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“There's rosemary, that's for remembrance; pray, love, remember; and there is pansies, that's for thoughts... There's fennel for you, and columbines; there's rue for you, and here's some for me; we may call it herb of grace o' Sundays.” - Hamlet, act iv, scene v
“We were told only to turn over the keys to Feanor,” says the farmer—a man Nerdanel has known for more than two decades. “And Feanor is wanted for murder, at least on this coast.”
She supposes she should have expected this. “I did not come for the house,” she murmurs, though that is not strictly true. Where else has she to go? Indis’s carriage bore her here, and now it will have to carry her back—to the city, and others’ mercy, and trapped by those two things she will remain. “I would ask only that you permit me to collect a few—a few things from the attic. And—”
“Full of favors, am I?” the farmer snaps, but his wife steps forward, a hand on his arm. Her name is Jennie. Nerdanel knows that because she was her friend.
“Nerdanal,” she says. “What else do you ask?”
“To walk in my—to walk in the garden.” Her voice sounds thin to her own ears, and oh, how it stings sharper than December’s chill to see the rows of trees, the sprawling house itself. How it pains her to know each and every room as well as she will forever.
(They let her walk in the garden.)
Maglor took great delight in flowers as they bloomed, and though he had no estimable skill in coaxing them to life, still his talent for beauty extended to arranging them upon the windowsills and at the center of the table. Snapdragons and buttercups and dahlias, a thousand shades of comfort.
Nerdanel closes her eyes and twists her fingers together, and imagines the brush of velvety pansies, the impetuous sweetness of peonies.
Caranthir was diligent and methodical, and helped most with vegetables, since, in his practical way, he said that they needed to eat. He kept three pepper plants himself on the back porch, and when Huan knocked one to its doom, just as its flowers budded, even Celegorm did not defend his dog’s clumsiness.
There was a creeping clematis vine that belonged to Caranthir thereafter, the seeds purchased by Celegorm from Orome—
But the vine died years ago.
If Maglor is the opulence of peonies, and Caranthir is the subtle pepper-blossoms (and those of the apple trees, too, ruddy and delicate at once), then Celegorm is the first bright forsythia, hasty-rising, so golden and resolute that she has always wondered—how is this one, too, my son?
When Maedhros was eleven years old, he helped her plant seven white rosebushes around the statue of the Virgin Mary, which Nerdanel sculpted and Feanor inlaid with gold.
My love, she asked, when the sun rose hot and high, you do not need to stay out all afternoon, if you are tired.
He shook his head. For that was Maedhros; he did not care to like or dislike any task. He said, I love to be with you.
Her twins are the sweet-peas that will clamor up the side of the kitchen window, come summer.
Curufin’s attempt to grow sunflowers ended badly, and he declared that he loathed plants.
So Maedhros is the white roses he will not name as favorite, and every other son, too, has a flower in her mind, and Feanor is the stiff sweet lilies drenched in the scent of heaven.
And Nerdanel? If she were to indulge in a little of Maglor’s poetry, she might consider herself the bleeding heart.
(She takes five paintings, a crate of books, a trunk of clothes.)
It is two days after Christmas, and she feels as cold and grey as the dead leaves and vines and flowerheads she left behind.