Midway into the chapter, I will *star a certain block of my writing. This comes from J.R.R. Tolkien's epilogue in 'The End of the Third Age' which sadly didn't make it into the books. The brief idea is from him and Mrs. Cotton's words and most of Rosie's are direct, but I bend the scene up a little from Tolkien's. I will 'unstar' it where my ideas come in, heh heh, almost like a 'quote-unquote' deal. Thanks ;)
Heh heh, I hope you like what I've done in this chapter…I like to put a twist to things…
Chapter Seventeen: A Reason to Sing and Weep
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The winter had been harsh and the cold had lingered. The well-to-do struggled and the poor suffered. The ruffians and the Chief Sheriff (Lotho's new authority name) were the only ones who lived comfortably with all the supplies they needed. Many complained to the Mayor and he had quite enough of the whole situation. They waited for his call of action.
The winter stayed through early February and now in the early of March, a gatekeeper and somewhat of a laborer for the chief wandered into the fields on watch for anymore Big Folk coming in. He came to a farm where an elder hobbit shoveled the rest of the snow off his porch and the gatekeeper spotted something beyond the farm. The laborer came over to him and the hobbit held up his shovel.
"Oy! What are you doing on me property, young sir? Get 'way!" He yelped with a cracked voice and the laborer held his hands up.
"I'm in no mean of harm, sir! I was just comin' over to see if you realized what was on your field yonder those trees?" He said with a tinge of authority in his young voice and the old hobbit grabbed his coat and examined the patch on his breastpocket. His brows furrowed.
"Who are you?" He asked and the hobbit straightened up, "I'm under the command of the Chief, sir!" The old hobbit grumbled and gripped his shovel just in case. "Well, you aren't a threat for any matter. What is a youngin' like you doing in such 'high rule'? You don't even seem old enough for your wisdom teeth to come in and you look like a Chubb. Ha! Now show me what you talk of!"
In the meantime, two children from over the Brandywine giggled as they ran their way into the thin thicket of trees. The tumbled on the floor and laughed quietly. They thought of themselves as sneaky from the way they slipped past the guards. They were going nowhere in particular, they just wanted to see if they could get past the 'fat-headed' chief and his guards by the bridge for fun. They crept slowly and suddenly dropped to the ground when they noticed two hobbits coming straight their way. They held their breath and when the time was right, they climbed the trees unseen and waited.
The two approached what they had spotted and the old one shuddered, "Heavens, in all my years I have never seen a sight! Dead, they are, dead! And not just one, but two!"
The young gatekeeper winced at the scene. There were two bodies facedown at his feet pierced with arrows in their back in the shallow snow. He walked away for a moment and walked into the small woods, right under the trees where the Brandybucks were hiding. The Chubb peered around for anything else and yelped as he tripped. He yelped again and scrambled out of the forest and the elder hobbit came to his side.
"What? What is it, lad? Pull yourself together!" He asked and the gatekeeper shivered, "There are two more! Two more bodies!"
For a few minutes, they gathered the nerve to look at the bodies more closely. The older hobbit shook his head slowly, "They have been here for quite a while. No wonder my dogs were actin' up lately. They smelled them. My word, my stomach is not up for this site."
The Chubb finally took a deep breath and reached down to the bags and swords at their belts. They talked in murmured tones and the youngest boy of the two in the trees nudged his cousin. "What did he say?"
The other pushed him, "Shh! We'll be caught and this is a bad enough situation as it is! See those bodies down there? They were hunted down by the looks of it!"
The youngest one whimpered at the thought and strained his eyes to see closer, "Look at those things! Those swords! And look! Looks like something Gandalf the wizard would have, or a dwarf at least!"
The older one rolled his eyes, "How would you know? You never met him before, only your and my Dad and Mum has seen him in our family! Now shush!"
The two continued quietly, just out of earshot for the children, "From my guess, these hobbits were trying to run away from the Chief's rule. I recognize these foreign items. They are the sheriff's that he received as a trade from the Big Folk. They must have stolen them and tried to be off but the men spotted them. I'm surprised the men didn't take back the items. A cold-blooded murder… Such a pity it has come to this. Look, I must be right. Here are some traces of leaf in his pocket. No one is allowed any leaf so it must be stolen. The ruffians must have come only to collect that from the dead. As for these four, they are past any identification. They have been here too long for that." The gatekeeper said and he gulped as he set the items back down. He uttered a few words for them and the elder one put a hand to his shoulder.
"Yeh know? You need to get out of this business soon. It's not right for a wholly-hearted fellow like you. So, I s'pose if we can't name them then we just should give them a quick burial and be off with it." The old hobbit suggested and they went off to the shed to find some bags or a stretcher of some sort to carry the four away.
