They doubt.

They don’t disbelieve, mind you. Not completely. Not yet. They don’t laugh, roll their eyes, or smile the pitying, condescending smile reserved for honored senility. They don’t do as the others do, even those who knew him, liked him; they don’t laugh at his daughter when they think her back is turned, tap their foreheads with significant looks when they think her eyes are elsewhere. And the worst is she knows that it can only grow worse from here, as the generations grow and fade and drift away like dried leaves. The Black Men who came to Buckland will become stories to frighten children, the King will dwindle to a distant shadow, scarcely more real to the Shirefolk than when a grim Ranger wrapped himself in a tattered cloak and slept beneath moonveined leaves. Less than a year gone by, and already the town’s whispers surround her, already only her fingers chase the dust from the Red Book. Her children’s children’s friends will not bother to wait for her to turn her back before they call her mad.

Mad as Bilbo Baggins; mad as Frodo Baggins; mad as maybe even Sam Gamgee was, ere the end, without his Rose to root him to the earth. Something in the well-water at that fine hill hole, perhaps. Because they know his daughter’s faith is only fancy; they know her Red Book for a gossamer tissue of beautiful lies. And she sees it now, in the shifted eyes of her own daughters, the extra tenderness of her sisters’ touch, even the breath-too-long hesitation before her husband echoes her assurance. They have all begun to doubt.

“She loved him so,” they say, or their eyes say it for them. “She loved him so. Let her have her fancies. What harm does it, after all?”

And they think it is only fancy. They know it is only fancy. They think that her father rode West to an empty promise and a forgotten dream, that he withered slowly on a deserted harbor or fell quick and drowsy victim to the late September cold. They think no ship waited for him, no Eagle bore him, no wave rose up to carry him home. They think that the Wise forgot him, let him drop to the dust behind their swift silver hoofprints while he struggled along on his own two feet after a sad-eyed smile and starlight-threaded sable curls. They think that Samwise the Brave, King’s Man, Elf-Friend, Ringbearer’s Squire and seven times mayor, spider-cursed and wizard-blessed and the gardener whose brown hands coaxed the only blooming mallorn west of the Mountains and east of the Sea…they think her Da was fool enough to trust an empty promise, fool enough to kiss her forehead, say “Take care now, lass,” and trot quietly off on Bill’s son’s son’s son, into abandonment.

And Elanor has nothing to hold against their reason and their wisdom and their piercing pity but a faded crimson cover and a heart that will not break. And her unbreakable heart might yet wither in the doubt that has begun to gnaw even her, in the sharp despair that is eating her hopes alive from the inside out.

* * * * *

“I’m thinkin’ to bring in the last o’ the roses tomorrow, ma,” her fourth son says, poking at the fire on this bitter night. “Frost’ll kill ‘em all, if we leave it longer much.”

His mother nods, poking her needle again through a tiny shirt; Elfstan’s wife is already rounding, and Elanor will be a grandmother in a few months’ time. Her hair gleams in the firelight, falling before her eyes; she looks young enough to be her own daughter, and Fastred’s eyes shine with old and comfortable love.

“That’s wise, Hal,” she murmurs through a mouth of pins. “Your grandda’d have my skin if he heard I’d let his roses die. They’re his favorites.”

The silence can be felt, and not in a pleasant way; something crawls through the room, and Lily tosses her hair as if to shake away some creeping thing. It is Daisy who dares to break it, Daisy the eternally irrepressible, who has her grandmother’s smile. Daisy was (is is is is is) Sam’s favorite.

“Oughtn’t you say were his favorites, ma?”

Elanor’s eyes are fixed on the tidy line of stitches.

“Why would I say that, lass?”

A chair falls on the other side of the room, and he is on his feet: Sardo, her youngest, her fire-eyed and fire-haired. Daisy is Sam’s favorite, Elfstan his father’s, Hal Elanor’s favorite, Lily belongs heart and soul to her father’s father – Sardo, just out of his tweens, seems to be no one’s, the youngest, at once pampered and ignored by the long line of those before him. But Sardo loved his grandfather with all the force that is in him, a force that frightens Elanor sometimes; there are dragons and volcanoes and forest fires in this smallest son of hers, and someday soon he will leave her in search of cool water before they burn him alive. His chair clatters to the floor and the round door slams behind him, and in the awkward silence known only in family quarrels the grown children look at each other, and Fastred looks at her, and she stares with fixed certainty at the neat line of her stitches until her husband speaks.

