Chapter Three: The Orphan

Author's Note: At this point in its mythological/historical progression, Middle-earth's circles are the finite dimensions of the globe. Aman has been removed and can only be reached via the Straight Road. Middle-earth now either orbits Arien, the Sun, or is about to begin doing so as the Age of Men commences. Whether its inhabitants were aware of all this or not is another question, of course; chances are the more inquisitive and informed among them would be.

~~~~~

And it is said that in that feast of the Spring of Arda Tulkas espoused Nessa the sister of Oromë, and she danced before the Valar upon the green grass of Almaren. Quenta Silmarillion

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Yule came with hoarfrost and the soil black and hard. Cousin Saradoc came with it. He was Rory and Mennie's eldest son, a golden giant of a hobbit and as dashing as an ancient hero of the North-kingdom. He was often gone from the Hall, off to the Southfarthing or the White Downs studying local climates, improved seed-stock, and the peculiarities of grange politics: the sorts of things that would equip him for one day becoming Master of Buckland.

Whenever Saradoc came home the cousins bounced and squealed and scrambled all over him. He always brought them a story and a song or two, a squeeze or a good-natured cuff on the shoulder, and a pocketful of presents from far-off corners of the Shire. On this visit, however, his time with the Great Room mob was brief. "You all run along now," he told them, after everyone had gotten their treats—an immense bronze chestnut from Bindbole Wood and a stick of sugar-candy from Longbottom—but no stories, and no songs. "Go off and be good to your parents today," he said. "Where is Frodo? Why isn't he here?"

"He's hiding," Melba said. "That's all he does any more, hide."

"Well, go find him for me."

They scattered, and Frodo emerged from behind the tall stack of firewood beside the hearth. It comforted him to be near his cousins, but he never joined in songs or games any more, and in every queue his chosen place was last. So it was a good place to hide. "Here I am," he said.

"Frodo! I'm glad to see you. Come join me, lad. For however long it lasts, we've got the Great Room to ourselves."

Saradoc had saved a chestnut and a sweet for him. Frodo murmured, "Thank you, cousin," and put them in his pocket without looking at them.

Saradoc studied him intently. "Well," he said finally, "they said you were awfully pale, and I do agree. You're thin, too—particularly for a Baggins! You're not getting enough to eat, are you, Frodo?"

Frodo shrugged and looked down at his lap.

"Now, my dad would never allow any hobbit living under his roof to go hungry. And my ma must have decided you're too big to force-feed. Otherwise she'd have done it, make no mistake."

"Yes."

"And Ezzie tells me she comes and finds you for every meal. But even she can't persuade you to eat, and that distresses her very much. She's afraid that left to your own devices you're going to just drift off and fade like a wisp of fog. 'We can't have that!' she says. 'Frodo is too good a hobbit to lose. The Shire needs him. All Middle-earth needs him.' A curious but highly Esmeralda thing to say, wouldn't you agree?"

Frodo looked up in surprise, not at Ezzie's defending him, but at the realization that lately, whenever they got the chance, Ezzie and Saradoc were off somewhere together. Folk said Ezzie would never marry. She was beautiful and accomplished, but headstrong. At her coming-of-age, when hobbit hearts were hottest, she had rejected every suitor who came along. Now she was a verging-upon-spinsterly forty-four, almost the age that Primula Brandybuck had been that enchanted summer of 1366. "She reminds me so much of my Mum," Frodo said. "She has been so kind to me."

"Of course she has. She loves you, Frodo. And anyway, Ezzie is a jewel and a queen among hobbits." There was such a smile in Saradoc's voice as he spoke that Frodo thought at once of Mum's words: "I never thought anyone would look at me the way he does, as though I were the radiant queen of the North-kingdom." "Are you going to marry her?" Frodo said abruptly.

"For my part, yes. For hers, well, I doubt very much she'll have me," Saradoc said, with a wink. "Though I have made arguments in my attempts to convince her that would do a lawyer proud. But for now let's talk about you, and this business of not eating. It's not natural for a hobbit, you know that. And it's not like you haven't got folk looking after you: you're reminded about meals, you're welcomed, you're expected. And still you're too thin. So are you simply forgetting to eat?"

"I suppose I am."

"Just as you're forgetting to smile and to laugh?"

"I'm sorry, cousin," Frodo said sadly, wishing he could please them all.

"Oh, you needn't apologize to me! But Ma and the aunties are in an everlasting tetter about it, you know."

Frodo squeezed his eyes shut and did not respond.

Saradoc placed a hand on his shoulder, warm and solid. "No, Frodo, I understand perfectly why you have withdrawn from all the things that used to give you joy. I can't imagine—no, I can't imagine any of it, bless you, cousin. I'm sorry this thing happened to you. It can't be changed, it can't be mended, and we don't know what to do. We want to help but we're helpless and in grief ourselves. You've been hit the hardest, though, poor lad."

Frodo looked up then, past Saradoc and the Great Room ceiling with its immense curved beams. He waved his hand toward the nearest window and the grey winter sky beyond, trying vainly to tell his cousin his unending feeling of loss: "It is so empty and cold." Saradoc did not reply, just kept his hand resting on Frodo's shoulder. Frodo placed his own hand over it, longing for the day when his cousin would come home to stay. The Hall seemed a little less lonely, now that he was here.

