Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at https://archiveofourown.org/works/5459003.
Fandom: “The Wanderer” and “The Wife’s Lament” from the Old English Exeter Book.
Rating: General audiences.
No warnings
Published 2015-12-19 for the 2015 Yuletide exchange.
Words: 4,087
For one who is often alone, the weather is a kind of company. It does not have much to say, but it can seem a kind of comment nonetheless. I picture my lost lord under rain or snow, washed by freezing fog from off the sea; I picture him cold, having given up my warmth. But I know he must sometimes see the sun even if he does not deserve it.
On me in my own exile, fate has visited sun at some times and rain at others. In fair weather I often leave my house. It is a meager house, part tunnel and part lean-to, carved out of a hillside so that I am protected from the wind but have no hope of seeing the sun from indoors. When the weather permits it, I spend a great deal of time walking among the trees in the little valley where I live. Sometimes I walk into town for supplies and a moment of human contact, but not often. I am a stranger in this country and they do not trust me.
On other days the sky drops snow on my head and my house. Then my sadness and bitterness seem wrapped in wool; then, when I cannot think beyond my own state, I am granted a closed-in view so that I need not pretend to be minding the world outside. Then I wrap myself in my shawl and my prayers are for myself only. On those days I almost believe myself buried beneath the earth, so deep is my solitude.
On one such evening full of snow, there came to my exile an unbidden guest, a fist pounding on my door. I leapt as if someone had called my name, like when I was a young girl dreaming of my future and my mother would call me for chores. No one had ever visited my home, not since I came to this place.
I lifted the latch to see the source of the thudding on my door. And when I swung it in, there he was, with snow in his beard and frost on his brows and white rimed all over his coat, his woolen hat, his boots. He could have been dressed like a king or like a laborer; finery and rags would have been hidden alike under that winter whiteness. The clean smell of the cold rolled off of him and into my small, dark house, making me aware for the first time in many days of the smell of the smoke from my fire.
“Lady,” he said when I opened the door, “do you have any alms for a homeless wanderer?”
In the days of my marriage I would have sent such a man around to the kitchen. Or, in truth, he would have gone there himself. The folk in the kitchen knew what we set aside for alms and how long to let a visitor stay. I had made up my mind about those questions once and let the answers stand, or let the servants decide how much someone needed help. I could not rely on anyone else now, in this as in all things.
Left to myself I am not, I hope, empty of charity. I stepped back to let the light from the fire fall on his face while I considered my answer to his question. It was only when I got my first good look at him that I realized I knew this man.
Before the woods, before this hut, before my life dwindled to such a husk of a life, I saw this man in my husband’s hall. He had often conversed with my husband when I could not hear what they were saying. For a brief time I had worried, as the tide changed and the balance of power in that place shifted, that this man was against me, that he hated my family for the same old reasons as the others in that place who saw me as a stranger and my marriage as a paltry peace offering. The fights between my husband’s people and my father’s people were old beyond telling, and frankly not worth a tale. They differed, as men have so often differed, on how to assign land, loyalty, men, gold. The feud was dormant by the time of my birth, and I thought it was dead by the time I married. Both families had lost ground; the king to whom they sent gold and men these days had not been part of their fights and did not care about them, and they had become vassals equally alongside one another.
But disputes can sometimes outlive all use, and intrigues were made in the house where I had lived so peacefully and so long. One day my husband sailed away and my enemies pounced. I was sent to this valley, far enough away that I could not return without help, and without much hope of getting help. I arrived here, bewildered, eking out a shelter in an old sacred grove, and waited to see my lord coming to fetch me back home, assuring me that the disloyal men had been banished. He did not come. Instead, months later, a messenger came and ordered me to remain where I was. It seemed my husband had been sent to his own exile, by the sea; we were not to expect to see one another again.
Before all that happened this man, this Leofwine, one of my husband’s housecarls and his trusted friend, packed up his belongings in the middle of the night and left us. He was found to be gone in the morning and no one had heard of him since. The whole household was shocked. I had sometimes nursed a private fear that he was not trustworthy, but still I was surprised. I had worried about weakness, that someone powerful would lean on him and he would give; I didn’t expect him to simply walk away in the night. I could not understand such faithlessness, and I imagined he had gone directly to my husband’s enemies to tell them what he knew. I imagined that at least I was safe from his enmity.
