Stories of Arda Home Page
About Us News Resources Login Become a member Help Search
swiss replica watches replica watches uk Replica Rolex DateJust Watches

A Tale That Grew in the Telling  by GamgeeFest

Chapter 5 – Missing

24 Rethe
 
 

“Frodo’s missing.”

“What?”

Merry crawled out from under the table, where he had been scrubbing at a particularly stubborn stain. Someone, at some point during the previous night’s festivities, had spilled blueberry hosp in the entrance parlor and Merry was attacking the stain with fierce determination. As such, he had only heard part of what Pippin had said.

“I said, Frodo’s missing out,” Pippin now repeated. “I don’t see why I have to be the only one polishing all this silver.”

“But you’re not the only one, are you? Berry and Melie are helping,” Merry reasoned as he turned back to stare down the unrelenting stain. There was nothing for it – he would have to use the old Brandybuck secret weapon. He stood up. “Besides, I’m sure Frodo’s enjoying himself just as much as you are, wherever he got landed cleaning.”

“Please, Merry. Like Frodo would consider dusting books in the library a chore,” Pippin countered.

“We don’t know that’s where he is, just because he managed it the last few years. Now, I’m going to retrieve something for that stain. I’ll be right back, so don’t you dare try to sneak off while I’m gone.”

Merry left the parlor and navigated his way expertly through the labyrinth of Brandy Hall. All around him, hobbits were busy wiping, sweeping, scrubbing, dusting, polishing, moping and washing. The annual day of Spring Cleaning was upon them.

Every year, the day after the Spring Feast, came the day of cleaning. All hobbits, no matter what their station, were expected to participate. Even Master Saradoc could be found with sleeves rolled up, scrubbing clean one of the kitchen hearths. And all hobbit children, no matter what their station, would try to sneak away early in the morning before they could be assigned any chores. The children who succeeded in escaping, usually all of them, were then able to spend the day doing as they pleased, with no adult supervision whatsoever.

This year, however, none of the children had escaped, for come morning, the rain that had started the previous night was still coming down in curtains. The adults had awoken after their night of merriment to find the children of the Hall sitting mournfully in the parlors and sitting rooms, staring out the windows at the tempest outside. The few that had braved the storm were found huddled in the stable, dripping wet and shivering. The rain could not have come at a worse time.

On top of that, Merry and Pippin had the misfortune of sleeping in. By the time they pried open their eyes and stumbled out of bed, the morning was half over and the easy jobs were all handed out. Pippin wasn’t even allowed to go to his room for fresh clothes, so that he had no choice but to borrow some of Merry’s older clothes to clean in.

Merry now reached the desired storage closet and quickly found what he was looking for. He grabbed the bottles, mixed the contents into a bucket and went to fill it with rainwater. On his way back, he passed by the library and peeked inside. Knowing his cousin, Frodo would be in there somewhere, dusting and reading. Unable to spot him – ‘He’s probably squirreled away in a corner near the back.’ – Merry continued to the parlor and went back to work on the stain. Moments later, he heard the unmistakable sound of a hungry Took: stomach rumblings loud enough to be mistaken for thunder by a startled Melilot.

“Pippin, you have to wait until elevenses,” Merry chided gently.

“But I’m hungry now,” he complained. “I’m nearly starved to bones.”

“We’ve only another hour to go. Why don’t you sit down and work on the tea set with Berry?”

“Why?” Pippin asked. “So I can think about the tea I’m not drinking and the water-biscuits I’m not eating?”

“Yes, that is precisely why,” Merry said with deadpan seriousness. “Now get to work or no one will be drinking tea.” Pippin and his stomach grumbled unhappily.

Another disadvantage to their unfortunate sleeping in was missing first and second breakfasts. Typically, they would have awoken well before sun up and snuck outside by way of the kitchen or one of the many pantries, where they would stock up on food to last the morning. The adults knew this of course, and could easily stop them, but this was the one day of the year they were able to get work done without constant interruptions. Not only that, but with all the adults pitching in and the usual spotlessness in which the servants kept the smial throughout the year, there was not ever much cleaning to do and they were usually finished before second breakfast. This gave them the rest of the morning to enjoy in peace and quiet. Not surprisingly, they turned a blind eye to their children’s “sneaking off.”