~~~~~

Saradoc kept Frodo at his side all that Yuletide, and, bless him, he refrained from constantly urging Frodo to eat. But still it was very hard at the turn of the year, now that Mum and Dad were gone. Of all the occasions hobbits found for merrymaking, Yule was Dad's favourite. "Have you ever noticed, Frodo," he said once, "that right about midnight on First Yule there's an instant when everything—the sky, the trees, the earth—seems to pause? Your mum says our world is a great globe, though it seems flat to us because it's so much bigger than we are. It hangs suspended in the Void amid the Moon and Stars and Sun. For half the year it seems bit by bit to turn away from the Sun and her light until, when the moment of greatest darkness comes, it's though the world halts, catches its breath, thinks better of the entire thing, and turns back. The days get longer and the weather gets warmer.

"But Yule heralds something even more important than oncoming spring. Your mum says that there are great forces of light and darkness in our world. We can't see them, but they are in constant strife with one another. The sun's return is a sign that, in the end, the forces of light will win. I'm not as good with words as she is, but that's how I understand it. The important thing to remember, Frodo, is that there's more to Yule than the feasts and songs and play-acting."

As though his recollections had provided the cue for the entertainment to begin, the throng in the Great Room suddenly went quiet. In the clear firelit space before the hearth three musicians appeared, drums and flutes at the ready. But no players in ribbons and masks came bounding out; there was only the muffled sound of bells, so high and faint they seemed to come from far away, as a springle-ringer cloaked from head to foot in grey took her place in the flickering half-circle of light.

This was not usual for wintertime. Springle-ringing was for planting and harvest, for weddings and birthday-parties in the warm seasons—and for choosing a lover at Lithedays. Who was this dancing on the darkest night of the year? For an instant Frodo saw not a hobbit but a tall figure, lithe yet majestic, cloaked in mystery. He blinked and the illusion passed, but it left him shivering, not so much with fear as with awe. He had seen many such figures, and not only in his dreams. In fact, upon glancing at Saradoc just now, Frodo saw not his cousin but a tall, big-shouldered Man with a golden beard. He quickly looked away, afraid that he had gone out of his head with sorrow.

In silence the dancer let drop her cloak. A hand reached from the crowd to draw it from the firelit stage. Esmeralda, all in green, stood with her eyes cast down and her hands, palms flat, crossed over her breast, so motionless that the hundreds of tiny silver bells she wore made no more sound than the whisper of a breeze.

