XI

I went to see my nephew at his office the morning after our argument prepared to offer a full and unconditional apology if that was what it would take to get him talking to me. He had said some most hurtful things - and some, alas, both hurtful and accurate - but my chief concern now was to regain his trust. I wanted to get to the root of this change in him - but he would, I perceived, need careful handling. I had not had a great deal of success in my dealings with his father - a man I had loathed for what I thought was his merciless torture of his second son and for the great unhappiness he had brought to my sister. But I believed whole-heartedly that whatever disappointments my nephew had faced over the previous year, he was not by any means beyond recovery. Even at that remarkably unpleasant dinner, he had shown much of his old easy temper; and I had only to think of his face as he looked upon or spoke about his children to bring to mind at once the great difference between him and his own father. There was a great deal of cant uttered about Denethor's love for his older son, but I had always seen it as self-glorification on the part of the Steward of Gondor. On the subject of his treatment of his younger son, I could rage for hours. Denethor loved his sons when they reflected well upon him. Faramir loved his children because he was a good and decent man.

He was not at his office. A gentle and persuasive conversation with one of his clerks enlightened me not only to the clerk's current financial tribulations - about which I offered some considered and, I daresay, very shrewd advice - but also that the Steward would, on occasion, retire for the day to a room in the citadel to rest. It would not surprise me to learn that after our encounter the previous evening, Faramir might have made himself ill. I tapped on the door of this room, not intending for us to talk at length if he were there, but simply to find out if there was aught I could do for him, and thus make a gesture of reconciliation. There was no answer, so I opened the door onto a small but pleasant room which was clearly in regular use - but which currently stood empty.

I spent some time checking offices and talking to staff to ascertain whether any business had taken him down into the city, but to no avail. So it was early afternoon before I tried what should have been the most obvious place - his home. All seemed very quiet. Éowyn was not home, and there was no sign of the children. I tried the door to the study and went in, and there he was.

He was sitting on the edge of the couch and appeared, from the evidence of the hand at his brow and the bottle and glass I could see on the floor, probably struggling with the usual after effects of spending an evening putting away the best part of a bottle of brandy. He dropped his hand, looked up at me and my heart quailed. He seemed distraught.

'What has happened?' I said, coming over to him quickly and in some alarm.

'She has gone.'

'What?'

'Éowyn has gone, and she has taken our children with her.'

'Well,' I said, chewing at my lower lip, 'I can't say I'm entirely surprised.' I looked at him closely. 'Did she speak to you last night?' I said warily, feeling a sinking sense of responsibility that it was I that had encouraged Éowyn to talk to him.

He nodded.

'I now find myself in the position of asking whether she found herself talking not so much to Faramir son of Denethor as to Denethor himself?'

This was the point where he broke down.

A great fear passed over me, as I wondered what it was that he could have said to her. I could believe Denethor capable of much, and I dreaded to think what terrible things Faramir might have said whilst in the guise of his father. The precision of Denethor's cruelty with his intellect and his eloquence had been one of his most appalling characteristics, as his second son knew too well, and Faramir had demonstrated to me only the previous evening that this lay well within his own abilities too. I had left him in a foul temper, and I could imagine that Éowyn would have pressed hard once she had decided that the matter of their marriage had to be resolved. Again, I felt a stab of responsibility. I should have brought them to my home, to neutral territory, and sat with them as they talked, rather than let them loose upon each other. They had had a year of that already and got nowhere.

I sat beside him. 'Tell me, son,' I said quietly, not caring for the moment that this term of address had enraged him the previous day. 'What did you say to her?'

'It was not what I said,' he whispered, 'it was what I did.'

That plain terrified me. For I had seen how Denethor would punish his sons when they played up - but surely Faramir would not have raised his hand to his wife in a similar fashion? The boy abhorred violence to such a degree he could no longer go about armed. Even mere discussion of warfare had, on that memorable occasion the previous year, brought about an extraordinary collapse.

With a great deal of effort, I coaxed the story from him; of Éowyn's ill-starred attempt to salvage the marriage, his own tiredness and remorse at our row that had made him somewhat less than responsive, the rapid degeneration into another quarrel, and the sudden and perhaps predictable wrath on her part. He then became exceptionally distressed about his steward's ring although, as he told me in somewhat garbled fashion of the rest of the evening's events, I privately thought Éowyn would have been considerably more disturbed by his subsequent frenzy and his dubious decision to put his fist through a pane of glass. His hand was mercifully uncut, if a little bruised. But he kept coming back to the ring, which seemed to have taken on an enormous significance for him, and which made him talk somewhat incoherently about how it had been his father's and was a plague on the family. It always, I thought, inevitably came back to Denethor.

'I swear,' I muttered, trying to keep my voice under a tight control, 'I wish I'd throttled that father of yours years ago. The only favour that man ever did me was to kill himself and prevent me becoming a murderer.'

'I think you will find, uncle, that it was not my father that injured my wife last night.' He put his head into his hands. 'And knowing what he would do to my mother...' Then he began once again to sob uncontrollably.

It was as if I had been knifed in the heart. I looked upon him in complete shock. I had once or twice wondered whether Denethor had laid a finger upon my sister, and I had dismissed it as being beyond the capabilities even of that vile man, despite the later evidence of his severe way of disciplining of his sons. But I had truly not believed it possible...

Oh, my sweet sister, how I failed you...

What had my nephew seen that had impressed itself even upon a five-year old? And, more, what could he be feeling now that he had even quite by accident hurt his own wife?   