(How late I learned what safety really meant in that place: not that you couldn’t be harmed, because everyone could, but simply that you were ready to face your own wyrd and refuse to let it break you.)
And here he was at my door. Here, then, was an opportunity to show kindness or to deny it, and in the process to change the past. Or to change how the past lived in one person’s mind, which is the same thing. To change the story told of those times when we had lived in the same hall.
“Do you know,” I said carefully, deciding what to say only as I said it, “to whose house you have come?”
He stooped his head and looked through my door and past me as if he were more concerned with identifying the house than its denizen. He found no useful information in the dim shapes of my hearth, my bed, my table, and only then did he return his gaze to my face and draw in his breath, realizing what he saw there.
“Lady Eadgyth,” he said.
I dropped a wry curtsy. “The same.”
He was stingy with his words for a minute after that, as if waiting for me to say more. I had hoped he would ask a question and I could use that to gauge his feelings about me, whether he was afraid of me, or angry with me, or what he assumed about the reason I was here, in this poor place, and alone.
But he did not say anything, and having the position of greater safety—standing in the threshold of a home of my own, and knowing more of our story than he did—I ceded the point and spoke first.
“We are both far from home,” I said to him. “And both for a long time. I have not seen Ofswyðan Hall for these five years. The politics of that house were too much for both of us, it seems. I left alone and in the dead of winter, not long after you. How have you fared?”
He laughed, with a dry and thirsty sound in his throat that betrayed how long he had been on the road. “Ill, my lady. I fare ill. Can you say otherwise?”
“No. But I have a roof over my head. I can offer to share it, if you are not afraid of me.”
“I am no longer afraid of anything,” he said, not as a boast but wearily, as if he had become accustomed to saying this often. I wondered who else he had talked to on the road, and who else had asked him about his fears. I wondered how often he had lain down at night and resigned himself to the possibility that he would not wake up again in the morning. I swung the door wider open to let him in, bringing the smell of the cold in with him, and then I latched the door shut and we were in my house together.
It is a lonely house even at its best, and it was too meager a place to keep out the winter cold and dark, but I had a hearth, burning smoky peat in the center of the room. Leofwine moved toward it as if he were a moth, drew the sodden gloves off his hands, and stretched his fingers toward the flames. His hands looked red with cold and white with chapping and dark with exposure to the sun, and his posture was hunched as if against the wind. I could see that he had difficulty uncurling himself enough to accept the warmth of the fire. Watching him, I felt something I had not felt since leaving my husband’s hall. I felt lucky. I did not uncurl my own self so far as to feel thankful to the men who had sent me out, but I did feel glad for this place that had allowed me to stay, and for the fact that my name had not been so ruined when I left my former home that I could not find such a mooring. My husband’s men could have put it about that I was a poisoner or an adulterer or a spy—someone must certainly have suggested I was a spy—but no one took the time to say so to the people here, and so I was trusted when I told the truth: that politics had destroyed me, that I was left friendless through the chances of fate and not through my own action, that I would not trouble any place that allowed me to stay there.
I thought of a question and I asked it. “Have you simply been wandering for the whole time since I saw you last?”
“More or less,” he said. “I work where I can. On land and on sea, in the snow, in the ice, among the sea-birds. There is not much work at this time of winter.”
“You didn’t go to tell any other lord what you knew?”
“What?” He squinted at me. “No. I fled for my own safety. Why did you leave?”
“I was chased out,” I said. “A month after you deserted us.”
“I see.” He rubbed his hands together and for a while we listened to the small sounds of the fire. “But why are you here? In this barrow, in this oak grove?”
“It was a place to stay.” I started to feel peeved that he was asking so many questions when I would rather have been asking them of him. “Where did you go? To betray us?”
I suppose I glared at him as I spoke, and he looked away from me, but he did not seem much moved by what I had said. His voice was even: “No. I wish your lord had not been betrayed as he was. But that was not my doing. I left because I saw which way the wind was blowing and I could not prevent it.”
“You mean you knew someone was planning his ruin, and rather than tell him of the danger and stay to fight it off, you left?”
