A/N: First of all, I'm terribly sorry this took so long. This was a difficult chapter for me, and I kept running out of time with it.
Midsummer is a huge deal for my countrymen, and I was hard-pressed at work for a whole two weeks before. Top that of with graduating students and their parents throwing parties for them, and I've been too busy for my tastes. I missed out on June completely this year, sad to say :/
I was also planning to publish this before I went out of town for a week, but as it was then, the chapter was no good. Now I had fresh eyes for it, and hopefully you like the result.
Théodred unmounted his horse with grace. He took a long look at his surroundings, noticing the little bits of disrepair that had crept over the ancient hall.
He had finished his final tour of the borders before yule, and had instead taken it upon him to ride to Aldburg, to aid his cousin. Éomer was certain Aldburg would shed light to Aefwyn's past, and Théodred was romantic enough to want to make his cousin happy. So, here he was.
Aldburg was the hereditary estate of Éomund's line, and now in the possession of Éomer, who rarely visited. Éomer liked Edoras better than his ancestral seat, and hadn't been here probably since his mother had died.
No one came to welcome him. The hall was indeed empty. The servants still remaining in Éomer's service didn't live within the hall's walls.
Since Théodred was no stranger to work he took his horse to the stable himself, and found the building to still be in decent shape. There was hay in the loft, he noticed, and a few small sacks of grain hung from the rafters, to protect them from rodents.
He chose a stall for his horse and climbed to the loft. After tossing down some hay and a sack of grain he had disentangled from the rafters he gave his horse a quick brush. Then he set out to take a closer look at the hall itself.
It had been expanded a number of times, but the original long hall was as it had been in Eorl the Young's day. The rafters were black with soot, the hangings were bit frayed at places, but clean. The huge trestle tables that would have otherwise filled the hall had been lifted away from the middle of the room, into the shadows by the walls.
He took a tour around the house and found all rooms in impeccable order if not a little dusty. The servants' quarters were a bit smaller than Meduseld, but the individual rooms were larger. He opened a door to a small chamber, and somehow instantly knew it to have been Aefwyn's. Its air seemed to hold a quantity of the young woman still. It was empty, lacking every sign of inhabitance. It hadn't been left in a hurry, all the drawers in the small chest of drawers were closed, the quilt on the bed immaculately folded and the small chair under the desk neatly.
The next room was larger and Théodred guessed it had belonged to Aefwyn's mother, the head maid. It wasn't as vacated as the other room: it seemed like all of Eadgifa's belongings were still in place.
This might be exactly what he'd been looking for. No need to interview old crones, perhaps?
Théodred felt only a short stab of guilt when he opened the first drawer. He had been taught to respect the personal space of others, as even Meduseld was often crowded with guests. He didn't like in the least to go through anyone's personal items, and even less a dead woman's.
The topmost drawer seemed to hold a clutter of parchment scraps riddled with notes, a few letters bound with a thong, some half-burnt candle sticks and an assortment of buttons. Théodred looked through a couple of the note slips, but they seemed to be stock on the stores of the hall, little lists with numbers and words like 'bolt of linen' written after them. He set the notes back in and picked up the letters.
He pondered a brief moment whether he should just take them to Aefwyn or Éomer and just not read them himself, but in the end his curiosity got the better of him and he opened the thong.
There were five letters in total, on parchment yellowed by age. None of them had any writing on the outside and no seal. He opened the first one and sat by the small table.
Judging by the hand-writing this one was from a woman. He almost set it aside until the words struck his eye.
Are you going to tell the truth? I strongly suggest you do not leave her in the dark, for that shall be in the benefit of none.
Now what was this? Théodred squinted closer but couldn't make out the words. The parchment had been smeared, but whether by the writer or the recipient, he couldn't tell. It seemed as if at least three words had been struck out, and he could only make out faint scrapings from the quill. One of the words might have been father, but he wasn't sure. The end of the sentence ran on undisturbed:
you cannot dream to deny her that what passes to her by right. You cannot change what happened, but undeniably it was for the best.
Eadgifa, I write this to you not as a lady, but as a friend. Heed my advice, and in the end you will have naught to regret. You cannot plan to go to your grave silent and let her remain as she is.
The letter was unsigned. He read the beginning again, but before the plain question of truth the letter sounded just like gossiping to him, just on paper. Some of these names could be matched to people in the Mark though, and that might lead him to the lady writer of the letter.
