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A Healer's Tale  by Lindelea

Chapter 11. Into Deep Waters

Woodruff was cutting leaves in the little wood not far from Whittacres Farm. She had wandered a good way from Whitwell in her search for the plants Sweetbriar had specified for the gathering (nettles were common, but Lady’s Mantle had proven shy), moving from copse to copse in search of shade-loving plants, but it was a lovely day, the old healer had packed a hearty second breakfast of bread and cheese and dried-apple pockets, and elevenses would be waiting when she came home. Home! After six years, the word still brought a thrill of comfort to the healer’s apprentice and adopted granddaughter.

Carefully harvesting young nettles, she gave a start as something crashed through the thicket behind her, and a sharp exclamation as stinging leaves brushed her exposed skin, above the glove she wore. Hastily she grabbed a dock leaf and scrubbed at the burning sensation, even as she scurried towards the nearest tree. She didn’t know what it was, boar or dog perhaps, but it was as big as she was, from the sound of it.

The brambles behind her thrashed wildly and stilled and she froze, having pulled herself onto the lowest branch. She stared gloomily at the overturned basket of freshly-harvested Lady’s Mantel and nettles—a proper mess of all her morning’s work. Listening, she heard panting, and then a groan that sounded more human than hog. It had made enough noise to be a wandering Man, perhaps.

 ‘Is someone there?’ she called, ready to spring for the next higher branch.

A young and breathless voice answered. ‘Help... please... help!’

That didn’t sound like a Man, she thought. The wandering conjuror who’d passed through Whitwell had spoken... differently somehow, though he’d adopted the Shirefolks’ way of speaking. The hooded stranger who’d startled her in an isolated copse, on an earlier gathering expedition, why, he’d given her a courtly bow, a whispered apology, and then he’d melted into the trees so quickly she’d doubted what her own eyes had seen. Yet even the whisper had not sounded exactly... hobbity. This was definitely a hobbit’s voice. ‘What is it?’ she called, looking all about as she let herself down from the branch. If stray dogs had chased the young hobbit into the copse, she wouldn’t do him any good if she were savaged herself. But no, she hadn’t heard any barking. ‘Who’s there?’

 ‘Help! Please!’

Caught in the brambles, but that didn’t explain the note of despairing panic in the young voice, that made the hairs stand up on the back of her neck.

Blessing the thick leather gloves, she cautiously pulled bramble branches aside. The young hobbit had crashed into the middle of the tangle and was trapped. Whichever way he turned, wicked thorns jabbed into him, and he could scarcely move for the thorns that grasped at his clothing.

 ‘Keep still!’ Woodruff ordered as she began to disengage the tenacious thorns. She bit off an exclamation as the young hobbit thrashed. Barely a tween, she imagined, from the look of him. She had seen him in Whitwell a time or two with Frodo Baggins when the latter had been visiting his Tookish cousins. Now she wracked her brains for the name... ‘Young Master Boffin! Master Folco! Hold yourself still, or I won’t answer for the consequences.’

 ‘Drowning...’ the tween sobbed. ‘Help... Get help...!’ He broke off with a yelp as a thorn penetrated tender flesh.

 ‘Drowning!’ Woodruff said, now tearing recklessly at the brambles to free the tween. ‘Who’s drowning? Where?’

 ‘Pip—well—old smial,’ Folco panted.

 ‘Pip?’ she said. ‘Peregrin Took? Young Pippin?’ Merry Brandybuck’s hiccoughs had spawned a smaller name for the lad whose proper name was “longer than he was”, or so old Mister Baggins was fond of saying. She pulled the tween free of the brambles with a final yelp on his part, and they both went sprawling on the damp ground, adding dirt to the small rents in Woodruff’s frock. ‘Where?’

 ‘Old smial—nobody lives there now,’ Folco answered, pointing vaguely behind him.

 ‘Come along!’ Woodruff said, pushing him off so that she could climb to her feet. She grabbed at his wrist and pulled him to his, and then they were running, or rather she was half-dragging him, towards Whittacres Farm. This copse was just at the edge of Paladin’s land... across two fields and they’d find help, indeed, sooner perhaps, if there were any workers out on the Whitwell side of Paladin’s holdings. But no, the fields they crossed were empty of hobbits, the first neatly ploughed, with well-ordered rows of plants marching along, and the other filled only with cows placidly grazing.