To keep up appearances, the adults had been obliged to deal out chores to the children, which slowed down progress. The youngest were more of a hindrance than a help. The teens complained constantly and the tweens were more interested in playing than working. Work progressed steadily all the same, and even given a late start, most everyone was finished by elevenses.

Pippin, Berilac and Melilot stacked their share of the silver, now bright and shining, into a shallow carrying tray. also polished. Berilac and Melilot went to distribute it all to where it belonged as Pippin lay down dramatically on the settee.

“My fingers ache,” he said. “I do not believe they shall ever recover from this ordeal.”

“Remember that the next time you grab a silver goblet with grubby hands,” Merry said. For that was, of course, the reason behind this exercise – to remind everyone of the hard work the servants did day in and day out, all the year round. Merry could not help but notice that many people seemed to miss the lesson.

Merry stood up and stretched, his knees sore and his wrists aching. Once the blueberry hosp stain had given way, Merry had moved on to other spots. He had a keen eye and noticed many smaller and easily overlooked stains throughout the parlor. He towel-dried the carpet where the final stain had once been and gathered together the cleaning supplies, then went to pull his cousin off the settee.

“We eat now?” Pippin asked simply.

“Yes, now we may eat,” Merry said, his own stomach protesting the lack of food it had been made to endure.

They quickly dumped the dirty water outside on the pathway, tossed the rags in one of the many laundry bins set out in the passageways and put the bucket back where it came from. Then they headed to the dining hall.

Almost all of the inhabitants and stranded guests were eating already. The room was buzzing with excited conversations about the storm, which was still raging outside with no signs of stopping. Merry and Pippin quickly retrieved a few plates of food and scanned the room for Frodo. Not seeing him, they gave each other a confounded shrug, then sat down to eat with several of their young cousins before their stomachs caved in entirely.

Frodo did not turn up at all during the meal, and the two friends wondered at this. It wasn’t like Frodo to miss a meal, especially when every hobbit who passed him would have reminded him to head for the dining hall. Perhaps he was simply so absorbed in his reading he had forgotten to come and eat. After Merry and Pippin had their fill, they went to look for their friend.

They found the library empty but for Merimac, who had taken his meal in the quiet room and was now reading a book about different types of fishing bait. Their uncle declared that he had helped clean the library to its current pristine condition, but oddly enough he had not seen Frodo all morning.

“He must have been dragged off somewhere else before he could get here,” Merimac stated. “Shame too. I was wanting to speak with him about the fishing at Bywater Pool.”

So Merry and Pippin went up and down the tunnels, asking everyone they passed if they knew where Frodo was. Many shrugs and blank expressions later, they stood once more outside the library, and they were growing concerned. How is it that no one had seen him all morning?

“That sly old rascal!” Merry exclaimed, startling Pippin with both his sudden proclamation and his choice of words. Merry laughed and shook his head. It was so obvious. “He’s hiding in his room, waiting for all the work to get done.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” Pippin said, but then thought maybe Merry was onto something. “Why didn’t we do that?”

“Mother and Father never would have let us.”

“They never would have let you,” Pippin corrected. “I could have been hiding with Frodo this whole time. I knew I should have gone back to our room last night.”

“Come on,” Merry said, an evil twinkle in his eye. “We’ll fix him for shirking his duties.”

They ran down the tunnels in their eagerness to play on their cousin and get him back for his slacking. They had no clear idea of what they would do, only that it would not be something that would require them to do more cleaning afterward. This automatically excluded most of their tricks. They decided to start with a simple ‘jump and startle’ technique. Frodo would be relaxing, so if they barged in, that would at the very least make him jump, and possibly scream if they roared while they did it. After that, they would improvise.

