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The first time that Merry ever kissed Estella Bolger was when they all played Five Turns of the Clock at the Boffins', and Cormac and Rory blindfolded him, and through in the parlour they blindfolded Estella, and they had to go into the pantry together and stay there while everyone else whooped and giggled outside. It was supposed to be that neither of you knew who the other one was until after you came out so everything was fair and even, but shortly after the door had been slammed behind them and he was reaching forwards to find out for definite whether he was with a lad or a lass before he put his hands in the wrong place, he heard the sound of Estella saying, "Hullo, Merry!"

"Oi, oi! You're not meant to peep around the blindfold!"

"I'm not." There was laughter in Estella's voice. "I always know when it's you. Maybe it's the smell of your pipeweed."

Her hand brushed Merry's arm, and he patted his way down to lace his fingers with hers, bumping into a few other things on his travels. "That's another way I can guess it's you," she said, and now it was his turn to laugh.

"Sorry, 'Stel."

"It's all right. Do you want to just wait until time up, or shall we put on a show?"

Merry thought about this for a moment or two, and then decided that it would be silly to miss out, even if neither him or Estella had ever been sweet on the other. "Might as well," he said.

"Don't tread on my toes, then," Estella said, and they managed to swap kisses with hardly a squashed nose, quite good enough considering the amount of room they had, anyhow. It was strange kissing completely blind, different to when you just closed your eyes and could open them at any time, but it made you think more about what you were doing. The pantry smelled of Lavender Boffin's mint chutney and blackcurrant jam. It was a reassuring, homely smell, in the same way that the kiss was reassuring.

Years later, whenever Merry smelled or tasted blackcurrants, he always pictured Estella Bolger standing in a pantry with a knotted scarf sitting across the bridge of her nose, and it never failed to make him smile.

*** *** ***

Estella's red hair always caught Merry momentarily by surprise whenever he saw her, until he remembered that she and Fatty were Tooks on the distaff side. You could find every sort of red amongst the extended family if you looked at enough heads, from his mother's glowing copper, all the way through Everard's carrots, to Isabella's strawberry blonde. Estella had a shade of chestnut that matched her eyes and made them twinkle. The second time that Merry kissed her, it had been because her hair had been the colour of conkers in the autumn sun, split new from their cases, halfway-buried in the pile of bright leaves where they sat. He had pressed his nose into it for a moment or two. It smelled fresh and clean and honest, like the morning, and like something else that it seemed was always wandering about on the outskirts of his mind but he couldn't quite remember.

She hugged him.

"Pip," Merry said, absently.

Estella pushed him off. She was almost silhouetted against the sky as they sat up, but he could see the expression on her face, and she was grinning.

*** *** ***

The third time that Merry kissed her, it had all started with a pony, or two ponies, to be exact. One of them was the dun that he was riding back to Bag End from the house at Crickhollow that he and Pippin, and Sam and Folco and Fatty, had been outfitting with furniture and careless mathoms and knicknacks, so as to give the impression to anyone calling to enquire that Frodo was to take up permanent residence there. The other was the skewbald accompanying Estella when he overtook her on the road. A lass sitting on a pony rather than behind it in a trap, let alone trying to dig a stone out of its hoof, was another sight that always surprised him, being something that he felt vaguely that he wouldn't have quite liked had it been anyone else. But with Estella, it was all right. Anything fitted and was all right, with her, because she always fitted, and the idea of Merry-and-Stella seemed to sit right alongside Merry-and-Pippin like apples and pears in the loft and not bother it one bit. Merry was nearly as fond of pears as he was of apples, just in a different way.

"Miss Bolger," he said with a wink, as he reined Sparrow to a halt, "you ought to leave it to the lads to handle ponies."

She grinned up as he dismounted, pausing in her efforts and lifting one hand to push back a few strands of hair. She had evidently had it tied up out of her way, but most of it had come loose and was now hanging around her face in an unruly sunburst. Merry had the suspicion that she would have cut it up to her collar if her mother had allowed it, and wanted to laugh at the sudden picture, but with her rather than at her. "Master Brandybuck, I can handle them as well as any lad I know, and given the choice between ponies and lads, I'd rather spend my life with the ponies."

Merry knelt beside her and picked up the skewbald's hoof, half-prepared to duck a kick, and relieved when the animal stood quietly. The stone was a large flint, smooth on the face and sharp on the underside, sunken into the soft part. "You don't want to marry?" he said, curiously. He'd always taken it for one of those things that all lasses wanted and lads had to do their best to avoid for as long as possible.

Estella shrugged. "Weddings are fun. I'd have a wedding day to dance on, and not go any further than that. Marriage is for husbands. So are all the babies they make come."

"It does take two," Merry said, not knowing quite whether he ought to feel amused or slightly affronted.

"Aye. But not always by choice. Kisses for me, thankyou, and no more."

