Disclaimer: Nearly all of these characters were created by Professor J.R.R. Tolkien, whom I greatly esteem. No disrespect whatsoever is intended to Prof. Tolkien in anything I may write, and I make no profit from any of these stories.
Many, many thanks to Tindomiel, Riona, DOJ and EloraCooper4 for their kind reviews! The Green Book is my first LotR fic, which makes the encouragement all the more appreciated.
Chapter Three
Brandy Hall, SR 1484
An Interruption
I couldn't help but laugh when I saw what Merry had written on his title page. Interruptions by Peregrin Took, indeed! I should be put out with him, especially when one considers that I rode half the night to be here this morning, arriving just after second breakfast, only to find that my cousin has gone away somewhere, and isn't expected back until after tea.
I suppose I ought to have let him know I was coming.
I've passed the time well enough, I'd say. Brandy Hall sets a fine table on all occasions, and after a lovely second breakfast I amused myself--or *meant* to amuse myself--by reading what my cousin had to say. Now I find myself feeling quite wistful instead, and I will have to shake myself out of *that* before Merry returns. Odd, the things one doesn't know about one's own family. All these years, I considered Auntie Esme one of the jolliest of my relations, and good fun, but I never thought of her, exactly, as anything *but* an aunt, or pondered why Merry was her only, in a family as large and varied as the Brandybucks. Perhaps, in some part of myself, I thought one Merry enough for any Hobbit mum to handle.
And then there's the matter of Frodo. I confess it gives my heart a bit of a twist, and makes a funny, salty taste come into my mouth to think of that forlorn little lad beneath the tree. I knew, of course, that his parents had died (roundabout 1380, I think that was--Merry would know for certain), and that he'd lived here at Brandy Hall before Bilbo adopted him and made him his heir (this was in 1389, when Frodo was twenty-one--I know this one for certain; it was the year before I was born). Admittedly, I'm rather wooly-headed about such things, but it never once occurred to me to ask Frodo who looked after him before Bilbo, or how he felt during that time, other than some vague-ish notion that he'd missed his parents.
And how had Merry felt, to see his beloved big cousin go away?--for Hobbiton must certainly have seemed like the other end of the world at such a time.
Here is proof indeed that it doesn't pay to think too much, for I've made myself quite downhearted, and I shall have to go hunt out some of my youngest cousins, and perhaps join them for a rousing game of stick-and-ball, or teach them a few inappropriate songs or stories. I've always found the little ones good for shaking the darker clouds away. I meant to have a houseful of my own, like dear old Sam with his baker's dozen, or at least Merry's three or four. I never loved another lass as I did Diamond, though--as I *still* love Diamond--and I continue to feel rather muddled about the way all that turned out.
Or it may be, in my way, that I'm grateful (not that I'm proud to write that it is so) for much as I try to keep in mind what Gandalf told me, about the white shore and the sudden sunrise beyond this world, I also recall what my dear Merry suffered, when his little Floramonde slipped away in the terrible Flux of 1426, and how he still mourns his Estella, after all their sweet years of companionship. I'll say myself that Estella was the kindest and best of all the lasses I have ever known, and If I'd been a wiser Hobbit than I was and am, I'd have married her myself, not run so foolishly after silky black curls and a pretty face.
Oh, but Estella and my Merry were well-suited, and if I'm sad about anything, it's that Diamond never saw in me any beauty whatsoever, unless it was that of the Took money and position--and what's that to do, really, with the silly Hobbit that is Peregrin Took?
Long Cleeve's a longish ride, even from Tuckborough, but I *shall* have to visit Diamond before we go. At least we're good enough friends now, for that. Faramir is a trustworthy lad (and I can't help thinking of him a lad, though he is a fine, grown Hobbit of fifty-four, with a darling wife and two little lads of his own). He will look after his mum, I know.
Now I've gone and made myself sadder than sad, which is a very foolish thing for an old Hobbit to do under any circumstances--but here's Merigrin, Sariadoc's little lad peeping round the door, though I've no doubt he's been forbidden, in very strong words indeed, to disturb the Thain at his labors.
