Chapter Twelve: Lozenge

Yule that year seemed a quiet celebration -- quieter than Diamond might have expected at the Great Smials.

Oh, certainly there were feasts and joyous songs and numerous hobbits about, but Captain Peregrin seemed to be recovering slowly, and retired to bed well before midnight on First Yule, claiming he was tired.

When she arose on Second Yule, however, he was already on the sofa of the sitting room, clad in his dressing gown and sipping his morning tea.

“Good new Yule!” Diamond said as she stepped up beside him and placed her hand on his forehead. The fever seemed to be gone, but it worried her that he did not seem as active and vigorous as he once had.

“Good new Yule,” Pippin responded after swallowing his mouthful of tea. “I believe there is something for you,” he nodded to the hearth rug behind her.

Diamond turned, puzzled, and gave a small gasp as she saw the items arrayed before the fire. “But -- but I am a married hobbitess!” she exclaimed softly, biting her lip as she looked toward them.

“Aye,” Pippin agreed, “but you’re nay yet of age.”

His eyes tracked his young wife as she knelt before the fire to gather her treasure, and he remembered his mother speaking the same words to him at the Yule of eight years ago.

Diamond held her own dressing gown out before her to form a pouch in which to place the almonds, the honey-roasted nuts, the walnuts, the chestnuts for roasting, the wrapped pieces of molasses taffy, and the colored glass bracelet which matched the necklace she had received at the Fair. Yule Dwarf gifts at the Great Smials, it seemed, were more elaborate than those in the North Farthing.

This year was the last she would find nuts and sweets and trinkets left to her by the Yule Dwarf who came in the night between First and Second Yule, in the magic hours when the old year passed to the new. Dwarves knew how to stoke the fires in their mines, and the Yule Dwarf was magic, so he was unsinged as he leaped across the Yule log to lay gifts upon the hearth for all the good hobbit lads and lasses.

“I--” Diamond began as she stood and turned back to Pippin, blushing as she held her dressing gown in front of her to cup her treasures.

A rap-tapping at the door interrupted her, and both hobbits tensed, the peaceful moment broken.

“Who is’t?” Pippin called out in a strained voice, to be answered with the cheerful response,

“’Tis Pimpernel! May I come in?”

Both hobbits in the room visibly relaxed their shoulders at that, although Diamond quickly clutched at her clothes again, lest her gifts fall to the floor.

It was Pippin who opened the door while she was thus occupied, exchanging quick pecks on the cheek with his middle sister as they wished each other a good new Yule.

As Pimpernel moved farther into the room, she moved to embrace Diamond as well, but stopped short when she saw the items the lass was laying upon the dining table.

“What’s this, then?” Pimpernel asked gaily. “I thought ‘twas yesterday was the gift exchange.”

“’Tis from the Yule Dwarf,” Pippin said gruffly behind her. “She’s still naught but a lass, you know.

“Did you need me, Nellie?” he asked. “For I thought perhaps I oughtn’t to wear this,” he waved a hand down at his dressing gown, and the corners of his mouth began to quirk up toward the sort of smile that had not been seen of late, “in front of the servants.” A slight flush of crimson began to stain his cheeks. “Er, in the servants’ quarters.” He blushed redder and looked even more uncomfortable. “Er--”

“’Tis all right, Pip,” Pimpernel interjected quietly. “I came to talk to Diamond.”

Pippin ducked his head toward his chest and escaped back to the bed chamber to change his clothes. Both hobbitesses’s eyes tracked his movements, and then they looked back to each other awkwardly.

“Diamond, I am so sor--” Pimpernel began, just as Diamond simultaneously began to ask,

“What was--”

She stopped herself, and held up a hand in a gesture that also meant “stop.” Smiling softly, she assured her sister-in-law, “Pimpernel, please, I do not wish to say it again. It was not your fault what those -- those -- I cannae even think to say it,” she shuddered, “what they did.”

A slight smile creased Pimpernel’s features at the bit of Tookishness creeping into Diamond’s speech, but it quickly fled.

“I just cannae help it, to feel a wee bit guilty that ‘twas my family’s dinner...and then...and then Pippin getting sick...and he doesna seem, quite, to be getting better,” she trailed off as her eyes roved toward the bed chamber again.

“I know,” Diamond said in a defeated tone, and Pimpernel turned quickly back to embrace her in a hug.

“Oh! Sister!” she cried out. “I dinna come to talk on such things, but to wish you a good new Yule!” She pecked Diamond’s cheek as she had done to Pippin, and Diamond smiled back at her with bright eyes and whispered back,

“Good new Yule!”