“It upsets him, Ellie. It’s hard enough your Da’s gone, but you…”

She takes the pins from her mouth and lays them carefully along her lap so that her voice rings clear and true.

“I’ll not mourn them as isn’t dead, Fastred.”

A heavy sigh from her husband; an opening cautious “But Ma –“ from Lily before Hal elbows her into silence.

“Ellie, it might be well….to think of it.”

She turns all the scorn of a seven-terms-mayor’s daughter upon him.

“Not to say as he’s dead, Ellie,” hasty, too quick, too assured. “But he’s gone, and he’ll be gone a long time, if not ever; perhaps it makes it…easier, you see? If we can accept it. It’d be less…well, odd, Ellie.”

Elanor’s eyes are clear and cold.

“When he dies over there, I’ll know it. He isn’t dead yet. My Da told me he was sailing, Fastred. And it seems to me the only thing odd is to be accusing my Da of falsehood, when he never told me naught but the truth all my life.”

“He didn’t know, Ma!”

Lily again; Hal is too slow this time. Elanor whirls on her daughter in swift attack.

“And now we’re accusing of folly him as was wise enough to give all you advice all your lives?”

Her son takes sides.

“Ma, that’s not what she meant…”

“Ellie, all I’m asking is that you hear reason..”

Their voices rise around her, her own children, Daisy joining the fray, and Elanor’s voice is climbing and her family responds and there is a frantic cacophony of sound growing louder and louder until Sardo stomps suddenly back in, holding in his hand one white-rimmed rose, slamming the door behind him to hold back the rising storm. His voice drops into the silence, heavily.

“The roses are dead,” he says hoarsely, auburn hair gone wild by the wind. He raises cold eyes to his mother. “And so is grandda.”

Elanor stares at him for half a moment, frozen; then she leaps to her feet, letting the pins scatter along the floor for bare feet to find, and runs down the curved hallway into the safety of her own round room, leaving on her chair the half-finished shirt for her first grandchild.

If it is a boy, Elfstan tells her, they plan to call it Sam.

* * * * * * * *

She can still hear the silence behind her, even while she lies on her bed with her eyes and throat on fire; the heavy awkward silence. Hal and Sardo go to save what of the garden they can; Daisy sweeps up the pins into a small pile by the hearth and leaves them to glitter in the firelight. Lily, always the peacemaker, brings hot milk and set it by her mother’s bed; Elanor thanks her, quietly, but does not turn over to face her daughter. The night drags to a close with none of the laughter or singing or reading of the Fairbairn nights a year before; the children that still live at home always disperse now to silent beds, as if the emptiness that belongs at Bag End has been displaced by Frodo-lad and his brood and settled instead at Tower Hills.

Elanor cannot remember how long after her father’s farewell this darkness had settled on their warm and happy home; she just knows it has been many months now since she met her children’s eyes fearlessly or fireside conversation was easy and pleasant. It would be easier if she could blame her Da for leaving or her children for not believing, but she is too just to do either. So she only lies in the dark alone and wonders if her family is forever fractured, or if when grief has passed this tension will pass too.

What scares her most is that she is almost too weary of the fight to care.

Fastred comes to bed late, when all the smial is still; she stares dry-eyed into the darkness when his weight settles beside her, and she shifts away from his hand on her shoulder.

“Ellie…”

And his voice nearly breaks her, crumbling as it is. He loves her. He had loved her Ma and her Da, had loved Bag End that was her home and the stories woven around her year in the city. It is not his fault that he is not built to believe in fairy tales.

But Sardo’s eyes still burn in her mind, his words still sear her breast, and so she lies still and cold beside her husband, until with a heavy sigh he turns his back to her. Long after his breathing settles into the familiar sleep rhythm, her eyes ask questions of the blackness; she closes them only for an instant, and wakes, it seemed, almost immediately, stirred by the roaring of an ever wilder storm.

She slips from bed slowly, wrapping her dressing gown around her, and pads on silent feet toward the dim glow of the banked fire. She thinks Sardo might be up again, reading late as he often does; she thinks dimly of a few words, of somehow stirring up again the dead embers of her youngest’s faith. She sees the form beside the fire, but thinks it only Hal instead of Sardo; or no, perhaps Merry-lad has come for a visit unexpectedly…the hair is dark, the carriage faintly unfamiliar…

And Elanor’s hand flies to her mouth and she takes a quick step backwards and sucks in a breath to yell her husband’s name, for the hobbit sitting chin in hand by her hearth is an utter stranger to her.