They slowed down as they rounded the corner to their guest room. Waiting several moments to catch their breath, they finalized their plan of attack with simple eye movements and facial expressions. Merry placed his hand upon the door and they poised to burst into the room. They could already picture Frodo’s startled reaction.

One. Two. Three.

Merry pushed open the door and they began their attack, which came to a swift and abrupt stop as the door suddenly hit upon something on the floor and refused to move another inch. The cousins looked at each other, the question clear in their eyes. The door had only opened a foot and from the little they could see of the room, it had not been cleaned either. If anything, it looked worse.

“Frodo?” Merry called. “Are you ill?”

“Should I get the healer?” Pippin asked.

Merry shook his head. Not yet. He pushed upon the door again, wondering what was going on and why his friend wasn’t responding. Pippin came up next to him and added his weight to the door. With both of them pushing, they moved it enough to squeeze through into the room.

“Merry!”

“By the stars!”

The room was in shambles. It looked as though the storm raging outside had come to wreak havoc inside the room’s small confines. Papers were scattered everywhere. An ink jar lay tipped over on the desk, its contents spilled down the face of the desk and onto the floor. The beds were ripped of their linens, the wardrobes turned out and the clothes were strung about the room. A mattress from Frodo’s bed was on the floor, jammed between the door and the wall. The one-day candles, replaced just yesterday evening, were burned nearly two-thirds of the way down to their base and their cousin was nowhere to be seen.

Coldness spread through Merry’s body as a sinking realization became apparent: Frodo had not slept in this room last night. And no one had seen him this morning.

“Merry?” Pippin said again. He had realized the same things, and one other. “He left the party just after ten. He’s been gone for more than half a day,” he said, panic evident.

Merry took a deep breath and tried to remain calm. This may not be entirely what it seemed. They would have to speak with Melilot to find out why he had left the party early. At the time, they had assumed it was to get away from having to play suitor any longer, but it could be he had said something to her. They hunted down Melilot in her family’s quarters and asked her what she knew.

“Well, he said he’d forgotten something in his room and he’d be right back,” she said casually.

“Didn’t it concern you when he didn’t come right back?” Merry asked.

Melilot shrugged. “I can tell when a fellow isn’t interested. I figured it was just an excuse to leave. Then I started talking with the Standley brothers, they’re from Standelf you know and-”

“Thank you, Melie,” Merry said, then turned and ran back down the tunnels, Pippin close at his heels.

“What do we do now?” Pippin asked.

“We get Father. We need to conduct a full search of the halls.”  


“A full search?” Esmeralda said five minutes later. She was pacing in their sitting room, considering carefully everything her son had reported. This did sound serious. While Frodo may slip away from time to time, he would not simply just disappear, and he was not in the habit of destroying property. Plus, it had been raining since about eleven o’clock the night before. No hobbit in their right mind would go into or stay out in something like that.

“I don’t think a search will be necessary, Merry,” Saradoc said to his son. “This Hall was just thoroughly cleaned from top to bottom; there wouldn’t be a room that went unlooked. All we need do is gather everyone back into the dining hall and ask if anyone’s seen him. If no one has, we need only to search the store rooms and the cellars.”

Merry nodded but looked doubtful all the same. He had a bad feeling about all of this. Pippin stood in the background, not sure what to think at all. Why would Frodo be in the storage rooms? If he was hiding to avoid work, surely he would know that it was past elevenses already and would have come out on his own. He did have a pocket watch after all.

A half-hour later, everyone was once again gathered in the dining hall, and the news was not good. Only one person had seen Frodo after he left the dining hall last night, and that was a servant who said he had been walking quickly and stiffly, muttering something unintelligible under his breath, his eyes glued to the floor. As best the servant could figure, that had been around 10:30.

That was enough for Saradoc. He ordered a full search of the storerooms, cellars and pantries, and asked everyone to check again all the public rooms as well as their personal apartments. He wanted to be absolutely certain that Frodo could not be hiding anywhere in the Hall and requested every inch and corner to be searched. Everyone was to meet back at the dining hall as soon as they were finished with their searches.