“And,” Pimpernel added, “I rather thought -- well, that perhaps you would like someone to go with you this morn.”

“Thank you,” Diamond said sincerely. “That would be most kind. I shall just go and change, myself.”

As she entered the bed chamber, she brushed past Pippin coming out. Diamond noted that he was clad, under his jacket, in the weskit she had given him on First Yule, when families exchanged gifts among themselves.

It was of a black velvet background, a fabric that was both elegant and warm in winter, and was embellished with large flowers of the type in the pattern she had designed so long ago and that Captain Peregrin had instructed her to embroider upon a pair of braces for him this autumn. Diamond had stitched the leaves of these flowers in a green with a silvery cast about it, remembering the clothing Captain Peregrin had worn to their wedding.

Pippin’s gift to Diamond, in turn, had been a pair of teardrop-shaped carnelian earrings within a gold setting. They were quite nice; they were also very similar -- only a bit larger, with a different colored stone -- to the earrings his three sisters and his mother had received. They were the type of gift that would be purchased by a hobbit, forbidden by the healers to do much traveling in the cold, who had sent his hobbitservant to a fine shop in Tuckborough with the injunction to “get something nice.”

Pervinca, her visit to the Great Smials being a long one this Yule time, had whispered to Pearl upon opening her package, “Do you s’pose we’ll get the matching bracelets for his birthday in a few days, then?”

“Hush!” Pearl had admonished, giggling though she was herself. “At least ‘tis better than the year he turned twenty, when Mama and Da let him pick out his own gifts unsupervised for the first time.”

The sisters tittered amongst themselves as they remembered a younger Pippin, confronted with two occasions in such close proximity that required gift giving to so many lasses. He had solved this dilemma, he’d apparently thought at first, quite admirably, by presenting them each with one earring from a set on First Yule, and its mate on his birthday, which followed four days later on the third of Afteryule.* After a little talk from their parents about how that was not an appropriate choice, however, he’d felt so guilty that he’d been much more accommodating than usual toward his sisters for some time afterward.


Diamond’s skirts swept behind her, Pimpernel’s following, as she entered the common area of the servants’ quarters on this side of the Smials.

“Good new Yule, Mistress Diamond!” they chorused cheerily as one and made their obeisances. Diamond pasted a smile onto her face to return the greeting and, on this day, curtsied herself to the assembled servants as she spoke the expected “Good new Yule!”

Pippin had entered the room merely a few steps before her, and Diamond had heard him exchange the same greetings. The breakfast they had had in their quarters that morning -- Diamond hastily, after she had dressed -- had been a mostly cold affair, one they had put together themselves from bits saved over from the feasts of the day before.

Now, Pippin pulled up a chair on one side of the room, and Diamond on the other. The hobbitservants lined up before the Heir, and the hobbitesses, for the first time, before his Mistress rather than his sister, to have read to them any Yule greetings their families had been able to send.

Some of the servants had gone to visit their families for the holidays, but of course many remained at the Smials. Diamond felt that, in a sense, she understood them: although Captain Peregrin had given her a generous allowance with which to purchase gifts to send to her family in the North Farthing, she, too, had been expected to stay at the Smials. For all that she was still young enough to receive gifts from the Yule Dwarf, she must also perform the duties expected of the Mistress to the Heir.


“Well, and it’s just right too bad that the holidays is nearly over,” the new kitchen lass stated confidently as she worked to tidy the table in Pippin and Diamond’s quarters the next day. Both Geranium’s keen eyes and Diamond’s were upon Sage as she gathered the ends of the tablecloth together in a prelude to bunching it up and carrying it toward the hearth to shake the crumbs out.

“Then there’ll be no more parties and all, and it’ll be back to just plain cookin’ for you, Miz Geranium,” the tweenage lass said, nodding her head toward the Second Cook as she grabbed a small broom, without being asked, to sweep the bits that had fallen on the floor into the fire.

Geranium was making a point to provide extra supervision during this lass’s training, but it seemed as if she was doing fine. Diamond was glad she had written to the Mayor’s wife, Mistress Rose, to ask if she knew if there could be found around Hobbiton any lasses of good reputation, handy in the kitchen, who were available to work at the Smials on such short notice.

Although Sage Goodchild was a younger tween than some of the servants, Diamond was glad to see that her first hire for the Smials seemed to be working out.

“Oh, I don’t know about no more parties at the Great Smials, lass,” chuckled Geranium. “After all, there’s already Captain Peregrin’s birthday on the third.”