At a signal heard only by themselves the musicians began a slow drum-pattern, barely faster than a heartbeat. Slowly and gracefully Ezzie opened one arm, and the bells on her fingers were like soft rain as she lightly, almost imperceptibly, shook her hand. Slowly she unfurled her other arm, her fingers, hands and wrists taking up the motion. Slowly she raised her head. She wore a garland of bells and ribbons bound across her brow, and a blaze of her name-jewels at her throat. The flute joined the drumbeats in an intricate knot of rhythm and melody, gradually accelerating, until all of Ezzie's bells were in motion, cascading like showers of March rain.

They rang wild and sparkling as she whirled. Her colour was high, her lips and cheeks crimson, and her eyes flashed, green as the swirling velvet fog of her gown. Her thick dark hair swirled behind her, and diamonds, set just inside the points of her ears, were tiny streaks of flame.

Everyone stared open-mouthed in awe and delight. Saradoc, at Frodo's side, sat straight and expectant. Could it be that his arguments had won his cousin's heart and hand after all? It seemed too much to hope for, and yet it was most unlike Ezzie to dance for love at Yule or any other time. She was a creature of intelligence rather than passion. But with a leap of hope and an almost-forgotten joy, sharper than pain, Frodo thought of Mum and Dad falling in love. He prayed with all his heart that it was so: that Ezzie had come to claim Saradoc, and be claimed.

The drums were like thunder now, the flute melody a jagged descent like lightning, the bells a flooding downpour. Ezzie's face glowed as she danced in the golden crescent of light. She seemed to burn with an Elvish fire, and yet there could be nothing more hobbitlike than springle-ringing, grounded like every other art of the Shire-folk in the land, the clan, the smial, the hearth, the marriage-bed, the cradle, the green grave-mound.

The music ended as abruptly as it began. Ezzie stood before Saradoc and bowed deeply. Then she vanished in the upwelling of applause and the sudden congratulatory surge.

Aunt Mennie was there, embracing her son and weeping. "Oh," she said, "I never saw anything like that, not since I chose your father at harvest all those years ago. You're a lucky, lucky hobbit, son."

"It's a good match," Rory said gruffly, landing an affectionate punch on Saradoc's shoulder, then awkwardly turning away.

Frodo was engulfed for the moment by the throng of well-wishers. He felt tears welling, and fought them back. His beloved cousins were moving out of the darkness of mourning into the bright happiness of a wedding. For them the world turned once more. Desperately he wished he could join them. But it was not allowed, not yet, maybe never.

The crowd thinned at last, and he was once again alone with Saradoc. Frodo hung his head, not knowing what to say, his heart still in winter. Formally and politely, he extended his hand. "Congratulations, cousin," he managed, and he didn't think his voice quavered too badly.

Saradoc took Frodo's hand in his own big kindly one and shook it. Then he ruffled Frodo's hair and pulled him close and held him. "Don't give up hope, Frodo-lad," he said. "You'll know joy again. It won't always be so dark for you. And one fine day some lucky lass is going to wed the best hobbit in the Shire—next to me, of course. You'll see."

~~~~~

They wasted no time in becoming engaged. It happened at the big noon banquet on Second Yule, just before the roast goose. Saradoc caught up with Esmeralda as she made her way across the crowded hall, a glass of wine in each hand. "To your dance of last night I reply yes," he said. "Whatever prompted you to do that, Ezzie? I thought you didn't want to marry me. I thought you considered me too young and too silly."

"I had a dream," she said. Today she seemed a plain hobbit-lady in a simple grey frock. Only the diamonds glinting in her ears gave a hint of the wild fiery creature of the night before. "It caused me to change my mind. That's all I'll say about it. Am I to assume that you have spoken, then?"

"Yes," Saradoc said, "I have spoken. More than once, you know. At least fifty times, I'd say."

"And I have answered," Ezzie said. "Only once, but once is all that is necessary. Yes." They kissed, chastely but earnestly, beneath the immense branching chandeler hung with holly and mistletoe. Every Brandybuck in the place roared and cheered. They drew apart and looked deeply into one another's eyes for a moment, and then they did something completely unexpected: without exchanging a word they both turned toward Frodo, reached out to him and drew him into their embrace. Heart pounding, dizzy with hope and uncertainty, he shyly slipped an arm about each of their waists: Esmeralda and Saradoc, who with their love seemed to heal—a little—the raw gaping wound in the world.