The two climbed down and ran as fast as they could out of the forest. They were terrified of being caught, terrified for being possibly hunted, terrified for their lives. The older one grabbed his cousin' arm and ran all the way back home, luckily without being seen again.
The smaller one cried as they slumped down by the side of their house and the older one comforted him. "Be strong and be lucky that wasn't us!"
The small one wailed and quietly said, "I hate these folk! I hate the ruffians! Ever since they have come, we can't have brown sugar, or nails… or leaf for my Dad! And now they are murderers!"
The older one nodded, "We must tell somebody. The Mayor has to know! If only we could have heard them---or at least nabbed those swords! We could defend ourselves or at least given them to someone who could!"
The youngest one still shuddered nervously and his cousin sighed and as they walked to the nearest town to report what they saw, he kept his mind off the murders by talking about where those foreign items might have come from.
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A month before, a hobbit flipped unconsciously in his sheets until his heart jumped and he woke up suddenly. The room was still and soundless and he noticed Mr. Frodo and Gimli Gloin's son sleeping silently beside him. He drew his covers closer and looked over his feet. Legolas, an elf of all things, was against a tree looking up and Strider, or by his proper name Aragorn, was on the ground listening to the soft sounds. Sleep rarely came over the two.
Sam closed his eyes and concentrated on the branches above him. They stretched out endlessly and tangled together like a web. A mallorn leaf would fall without a sound every once in a while and he watched the stars twinkle between the limbs.
The image in Galadriel's mirror haunted him in his sleep. The falling trees and the tall mills pouring black smoke into the Shire was awful to imagine. And worse, he had seen Bagshot Row, dug up and destroyed with his gaffer and family with nowhere to go. She had told him that the mirror showed many things that had not yet happened but there was no comfort in those words. The Shire could be in trouble now and he was many, many leagues away to do anything about it.
But he had to stay. He had to do his job what he set out to do and it was not finished. He couldn't go home now and he got a sick feeling that he wouldn't be seeing the Shire or Rosie for a long time yet.
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Rosie tidied up the living room of the Cottons while her mother worked in the kitchen. The house was unusually silent and perhaps it was because the ruffians had been passing down their road more than often.
She came to the couch and took her mother's sewing basket and set it away in its proper place. There was nothing much else to do but nit-pick. She noticed an unfinished scarf at the bottom of the basket and took it to her mother.
"Ma, how come you haven't finished this one?" Rosie asked plainly and Mrs. Cotton wiped the counters rigidly. She had been stressed for weeks and lines of her aging finally began to show.
"It was a scarf I made for…Samwise Gamgee that I never finished. I do not see the point of finishing it now," She said quietly and Rosie had enough. She stuffed the scarf back in and faced her mother after an uncomfortably tense silence.
"Don't you have any hope, Ma? He will return!" She said as she gripped the counter.
Mrs. Cotton admired her hopefulness but her stubbornness had gone on too far. "Rosie-dear, there is a time where you have to stop believing and just come to reality! Your senses need to come back, my darling, and face the truth!" She gave her daughter a pitying look and turned back to her counters.
Rosie's eyes filled with blurring tears and she stomped her way outside. The winds were brewing harder and harder all morning and the sky was dull and unusual for March. Her dress whipped eastward and snapped at her legs. She told herself that she wouldn't cry for him but it was so hard not to now that everyone had turned to despair for Sam. She clutched her dress closer to her and bit her lip in the attempts not to cry.
There was a deep rumbling that came faintly to her ears and she whipped around behind her. A wind past through the trees harshly and Rosie stood there still. The clouds suddenly seemed to move swiftly with the wind and the sun broke through the smog and came down over the Shire.
The wind stopped and the sun warmed everything under it and Rosie took deep breaths. It was of a new and fresh air and her heart pounded. Something must have happened…Sam must be all right. The thought suddenly came to her from no where and she looked to the horizon. She laughed openly without any reason at all and hope came to her again. She ran back to the house, over the hill, and began to sing just for Sam.
Only tomorrow says, when Lilacs sway their beds
Of buds of Morning Glory and Trolley-Tum-Toe High!
Flowers of Sun with say, when Moon of silver lay
Up in their castles, singing Hum-Tally-Toe-Ta!
*She sang it three times straight through and she stopped out of breath. Mrs. Cotton looked out her window in the kitchen and gave a panicked command, "Quite, lass! There's ruffians about!"
