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In the corner, Feanor sits with his elbows on his knees, leaning protectively over Maedhros. Maedhros, despite being no longer quite a baby, has managed to furl himself like a bud in his father’s lap. “Do you suppose,” says Feanor, “That he will be envious?”
Nerdanel is resting on the bed, her heavy belly supported against a number of carefully arranged pillows. The baby is protesting his close quarters. She thinks that she can feel an elbow, sharp as his father’s against her ribs. Of course, she calls the baby him, but Feanor says that it will be a girl.
Oh, to be sure, Nerdanel has jibed him, when he makes such declarations. I am but the mother! What could I know better than you?
Just as she did with Maedhros, she believes with certainty that she will bear a son.
“Envious?” she asks her husband now. “Of the wee one?”
Feanor nods. His hair is too long, falling over his brow and clinging to his neck.
“I think our lovey boy Maitimo, who cannot go an hour without giving us a dozen kisses, shall like his little brother very well,” Nerdanel says, smiling fondly at the silky red head.
“Sister,” says Feanor. “A sister would be easier to love than a brother, I think.”
Nerdanel sighs. “Can you join me?” she asks, appealing to him rather than arguing. She is too tired to argue today. “I am a little lonely here, and so very fat.”
Feanor moves with agility, shifting Maedhros into his arms. He lays Maedhros—still sleepy and docile—in his high-walled crib, then stretches out on the bed behind Nerdanel.
“You are perfect,” Feanor murmurs, against her neck. She can feel his warmth at her back. One of his clever hands begins to trace small circles over the most tender parts of her back.
She breathes more deeply.
“Does—does the child hurt you?” Feanor asks. “Will the danger be greater, this time, because the flesh has already been torn?’
She considers. What the truth is, and what he can bear to hear. The truth, for once, is not a difficult one. “I think it will be easier. He is just…heavy.”
“She.”
“Feanor.”
The pressure deepens. With the fingers of his other hand, he finds the lost grooves of her ribs, rubbing gently. “Our son deserves a faithful companion,” he says. “That is all I hope for. A—a friend. It seems too much to ask. Too much to pray for. Sometimes God likes to make us suffer, you know.” His theology is, as ever, flawed—but his heart is a dear and shy and uneasy one. Nerdanel wants to turn and kiss away his fears, but it is too difficult to move. His touch is soothing.
In his crib, Maedhros gives a little sigh. Nerdanel can see the pad of one pink foot, lengthening already but still flat with baby-fat. He loves to run about in the wee boots Feanor has had made for them, bringing them fallen leaves to admire. He is learning a new word, it seems, each day.
“They’re asleep,” Feanor says, and he all but slumps against the doorframe, his purposeful bones loose with exhaustion. Maedhros and Maglor, though they are generally sweet-tempered, can be quite rambunctious after supper, when their romps are assured of an audience of both father and mother. Calming them for baths and bed is an ordeal with which Nerdanel is well-familiar, though Feanor has heretofore considered an easy solution possible. Possible, if out of reach of a fretting mother.
Now he has had a chance to try his own hand at it.
It is not so easy, is it? Nerdanel thinks, but she does not say so. Instead, she permits herself merely the hint of a satisfied smile. “Thank you, husband.”
He straightens, eyes glinting. “Is that all I can expect to receive as a reward?”
Nerdanel yawns lightly against her hand, though she is not particularly tired. “Perhaps not.”
Celegorm’s birth is a difficult one, though it goes quickly. Nerdanel is troubled, even in her distracted state, by how much less attentive Feanor is. Twice before, he has been frantic and imperious by turns, ordering the midwives about enough to test even their admirable patience. This midwife does her work uncontested, however. She is a plainspoken woman, exclaiming over how hasty the stalwart little lad is—how eager he is to be out.
Nerdanel clings to Feanor’s hand, and prompts him to stroke her hair and speak to her at the bad times. Through the anguish and the shock, however, she has a realization clearer than any muzzy disturbance. She sees, all of a sudden, that Feanor is no longer afraid of her dying. Not in the same way as he was with Maedhros, with Maglor.
Later, when she is resting, and new little Celegorm is sleeping like a contented pat of butter on her chest, she wonders if it is sinful to desire Feanor’s fear.
But he is afraid of everything, these days. Is that not enough for you? Must you drive him mad? If he can be relieved on one account—
She cries, not knowing what she wants.
Her whole body aches; her body is torn open. And her husband is not with her, now, to be afraid of his own deep shadows or afraid of her likeness to the mother he never really knew. He is gone to fetch Maedhros and Maglor from a neighbor’s farmstead.
He is afraid, and in his fear, he has forgotten you.
That is her fear.
So, Nerdanel cries. When that is over, she kisses the delicate cap of curls, so fine and pale it is almost invisible. Why is it so light? Maedhros’ hair was red when he was born, and Maglor’s, though not so dark as it is now, was many shades darker than this. But, she considers, this is a baby born into uncertainty, as the other two were not. He will need all the quickness and levity that God has given him. He will need his golden hair.
“Listen to this, Nerdanel—It has now been two years, dear sir, since we made our acquaintance, and I am desirous of more communication than the illegible screeds with which you have thus far favored me. Illegible screeds! The fool doesn’t even recognize Irish.”
Nerdanel sets aside her sewing. “Feanor.”
“He has a most hideous, spidery hand, my dear. You would despair if any of our sons exhibited one so ill.” Feanor darts a glance at her from beneath his curling lashes—unfairly long, as some men’s are.
