Chapter 23 Heart to Heart Talk

'I can't seem to talk to him,' Merry said as they walked the fields under the moon and stars. 'I haven't been able to talk to him, really talk for months.'

'It's partly your fault, you know,' Samwise said.

'My fault?' Merry asked, stopping short.

'You started the whole mess when you rushed here to rescue him from the cave-in.'

'I started the whole mess?' Merry was dumbfounded.

'If all you're going to do is repeat the words I say, this conversation is not going to go very far,' Sam said. 'You could have sent your engineers to dig him out, and followed later,' he added, 'instead of making it look as if the older cousin was running to the younger cousin's rescue once again.'

'Sam, I thought he might well be dead! I wasn't thinking of politics or what people would say, I was thinking of Pippin under a tonne of earth and rock...' Merry turned away, the same fear nagging at him, the fear of losing Pippin, which, since carrying his cousin to the study after dinner, had returned to haunt him.

'Aye, I know. But for you, now--and him, and me, even--there's always politics, Merry. You can't never forget about what people are going to say.'

'And if it was Frodo, under a tonne of earth? Would you stay home and send some engineers?'

Sam closed his eyes. 'No.' He took a deep breath. 'But my point still stands. You compromised his position by your actions. How much of his energy--not that he has any to spare, mind--has been spent trying to keep the Tooks from prying him loose for his own good, or because they fear he is not strong enough to stand the strain? They look at him like you'd look at a waggon wheel with a crack in't... better replace it before it fails and the waggon comes crashing down.'

'Pippin's not a cracked wheel,' Merry said.

'No, but when you rush to the Smials to prop him up, the Tooks see him that way.'

They walked in silence for some time while Merry digested this information.

'Being Mayor, I hear things,' Sam continued at last. 'I travel all over the Shire, and when people have been celebrating a bit overmuch, sometimes they forget to guard their tongues.'

He paused, then went on. 'After the cave-in, there was a lot o' loose talk, the usual speculation, second-guessing. Perhaps the Thain's "think" was bigger than his "do", maybe he was to blame for those two deaths, mayhap he's trying to change what's best left alone. After all, Tookland got along fine for years before he came in with his plans and big ideas.'

'And then I rush in to save him from himself,' Merry said slowly.

'That's what it looked like,' the Mayor said. 'He's been fighting to keep hold of the Thainship ever since.' Merry saw him shake his head in the moonlight. 'Hobbits are funny folk,' he continued. 'The New Smials are all built, and a beautiful job, but what do they remember? The roof fallen in, and two dead.'

'And the Thain to blame, for proposing it in the first place,' Merry said.

'Exactly.'

Merry sighed. 'It was so much easier when all we had to fight was orcs.'

Sam laughed, and Merry joined him.

'Sometimes I'd just like to go back to gardening,' the Mayor confessed. 'Where all you have to fight is weather and weeds.'

'I wonder what Pippin would like to go back to...' Merry mused.

Samwise chuckled. 'I don't know,' he said, 'but let us steal him away tomorrow from all those smothering Tooks who watch over him like dragons guarding their treasure hoard.'

'That ought to be quite an adventure,' Merry said. 'But how do we get him away?'

'Tell Diamond to pack an enormous picnic, and that we plan to feed it all to him; she'll distract the steward whilst we spirit him out of the Smials...' Sam said, and Merry laughed.

'Quite the adventure indeed,' he said. 'I'm looking forward to it.'

***

In truth, the plan went much as their talk the previous night. Diamond saw to it that a large picnic was packed away in three sets of saddlebags, Meliloc saw to saddling the ponies, Diamond called Reginard and Ferdibrand to address a problem elsewhere in the Smials, and Sam and Merry, feeling as mischievous as young tweenagers lifting mushrooms from Farmer Maggot's fields, carried Pippin between them out of the Smials.

'Where are we going?' the Thain asked.

'Hush,' Merry said, 'We don't want to alert the dragons.'

The Thain shook his head. Surely the strain of administering Buckland had finally broken his cousin's mind. On the other hand, he seemed to have roped in the Mayor, and Sam was grinning with delight, so this could not be all bad, whatever it was. Pippin had found much opportunity to practice patience over the last weeks, and he decided to sit back and see where this was leading.

...out to the stables, evidently, where three ponies were saddled and waiting. They lifted him onto Socks' back, mounted their own ponies, and were off into the woods and hills.

After they'd lost sight of the Smials, Pippin turned to Merry. 'So, did we slip away from the dragons?'

'I'd say so,' Merry grinned.

'Did we manage to take away any treasure with us from the hoard? A silver cup, perhaps?'

'O, much better than that, cousin,' Merry said. 'We came away with the entire hoard.'

Samwise chuckled. 'Indeed,' he said. 'But we had better put some miles between us and their lair or they might come after us.'

'We cannot have that,' the Thain said, leaning forward to encourage Socks to speed up a bit. It felt wonderful to be riding out to no place in particular, without knowing what specific thing needed to happen upon arrival, or whom he needed to consult with, or what persuasion needed to be accomplished. He felt, for the first time in a long time... free.