But there was quite a gathering of hobbits in the farmyard. Tables and benches were set up, and hobbit mums and daughters were bustling about with serving bowls and dishes, and hobbit dads and sons stood about talking merrily, whilst two fiddlers tuned their instruments preparatory to playing. Woodruff remembered: Today was Paladin’s birthday, and his friends and close relations would be gathering to feast and frolic!

Sweetbriar was not a close relation, and was feeling poorly in the bargain, so she and Woodruff were to have stayed at home this day, once Woodruff returned from her gathering. Still, the healer’s apprentice would have been welcomed warmly, had her wanderings taken her through Paladin’s fields, for there is always room for another guest, even an uninvited one, at a birthday-party, and another mathom can always be found to give away.

The two breathless hobbits were received with cries of sympathy and alarm, supported to a bench, fanned, their cuts and scratches exclaimed over, presented with cool drinks and solicitous comments while they tried to get a word in edgewise, difficult enough under any circumstances but more so when out of breath, especially when so many were talking at once..

 ‘Folco! Look at the state you’re in! I imagine young Pippin’s worse off, the little imp!  Led you a merry chase, did he? What did he do, duck through a bramble-bush, leaving you to blunder through after him?’

At the same time another was saying, ‘Drawing the healer’s lass into the chase—a merry chase indeed! Has he gone to ground yet? Did you chase him back here, clever lad?’

 ‘Where is Pippin? It is time to get him cleaned up for the party!’ Pippin’s eldest sister dabbed at a scratch on Woodruff’s arm, tch-tching, even as she muttered about how fortunate the sturdy leather gloves had preserved Woodruff’s hands and wrists in her evident struggle with brambles.

Woodruff seized the ministering hand, gasping. ‘Pearl! Stop! He’s—’

 ‘Drowning!’ Folco put in.

 ‘What a joke! He always complains he’s drowning when Da dunks his head in the bucket to get at the dirt behind his ears. Did you do the favours this morning, for a birthday present? But where is he now? You take your eyes off him, he’ll be rolling with the pigs in the pen to recover his dirt...’

 ‘Drowning!’ Woodruff said sharply, and ‘There’s been an accident, I fear,’ while at the same time the recovering Folco shouted the news.

 ‘He fell in the well! He’s in the well, I tell you!’ Sudden silence fell as the desperate tween shouted a last time, ‘Pippin’s fallen in a well!’

Young Merry Brandybuck was there, even before Pippin’s parents reached them, grasping at Folco’s shirt with such force several buttons popped off. ‘Where?’

Folco half-sobbed, waving towards the fields. ‘Old smial, I don’t know whose...’ He wasn’t from around Whitwell, after all, and didn’t know the environs.

 ‘An abandoned smial,’ Woodruff put in. ‘He said nobody’s living there now.’ Eglantine gasped as the enormity of the news struck her; Pearl, who'd stopped short, now wrenched from Woodruff's grip and whirled to throw her arms around her mother, sobbing in sudden fear. Eglantine returned the embrace, staring at Folco, while more hobbits hurried toward them, calling questions to each other.

 ‘He’s drowning!’ Folco yelped desperately, and Woodruff, looking up, saw the young hobbit now standing behind Merry turn pale and sway.

 ‘Now lad,’ a hearty voice said, though the sober note in it seemed ill-suited to the owner as Bilbo caught the swaying tween and steadied him.

The tween swallowed hard and mastered himself with an effort of will, and Bilbo nodded and eased his grip now that imminent danger of fainting seemed to be past. Some distant part of Woodruff’s memory, detached from the terror of the present moment, reminded her that Frodo’s parents had drowned, somehow, an unnatural death for any hobbit.

 ‘What are we waiting for?’ Bilbo said, his arm still steadying Frodo for the moment before he turned to shout towards the hired hobbits near the barn. ‘Fetch ponies! Ropes! Fetch the healer!’

 ‘Healer’s here,’ Merry said, nodding at Woodruff. His hands were clenched into fists still holding Folco's shirt, but he spoke with forced calm much older than his years. Though he was little more than a child himself, he was steadier than many of the excited adults surrounding them. ‘Now, where is he? What smial?’ Folco sat motionless, his eyes darting about as if he'd point the way if he only knew which way to point.

