A visitor comes to the new house

“Mama’s coming, Mama’s coming,” Gunnilda murmured as she shuffled into the bedroom. She had just put Bedwig down for the night and the lad had seemed tired enough, but he was awake and whimpering frantically now. Perhaps a pin was sticking him, she thought.

It was only their third night in the new house, and so it was still a pleasant surprise to open the bedroom door and step into the blue dimness of a moonless spring evening, while the night itself was held at bay behind the brilliant glass of her tall windows. 

How different it was from utter blackness of the stifling bedroom at the old house! where the banked fire in the outer room only served to accentuate the darkness, rimming poor Alwy’s sleeping body with a reddish glow as if he were made of cast and cooling iron. It was a strange thing to wake now and clearly see the features of his face in the keen starlight.

Gunnilda lit the candle on the pretty table by the door and went to her baby, murmuring words of comfort as she crossed the floor. He was crouched down low in his cradle, but when he heard her coming he pulled himself up to stand on his quaking legs and lift his tearstained face to be kissed.

Gunnilda had just laid her hands on him when she glanced outside, and shrieked in terror. “Alwy!” she wailed.

There was a man outside – a grimy, disheveled, naked, leering man – staring in her window.

She scooped up Bedwig, but in her panic the only idea that came to her was to crouch down and hide behind the cradle.

Alwy burst into the room a moment later.

He was waiting this night – the night of the new moon – to be summoned out to hunt for wolves. Egelric was spending the night at his old house, watching the crossroads with a horse saddled in the barn, and with Alwy’s hounds loose to prowl around the farm. 

But he was not expecting to be summoned to his bedroom by his wife. Could the wolves get in through the window somehow?

“Alwy! there’s a man – a man – a naked man – outside! Looking in!” she blubbered, clutching Bedwig to her breast.

Alwy was outside before she had finished, and he leaned over the railing on the stairs in time to see the man run past, heading down into the woods at the edge of Egelric’s farm.

He dashed back inside to grab the great knife he used for slaughtering pigs, and which he had brought in from the barn this night in case he should be called out against the wolves.

Gunnilda met him in the hall. “Oh Alwy!” she cried, remembering the other danger when she saw him take the knife. “What about the wolves?”

Alwy only ran outside again.

Gunnilda followed him out onto the step. “Alwy, the wolves!” she cried in panic. “Alwy!”

But Alwy had disappeared into the woods, alone and armed only with a knife against a pack of savage animals – and one frightening man.

Bertie had followed her out, but before he could open his mouth to form a question, she herded him back inside. “You get in the girls’ room with young Egelric, and you close that door, and you all stay in there, and don’t you open it again till I come for you, is that clear?”

Bertie’s eyes filled with tears, and he whimpered “Mama” as he had not done in several years.

“You got to be a man tonight, Bertie, that’s what,” she said, trying to master the tremor in her voice long enough to convince Bertie that she was in control. “You got to keep them kids calm. I’m counting on you, do you hear? I take care of the house, and you take care of the girls and the babies.”

“Yes, Ma.”

But he was only a baby himself! And she only a girl.

After she had the children packed away, she went back out onto the step and looked out across the yard and down into the woods. But there was nothing to see. No wolves, no man, no Alwy – but there was nothing stopping the wolves from slinking up to the house in Alwy’s absence, and all of their dogs were down at the old place. And while she could bar the door against wolves, there was nothing stopping the man from coming back either. Against a man she did not know what she could do.

But there was one thing she could do well. She lifted her head and screamed, “Egelric!” The name rang out across the downs and over the woods, and she knew that it would carry as far as the old house on a still night. “Egelric!”

And then she waited.