"What do you say, Master Meri," I ask without turning, "To a good game of Hobbits and Trolls?"
The little lad's squeal of delight is all the answer I need.
* * *
MISSING
Brandy Hall, SR 1389
Merry found the leather cases going into Frodo's room quite interesting, and the wooden crates packed with straw even more so, though he thought his cousin rather a big lad to need *all* his books and toys and things just for a little visit. After all, he himself was only seven, and when *he'd* gone to stay with Uncle Dinny and Auntie Egg at the Great Smials, he had only taken with him a few clothes, his one special blanket and his floppy bunny, Rags.
He'd been sorry, too, even to have brought poor Rags, for Pim had teased him about still sleeping with a soft toy, and Pervinca had bit off one of the rabbit's button eyes, then swallowed it, which Merry did not consider at a proper way for a cousin to behave, no matter how small. He'd never ruined any of *her* toys.
Frodo's room made interesting sounds, as well, once all his possession had been loaded into the cart, leaving only the one small rucksack behind. Lovely, echoey sounds. Merry amused himself very much by standing in the exact center, than off by the door to his room, then over near the window, yelling in his loudest voice to see which location made the best noise (by the door won, but only by a little).
At last, Frodo came back in, shaking his head, to see what all the rumpus was about. Merry demonstrated for his benefit, but the room didn't perform quite up to expectations, not with Frodo there.
Merry plopped down on the bare, scrubbed floor. "There. You've ruined it," he told his cousin accusingly.
"What's that, Mer?" Frodo asked, in his kindest voice, with such a sad look on his face that Merry feared he'd gone too far. He flung his arms round the older lad's waist, rubbing his nose against the soft velvet of Frodo's waistcoat.
"It's all right," he muttered. "Doesn't matter."
"Oh, Merry," Frodo stroked his curls gently, which should have been comforting--it always had been in the past--but just now Merry's stomach was sending him a message he didn't quite understand, and he stepped back away from his cousin, trying to figure out what the trouble could possibly be.
"Dear me, what a fierce expression!" Frodo laughed. "You looked rather like one of Farmer Maggot's dogs, just then. I thought you were going to bite me!"
"I'd never bite *you,*" Merry answered, laughing himself. Whatever the scary thing was, that gave him his moment of fright, their laughter had chased it away.
"Ah, so I'm safe from you, am I? Not like poor Berilac?"
Poor Berilac, indeed!
"He held me down," Merry protested, "And he put a frog--" Merry's face twisted with outrage and disgust. "In my mouth! It was horrid. And he said he'd hold my mouth shut 'til I swallowed. Only I didn't."
Frodo bent for his rucksack, but his cousin's sharp eyes caught another shift in the older lad's expression that made the fluttery, worried feeling go through him again, though, "We'd best get out to the cart, Mer," was all he said. "Your mum and dad are waiting."
"Yes, I know," Merry answered impatiently. He wondered what made Frodo so slow in opening and closing the door out into the corridor, and why he ran his fingertips gently over its carved pattern of vines and leaves before he turned away. Everyone had been acting terribly odd this week, and he didn't know why. "But don't you want to hear what happened with Berilac?"
"Yes, yes, of course," Frodo answered vaguely. He'd started striding too fast for Merry's shorter legs to keep up comfortably, so Merry hurried until he was nearly running, catching hold of the hem of Frodo's coat for good measure.
"Kicked him," Merry panted. "And then I twisted away and spat the poor little frog out. And that's when I bit Berilac." The memory held a certain satisfaction. "Only it wasn't nice."
"I should say not," Frodo replied. "Kicking and biting your cousin. Stars above, Merry!"
Merry shook his head, exasperated by the older lad's thickness. "Frodo! I meant his *hand* wasn't nice. It tasted all swampy, and froggy. So I had to eat some of Grandmother's strawberries to get the taste out. And I spoilt my new shirt, rather, with the juice. Only it was muddy already." He put on a little extra burst of speed in order to pass Frodo by and give himself the pleasure of opening the big West Door. It was a skill he'd only recently acquired, and Merry loved the cool, slippery round feel of the knob inside the circle of his small hands. The door was heavy too, and that he could manage it alone must mean that he was growing into quite a big, strong lad.