Ferdinand Took ran into the barn and soon emerged with a coil of rope over his shoulder and three fine ponies, his own and Saradoc and Merry Brandybucks’. Saradoc pushed Paladin, frozen in horror, forwards.

 ‘Ride my pony,’ he said tersely. ‘I’ll follow on another.’ Paladin’s plough ponies were strong and steady, but built to pull a plough the daylong and a waggon to market, not to race over uneven ground at top speed. Paladin nodded, a sharp jerk of the chin, and ran to where the excited ponies, having caught the hobbits’ feverish mood, plunged in Ferdinand’s grasp.

Saradoc hesitated and turned to his son. ‘Your aunt,’ he said. ‘She needs...’ He broke Merry’s grip on Folco, levered the latter to his feet and gave him a shake. ‘Come along; we need you to tell us the way to go!’ Together they ran to the barn, Merry to claim his pony from Ferdinand, his father shoving Folco towards Paladin and then plunging into the darkness of the barn to help haul out saddles for the visitors’ ponies grazing in the paddock. Frodo was right behind them, claiming a pony from one of the hired hobbits for Bilbo and himself to share, for they’d walked over the fields from Bag End the day before.

 ‘Come, lass!’ Ferdinand shouted as he leapt to his pony’s back, waving to Woodruff. She took his meaning immediately and stood up from the bench. Her legs were no longer wobbling under her, and she had caught her second wind. He rode towards her, scattering hobbits to the right and left, held out his hand, and hoisted her up behind him.

Paladin mounted and took Folco up behind him. ‘Which way, lad?’ he shouted.

 ‘Broken windows, grey door,’ Folco said, even as Woodruff waved in the direction they’d come.

 ‘Grey!’ someone said, startled, but Paladin nodded.

 ‘I know the place,’ he said. ‘Been empty so long all the paint’s peeled away and the wood weathered.’ Turning the pony, he urged it down the lane that ran alongside the cow-pasture. Ferdinand, his pony faster, caught him soon. Paladin waved him past. Someone had to get there, and quickly! 

Merry led his pony at a trot to the little knot made up of Paladin’s wife and daughters, fixed together in fear and dread. He caught Eglantine’s arm. ‘Auntie!’ he said. ‘Ride with me! We’ll fly on the wind of their passing!’

In less time than it takes to tell of it, hobbits had claimed all the ponies to be had and were riding out, followed by a great body on foot hurrying past the astonished cows and then over the cabbage field and around the little copse where Woodruff’s abandoned basket likely still lay.

Folco was explaining, loudly above the sound of the galloping hoofs, the wind snatching away half the words, how he’d hauled branches to the well and dropped them down to give young Pippin something to climb onto, to keep him out of the water’s icy grip.

Woodruff, riding behind Ferdinand Took, her arms clasped firmly round his middle as they raced along faster than she’d ever gone on a pony before, heard Bilbo shout to Paladin, ‘Then the lad’ll be fine! The way he climbs trees...!’

They clattered into the yard of the abandoned smial, where the arriving rescuers provided the only sign of life. Ferdinand flung himself from the pony’s back, not even stopping to help Woodruff down, unslinging the rope he carried as he reached the well... and stopped, staring into the depths.

 ‘Pippin!’ Paladin shouted, sliding from his own pony’s back. ‘Why don’t you—’ he said to Ferdinand, only to stop, gaping.

Woodruff closed her eyes, imagining the child, dead, white face floating just below the water’s surface, curls gently fanned out to frame his countenance. But the pony pranced beneath her, and she slid off just in time to keep from falling off.

Frodo Baggins sat stiff and straight behind Bilbo, his face bleak, and Bilbo’s customary smile was gone as he patted his pony’s neck and murmured something inaudible, drowned out by the clatter of Merry and Eglantine’s arrival. He had gone round a longer way, not trusting himself to hurtle the low dry-stone fence, as the others had, with his aunt in his care.

Woodruff forced herself to move forward. Perhaps, if they got the little lad out in time, they could force the water out of him. Perhaps, if it wasn’t too late, they could get him breathing somehow, rolling him over a log. She joined the growing crowd of silent watchers staring down into the well.

It was nearly noontide, and the Sun shone her light helpfully down the shaft sunk into the earth, to make it easier for the craning hobbits to see, and just as well, for nobody’d thought to bring a lantern.

The waters stood, dark, still... and empty.





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