Chapter 17. Measure Twice, Cut Once

‘Healer Woodruff!’

Renilard wakened to Meadowsweet’s exclamation, in conjunction with a blast of cold air that sent the flames dancing on the hearth and caused his wife to utter an exclamation of her own, one of dismay as she pulled the blanket up over him.

The door slammed shut, the cold wind stopped though the temperature was perceptibly lower in the smial. Another time Renny might have been annoyed at Anise’s fussing, but now he welcomed the warmth of her bulk, pressed over him as if to shield him from harm. There was a stamping of feet behind him then, and then murmured apologies in several voices. Rather than basking in his wife’s closeness, he pushed at her to gain enough room to roll over.

The Thain was there, as he’d thought from what he'd heard. The Thain's own healer leaned on his arm as they wiped the snow from their feet. Snowflakes decorated their cloaks and sprinkled their heads in feathery clumps. The farmer's middle daughter stepped in to take their cloaks, hoods and gloves.

‘At least it’s not ice,’ the Thain was saying, in answer to Farmer Langred’s observation. The good farmer was wrapped up in a blanket, before the hearth, though he’d hastily stood up to offer his chair to one or the other new arrival. ‘But too cold, by half! I apologise for the cold air we brought in with us. It won’t be a bother to you in future, I’m glad to say.’

‘Won’t be a bother?’ Langred said fuzzily, sinking back into his chair at the Thain’s staying gesture. Meanwhile, Woodruff disengaged her arm and lowered herself to the floor between Renilard and Tolly.

‘Well now,’ she said. ‘Hobbits laid out before the fire like a tin of sardines!’

‘No fires in the bedrooms,’ Aster said apologetically, twisting her apron in her hands. She knew enough of Healer Woodruff to be in awe of the hobbit. When her daughter-in-love had laboured long to bring forth her first child, to no avail, and showed signs of failing, the worried midwife had sent to the Great Smials for the Thain’s own healer, who had a knack with difficult births. Woodruff had come at a gallop—and saved both young mother and new babe. Though Woodruff had sat down at table after the birthing was done, sipping a mug of tea and nibbling at a biscuit just like any other hobbit, Aster could not forget the way she’d taken charge and snapped out her orders as she’d waded into the battle to save two lives. She was a hard and fierce fighter, that one. No telling what she might say to Aster’s makeshift arrangements.

‘Very cosy, and easier to keep an eye on all together,’ Woodruff said with a nod and a twitch of her lips that might have been a smile in other circumstances. ‘Now then, Renny,’ she said, laying the back of her hand against his forehead. ‘Fever’s broken, from the look of you.’

‘Yes,’ Anise spoke up. ‘Yesterday, near teatime. He wanted to get up this morning, but I argued with him until he went back to sleep.’

‘You ought to listen better to your wife, Renny, for what are wives for if not to keep their hobbits on the right path? Now, what’s this I hear of you—you were out of your head for a good five days?’

‘I wouldn’t know—I’ve been out of my head, as you say,’ the hunter grumbled. He avoided healers like the plague, in better days, but it seemed he was well and truly trapped at the moment.

‘Five days,’ Woodruff said with another nod, folding back the blankets that cocooned him in warmth. He shivered as she seized his hand and ordered him to ‘be still, that a hobbit might think a thought or two in the meantime.’

She held his hand for a long moment before her fingers moved to his wrist and she turned her eyes to the flames roaring on the hearth. A dew of melted snowflakes glittered in her hoary curls, he noted absently, as he set himself to be as still as possible. She was likely to stir up an awful-tasting draught if he annoyed her.

Done with her counting, she laid his hand down upon the blankets and peered into his face, bending close to sniff at his breath, to peer into his eyes, even pulling his lids wide with her fingers for a better look.

‘Did ye want to see my teeth as well?’ he muttered in spite of himself.

‘No fever on your breath,’ she said, ‘but let me see your gums, anyhow, and stick out your tongue whilst you’re at it.’ As he obliged, she said, ‘Say “ah” now, do. I’ve been near breathless with the anticipation, all the way here, for you never visit me in the infirmary for some reason.’

Anise snorted, and Woodruff’s lips twitched again as she examined Renny’s mouth.

At last the healer sat back. ‘No sore throat?’ she said.

‘None,’ the hunter said, and added, pulling himself to an upright position. ‘So, does that mean I can get up?’