I put my arm about him and, in time, he stopped shaking. 'Faramir,' I said gently and calmly, trying to disguise my own very great distress, 'what would he do?'

It took him a little while to answer. 'I do not remember very much about it,' he said softly, and he seemed now a little dazed, 'but Boromir would sometimes speak of it. I think it confused him and he wanted me to explain it. He loved father very dearly.'

Removing himself from my hold, he stood up and made as if to leave the room, and I followed him. When he reached the doorway, he stopped and ran his hand thoughtfully down the wood of the frame. 'He pushed her back once against here,' he said. 'And she hit her head on the edge. She wept for hours.' He gestured into the hallway. 'I was sitting on the stairs. When she ran past, he saw me there, and so he came up and he hit me too. That was the first time I recall him doing it. I don't know if it was because I was out of bed when I should not have been, or that I had seen his deed, or... Well, I never really grasped why he would lash out at me.' He breathed deeply. 'Éowyn hated this place,' he continued, tracing his fingers up and down the woodwork. 'I don't know why I brought us back here. It seems that shifting the furniture and painting the walls is not enough to cover over the dishonour of the house of the stewards.'

'Perhaps you should stop trying to cover it over,' I said gently.

He moved to rest against the door frame and then leaned his head back on it.

'Did he hit you very often, Faramir?'

'Quite often.'

'I knew he would punish you both severely when you misbehaved, but I thought that that was the full extent of it.'

'It was a little more than that.'

I wondered exactly how much more was being covered by that statement. 'So that occasion... you must have been about... eleven?'

He dropped his head to look at me dryly. 'You would have to be a little more specific,' he said.

'Here in this house. Your father and I were talking in his study, and I think that your brother had been chasing you down the hallway, and he must have pushed you in through the door. You came flying in.'

He thought for a moment. 'Oh yes!' he said. 'I remember. Yes, he was furious with me. He did not like to be interrupted.'

'He shot across the room, grabbed you by the shoulders, shook you hard as he shouted at you, and then hit you full across the face, backhand then forehand. I had never seen anything like it in my life. I was so angry with him - and this shows you what kind of a man he was, he would drive anyone to violence - that after you had fled, I told him that if I ever saw him do anything like that to you again, I would break both his arms.'

'I should imagine then that you never saw him do anything like that to me again.'

And indeed I had not.

'Did he strike your brother much?' I asked suddenly.

He frowned. 'When he misbehaved,' he said. 'He always loved Boromir,' he added as if by way of explanation, which I thought rather tragic. 'And I think that there came a point where it was clear that Boromir would have struck him back. Perhaps he did once, I do not know.'

'And what did Boromir make of your father striking you?'

'As children, we both rather thought it was the order of things. Of course, it stopped when I got bigger. I wonder if he imagined I might strike him back too. Do you know,' he said, almost thoughtfully, 'I used to take pride in the fact that despite all his provocation, I never once lifted my hand to the Steward of Gondor, not even in self defence. But the moment that the crisis came, I was prepared to lift my hand to Éowyn. I shall never forgive myself for that.'

'It is not, I think, your own forgiveness that you need concern yourself about.'

'I suppose you are right.'

We did not speak for a moment, then I said, very faintly, 'My poor sister...'

He turned to look at me, comprehension growing in his eyes. 'I had always assumed that you knew,' he said slowly, reaching for my hand.

I looked at him aghast. 'Do you imagine for a moment that if that was the case I would have left you all here?' I said passionately.

His face twisted, in confusion now. 'I suppose I thought it was simply one of those things that was not mentioned.'

'There were rather too many of those, it seems. Faramir, I would have had all three of you back in Dol Amroth in no time.' I was very close to tears now, but restrained myself on his account.

'I would have liked that,' he said, a little vaguely. 'I wish I had said something now.'

'So do I.'

After a long pause, he said, 'We were not entirely unhappy, you do understand that? He did love us; well, you know he loved Boromir very much, but he and I did have a great deal in common. We used to talk about books.'

This seemed to me a very impoverished sort of bond between father and son, but I did not say so.

'I think that it was really only when I grew older and he knew that he could not entirely determine all my actions that he began to dislike me. By then I did not spend so much time in the city. But I did love him. He was my father. And my lord.' He frowned again. 'It is hard to reconcile the memory of that man with the other that people have told me about. The one that tried to kill me.'

I had no answer to that; and I, at least, could reconcile them very easily.

He wandered into the hallway and I watched him anxiously. He stood for a moment looking round. 'What hour is it?' he said suddenly, and pushed his hand through his hair. 'I ought to go to my office. I have a great deal to do before the King gets back.'

'I think,' I said gently, 'that you should leave it for today.'

He frowned. 'I suppose I do feel rather tired. Perhaps it can wait until the morning.'

He gazed around the hallway again. 'When I first met Éowyn, she did not care for me. I was very despondent about it; well, you know what I am like. I would rattle around this house thinking of her. And here we are again. Me, the ghosts, and the thought of her.'

I touched his hand again, and it was very cold, and he clutched back at mine. 'I think you should come back to my home tonight,' I said, and could only regret that the offer was coming more than thirty years too late.

He hesitated, as if looking round for something, and then sighed. 'I was about to say that I would look in on the children first, but...' He shrugged. 'Well. Shall we go?'

I took him home and, even though it was only mid-afternoon, put him to bed, where he quickly fell asleep. And I sat and watched him for some time as he slept, and his face was very pale and very tired, and I wept quietly, as I had often done before but, I think, this time with more grief, for my sister and her sons.