Night Noises

          Frodo half lay, half sat up in his bed, his hands pressed to his ears.  How in Middle Earth was it that he could hear the noises in the next room so clearly? 

          He could understand it if he were in Minas Tirith.  There the outside walls might usually be stone, but unless there was a hearth, inner walls tended to be of wooden boards overlaid with plaster.  Sound could carry easily throughout a house with such walls.

          But here, here in Bag End?  There were hearths on both sides of the adjoining wall, but they were not open to one another.  Their chimneys rose side by side, but didn’t join with one another until they emerged from the crest of the Hill, some fifteen feet or better above his room’s coved ceiling.  Beside the fireplace in the master bedroom was a shallow dressing room that might not hold as many garments as it had in Bilbo’s day, but still enough belonging to both Sam and Rosie as ought to have satisfactorily dampened any sound from their bedroom.  The wall between the rooms was mostly stone and earth faced with wood paneling and plaster on each side where there were not stone and brick for the fireplaces, mantels, and overmantels.

          How could any sounds from Sam and Rosie’s room be heard here, here in Frodo’s room? 

          He shook his head, and drew up a pillow over its crown to try to further muffle what he could hear, and once more cursed the Morgul knife that had so wounded him.  How was it that such a wound had managed to increase the sensitivity of his hearing so?  Another charge to lay at the feet of the vanquished Enemy!

          “It should be me!” he muttered.  “It should be me, me with my own wife!”

          He ought to have married, had certainly intended to marry one day.  But that day had never come.  First, Pearl Took had thrown him over just before he’d intended to ask her to marry him, back before either was of age as yet.  Then, just as he’d thought that that disappointment was finally done and over with, the Ring had come to him.  How shocked he’d been when he found that the sight of an attractive Hobbitess aroused not simple interest but a twisted lust in his heart!  How he’d thought not of sweet kisses shared in the Grove outside the grounds for the Free Fair in Michel Delving but instead of himself forcing masterful kisses on a lass he desired and intended to have!

          But that was not him!  He wasn’t such a Hobbit, one who could never be described as a gentlehobbit, no matter how illustrious his breeding or fine his garments or beautiful his smial.  No—he refused to become such a person!

          And now he knew that he had managed to avoid the fate that the Ring had intended for him, but that in doing so he had scarred himself so badly that now he would never—could never—know such joy and shared pleasure as Sam and Rosie knew of one another in the next room.

          At last he rose from his bed and drew a match from the stone safe on the mantel, went to his desk by the window and lit the candle there, dropping the spent match onto the silver dish kept there to receive such things.  Seating himself, he drew a sheet of writing paper from the top of his stationery box, opened his bottle of black ink, dipped a steel pen, and began to write….

          It wasn’t fair!  No, not fair at all!  He had been the Ringbearer, the Cormacolindo, yet it was Sam who knew the happily-ever-after!  It was Sam who smiled into the loving eyes of his beautiful wife, who caressed her fair skin, and who rejoiced in her even as she rejoiced in his delight in her.  And it was Sam who would father----

          Suddenly his anger fled as he realized just what it was that he was hearing—the conception of the first child truly born of the sacrifice he and Sam, together, had offered there on that hill of slag at the foot of Mount Doom.

          No tantalizing torture this, but the reassurance that, because of what Sam and he together had achieved in Mordor, life would continue here in the outer world, here in the Shire, here in Bag End.

          He bowed his head in shame and grief—and relief.

          He cast his eyes over what he’d written, at the words of anger, frustration, jealousy even, that he’d felt toward his beloved Samwise Gamgee, his closest brother of the heart.  He’d written pages of bile and rage, he realized.  But how could he begrudge Sam what he’d earned fairly?

          His tears were splattering on the topmost page, blurring the ink.  He glanced at the hearth.  No fire burned there, not in the warmth of a night in early June.  Little chance of burning this letter so that Sam would never know it had been written. 

          But, when he thought about it, he decided it would not be honest to destroy it and pretend that his terrible grief at his own inability to know such joy had never existed.  He sighed and reached for the blotting paper to dry away his tears from the page before him.  He composed himself and resumed writing, making his apologies, explaining just how deeply his own inability to love as a husband must properly love his wife had cut into his own happiness, his own feelings of self-worth; how he prayed that Sam and Rosie should always know that joy and pleasure they’d shared on this night of all nights, and how he felt joyous to know that the first of the many children they’d bring forth to the delight of the Shire was to be born of tonight’s shared love.

          I bless you, Samwise Gamgee, you and Rosie, and the family you will give life to that will fill this beloved hole as Bilbo’s parents had intended, as I’d hoped—vainly, it proves—to do myself.

          So he finished it.  He reread that last sentence, then reached for the little silver sifter so as to sprinkle drying sand over the letter.  He went to the watch holder on his dresser to fetch the key to the stationery box while the ink dried, opened the locked drawer, and, after carefully spilling the sand off the rolled pages back into its box, he deliberately ordered, straightened, and folded the letter, then sealed it with wax spilled from his candle, pressing it with the star pin that was now his private seal.  He turned it over and carefully wrote, To my beloved brother Sam, to be read only after I have quitted Middle Earth.

          At last he entrusted the letter he’d written to the drawer in the stationery box, relocked it, and snuffed the candle.  He didn’t need additional light to return watch and key to their proper place on the dresser, and after returning to his bed he covered himself and swiftly fell into a deep and deserved sleep, knowing full well that when the day came that Sam actually read that letter the gardener would understand.  Oh, how pitiable he’d proved himself this night.

 *******

          He heard the laughter of children, and saw a small Hobbit lass, a faunt, actually, dancing about what appeared to be a young Mallorn tree, golden blossoms falling about her equally golden curls, a small bunch of elanor and niphredil flowers in her tiny fist.  Rosie sat on a bench nearby, watching with an indulgent smile on her face as she nursed a new bairn.  Sam and children both new and familiar danced with her, all with signs of delight on their faces.

          “What a lovely child she is!” Frodo whispered, his heart gladdened at the sight of this tiny child.

          *And you shall bless her with her name, Best Beloved,* murmured a soft voice in his heart.  *She will always think of you as her other father, even should you be far distant from her.  Know this—you shall always dwell in her heart as you do in the hearts of her parents by birth.* 

          She came to him, placing a golden sun-star blossom in his hand, and his hands caressed those golden locks….

 *******

          “I think as Master Frodo must of been out walkin’ in the garden last night,” Rosie commented.  “I found a golden flower in his bed as I was makin’ it this mornin’.  It’s too bad as he often feels restless of a night.”

          Sam looked up from the pansies he’d been dead-heading, and recognized that she held a blossom of elanor between her thumb and forefinger.