The second letter was from the same woman and in contents a close match to the first. Unlike the first one, this featured a name of a male, however.
Ceadric asks for you in his lucid moments. Will you not write to him?
It was written as a post scriptum. The events, if they had a connection to Aefwyn, had happened well in his adulthood, but he recalled no noble by the name of Ceadric. However, he had to be of relation to the lady to be in her letter.
Then again, why was a lady writing to a servant? Even one in a position such as Eadgifa's was far below even the lowliest noble.
Was it so, that Eadgifa had been disgraced by some lordling? That Aefwyn was a nobleman's bastard? The conditions of her birth were no secret; the only question was who had fathered her. And it was true Théodred knew nothing of Eadgifa's past before Aldburg. It was possible Eadgifa had not been a mere servant, like the ones scurrying about with trenchers, but perhaps more like a lady's handmaid.
That position had some elevation amongst servants. It might as well be possible for a lady to write letters to her former handmaid, even one impregnated by the lady's brother, or father, or any available male relative.
The last three letters were all penned by a different hand, and proved to be most interesting of the bunch. The writer, it was clear, was this man Ceadric. The letters were unsigned, a good precaution if his assumptions were correct, but the concept was clear.
They seemed a bit too close to love letters for Théodred to feel comfortable reading them, so he just skimmed over them.
Each and every one began with an apology, and ended in the hopeful plea for Eadgifa to forgive Ceadric. One even featured a crude proposal, clearly left unanswered as after a few sentences the young suitor complained her lack of replies.
It seemed to Théodred some letters were missing, and he set to look through the rest of the room. The search proved futile what came to letters, but he did find a locket wrought of silver. It contained a painting of a young man and a young woman. The woman had a similar look as Aefwyn and was probably her mother, but the man was a stranger.
He was a handsome man, but his eyes were full of insanity. The locket looked unworn, and it had been wrapped in a small square of silk. It had been hidden deep within one drawer; so far back he'd almost missed it completely.
This was clearly Aefwyn's father, then, and the locket most likely a gift from whoever had written the first two letters, this unnamed lady.
He wasn't a robust fellow, even the tiny painting made as much clear, and his skin was pale from time spent indoors. It would certainly explain why this Ceadric was a stranger to Théodred: the Rohirrim enjoyed most tales from the battlefield. Stories and legends of military prowess were popular in Rohan, and the most memorable ones were retold often enough for most children to know them by heart before they could even sit a horse properly.
Théodred took the letters and the locket with him. He intended to speak to the elder servants and ask questions, but these would next be shown to Aefwyn and Éomer.
He walked outside to the ruddy evening light. The hour was later than what he would have preferred, and it was clearly too late to pay anyone any visits today. He went to the stables to see to his horse and to pack away his evidence.
His stallion looked at him quite irritably and he spent the next hour grooming the horse and feeding him. After finishing with his mount he took some hard bread and cheese from his saddlebags and fetched a pitcher of cool water from the well.
Théodred had the intention of finding the library and eating there, but it proved a bit more difficult task than he'd expected: the door to the library was locked and the key was nowhere to be found. Sighing, he doubled back and ate in the great hall in from of a small fire he'd lit.
oOo
The next morning Théodred set out to find the key. After an hour of digging through the rooms he finally found it. The library had clearly been closed since Théoden King had fetched his niece and nephew. Surfaces were covered with a layer of fine dust, but miraculously the place had not been plundered by mice or rats.
The room had a single window, barred with heavy wooden shutters. He opened them and took a look around the room. It wasn't very big, and housed perhaps twenty or thirty books. There was a perhaps an equal amount of scrolls about. It was a modest library, all in all, but books were expensive.
This room had an air for secrets; he decided and set to work.
He went through most of the books, leafing through the pages to find hidden papers within. Unsurprisingly, that proved a futile effort, but nonetheless he set out for the scrolls next.
The scrolls proved more useful. Within one was a letter, and it was clearly part of the same set that he'd found in Eadgifa's chambers. After trifling through the rest he'd found four more letters.
He read a few from the nameless lady, and discovered a few interesting tidbits from within. Something that had happened after Aefwyn's conception and Eadgifa's arrival in Aldburg had caused Ceadric to lose his mind. The lady had sent the locket to Eadgifa from Ceadric, and spent three lines praising the artist because in her opinion the paintings looked very alike. The painter who'd done the pictures had been from Edoras. This in particular brought a smile to Théodred's face: a painter in Edoras was much easier to find than one in, say, Gondor.