 ‘It may very well embarrass the poor lad when he’s found however,’Saradoc thought. Frodo was after all a grown hobbit, more than capable of taking care of himself. The shambled room concerned him though. Only once before had Frodo ever done anything like that and the circumstances surrounding that event were not pleasant ones to think about. He shuddered still whenever he remembered it. ‘Let him be embarrassed then. As long as we find him.’  


Merry and Pippin took the west side cellars beneath the kitchens, along with Melilot and her siblings and a handful of servants.

“This is ridiculous,” Merimas whispered. “Frodo’s forty-three years old and we’re searching for him like he’s a faunt.”

“He may be ill,” Melilot chided her brother. “He really didn’t seem well last night, now that I think of it.” Her brother continued to grumble, and she nudged him to be quiet as Merry came out of another empty pantry.

The situation became less ridiculous and more serious as more of the searchers returned to the dining hall with no news. An hour after the search began, now two o’clock, everyone was back in their seats, looking up at the Master and waiting to see what would happen next. The Hall had been searched and Frodo had not been found. There was only one conclusion to make.

“Frodo left the Hall at some point last night. We don’t know why, but all the signs point to him being under some sort of duress. I need volunteers to come with me to search Bucklebury and the surrounding areas. Hopefully, with the rain, he didn’t get far, but he could be hurt or ill. We must find him as quickly as possible.”

Merry and Pippin stood up instantly, ready to leave that very second to look for their missing friend. Berilac stood also, and Merimac stood with him. Some of the Burrows lads stood next. More and more fellows and lads took up the call and by the time they left, they were twenty strong. They went to their rooms to change into thick clothing and met outside by the stables, where each was given a pony.

They were fortunate when they departed, for it had stopped raining and they remained dry. Saradoc and Merimac split the searchers into four groups. Saradoc’s would go east and circle around south on the return pass, Merimac’s east and north. The two other groups would search the southeast and southwest sectors. They set a perimeter for each quadrant and fanned out to search as much ground as possible before it started raining again.  


In Saradoc’s group were Merry and Pippin, and his cousins Marmadas Brandybuck and Milo Burrows. They searched the area just east of the Road, south of Crickhollow Lane and north of the first farm fields.

Merry and Pippin said nothing when they came upon Frodo’s pond. The water now stood deep but it was as vacant as ever and there were no signs that Frodo had come this way. When they reached the area of the deserted hole, Merry and Pippin led them off the lane and through the brush, feeling like traitors for doing so but knowing it was for the best. They were greatly surprised by the Master’s reaction. Saradoc stood rooted in the doorway and stared into the hole in shock, his face pale. When Merry asked him what was wrong, he only shook his head and told Merry and Pippin to return to the lane at once. Then he, Milo and Marmadas searched the hole quickly. Finding it empty, they left without saying another word.

They turned south from there. Saradoc came to ride by Merry and asked him what else he and his cousins had been up to since Frodo’s arrival. He wanted to know even the minutest details: every place they had gone, every word Frodo had said and every mood he had expressed. Saradoc seemed especially interested in the smial, wanting to know what Frodo had told his friends about it.

Merry told him everything he knew, but he had a question of his own. When he asked about the smial and who had once lived there, Saradoc only shook his head sadly. Not seeing any reason to keep the truth from his son, he sighed and said, “No one ever lived there. That was to be his parents’ smial. They’d just finished building it when they passed away. They hadn’t even moved their furniture in yet. We hoped that if we hid it, Frodo would forget. He’d only been there once before.”

“But I thought his parents already had a house,” Merry said. “I know well enough Frodo never lived in the Hall until his parents passed away.”

“They did have a house, a rather big one for their small family. Primula always wanted a large family like the one she grew up in and they planned accordingly. They tried for several years after Frodo was born to have another child and were never successful. Finally it was determined that she could have no more children, and she was devastated. Drogo thought it would be less depressing for her if she lived in a home without a hallway of empty bedrooms, so he decided to build a smaller home just for the three of them,” Saradoc explained.