She turned her head, shading her eyes against the sun, and they were suddenly so close together that it seemed natural for Merry to lean in a little and do it. It was different, he thought, than kissing Pippin, who was inclined to pull Merry's hair when he scruffed his fingers in it and whose quick fingers seemed to get into no end of places. If he had been asked to describe how Estella's kiss felt, the way it pressed, light but decisive, and then parted from him just as gently, his answer would have been peaceful. And then they both turned their attention back to the pony's hoof, and everything was just as easy and friendly as if it had never happened, or as if it happened all the time.

By the time that Merry returned the next November, he and Pippin had learned to kiss quietly too. Secretively, so no-one knew, in the Houses of Healing, when they shivered at how they were so nearly lost to each other. More desperately than before, back in the Shire, when one of them woke and reached out in the darkness. Merry oftimes wore his uniform, that of a rider of Rohan, and his sword arm ached when the weather was damp. During the days of rejoicing, some of his confusing multitude of thoughts had turned to Stybba, and he had sought the grey pony who had carried him among the Rohan animals and at last found him carrying pack, still without complaint. King Eomer had granted permission for Stybba to be ridden home by Merry, to live out the remainder of his days in Buckland. Estella greatly admired him.

"Elderly," she said, "but stout-hearted. Poor pony, being taken to war. I think you're a great hero."

Merry lifted his hand and let Stybba nibble his fingers, the way he did when he was looking for a treat. "Are you talking to me, or to him?"

"Both of you." Estella poked him, before going back to patting the pony's whiskered muzzle. After a moment, she added, "Melilot told me I'd let you get away, letting you go adventuring with the big people without having you say anything first."

"What did you say to her?" Merry asked, honestly wondering about this, not to mention the fact that Melilot should think there was something for him to say.

"I told her I never had you in the first place."

He kissed her then, or it might just as easily have been that Estella kissed him, or they both kissed each other; he was never quite sure. But it was the fourth time. She was thinner than he remembered, but she still felt upright and strong against him.

"Welcome back," she said.

*** *** ***

Estella was the person Merry had always found it easiest to talk to after Pippin and Frodo, so when Frodo was gone, and when he couldn't talk to Pippin about it any longer because so much of it was about Pippin, he talked to Estella. He talked to her about being forty-five years old and his father's only son, and about Saradoc's noises about seeing the next Master of Buckland safely wed before he died that were getting louder and louder by the day, and about loving his da and wanting to see him at peace, and the sick feeling that still rose up in his heart every time he realized that he'd betray any lass because he could never give himself to her the way he ought to; had already given that part of himself a long time ago. And after he had said all that, he stopped talking and listened instead, while she said a lot of the same things. Estella was forty-two.

"I thought Freddy would carry on the line for both of us," she said. To the surprise of more than a few, Fatty Bolger had married quite young, and was well on the way to producing a fair-sized family. "But Father wants an old maid off his hands even more than he wants grandchildren." Then, fiercely, her hands forming small fists in her lap, "I'd rather leave the Shire - and go off to Bree. I'll make my own way in the world."

Merry felt suddenly concerned that she actually might. "They're rough sorts, some of them, in the Bree-land. It's not the right place for a lass on her own."

Estella sniffed. "Better that than be an unloved wife."

The phrase seemed so painfully out of sorts to Merry, because it was hard, to him, to imagine anyone, looking to wed and wanting a lass with a mind of her own, not treasuring one like Estella. She should have a happy life, he thought, and a long one, with never any reason to cry, only to look back and think how every day turned out better than the last. "If I'd wanted to get married," he said, "I'd have picked you years ago." Above anything, he hoped that it might be comforting, but it wasn't without truth.

"And if I'd wanted to get married, I couldn't have done any better."

"Would you have had three people in a bed?"

She blinked at that, then smiled. "No. Two. And me quite happy in my own. How would that have suited you?"

Her hand was near enough to Merry's to make no odds, and he took it and squeezed it. "'Stel, if you suited yourself, you'd suit me."

A furrow appeared in Estella's forehead. She looked at their hands as if they made her think of something, or maybe remember a thought she'd had a long time ago. A short silence ensued, but it wasn't a tense sort of silence; he almost appreciated it. After a minute or two, she said, slowly, "Merry, I think that I've got a plan."

He ploughed a furrow to match hers. "Of what sort?"

"Ask me to marry you. Today. Right now."

"But, 'Stel," Merry said, now completely bemused, "I don't want a wife."

Her smile could be no better described than mischievous, now. "And I don't want a husband. But I like Brandy Hall pretty well, and if I come and live there, you'll look awfully like one to your father and mine, won't you?"

That was when Merry understood, and it seemed so clever, and yet so simple, that he kissed her for the fifth time. And after they had been duly married under the canopy of the apple trees that April, Pippin kissed her as well. The blossom came early that year, and so heavy on the branches, that it was still being discussed until well after Lithe and the rush of orders for extra pans in anticipation of the pies, tarts and crumbles in the autumn came close to being unfillable. In the late afternoon, the young Brandybucks, and a good number of Tooks with them, went boating on the river. They stayed out until the lanterns were lit and nobody could tell where the meadow started and the sky left off, full of stars as it was, Eärendil hanging over Buck Hill like a beacon, guiding them all home.