Diamond gave a small start, then a smile began to spread across her face. Pippin’s birthday! Of course! “Gerry,” she began as she turned toward the Second Cook.


“You wanted to see me, Da?” Pippin asked, poking his head around the doorway into Thain Paladin’s office.

“Aye, lad,” his father answered, waving him in, “though I dinna expect to see you so early on your birthday. “How’s your wife, then?” he winked.

Pippin grinned rather faintly back. “She seems to have been rather preoccupied these past couple of days.”

“Harumph!” Paddin exclaimed. “At least she kissed you good morn and happy birthday, though, did she not?”

Pippin’s grin grew no brighter as he said, “That ‘twould be telling.”

“Aye, that it ‘twould!” Paladin laughed, having come out from behind his desk to clap his son on the back. “Raised you up into a gentlehobbit, we did.” He lowered his voice to add, “without much help from me, your mother might say.”

Pippin gave a true snort of amusement at this, and his face was still lit up as his father embraced him, saying, “I just wanted to wish a happy birthday to my lad.” He tilted his chin up to be able to say into Pippin’s ear, “my own little Thain Peregrin.”

Pippin stiffened a bit at this while he was returning the hug, but then forced himself to relax.

“So,” Paladin said as they broke apart after a moment, resuming the game the two had played on a time as Pippin grew up, “what is it you wish this day, my Thain?”

And Pippin, playing along, asked for what he had frequently desired as a child. “Have you any more of those sweets hidden in the drawer of your desk?” he asked cheekily.

“Aye,” Paladin smiled as he went to withdraw the hard sarsaparilla root candies from the main drawer. Today was a good day, and he did not mention that on some other dates, even these now disagreed with him.

“You know, Pip,” he said instead, his eyes twinkling as he tipped the sweets into his son’s hand, “you’re old enough now for an actual ale.”

“Perhaps after nooning,” Pippin grinned back, and popped one of the sarsaparilla lozenges into his mouth to suck on.


Pippin approached his birthday party with trepidation. He tried to tell himself there was no reason to be leery just because Diamond had been so involved in the planning of the party, but the truth was...he was leery because Diamond had been so involved in the planning of the party.

Things seemed to move along properly and decorously, though, with a feast of fine food, then his own short speech and handing out of gifts. (His sisters exchanged knowing glances as they received their bracelets.) Pippin was anticipating, next, the expected dancing in the floor space of the great room that had been cleared.

It was the predictable pattern of birthday parties, and would likely be the order every one of his would follow from now on -- with the rest of his life following in orderly, predictable routine. Mayhap his wife, she who was to be his partner in this life, couldna love him, but Pippin silently renewed his resolve to be a respectable and a responsible gentlehobbit, and to fulfill the vow he had made in front of both Diamond and the Shire to honor her. There would be no more departures from routine that could lead to transgressions, he told himself, beyond what he had already committed. Where was the band, anyway?

“May I have your attention, please?” Diamond asked as she rose from her seat to face the room full of hobbits. She had swallowed, hard, before daring to address them all, and her voice held still a faint rasp of fear. Pimpernel smiled conspiratorially at her from further down the table, causing raised eyebrows on the part of Pervinca, and Diamond continued with more confidence.

“There will be no dancing this evening.” Pippin began to frown at this, and a slight buzz of chatter made its way through the room, but Diamond continued on.

“We shall have, instead, a series of games,” she said. More murmurings -- some merely surprised, others pleasantly so -- followed this announcement, so that not many hard her words which followed. “We might have remembered, this past Yule, that we were all once lasses and lads, and there is no rule which requires us to put all such amusements aside.”

Pippin was a bit befuddled by this choice of his wife’s in party planning, but decided it must be attributable to her desire, along with the healers’, to protect him from the overexertion of dancing.

Diamond’s natural reticence proved to be an asset in the first game, in which various sortings of hobbits arranged themselves into seated circles. Taking up a stick someone had fetched from the tinder pile, she tapped it twice on the floor in front of Everard, seated next to her, and spoke the words to the game:

“My father sent me here with a staff,
To speak to you and not to laugh.”

Everard, of course, was already beaming as he crowed out the expected response: “Methinks you smile!” he called out gleefully.

“Methinks I don’t,” responded Diamond with perfect composure.

“I smooth my face with ease and grace,
And set my staff in its proper place.”**

She leaned forward with a flourish and presented the staff to Everard, never once cracking a smile.