Only two of these letters were from Ceadric. These were of a later stock than the ones he'd found the previous day, as in one he inquired after the child. The other was even more persistent in the matter of their offspring, he noted after skimming through it: the man insisted he wanted to name the child his heir.
But still, not even these five new letters brought any new knowledge of the identity of their writers beyond Ceadric's name.
It was more than a little frustrating.
Théodred thus left the library and the hall. Outside, the sun had just crossed its zenith, and the weather was perfect. He took another long look at the hall, taking in its carved wooden façade, the smaller buildings that formed a protective circle around the central yard and the imposing wooden gate through which a narrow road led through the city of Aldburg towards the west.
Aldburg was considerably quieter than in its heyday, and the death of its lord had made it quite a subdued city. Thus even during daytime the streets were nearly empty, only a few children were playing outside. Asking a few choice questions from the children he was soon able to locate one of the servants that had worked for his aunt.
The woman lived in a small timber house flanked by a vegetable garden in the other side and a gnarly oak in the other. She was outside, squatting in the garden when he walked up to the house.
"Good day to you, mistress!" He called.
"Might we talk?" She rose and dusted her skirts.
"And who might you be?" Her tone wasn't unfriendly, but suspicious. Strangers were rare here, and suspicion was better than turning up dead.
"It matters not, but I'm on an errand for your Lord, Éomer son of Éomund." Giving out his real name would only make the woman shut up tighter than a clam.
"Aye? Well, the Lord hasn't been here for a while, might he have a need of his servants now?" She however gestured him to sit on the bench by her door. She sat next to him, still eyeing him warily.
"Not quite now, apart from a few answers." Théodred knew that a bookkeeper Éomer had hired rode here twice a year to pay the servants what they were owed, but otherwise Éomer troubled himself rarely over his seat.
The woman harrumphed at him, but nevertheless gave him an expectant look.
"You had a head maid here by the name of Eadgifa. Where was she from?"
"I was working for his lordship's grandfather when Eadgifa came here. She was a pretty slip of a woman, had been a maid to some highborn woman a ways east from here. Pregnant when she came, too. But the Lord's wife was kind and let her stay. She never mentioned to anyone any place she was from though, just said something vague about east if she was asked."
"Did she ever mention the child's father?" The woman shook her head, pursing her lips.
"No. She had quite a few people talking about her after she gave birth to that little girl of hers, but she never said a word about it."
"Did she have any close friends here?"
"Eadgifa kept to herself pretty much, and took care of the girl. There was this guardsman who showered her with attention, but I don't think she much cared of him. He was short of being engaged to this girl Odwyn before he took a liking to Eadgifa. Odwyn didn't take his wandering attentions too well and just left. That's the last I've heard of her."
"What happened to the guard?" She shot in a sideway glance before replying.
"He didn't live too long after that. Died in some raid or the other not half a year after. Eadgifa never paid him back any attention, but he just kept trying nonetheless."
"Thank you for your time, mistress." He rose to leave but the woman wasn't quite done yet.
"Now, m'lord, why is the Lord Éomer so interested in a servant?"
"It will suffice to say it is in his interest to know, mistress." The woman cocked her head and looked at him sharply, but finally nodded.
"Good day to you, m'lord." He replied in kind and left.
It was obvious there was nothing else to know in Aldburg. Whatever secrets Eadgifa had brought here had remained only hers until the very end. There had been valuable clues, and where there were clues there were people to answer a few questions.
First was the painter in Edoras. Despite being the capital city of Rohan, Edoras was not mightily large and housed only a handful of artists capable of work in this quality. It shouldn't prove too difficult to find a painter who had painted the two miniatures.
Also the locket was likely from Edoras too. It was fashioned after a popular model and had a beautiful carving at the front of roses.
Combine a face to a name and the knowledge that the man was insane, and there should be no issue remembering a name. And, to have painted Eadgifa, the man must have seen her too.
He smiled and went back to the stables to saddle his horse. It was a long way back home.
A/N: Now that we've got this truth out in the open... Well, it wasn't exactly how I had planned it originally. And it is possible the previous chapters still contain some misleading lines, however carefully I've tried to go over them and see everything matches up. Sorry about that, and please tell me if you find any mismatching lines, I'll make sure to fix it.
I also really hope you like my version of Théodred. I've always pictured him as a kind, humane man. Even if he's a bit jaded when it comes to women, but we can forgive him that.