Frodo reached down to ruffle his hair. "Look at you, Merry! I'd no idea you'd mastered that yet! How strong you are!"
Merry beamed. "And clever too!" he reminded his cousin, not meaning to boast, really.
"Yes, and clever too," Frodo agreed, laughing--but his face didn't have a laughing look. It had gone strange again, distracted and sad.
Merry frowned at his back as Frodo passed by.
The cart was indeed waiting, parked in the gravel drive in front of Brandy Hall. His mother and father stood deep in what didn't seem happy conversation on the nearer side. Merry bit his lip, scritching his bare toes into the stones. Why did everyone have to be so funny these days? And why wouldn't someone explain?
"Well, lad, is that the last of it then?" Saradoc asked, catching sight of the two boys. The heartiness in his normally deep, warm voice didn't sound exactly real, but he smiled as he took the rucksack from Frodo's hand, securing the bag where it could be easily reached.
"All but one little parcel," Merry's mother cried, and her voice, at least, rang as clear and true as it ever did, which made the knot in Merry's middle relax a little. She ran to them, sweeping her son up into her arms--unexpectedly, for he'd really become too big for his mum to carry. Merry went into an ecstasy of giggles as she swung him round, tickling his sides, and came down quite
breathless when she deposited him on the driver's box.
"Mum!" Merry sang out--he'd almost forgotten, in his confusion, to share with her his marvelous discovery. "Did you know Frodo's room makes lovely echoes now, if you yell loudly?" He expected his mother to be interested in the news--perhaps, when they'd all come home again from visiting Bag End, they could try out the echoes together.
But, to Merry's disappointment, Esme only gave Saradoc a grown-up kind of look, and no one said anything as she swung up on one side of the box and Merry's dad on the other. Usually, Merry liked to sit between them, up high where he could see the whole of the world from the safe little valley of their shared warmth, breathing in his mum's comfortable, clean, gardeny smell and the way his dad smelt of trees and hay and the vague spiciness of pipeweed. He loved the way the road rippled on before them, and the soothing swish of the draft-ponies tails, in time with the bright clip-clop of their hooves on gravel--but today seemed made up of strange looks and words not spoken, and it seemed dangerous to let his cousin out of his sight.
Frodo had folded down the little padded bench in the space between the box and the cart proper, and so, as they wound down along the front of the Hall, and down the hill-road that led to the Bucklebury Ferry landing-stage, Merry squirmed over the box's backrest, hanging a moment by his fingertips before dropping neatly into Frodo's lap.
"Oof!" Frodo exclaimed. He'd been looking elsewhere, and hardly expecting an armful of determined Hobbit-lad. "What's all this, Merry? You didn't fall off, did you?"
Merry favored him with a disdainful glare--until he realized his cousin was only joking. He pushed his face once more into Frodo's waistcoat, wondering, not for the first time, why the older lad smelled so different from other Hobbits. Instead of gardens or fields, his scent was higher and clearer, like cool water in a stream or well. He smelled the way Merry imagined an Elf would smell.
He held still then, waiting for a bit of Frodo's gentle teasing, but none followed. Instead, Frodo pulled him more firmly onto his lap, wrapping Merry up in both arms. Frodo's chin pressed lightly against the top of his curls.
Merry wasn't good at holding still, usually, but just then he felt he couldn't move. He hardly dared even to breathe. Something was happening. Something *was.* Why wouldn't anyone tell him? By nature, he mistrusted secrets--they made his mind whirl round and round on itself--even the good kind, like what sweets and little surprises he'd find tucked into his hood on Yule Morn. Just lately he'd discovered other secrets, such as what had *really* happened to his five white ducks when the fox got into their pen. And why Great-Uncle Dodinas suddenly didn't come out to meals after last month.
When Merry asked, Frodo always tried to explain things to him, clearly and honestly, until Merry understood.