He straightens abruptly but does not rise when he sees her, jerked, it seemed, from a quiet reverie. He holds out one hand toward her, pale in the firelight.

“Mistress…!”

His tone is that of an educated fellow, quiet and unthreatening; she pauses an instant, held somehow from the shout caught in her throat.

“Who..what..”

He smiles; a shy, bashful smile, like a child caught out at mischief.

“You must forgive me…the storm is terrible, and your door was unlatched; I only thought to warm myself an instant. I’ll soon be on my way.”

She measures him with her eyes, still poised to flee; his clothes, though travel-stained, are well-made, the weave of the cloak luxurious even to her unpracticed gaze. One hand is still hidden in his cloak, but the one she can see is long and finely made, the fingers smooth and white.

The wind is surely howling, the rain beating against the hill; something is unreal about this firelit scene, something that makes gentlehobbit tramps a matter of course, and welcoming them a sacred duty. He is still smiling, hopeful, uncertain; she takes a few steps toward him, perches herself uncertainly on the opposite chair, and surprises herself by a small smile in response.

“You are traveling far tonight, Master...?”

He ignores the query, if he noticed it; he smiles again, that small frail smile that nestles in her heart.

“As long as will fill up the time between now and morning, I daresay. I did not waken you or your family, I hope?”

She shakes her head, gesturing behind her to the silent hole.

“My brood sleeps soundly, master.”

He nods toward her feet, the half-finished shirt, lovingly folded and set beside her work basket.

“Even the babe?”

She stares at him an instant as if transfixed, confused; then she banishes the spell, shaking her head.

“Oh, no…no, mine are all grown. My son’s wife, that’s for…she’ll bless us before the New Year, we’re hoping.”

“Ah!” he breathes, but his voice is too bright with sudden joy, too filled with knowing delight for a strange tramp fiddling at smalltalk with a kindly goodwife. “That is good news, Mistress. I rejoice to hear it.”

The smile that lights in his eyes is a fire, warm and golden. It discomfits her, this queer, almost possessive elation from a stranger, and yet at the same time she wants to cup her hands round his smile as if it were the only source of warmth in the world, bask in it as if it were a fine summer day. He makes her think of her gladdest days long past and forgotten, of her infant children murmuring in her arms and the sweet secret thrill of Fastred’s first kiss and the blue sky whirling round and round her as her Da swung her in his arms.

He is mad, a small voice in her head says quietly and clearly. He must be mad, to look so and speak so, and he may be dangerous. You must pack him on his way as quickly as possible. The voice is prim and vaguely disapproving; it is the voice that scolds her about clothes unmended and bread unmade when she steals secret moments with the Red Book.

But his madness is so beautiful, answers the voice that makes her go on stealing the secret moments. It isn’t dangerous, it is beautiful and so safe. It is so dangerous to be sane.

The two voices spar a moment, and then declare truce; send him on his way, yes, but gently, with a friendly word and a friendly smile. Gently, that he might remember her kindly. It is somehow very important to her that this strange hobbit, risen on her hearth like a ghost of the storm, think of her kindly.

“Let me fetch you a cup of tea, master, to warm you for the road,” she says in the voice she uses when her children are sick, rising with a comforting smile. The tramp watches her with a disconcerting glint of humor in his bright eyes; she has an uneasy feeling that he divines much, if not all, of the colloquy behind her bland expression. And as she passes close to him to reach the kitchen his hidden hand darts out, suddenly, and warm fingers, not at all the fingers of a ghost but feeling somehow strange nonetheless, close firmly on her wrist.

She pulls back, but that soft unsettling grip holds like steel, and everything she has ever been told by a stern mother before an evening romp comes rushing back and she knows she should grab a stick from the fire with her free hand and yell for Fastred at the top of her lungs. But she stands frozen instead, staring down at dark curls and clear eyes, and she still feels no fear, even this close to the stranger.

He smells, oddly enough, not of long and lonely wandering or damp rank clothes steaming dry, but of many things she has known. Of her mother, warm bread and clean cloth, of her father, green earth and cut wood, of a certain trunk in a certain room, a room that she used to enter but rarely until Hamfast was born and her father took it as his new study because his old study was larger and better suited for a bedroom. She had missed the smell of that trunk when her father put it away; it was never opened, but when she would toddle up to it and lean her head on the lid it filled her nose not with the heady odor of cedar but with the crisp scents of dusty linen, stiff parchment, old and delightfully crumbling books and a queer mysterious musk that she knew was the Sea. This stranger smells of that faraway chest, and the firelight plays on a white jewel round his neck and mesmerizes her.