~~~~~

As it always did, Yule ended. It took three weeks to wash all the dishes and even longer to sweep the last pine needles from the corners. Winter set in hard and cold, and there was nothing to look forward to but spring, still two months off, and the wedding, even further off than that. Saradoc departed for the Northfarthing to learn the ways of the malters and brewers. Esmeralda departed for Tuckborough to make her wedding-clothes and to spend her final weeks with her family before Saradoc adopted her into his. Once again the days were dreary and the nights heartachingly sad, as Frodo drank in all he could get of his parents through his Mum's stories. If possible he felt even more lonely than before.

After a late but fierce snowstorm, with the world glowing blue-white and the snow scrunching under his feet, Frodo went rooting through the dustbins out behind Buck Hill. Amid the egg shells, sodden tea leaves, and broken mathoms he found a handful of glass beads, a pretty blue like mum's eyes. He melted snow in his hands to wash them off. They glittered against his outstretched palms in the dazzling winter sunshine. Tonight he would leave them for Mum and Dad. As if to reassure himself that everything was as it should be, he glanced up at his window.

It was flung wide open, the cold February air pouring in. He stuffed the beads in his pocket and ran inside and up the tunnel, nearly flattening two young cousins in his haste. Mum and Dad's door stood ajar. To his dismay the rooms were filled with daylight and with shrill female voices. Aunt Mennie and Aunt Amaranth had invaded, together with a gaggle of housemaids wielding washclouts, dustpans, and brooms.

Mennie saw him in the doorway. "Why, of course," she exclaimed. "Here's the one who's been bringing all these messy sticks and leaves in here. I have no idea what you were thinking, Frodo, but bless me, what a job of work you left us, what with the wedding coming up and all. Well, well, I thought as much, didn't I tell you so, Amaranth? Suspected it all along, in fact. But I didn't go tattling to Rory on you, lad; he doesn't know, and for your sake let's keep it that way. He'd never have the heart to beat you at such a happy time, though the dear knows you've earned it, defying him like this—"

The ladies had swept his gifts away, and in a great flurry of bedsheets and billowing curtains they were stripping the rooms bare.

"But don't worry, lad," Mennie went on gaily. "We aren't turning you out. Amaranth has a spare room, and that's going to be your home now. Go on, now, be off with you. Go!"

Aunt Amaranth, even more sour-faced than usual, came at him with her broom raised like she meant to do something much more violent with it than sweep him out the door. She hated boys. Frodo fled to the Great Room and slipped behind the woodpile. He hugged his knees, shaking all over with a feeling that he had known so seldom in his young life he hardly recognized it: he was angry.