“It was never that simple. Threats were everywhere. Your husband knew that as well as I did.” He paused and seemed to consider how to proceed. “In the end . . . he believed he would survive. I did not. I could not persuade him to be wise when all he wanted was to be brave.”
“You are being cruel. He was always wise.”
“Yes, and virtuous. I know. I loved him well. But he was wrong about his own fate. He thought he could weather the storm by means of his virtue, and he couldn’t. No one could have. Half his household was against him, none of them respected me, and they had been promised rich prizes by his enemies. The only wise thing to do in that case would have been to surrender.”
“But he did.” I knew that gossip was unreliable, that that house had been full of liars, but I was surprised Leofwine had not heard this. “I am here as a result. His enemies told him to put away his foreign wife, and he did as they told him. That is why I am here in the cold, alone. It didn’t work. When my father’s old allies heard what had happened to me, they decided that Osmund was no longer to be trusted, and they joined forces with his enemies. He was ousted and went into exile a short time after I was sent away.”
Leofwine seemed alarmed. “So he is alive? He was not killed?”
“No. Surely not.” I suddenly felt some doubt. I was not there, after all, when he ran away. I had learned about what happened since then only by hearsay. What happened to the lord at Ofswyðan Hall, I had asked the people of the village, as often as I dared. He ran away, they said; fled with only the clothes on his back, they said. A coward in the end, they called him. No one ever said he was dead. Could he be dead? I felt dizzy, as if I had tried to put my foot down on solid earth and found nothing there. Almost every day I think of him in his exile, as I am in mine. I wish, somewhat cruelly, for him to be as lonely as I am. I wish for him to be well. I wish for him to die. Was it possible I had been making all these wishes about someone who was already dead? The thought was lonely. An Osmund who was alive was not good company, but an Osmund who was dead made me something of a fool. “Everyone says he survived,” I told Leofwine. “I think it is true. It would be a useless lie.”
“I was wrong, then,” he said, a little stupidly.
I shrugged, hoping to seem nonchalant, and abruptly changed the subject. “Do you want some bread? I don’t have any meat. There’s a little beer.”
He blinked slowly and said, “Thank you.” I fetched the bread; it was getting stale, but there was no mold on it. I broke us each a portion and we ate at my little table, not looking at one another. It was not much of a meal for one who had been wandering in the cold for a long time, but I could not offer him any other than what I had myself.
After a while he looked up at me and said, “This is the first fresh bread I have had in weeks.”
“It’s not fresh.”
“Fresh enough to be eaten in someone’s home, and not thrown away to the beggars.”
I hummed a sort of acknowledgement. I wasn’t comfortable accepting thanks for something I had so begrudgingly given. In truth I was getting tired of having him in my house. I had never much trusted Leofwine, had made up my mind against him when he left, and had grown accustomed to having my home to myself. I was starting to wish I had not invited him in.
Leofwine looked up. “Are you going to stay here?”
“I have been ordered to do so.”
“By Osmund?”
“By him or his enemies; it’s hard to say. The messenger used to be one of Osmund’s men. And it is safe, or as safe as any place I can expect to find. I don’t have much, but people leave me alone, and that is a great deal.”
“Don’t you have regrets?”
For the first time in some years I felt myself as I had been, the lady of the hall, with a man of the house speaking to me over-boldly. “Why should I?” I said, a little stung. “I kept faith. I did what was right and abided by my vows.”
“And yet they landed you alone. You have proven yourself trustworthy, but there is no one now to trust you with anything.”
“My faithfulness is seen by the eyes of God,” I said piously. “What about your regrets? You did not choose to be faithful to your lord, and yet your betrayal did not make you safe. Here you are in my house, with your skin chapped and broken from the cold and owning nothing but what is on your back. Do you not have regrets? Would you not be happier now if you had kept faith?”
He sighed. Nothing I could say seemed to hurt this man’s feelings. It was frustrating, as if I had become a ghost; I could throw my anger against him for as long as I wished, and he would take as little mind as the moon takes of a cloud.
But here was some feeling: “I do feel regret,” he said.
I looked up.
“I roam the earth and the sea wishing to have my home back. I have no lord at all and wish for protection. I miss everything that I have lost. But I know that this is my fate, and I know that I must bear it. I choose not to live in my rue, whenever I can. I wish things had gone differently, but I know that I did what I must. That comforts me.”