“I knew,” Nerdanel says,in the most measured tone she can manage, “That you had received letters from…Bauglir. I did not know that you wrote to him.”
Feanor turns back to his desk. Over his shoulder, he says, “Only when I have nothing better to do.”
“When you have nothing better to do, you might woo your wife or play with your sons, heart of hearts.”
Not looking at her, now, he says, “You’re angry.”
She is, but only because she has held this same fear-stiffened husband of hers close, as he tried to understand cruelty.
Now, it seems, he has decided to laugh at it.
“If you are going to be angry,” Feanor says, gathering up a sheaf of paper as he rises, “I shall not trouble you with my presence.”
That night, the baby in her womb kicks for the first time.
To love Feanor is to court madness. Did not she spurn those who gave her advice, unlooked-for, long ago?
Whenever silence stands between them, like a wall, Nerdanel swears to herself that she will not be the first to break it. But Feanor’s stubbornness is different than hers: his hurts even his own self, after a time. In avoiding her, he will forget to eat. He will not come to bed and will fall asleep in his sharp-edged forge.
And so, each time, Nerdanel must coax him back. Not apologizing, exactly, but demonstrating by her word and look and touch that she misses him; desires him.
She opens one of the letters herself, one day. Caranthir is sleeping peacefully for once when the post-rider comes, and Feanor has taken the older boys with him into the fields.
Let him be angry, she thinks, scraping at the black wax seal.
What she reads makes her skin crawl.
“He seems like a dangerous man,” she murmurs against Feanor’s chest, that night. Though the air is warm with summer, they are huddled together as if for warmth. One of his hands is teasing the curls at the nape of her neck; the other tucked comfortably beneath her ribs. “He wants to hurt you.”
“He is, and he does. But I’m not a fool, Nerdanel.”
She shivers as his hand moves lower, his nails grazing the ridge of her spine. She presses a kiss to his skin. “Sometimes you are.”
“Only you think so, wife.” But he doesn’t sound particularly troubled, that his wife thinks him a fool.
“These letters…can you not bring them to your father’s attention?”
“My father is too gentle of spirit,” Feanor says. “He would do nothing. And…he might not approve of the trouble I have made for Morgoth, when the occasion calls for it.”
Morgoth is his name for the one who wrote,
Yours was a mind made to be subdued. You break more often than you build—consider what your fire could do upon my hearth, willing as I am to still offer you a place there. Elsewise, consider what your flesh might become if your mind lost its value.
My hands are capable of attending either possibility, but I speak, of course, only in metaphor.
“When the occasion…” Nerdanel sighs. “When, pray tell, is that?”
“He is a cruel master to more than Rumil, Nerdanel. Even if he pretends to leave the South behind.”
Nerdanel is not a woman of much information, a fact that would certainly disappoint her dear, departed father. Mahtan sent her to a Boston finishing school so that she might be exposed to more than wilderness.
Her eventual education was more personal in nature.
She knows only vaguely, therefore, that Melkor Bauglir oversees a powerful steel factory, the likes of which Finwe might have managed had his mind not turned to politics and people. Feanor complains, in carefully dispatched doses, of the foul treatment of the workers there.
Feanor’s own visits to the city have increased.
Nerdanel delivers a son who, though a tiny scrap of a creature, resembles his father almost shockingly.
“I know such reports have vexed you in the past, my dear, but I have deigned to write in English this time—”
She does not chide him. She is too weary. This confinement is setting in earlier than any of the others; she has a suspicion it will be her last.
Feanor clears his throat. “Were I to believe that drawing up a list of charges against you was a worthy use of my allotted span, I daresay I could account for more than twenty-eight.” He pauses. “There were twenty-eight against the Tyrant George, you know, and I believe this fiend to be of English descent likewise. As it stands, however, rebellion shall sound a voice louder than any my pen could command.”
“That is very grand, Feanor. Do you not think that silence would prove the point about rebellion more starkly?” She hopes the rebellion does not involve him personally; she is beginning to believe, however, that she has no ability to predict this.
Feanor is bolder of late, and yet more secretive.
“No,” he says. “There is an especial irony in sending him this final missive—for it shall be final, Nerdanel—in the language he has used to slander and manipulate. After this, my work shall speak for me.”
Nerdanel rubs her distended belly. The pains are already setting in.
Without consulting her, Feanor purchases a house in the City. She tries to tear the deed from his hands—an act that would have precipitated a tremendous fight under any other circumstances. As it is, her fury is her undoing. Her water breaks; the twins come early.
“Who is Morgoth?” Maitimo asks her, his heels striking the legs of his chair absently. He is eleven years old, and trying very hard at the long sums that increasingly escape him.
Nerdanel is more troubled by the question than Maedhros is by the sums. “Have you been speaking to your father, Maitimo?”
“In the paper,” Maedhros answers. “There was—a riot? Some sort of fighting, I think. Athair was not in the fight,” he adds, hastily. “Our City house is far away, from where the fighting was, Mamaí. But Athair said today, It begins, and he called someone Morgoth, and I do not know that name.” He is beginning to look a little worried, as he makes his tumbled explanation. He is a sensitive child.
Nerdanel is grateful, suddenly, as she had not thought to be before, that Maedhros and Maglor were safe in Indis’ house on that evening when Feanor made this enemy.
“Do not think of that name, my love,” she says. “He is nobody that shall ever matter to us.”