Was this, then, the end of Mennie's decent interval? Barely more than half a year? What about respecting the dead and their things? Of course Rory owned Brandy Hall and everything in it, and he was completely within his rights to give the rooms to anyone he chose. All the same, it was like a blow to the chest. Frodo felt hurt, betrayed—and robbed. Saradoc would never do this to him, never! And Ezzie would throw a fit if she knew. But she was far away, and by the time she got back to Buckland and saw her bridal suite, it would be too late. Only the curving walls and round windows would remain. All other trace of Mum and Dad would be gone.

~~~~~

It happened just as he imagined. Frodo was not consulted, being only a teenager. But he watched it all, standing off to one side, ignored and forlorn. The rooms were cleared and painted over. All their possessions, Dad's pipes and jolly waistcoats, Mum's dresses and hair-jewels and combs, were packed in a big mathom-trunk and stored in one of the sheds out behind the pony-barn.

Even Laddie was carted off before Frodo could find him, destined with the rest to be food for moths and mice. All that was spared was the desk and the chest with the runes that held Mum's journals. These did not fit in the small dark room off Amaranth's pantry that held the sway-backed cot where Frodo was to sleep. They ended up in her kitchen, where she complained bitterly about them every day. She eyed the jewel-inlaid chest with considerable interest, however.

Aunt Amaranth and her rooms smelled of coal tar, and she grudged Frodo tea or anything else from her cupboard. This hardly mattered, because he had no appetite. He spent as much time away from there as he could, sleeping in the Great Room when the nights were still chilly, staying out all night once the weather was fine.

It was a mistake. His aunt concluded that the arrangement was off, and dealt with Frodo's meagre possessions accordingly. She gave the desk to Uncle Saradas, who had built it for Mum in the first place. She took the chest that had held Mum's journals to keep her knitting things in, and as for the contents—

"Frodo!" Melba had squeezed behind the woodpile and was shaking him awake. "Aunt Amaranth is up to something. You'd better go and see."

There in his aunt's dark little rooms, Amaranth and Uncle Saradas stood feeding the fire from a two-foot-high stack of letters and papers. By a trick of his eyesight, which grief and dread had distorted, Frodo thought he could read the actual writing on one of the doomed papers, just before it dissolved into ashes:

"As fair as an elf-child, and gentle and kind,
Yet as brave as a warrior, with a high and deep mind."
His anger awoke fully. Feet and fists flying, he hurled himself at Saradas. His uncle hurled him right back out the door and across the tunnel, slamming him into the wall opposite. "You let your elders and betters do what needs to be done," Saradas cried from the doorway.

"Those are my things. I didn't want them burned. You should have asked me," Frodo gasped, all the wind knocked out of him.

"Asked you what? You're a boy. You own nothing here."

With a scream of hinges and a cloud of dust Saradas flung the door shut.

~~~~~

He dreamed of running away. He wondered how far he'd get. Being a child, he had no money of his own. He wondered if his parents had left him anything. If they had, nobody had told him. Fervently he hoped that Rory, who was his guardian now, had his best interests at heart. But it certainly did not feel that way, and it made him anxious and fearful about the future.

Often he found himself thinking about Dad's people, in and around Hobbiton far off to the west, and wondering why they didn't send for him. He knew that Mum and Dad had taken him to visit the Westfarthing when he was a baby, but he didn't remember it. He knew that the Bagginses had come to Buckland for Mum and Dad's burial, among them the infamous mad uncle Bilbo, but he didn't remember that either. It would have been a regular Shire wake, with no end of food, and relations arriving from all over to mourn the dead and to speculate on who was to inherit what, followed by the solemn journey in procession to the graveyard at Newbury. But whenever he tried to recall those terrible dark days after the accident, Frodo's mind slid away.