“Well,” I said. “How nice that you have such a comfort.”
He seemed miffed; I suppose he had expected me to praise his resignation. “If you can’t accept the past,” he asked me, “what other choice do you have? What do you wish would happen? Do you wish your husband would die? That he would take you back?”
I told him the truth. “I would be happiest if he came to me and made a thorough confession of his sins, and then performed penance for them before me, and still, after that, did not expect me to forgive him until at least ten years had passed.”
Leofwine seemed a little taken aback. He took another bite as if to buy time; the bread was so old I could hear it crunching between his teeth from across the table.
I looked at him directly and waited for him to meet my gaze. “Listen. I live every day surrounded by the knowledge of what I have lost. You say you choose not to dwell in those thoughts. I can’t put them away. Sometimes I can blink my eyes clear and see what is around me. Not always. I know that I can’t change the past, but I can’t bear to cut myself off from my history any more than I could to cut off my arm. I know it’s not a functioning arm. I know it can’t hold the person I wish it could hold. I no longer think he is worthy of that. But it is a part of me. I don’t wish to be any less than I am.”
It was the longest speech I had made in years. After such a long time alone, perhaps I had forgotten how to govern my tongue. I used to be skilled at that. Like a swan, I was usually silent; like a swan, too, I had become garrulous after taking flight. Where do you go, what can you do, after speaking that kind of truth, confessing that kind of weakness? I had given him everything he needed to dismiss and deride me; there was nowhere for the conversation to go from here.
The only thing to do was stop speaking. I rose and banked the fire; I directed him to sleep on the floor near the hearth and he wrapped his cloak around himself and lay down without comment. He went straight to sleep in the warmth, and I dozed for the whole long night, waking often to see that he was still there. It would be a stretch to say that all was well, but I made it tolerably through the night.
I was up as soon as there was any hint of dawn, and Leofwine woke only as I raked up the coals of the fire to get it started again for the day. He rolled himself out of his cloak, brushed the dust off his clothes, and rubbed a hand over his face to clear the sleep away.
“Sleep well?” I asked, needlessly.
“Very well. Thank you.”
“Are you going to find him?”
So that was what it took to startle this man, this wanderer who thought himself resigned! He stared at me as if I had read his mind, when I had only asked the most obvious question in the world.
“Yes,” he said. “I have to try.”
“Good.”
“Do you . . .” He coughed. “Do you want me to take him a message from you?”
I had given the question real thought during the watches of the night. I had wrought several complicated messages of love and anger, demands for apologies, curses for his loneliness. I imagined him dwelling in a cold house above the sea, and I wished for him to be cast into the waters in a storm. Let his own mind bedevil him with weariness. Let him suffer his cruel anxiety. Let him think of the home he has lost, its grace and its evils; let him long for his lost love.
But none of these things seemed wise to say in the light of day. So instead I said, “Tell him you saw me alive.”
“No more?”
“If he asks for more, tell him about the ten years of penitence I want.”
He didn’t argue.
I gave him some bread for the road. He left as the morning sky turned from charcoal-grey to ash-white. I was left alone to dwell in my earth-house, to hear the wind rattling the dead leaves on the oak trees, to deal with strangers.
He is alive, and he thinks of me. Leofwine will tell him about me and he will come begging forgiveness.
He is alive, and he has forgotten me. He will receive Leofwine’s message with indifference, and I will never see him again.
He is alive and he hates and resents me. He will hire someone to curse me.
He is dead, he is in heaven where they do not marry; he has no need to think of his wife. He is dead and is punished for his sins. He is dead and in purgatory and I should pray for his soul.
So many possibilities, and yet so little hope of justice! I told Leofwine that I could not cut myself off from my regret, but it is a cold companion. I am, by some grace, still living. I might live for many years yet, and what is left for me?
With my guest gone, I was left alone again with the sky. It was white with clouds and I could smell an oncoming snow. I wondered what it would be like to forgive. Clean, maybe, like the snow? Cold and empty? Restful?
Forgiveness was too large a task to accomplish on a cold winter’s morning with little sleep, but for the first time it started to seem like a way forward. In the meantime, in this place, in my aloneness, I exert what control I can over my own life. No one can claim to do more.