But just now he found himself too frightened to ask anything. Instead, he busied himself with watching how the cart rolled slowly and carefully onto the Ferry, and how his dad poled them across to the Marish side, then drove the cart off again. He noticed that someone had left a round golden pumpkin on the landing-stage, and he counted the white rocks in their neat line up Ferry-lane, though he had to stop because he hadn't yet learned what came after fifty. He wondered whether they'd stop by Farmer Maggot's house on their way, and if Grip's seven pups were all grown now, and what were their names, and would Mistress Maggot ask them to second breakfast, and would there be mushrooms, because the mushrooms that grew on Maggot's land were particularly fine.
Except that he felt very funny inside, and not like mushrooms, or stopping. Mostly, he felt like turning around and going back home, with Frodo still holding him, or maybe telling him a story. None of those things were like him at all, except the bit about a story. Merry was very fond of stories--though he was also, usually, extremely fond of mushrooms as well, not to mention visits and journeys.
They traveled on many miles, not stopping at Farmer Maggot's gate, with no one saying much of anything, until Frodo spoke up suddenly.
"Cousin Saradoc, did you know Berilac has been bullying Merry?"
Merry's dad glanced back over his shoulder, shaking his head. "That lad!"
"Weren't meant to tell," Merry muttered into his cousin's chest. Frodo returned to him a look of gentle reproval.
"I'm a big lad," Merry informed him, but his voice sounded odd, as if was bordering on tears.
"No one doubts that, Mer," Frodo answered kindly.
"And you look out for me." Merry raised his face, watching his cousin's face intently.
*Now,* he thought. *Now I'll know.* The small, tingling suspicious part of himself flared all at once to fill his entire body. Merry felt his jaw drop open, but had no power to make it go shut again, because in an instant he *did* know. His brain, without him even knowing, had been quietly fitting together the pieces of the puzzle, working out the sad looks, the silences, the delightfully echoing room just beside his own, the cartload of possessions behind him.
All Merry's breath hissed out of him, and he couldn't seem to get any more.
Frodo wasn't going to Cousin Bilbo's for a visit. Frodo meant to go there to stay, forever and ever, and when he and his mum and dad came home again, they'd be leaving his dear, beloved cousin behind.
Which meant...
Merry at last managed a little hitching breath, not enough to stop the burning in his chest, but enough to send away most of the colored spots whirling in front of his eyes.
He must have been very, *very* bad to make Frodo want to leave him.
Merry knew he made too much noise sometimes, and he'd been known to go into Frodo's room and play with his things when he'd been told not to, and that one time he'd spilled jam on Frodo's lovely book with the maps and the picture of the dragon, but most of that had come off, and besides, it was strawberry jam, and red, which made the stain look like blood, and therefore interesting.
His mouth closed a little then, and he felt his lips go very round, as if they wanted to say, "Oh!"
He'd thought Frodo loved him best of all cousins, even if he was naughty sometimes. He'd thought *that* was forever and ever.
Merry's head went swimmy. His stomach gave a big sideways lurch and before he even knew it was going to happen, he was being horribly, miserably sick all over himself and the floor of the cart. Frodo, perhaps catching some warning in his young cousin's expression, had jumped back enough to miss the worst of it, but he moved in close again in time to take Merry's shoulders, leaning him over the lip of the cart before the second bout hit.
Merry hung weakly in his hold, head drooping, the cart's hard wooden edge hurting his chest. No matter how he fought it, his stomach wouldn't seem to quiet down: he kept retching until he felt he'd turn inside out and, to his shame, he'd begun to cry as well, tears of humiliation, and a sorrow too huge for his small body to contain.
"Whoa, there!" his father called, and the cart shuddered a little as Saradoc set the brake. He must have climbed down from the box then, because Frodo was handing Merry over the side and into his dad's waiting arms.
Saradoc carried him away to the green, grassy verge, laying him on his side in the shade of the bank.
"Ssh, ssh," his father crooned, "Just lie quiet now, lad. The worst is past."
*No,* Merry wanted to shout back. *No it isn't.* In his heart, he knew the worst hadn't even begun. He lay shaking upon the cool green, and all he could manage to say when his father asked how he did was, "Sorry. Sorry."