But Rosie kept on singing and she came to the windowsill, "Let them come then! Their time will soon be over. Sam's coming back."*
"Glorious heavens! Is he now?" Mrs. Cotton asked excitedly and she set her cloth down and leaned out the window to look down the path.
"Not of yet, but he will. He will be back home soon enough. It is a new day now and for many days, and Sam will be back to see it."
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Unknown to Rosie, conditions in the Shire were not improving anymore but her hopes were high. For a week, she smiled when no one else would.
She worked at the Green Dragon and brought in as much money as she could for her family. They were not suffering as much as they were and any spare money they received they gave away to ones that needed it. The inns were emptier now a-days and it was heard that the Golden Perch was closed down not two days ago.
Rosie grabbed her tray of ales for the hobbits that had come in. All three of them drank their ales profusely and one even forgetfully gnawed at his pipe even though there was the absence of leaf. She gave them a basket of bread and butter and the eldest of them nodded out of her courtesy and then huddled in with the rest of his table as one of them talked in a dark voice.
"Bad news, bad news comin' from the east. Our Mayor Whitfoot went down there a while back and it's been heard that they have him locked up down there! Now where's our rule? In the hands of that Chief Pimple? No-sir-ee, I won't be following that chum!" Said the hobbit with the pipe in a hush and the graying hobbit tapped the table.
"Well, then consider yourself being locked up if he heard you! Or worse---from what I've heard in Buckland. Mistress! Another ale please!" He said and he smiled politely as she walked into the back. She came back and set the mug on the table and went back to her washing of the table beside it. They were the only customers and it was hard not to eavesdrop…
"It's never safe anymore with these folk around," The hobbit muttered and the other two leaned in, "Do you know what they reported on Mr. Hownblower's farm by the Brandywine? Bodies…dead bodies of our kin!" And with that he slapped his hand firmly on the table.
"I heard of this a week ago and I s'pose it occurred about a fortnight ago. There were four bodies found and the details are vague from my source. But I heard they had been dead for a while and so the bodies are unrecognizable." The others shuddered and winced but he continued. Rosie finished her table and shivered. This talk made her sick and she came over to the table to pick up the empty mugs.
"Anyway, these folk were shot down with arrows by these cursed ruffians! They held foreign things I heard, swords, belts, and other things from lands away from here. The strange thing is that we figured these lads were coming back with these things since no one seemed to know who they were at first. And the only explanation for this is that they are those missing hobbits that got themselves lost six months ago…now they are surely dead."
A shatter broke their muffled talking and the elder hobbit stood up. "Are you all right, lass?" He asked and Rosie stood their ashen-faced with his mug smashed on the floor on her way back to the bar. She stumbled over to him and gripped the table, "What did you say?"
The hobbit became quiet and looked down, "The bodies, miss. They are said to be the hobbits that left with Frodo Baggins half a year ago."
"But you said four bodies, there were only three that left! You cannot say it is them, how do we know?" She said abruptly and the hobbit shook his head slightly.
"There was also young Meriadoc from Buckland…I'm sorry, miss. These lads carried things outlandish to our country and Mr. Baggins most likely came back from his journey like Mr. Bilbo Baggins did so many years ago with an ill ending. It's the only reason anyone could think of. Curse those ruffians…" He swore but Rosie heard no more. She set her apron down on the table and ran out in the direction of the Gamgee's smial. She knew she might not receive the day's pay by running out like that but that was the last thing on her mind.
She ran all the way there until she couldn't feel her legs. The smial to the Gamgee's came to view and the door was open. She hesitated and then opened the door wider as she prayed it was all a rumor she heard. After all, Sam told me he would be fine, that he would be back, she thought.
A soft light shone through the windows in the smial and Hamson and Halfred were sitting at the table with Daisy; May and Marigold were standing in the same room. They looked up to see Rosie and she walked in finally catching her breath. Marigold hurriedly came to her side and at first she had forgotten what she came to say, but Marigold looked up at the ceiling trying not to cry and Rosie's heart stopped. There had to be another reason why their siblings had come to visit, another reason why they were all crying! She told herself all of this and she looked over into the living room.
Gaffer Gamgee stood up with his back against the fireplace and Mrs. Bell Gamgee was at his feet. She was sobbing with her hands over her face and the Gaffer drew a hand up to his hair.
"No, Bell, our Sam is still out there…alive and well like I said! I won't believe in it, I won't. It cannot be our Sam---," He said loudly but his voice cracked and he collapsed on the fireplace's ledge and Bell took him in her arms and they wept.
Rosie turned to Marigold speechless and she nodded. She cried heavily on Rosie's shoulder and she stood there emotionless.
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