In any event, it seemed quite plain that the Bagginses didn't want him, either.

~~~~~

In the weeks that followed, Frodo became acutely aware of what it was to be homeless. He wandered lost and empty through the tunnels that once had held the world. While looking for some corner to call his own, he found himself in parts of Brandy Hall he had hardly known existed. There were basement chambers down behind the Hill and toward the River, where a number of the men of the Hall sat day and night in a reek of pipeweed and ale, among them his two bachelor uncles Dodinas and Dinodas.

Uncle Do and Uncle Di were jolly fellows, the knee-slapping throw-you-in-the-air-and-catch-you sort of uncle, and they were always happy to have his company. They at least paid some attention to him, though the cost of their attention was high: they'd get him tipsy or ply him with pipeweed and then laugh uproariously as he coughed and choked. In their cups they'd say hurtful, distressing things about everyone he loved. He remembered Mum complaining to Dad about their endless drinking, their deplorable lack of worthwhile work to do. She'd always carefully kept Frodo away from their influence. But now she was not there to protect him--or herself.

It was a bitter night, and he ventured into the stifling hole to get some warmth. The uncles soon had him so woozy that of its own accord his head sank onto the grimy, sticky tabletop.

"Poor little chap," he heard Dodinas say. "Poor wretched little chap."

"Life's ruined, you know," Dinodas said. "No one wants to say so, but it is."

"Aye. And all because his parents couldn't keep their hands off each other."

At this, Frodo awoke from his doze, but filled with curiosity and dread as to what he might hear, he didn't move.

"And at their age! Primmie was much too long in the tooth to be carrying on like that, if you ask me," Dinodas said. "But that's why the moonlight sail. They were trying to get in the mood to make a baby hobbit, if you can believe it." "Those two? Weren't they always in the mood?" Dodinas clucked. "At sixty, Primmie ought to have been settling down and looking forward to the grandchildren. I know she didn't look a day over forty, but still—"

"Well, and that husband of hers! If Drogo had ever done a thing in his life besides eat and smoke, maybe he wouldn't of made that boat sink like a rock."

"Aye. There's a hobbit that never lifted a finger or earned an honest day's living. Poor Primmie! Such a comedown for her when she found out! How humiliating to have to come crawling back home to live."

"Typical Baggins trick, though—find yourself a rich lass, marry up and let the wife support you."

"Or the wife's relations, more likely."

"And do you know what's worse? That ne'er-do-well lout, living off his in-laws, left the boy nothing. Nothing, do you believe it? Not a brass button or a penny piece—and the dear knows it took enough of them to fasten a waistcoat over Drogo's belly—brass buttons, I mean."

"That's for certain! The wonder is that Rory doesn't turn that little half-Brandybuck out. He's got enough of the real thing to feed as it is."

"That he does. And do you know what they say? They say the boy was the real cause of it all. He was the reason for the sail. Had to have a brother or sister, he did, just like his cousins. Insisted on it, don't you know. Wouldn't shut up about it, in fact. Spoilt as sour milk, if you ask me. If I were Rory, I'd—"

His heart aching, Frodo went on pretending he was asleep. He waited for his uncles to fall into rafter-rattling drunken snores, then he got up and ran out into the night. He sat down beneath the oak tree at the River's edge, no longer minding the cold. Those two seemed to have dug deep inside him and brought wriggling forth his blackest suspicions, his vilest imaginings. And to say those things about his parents, as though it was something bad and wrong that they loved each other so much!

And was it true his dad was a penniless ne'er-do-well? Mennie and Rory would know. Frodo knew he ought to go to them, but he steeled his mind against it. He'd had enough of being reproached by Mennie—and locked out by Rory. He felt all too keenly that under their guardianship, his life was indeed in ruins.

He wished he had been in the boat with Mum and Dad on that terrible summer night.

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NOTES on Chapter Three

"It is so empty and cold." —After the death of his wife Edith, Tolkien wrote to their son Michael: "I remember trying to tell [my cousin] Marjorie Incledon this feeling, when I was not yet thirteen after the death of my mother (Nov. 9.1904), and vainly waving a hand at the sky, saying, 'It is so empty and cold.'" Letter #332, 24 January 1972.

"Amaranth and Uncle Saradas stood feeding the fire from a two-foot-high stack of letters and papers." —From Tolkien–A Biography by Humphrey Carpenter: "Aunt Beatrice [Suffield] gave him and his brother board and lodging, but little more. She had been widowed not long before, and she was childless and poorly off. Sadly, she was also deficient in affection, and she showed little understanding of the boys' state of mind. One day Ronald came into her kitchen, saw a pile of ashes on the grate, and discovered that she had burnt all his mother's personal papers and letters. She had never considered that he might wish to keep them."