‘I think it means that you may sit up, in a chair, when the good farmer seeks to lay his head down once more,’ Woodruff said, ‘at least for today. If you eat all you’re given, and rest today, then you may get up on the morrow, and walk a few steps around the smial.’ She lifted a peremptory finger and added, ‘No going out-of-doors until the next day, however!’

At that moment a great racket of hammering erupted outside, and half the hobbits started up from their places.

Thain Peregrin, however, commanded them back to their rest, and when all were settled to his satisfaction, he said to the farmer, ‘I beg your pardon.’

‘You have it,’ Langred said at once, with a bow that nearly spun him out of his chair. ‘And aught else you might need, Sir...’

For along with the waggonload of supplies, sent by the Thain some days earlier and just before Langred himself had been laid low, had come a bag of coin, “in thanks for your hospitality and apologies for the inconvenience to your family.”

‘No, I beg your pardon for taking the liberty of adding to your smial without consulting you,’ Pippin said, a little diffidently. ‘You see,’ he said, having to raise his voice somewhat above the hammering, ‘you were out of your head the last time I came, and I couldn’t very well ask you... and your wife was run off her feet, what with all the unexpected hospitality required of her...’

Langred waited patiently.

Pippin shuffled his feet and cleared his throat. Woodruff looked up sharply at the sound, reassured herself that he wasn’t sickening on the spot, and turned her attentions to examining Tolly.

‘Well, you see,’ Pippin said, ‘it doesn’t seem right that we’ve brought trouble and fever to your smial, where you were managing very well up until now, until everyone must lie here in the main room, before the hearth, rather than snug in their beds.’

Langred inclined his head in a gracious manner, though he wasn’t quite sure what the Thain was driving at, nor what role the hammering played.

‘Well,’ Pippin said, blinking a little in his earnestness, ‘I took the liberty of engaging workers and lumber and bricks and tools, to build an entryway, that when the door is open you don’t have all the heat escaping the room and all of outdoors coming in, so to speak.’

‘It was a great liberty,’ Woodruff said dryly, and under her breath. ‘Not asking permission of a hobbit out of his wits with fever.’

‘Building on to the smial...?’ Langred said in a befuddled manner.

‘Aye,’ the Thain said, reddening. ‘It is a great liberty, I know, and...’

Langred blinked. It was something he’d been planning himself, one of the improvements he’d wanted to make “one of these days” when the weather was better. However, when the better weather arrived, it never seemed so urgent a matter as all the other things that called to be done during the warmer months on the farm.

He wondered if they’d be digging chimneys next, and laying down stone for bedroom hearths.

Woodruff was frowning now. ‘But I thought he was taken with fever the same day as Hilly, and Renny,’ she said, ‘and a host of others.’

‘He was,’ Meadowsweet said. ‘Early in the morning of that day, it must have been, for he took his pony and rode out of the Smials without a word to anyone, long before early breakfast, and they said from the signs on the trail they thought he was out of his head even then.’

Woodruff counted silently, nodding to herself, and then she counted on her fingers for good measure. ‘This is the seventh day,’ she said, staring down at the hobbit who moaned and turned his face restlessly from side to side, even as his hands moved together to some unfathomable purpose, pushing out from his body and pulling back again, only to push away once more. He gasped for breath, and rivulets of sweat ran from his temples, but he did not seem to hear anything said to him, by wife or healer or farmer’s daughter, leaning down to hand a freshly brewed mug of tea to Meadowsweet.

It was difficult to count his heartbeats, moving as he was, and Woodruff had to give up and find the pulse point on his throat, in order to get an accurate reading. His flesh burned under her fingers, and his heart galloped faster than she could count.

‘Well?’ Meadowsweet whispered, ‘is it close to running its course, do you think?’ Her eyes were bright with hope, a desperate hope perhaps, but Healer Woodruff wasn’t head healer of the Tooks for no reason. Even the Thain broke off his continued apologies to Langred and Aster to bend close, to hear the answer.

‘Close to running its course,’ Woodruff echoed absently, lifting an eyelid to peer into Tolly’s bloodshot eye, while she sniffed delicately at his faint exhalation. Her lips tightened at the odour—sickness, deadly sickness perhaps, a wasting, with a hint of death's corruption clear to her healer's perception.

Tolly was very close to the end of his course, indeed.