“Where’s their old house?” Pippin asked. He could never remember hearing this story before and it seemed Merry had never learned this information either.

“You’ve been there,” Saradoc said. “It belongs to Milo and Peony now.”

They rode in silence after this news was revealed. Merry felt the cold dread return as he thought again of what Frodo had told him. His friend would go to that smial and pretend his parents were still alive. Merry understood now that what he pretended was not of times long past, but of what could have been and almost was. It must have been a terrible strain to Frodo to take them there. No wonder he’d had that night terror and wound up at his parent’s graveside the following day. Why had Merry insisted that Frodo show them his haunts? He felt like crying and screaming both.

Pippin’s feelings were less accusatory than Merry’s. After all, Frodo did not have to take them to that smial if he did not want to; they’d have been none the wiser if he hadn’t. For all they knew, there could be many more places their friend would hide that they still didn’t know about and this was what concerned him. He did not see how they could ever find Frodo if he had more hiding places like that smial. This thought tormented him, and the drizzle that started to fall again did not help his mood.

“Why do my cousins always disappear during rain storms?” Pippin said. “I have decided that I do not like the rain,” he added, as the drizzle quickly turned to a steady sprinkle.

Merry nodded beside him, glad to momentarily have something else to think about. “It always does come at the worst possible moments: picnics, festivals, parties, mushroom raids,” he said, managing to keep his tone light, if somewhat strained.

Merry was becoming discouraged that they had found no trace of Frodo, but he clung desperately to the hope that one of the other groups would have better luck. They may have already found his friend and taken him back to Brandy Hall. Merry pulled his cloak tighter around him and mopped his hair out of his face.

Pippin fell back into silence. He was shivering despite his cloak, and the wind returned to blow the rain violently around them. No, he did not like the rain at all. He liked sunshine and flowers and gentle summer breezes, boating lazily on the Brandywine or running through his father’s farm fields in Whitwell. He liked lying under clear blue skies and smoking beehives for honey and laughing at Merry’s antics. This cold, hard, bitter rain and gloomy sky were not for him and he wished them to be gone.

A short while later, they passed the halfway mark and checked their ponies for the turn around. As they began their slow return to the Hall, the skies let loose again, the sprinkle turning to a downpour as thunder rumbled in the distance. Their clothing, already wet, was soaked within seconds. Instinctively, they quickened their pace, but Saradoc slowed them with a shout. He was not going to rush the search, especially in the rain, for there was too great a risk of overlooking something. They found nothing however and returned to the Hall, miserable and cold.

The clocks chimed five o’clock when they returned. They were the first group to arrive, and this encouraged them slightly. Hopefully, one of the other groups would bring back better news. They would have Frodo with them. He would be cold, wet, possibly ill and most likely injured, which would explain why he did not return of his own will. But he would be with them, and he would get better.

One by one, the groups returned wet and hungry – and empty-handed. They were ushered into the dining hall, where they were fed dinner and given warm tea or ale. Soon, the only group left out was Merimac’s. At six o’clock, they at last entered the hall and shook their heads.

Pippin’s courage failed him, and he sobbed quietly into Merry’s shoulder. Until this moment, he had been unaware just how close to despair he has been since first discovering Frodo was gone. He found now that he was exhausted with worry and could not hold back his fears any longer.

Merry rubbed his friend’s back absently, unable to offer any more condolence than that. He himself was suddenly tired, more than he ever remembered being before. He stared blankly at the wall, thinking hard. Nearly a day was wasted and the rain continued to pour with harsh indifference. Their friend was missing and there was nothing they could do to help him.

“We’ve failed him,” Merry said. Saradoc came and gathered his son and nephew to him as they both now cried freely. Though he would never admit it to his son, Saradoc couldn’t help but feel that Merry was correct. Somehow over the years, somewhere along the line, they had failed Frodo, and it all led to this moment.

Frodo had left them at last.

 
 

To be continued… 





<< Back

Next >>

Leave Review
Home     Search     Chapter List