"For what, Mer?" Frodo's quiet voice asked. "There's no harm done. Nothing a bit of soap and water won't wash away. Do you want me to sit with you while your mum and dad set things to rights?"
"Mummy," Merry managed to whisper. His throat felt all tight and sore, his face hot--though the rest of him was shivery.
"All right, then." Frodo sounded sad again, underneath a false cheeriness. "I'll fetch her for you, shall I?"
When Esmeralda came, she said nothing, only stripped Merry down to his underdrawers and dressed him again in a clean shirt and trousers. Then she wrapped him up in his favorite old tatty blanket, the one he'd loved since he was little, and took him onto her lap, his head pillowed on the softness of her shoulder and breast, her arms around him, tight but not too tight. Merry listened to her quiet breathing, until the inside of him got quiet too.
An oak tree stretched out its branches above them on the bank. After a while, Merry opened his eyes to watch the way the sunlight flickered through the gold and scarlet and crimson of the leaves over his head. The day was warm, for almost-autumn, and the wind smelled faintly of spices and woodsmoke.
"I knew you hadn't understood," Esme said at last. "Did you think Frodo was just going for a visit, love?"
Merry nodded, but that made his head dizzy again. He shut his eyes.
"Do you know why he is going?"
"Tell him I'll be better, mum," Merry whispered desperately, opening his eyes again and twisting in his mother's lap until he could reach up and take her face between his two small hands. "Tell him. *Please.* I won't be bad anymore."
Esme's green eyes went all soft and far away, and her mouth looked like it couldn't decide whether to smile or to frown. "Oh, my poor little love. You want to take it all on yourself, don't you?"
Merry started to shake again, with his stomach doing funny things and his eyes leaking. It had to be, didn't it? Why else would Frodo want to go?
"Frodo's growing up, Merry," Esme said, stroking the damp hair from Merry's face. "It's time he had...oh, I don't know...a proper family. A proper home."
"*We're* proper family," Merry protested. "And isn't Brandy Hall the bestest home?"
"Yes, love," Esme answered patiently. "But when Cousin Bilbo..."
"*We* could adopt him." Merry felt amazed that no one had thought of this wonderful solution earlier. "We're a mum and a dad and a...a...little brother. What could be better than that?"
"But think of Cousin Bilbo, love. Think how lonely he'd be!"
"Did Frodo think how lonely *I'd* be?" Merry responded. Ha! He had her there.
"Frodo thought of that, lad." Saradoc squatted down beside them, his hand firm around Merry's arm. "The Family won't...that is, we aren't allowed... We can't adopt your cousin, son, and that's that. No more about it, if you please."
Merry gaped at his father, stunned. Saradoc's face was all sadness and sternness mixed up together, and his eyes had *that* look, like ice on the river on a winter's day.
"It has been decided," Saradoc continued. "Frodo's going to Bilbo, and that's all there is." He rose abruptly, turning away.
"Sar, don't you think...?" Esme began, but stopped at that.
Merry's mouth hung open again. His dad was angry, but at whom? At him, for making such a fuss? At his mum? At Frodo?
He didn't want his father to be angry at mum or Frodo. If he'd made Saradoc angry, then his dad was most likely right to be so, since he was the wisest of all Hobbits, ever--though Merry still couldn't understand exactly what it was he'd said or done.
"We'd best be on our way," Saradoc continued, in a milder tone, turning round again. "Else we won't reach Frogmorton by dusk. Come along, Merry." He reached down a hand and Merry took it, hardly daring to do otherwise. He'd never seen his father truly angry before, but Saradoc's fingers, curled over his own, were tender and warm as they'd always been. He didn't want to let go when his dad boosted him into the cart again.
The space behind the box remained damp where it had been scrubbed out, and underneath the odor of soap, still smelled faintly of sick. Merry found he'd rather not sit apart from Frodo, but preferred not to be too close to him either, and so they perched as stiffly as two young Hobbits can, Frodo gazing off into the far distance and Merry holding poor old Rags in a stranglehold, glaring down at the top of the stuffed rabbit's blue cotton head.
He bit his bottom lip hard, refusing to let his brain think any thoughts at all.
To be continued...