Spanish villas, of dancing beneath the bright moon on warm Spanish nights with the dark men and maidens of Spain. And there was Leif. And Leif had a ship. Leif had been to Spain and would go again. Leif was a good man, and perhaps he might take me to Spain. I loved him with a foolish, girlish love. We were seen together. There was a fight. Eric killed the man I was to marry. To save the Norsk and my father’s honor, we pretended that Leif kidnapped me.”
“I don’t understand how this touches your father’s honor,” he said.
“That part does not matter,” she said wearily.[1] “But my mother insisted we marry before we went. So we made our promises. But there was no time to lie with him. And they never planned to take me with them. They abandoned me at Whitby, and so Leif and I were never properly married.”
“Whitby?” he asked.
“The Abbey of St. Hilda. And then there was Eardwulf.”
“I have heard that name,” he said. “Is that not the name of the King of Northumbria?”
“I’m sure it is the name of a lot of men,” she said snappishly. “That part does not matter either.[2] I was going to be a nun. I was accepted as a postulant. But then Eric came back. Leif was dead, he told me. Eric was an exile from his clan and had taken up with vikingar. He wanted wives for his crew, and he wanted me for his wife. So I went with him, and chose the women for his men, because he ordered me to. I did it to save the rest.”
“And he brought you here and settled by the river,” he said. “My uncle told me this part of it. But I do not understand how you are a virgin still. You must have been married to him two years or more.”
She was silent for some time. He turned and looked at her. She was sad, and exhausted by the heat. “I don’t know why I told you that,” she said. “That isn’t part of what the district knows. Eric would be furious if he knew I told you.”
“Why did you tell me then?” he asked. He knew, of course. It was because of his vocation. But did she know this also?
“The heat makes me stupid,” she said. “And sometimes I find it very hard to care. I think that when we have been particularly wicked, God grants our heart’s desire.”
“I am sorry, lady. If I can do anything to aid you, name it.”
She was silent again for a moment, and he did nothing to rush her or prompt her to speak again.
“When I was a girl,” she said, “and giving my mind to girlish fancies, it had always been Eric I thought of. Oh, I had lain in my bed many times, imagining Eric carrying me away among the dunes to some secluded place and laying me down on the sand. I was a wanton child. At least, I was given to wanton thoughts. I did not love him when he came for me. But I thought, I can bear to lie with him, as I had so often done in my thoughts. I can bear to do the duty of a wife to him. And so I agreed. But on the dock, as we were about to sail, he took a girl I loved and slit her throat as a sacrifice to his god.”
Here she paused, and he knew in his heart that there were tears in her eyes, and he wanted, as he had never wanted anything in his life, to take her in his arms and dry her tears and make all things well for her. But he knew also that he must not do this, that if he even turned and looked at her in this moment, she would recoil from him and be lost to him forever.
After several minutes had passed, he heard a sniffle, and she resumed her tale. “He was very cunning,” she said. “The men were disputing among themselves who was to have which woman. So he put in at a deserted cove to camp for the night, and he said that it was up to the women to choose which man they would have for a husband. None of them wanted to make a choice at first. But there was one man among them, Lars, who was particularly handsome and who seemed kindly, and Mathilde suddenly ran forward and said, “I choose Lars!” And then the others saw that if they did not choose, they would be left with Hogni, who was a stunted man of evil aspect. And so they began to make their choices, and even quarreling with each other over who was to have a particular man. Poor Odelinda was too shy to dispute with them so she was left with Hogni. But in the end, I think she may be the happiest of us all, though she had never meant to marry at all.”
Here again, the story trailed off.
“I don’t know why I am telling you this part of it,” she said.
He knew, but he sensed that it was too soon to tell her that she was his vocation, so he kept quiet and waited.
At last she continued. “‘Your choices are not final until they are consummated,’” Eric told them. So the men and the wives who had chosen them went off to find some place to lie together. Some were eager. Some were weeping. But all went, and then I was alone with him. He did not have to say anything to me. I knew what was expected. I opened my dress and showed myself to him. He stood and looked at me in the moonlight a moment. I remember that gaze. No man has seen me so, before or since. I looked back at him, hating him for what he had done to Gweneth, yet prepared to lie with him as I had given my oath to do. But he saw the hatred in my eyes. He did not undress but turned his back on me and said, ‘Put on your dress,” and he walked away to cool his ardor in the cold sea.”
“I had not heard that the Northmen were known for such delicacy of feeling,” he said.
“Are the men of any place?” she asked him. There was something in her that was very weary of men, and he resolved that he would strive never to weary her if it was in his power to avoid it.
“Eric is the most saintly man I ever met,” she said. “But he is a saint according to his own creed. I do not think it is the creed of all the Norsk. I think it is Thor’s creed, which he taught to Eric when he adopted him.”
“I remember Thor,” he said. “There was something very serene about that man, and yet a great firmness and a great sense of purpose.”
“I loved Thor,” she said. “To my shame, I loved him more than my own father. Or, at least, I had more regard for him.”
“And this creed that he taught to Eric?” he asked.
“I don’t know if it was taught by words or by example, but Eric’s creed is simple and absolute. He will do no harm to kin. And in his mind, I am kin to him because I was married to Leif. And also, I think, because Harrald and Thor both treated me like a daughter, as my parents always treated Leif like a son. Whatever the reason, in his eyes, I am kin to him. And he loves me. He honestly does. So when he sees the hatred I have for him in my eyes, he will not lie with me, for in his eyes I think that would be rape, and I am kin, so he will not rape me.”
“But he will take a concubine and father children by her.”
“She is not his kin. He has no mercy, no regard, for anyone who is not his kin by blood or oath.”
“So the child is kin to him, but the mother is not.”
“She is kin now because she is his second wife. He could force her to marry him because she was not his kin, but by marrying him, by lying with him, she became kin. Such is his philosophy.”
“Doesn’t she hate him also?”
“No. She dotes on him.”
“He captured her and forced himself upon her, and yet she dotes on him.”
“He is the father of her child. And he treats her well. He is not a cruel man.”
“But I do not understand. If you hate him, and you know he will not harm you, why have you not fled from him long since? I see no riddle here. You are a virgin, free to marry if you will. Free to take vows if you will. Why do you remain?”
She sighed. “I know that I am not properly married to Eric until I lie with him. But I gave my oath to marry him, and if he comes to me to lie with me, I must receive him. While I hate him, he will not come to me. And while Gwenneth is dead, I will always hate him. And since Gwenneth cannot be restored to life, I will always hate him and he will never come to me. But still, I am bound to him by my oath. So it is my fate to be never properly a wife and never properly a nun, but always a woman torn in two.”
“It seems to me, lady,” he said, “that you are free to be either wife or nun, as you please. And if you will allow me, I will do all I can to assist your escape from him.”
“No,” she said firmly. “I broke a promise to a man once, and it brought fire and death to good men, exile to me, and the threat of exile, slavery, and death to people I love. I will not break my oath again.”
[1] For that part of the story, see The Wistful and the Good.
[2] For this part of the story, see Saint Agnes and the Selkie.
Comments welcome. If you spot a mistake, please let me know by replying to this email or by sending an email to author@gmbaker.net. Thanks!