Her features remained composed as the stick wended its way around the circle, even though several other hobbits were collapsing in giggles and guffaws -- aided by the antics of their friends, many of whom were making faces and pulling gestures designed to make the current stick wielder collapse in mirth.

Diamond looked anxiously once or twice to Pippin on her other side, and her eyes did relax a bit as she saw that he, too, had succumbed to a couple of giggles. By the time the stick reached him, Pippin was grinning as he reached for it.

His smile seemed frozen and hesitant, though, as he turned to Diamond to tap on the floor before her.

“My father sent me here with a staff,
To speak to you and to make you laugh,” he recited dutifully as the giggles continued around them.

Diamond’s own spirits sank again at seeing this and, thinking quickly, she darted a foot out from beneath her skirts and ran her toes lightly and quickly along Pippin’s instep, keeping her face neutral except for the a raising of the eyebrows, as she responded, “Methinks you smile.”

Pippin yelped at the surprise of being tickled and jumped back slightly from the accosting foot. He continued with a slightly bewildered expression,

“Methinks I don’t.
I smooth my face with ease and grace,
And put my staff in its proper place.”

Diamond stood to take the stick he proffered as the circle was completed and offered, finally, a tight-lipped smile to Pippin as grasped the other end of the stick. He, in turn, smiled bashfully back at her.

The next game took place at the tables. It was fortunate coincidence, Diamond had thought, that the letters “P” and “T” called for one of the game’s cubes mirrored the initials of the birthday hobbit. She sat next to Pippin at a table filled otherwise with his sisters and their husbands to throw the two cubes -- one marked on three sides with a P and on the other three with a T; the other cube labeled 1, 2, 3, and 4 on four of its sides and A (standing for “all” ) on its two remaining ones.

Five times around they went, with each player taking a turn to “put” or “take” the appropriate number of dried beans from the pile in the center, according the results of their throw.

Game of chance it might be, but the lads inevitably fell into good-natured bickering about the need for -- and their own prowess in -- throwing skills to effect the desired outcome. Diamond was glad to see Pippin take part in this, and even more so to hear him laugh out loud and give a small bounce in his seat as his final roll, right before the winner would be calculated based on a count of who had the most beans, led to a result of T, A: take all.

Other games ensued during the evening, and Pippin seemed progressively to grow more relaxed and closer to the hobbit Diamond had previously known as the festivities wore on. At last, it was time for the final entertainment she had planned.

This was a game in which married hobbits were to partner with each other, she had told those assembled as she passed out the equipment. Thain Paladin, sitting with Mistress Eglantine to one side of the room, opted to sit this one out as she offered a piece of string to his wife. Pippin’s parents had played some of the games this evening; for others, his father had elected to rest.

“Ready. On your marks. Set,” he called out as Pippin and Diamond and the other couples stared at each other from opposite ends of a length of string. “Go!” Paladin shouted and, their hands clasped behind their backs, they began to earnestly suck and chew on the string in a race to reach the treat suspended in the middle.

Doggedly approaching the marshmallow from his end of the string, Pippin looked up from his pursuit of the confection to check Diamond’s progress. She must have made good time at the beginning, for she seemed to have moved quite far along the string, but now something seemed to be holding her back as she made slower, more deliberate chomps toward the marshmallow. Her eyes were fixed all the while on Pippin’s face.

Their clear gray pools managed to look somehow both calm and anticipatory, and even a little bit apprehensive, all at once. There was something else there, too, but before Pippin had time to process what it was, he had oh-so-very-nearly reached the marshmallow. His green eyes widened then, in sudden understanding, to look into hers.

His mouth, at the same time, opened wider nearly of its own accord for his teeth to clamp down on the marshmallow. Diamond simultaneously twitched her own mouth forward and, as Pippin’s lips began closing together and he looked into his wife’s eyes, their lips met for the first time. Their tongues and teeth clashed slightly together, the sweetness of the marshmallow melting between them.

As Pippin swallowed the chunk of confection he had bit off, and Diamond swallowed hers, they remained standing for a moment, their lips pressed together, the tail of a string dangling out of the mouth of each.

Pippin’s brain strummed with one thought: he had kissed his wife.


_________
*”The last day of the year and the first of the next year were called the Yuledays. The Yuledays...remained outside the months, so that January [Afteryule] 1 was the second and not the first day of the year.” Return of the King, Appendix D, “The Calendars.”

**from Games and Songs of American Children by William James Newell, 1893; an adaptation of a verse game found in The Popular Rhymes of Scotland by Robert Chambers, 1826.