His voice still sounds like the easy speech of an educated old gentlehobbit, if a little too familiar for a stranger, but now beneath his words she hears too her mother humming in the kitchen, the cry of far-off gulls, and the songs her Da would whistle on a morning in the garden.

“Elanor, your father sailed.”

She stares at him, her heart perfectly still in her chest, and she knows, without having to review the last ten minutes, that she has never once told him her name. She opens her lips and a whisper trickles out.

“Who…”

He laughs, and the laughter curls round her like her parents’ arms, her brothers’ grins, her sisters’ soft fingers stroking her hair. He rises so that they are face to face, his eyes just a bit above hers (and yet somehow they make her think too of her father’s eyes, though Sam Gamgee was shorter than his firstborn). His grip around her wrist shifts, his fingers folding around hers in a clasp that still feels not quite right.

“I would not have failed in my promise to a friend who never failed me in his. A ship was waiting for him, Elanor. Your father sailed.”

She looks into his eyes, and the beauty and the sorrow that those eyes have seen takes her breath away. She feels a powerful desire to curtsy and at the same time she wants nothing more than to fling her arms round his neck and kiss the ruddy cheek like a child. And in her confusion and strange, joyous embarrassment, she casts her eyes down to his hand on her hand, and she sees with a shock (and yet somehow she had expected, she had known) what has been troubling her all along about the feel of it.

There is no third finger on that slender hand.

Her gaze snaps back to his alien and familiar eyes, and she feels tears prickling sharply behind her own. Her voice is barely more than a breath.

“I know you.”

The stranger smiles fully then, a blinding light that is like her mother’s smile and her father’s laugh and the cheeky knowing grin of her eldest brother. This smile does not make her want to curtsy or kiss him but just grin back, full of shared good humor, but the tears will not let her do that.

“I saw and loved you all,” he says in his voice that is like everything she has ever loved. “But you, star-flower…you I held.”

And then he lets go her wrist to cup her face in his nine fingers. He presses his lips against her forehead in the same place where she felt her father’s kiss a year ago, and she closes her eyes against the tears and the smell of damp gardens and fresh bread and old books and over it all, over it all the Sea…

* * * * *

…And opens her eyes to the clear sunshine on the curved ceiling, and the sound of Sardo chopping wood, Hal whistling in the garden, and Lily and Daisy crashing loudly in the kitchen. Fastred, buttoning up his shirt, comes and sits down beside her with the small hesitant smile that she loves, oh she loves it, and come to think of it that smile, too, was in the stranger’s face.

“I was wondering when you were going to wake up,” he laughs half teasingly, touching his hand to her face. Then his expression changes abruptly, and she feels the slickness of salt tears or salt spray on her face as his fingers brush it.

“Ellie, please…Sardo didn’t mean anything, you must just…let him be. Please, love,” as she still watches him as if puzzled, “Ellie-love, what’s wrong?”

She stares at him a moment in silence; then she surges up, shedding blankets and pillows, and buries her face in his shoulder, wiping her tears on his fresh clean shirt. Fastred holds her obediently, confused but comforting, and after a moment Elanor pulls away, wipes at her face and smiles up at him through her swimming eyes.

“Nothing’s wrong,” she whispers, and then joy bubbles up inside her and she could shout it, or maybe sing. “Nothing’s wrong at all, Red, and I’m sorry I’ve been such a beast.”

She darts towards him again, this time to press her lips against his with a little grin.

“I’ll have a word with Sardo later; we’ll fix on something that suits us both, for speaking of my Da. But now…”

She pushes herself from his arms and from the bed and wraps her dressing gown around her.

“Now I’m going to the kitchen, before those girls of yours break every pot I own and we’re left eating out of our hands till the tinker comes again!”

Fastred watches her go with a bemused look. He hears her bright gay voice accosting her daughters and the soprano laughter from the kitchen, joined by a deeper note when Sardo enters, his sullenness no proof against his mother’s smile. Fastred shakes his head, a bewildered smile growing on his own face, and then as he smoothes the covers back over Elanor’s side of the bed he suddenly frowns.

For from his wife’s pillow comes, faint but unmistakable, the clear sharp smell of the Sea.