febobe

They used to be Mr. Bilbo’s mother’s once, part of Belladonna Took’s dowry, when she was young and ready to marry. Mr. Frodo gave them to me when Sam and I married, when we moved in Bag End. He said seeing as how we’d be living there with him, so long’s I didn’t mind him using them too, and them being for the household, they could be mine now. I was so shocked you could’ve wiped the floor with my tongue, my jaw dropped so far. I asked him wouldn’t he want them for his own family, and he smiled real sad and said that no, he wouldn’t be marrying, and nothing would give him more pleasure than to give them to me. I wonder now whether he knew he’d be leaving us after only a few more years. I think maybe he did.

They’re Westfarthing crockery, and pretty things, painted with pictures in pretty reds and blues and greens. Little Shire scenes on them, rolling green hills and grassy meadows, hobbit-lasses and lads, sheep and cows and little birds, robin redbreasts and the like. It makes me sad sometimes to think of it, though, to look at them lovely dishes, expensive ones, handed down nigh on two hundred years now, down through the Tooks and then the Bagginses, and now mine, finer than anything I have any right to, and all because of someone else’s misfortune.

I didn’t see it that way at first. I thought Mr. Frodo was just so well off that he could afford to be extravagant, and if he weren’t going to marry, well then, why shouldn’t I have them dishes? It weren’t till we got moved in and I heard him crying out in his sleep, and sometimes walking the halls like a ghost up in the dark hours of the night, that I started to understand. What he brought back with him as reward weren’t so much riches as it were something dark and terrible and sad.

So I don’t feel entitled to my dishes. I feel humbled by them, by the price paid for me to have them. I make Mr. Frodo hot milk at night to help him sleep, and I put it in one of his tea-cups, and when he’s feeling poorly I make chicken broth or beef broth for him, with mushrooms, and put it in one of the pretty soup-plates from that set, and I put toasted white bread with a bit of butter on a little plate and try to get him to eat that. It don’t work, usually. But he smiles when he sees them dishes, and I like to think it reminds him of Mr. Bilbo, and happier times when he was a tween. I remember him then, all long thin body and big blue eyes and mop of dark hair, and all of us girls thought him a lovely sight, if too scrawny to make anyone a proper husband. He’s not changed in that; if anything, he’s thinner now, for all he’s taller, and he looks like a skeleton.

And I can’t help but look at them dishes sometimes when I’m washing them and wonder - Mrs. Belladonna Baggins, would it make you hurt that they’re mine now? Would you be angry?

It weren’t my fault. But somehow I can’t help feeling there’s something sad about getting something through a body’s misfortune.

-the end-