There’s taters, of course, Golden Shires in abundance from Finchley’s trip. With a price of “free”, naturally they predominate. Two ways he’s prepared them: one set he’s twice-cooked, boiled then crushed down and roasted with oil and peppercorns, plated atop cultured cream and doused with a savoury mushroom sauce; the other set he’s made into a soup thick with milk and butter, topped with breadcrumbs and crumbled bacon and the thin-sliced stalks of spring onion.
On an ordinary night that might be all he offered. Meat is a great pleasure, and he can indulge it now, with his steady and well-paying job. But he’s stingy, so he rarely offers more than he’s already topped the soup with. ‘Stingy’ is how he fed mother and sister in months when the Longbeards gave them no work and they ate their little savings; it is a habit that remains, and while he spends generously on Maurr and his Maddoct, for himself and his room-mate he buys a cut from the butcher just once a week.
But an ordinary night, this is not, and he spends all of what he had been saving in this week’s envelope.
It is annoying that this night lands in this of all months, one of the worst for interesting produce. Most of the autumn’s bounty stowed in attics and cellars is used up or rotten, and little green has had time to grow. The meal would no doubt be much better if he were a less scrupulous dwarf and had, while labouring in Lumina’s kitchen to help produce the wedding spread, pocketed a little bit of those imported spices with their astounding colours and aromas, many the Firebeard bumpkin had never seen or smelt before, but alas; Byrge is not a thief. But still, he did find some treasures to mine at the market: the vivid red-pink sauce that coats the pork chops is honey-rhubarb, and on a side plate are tender green tips of asparagus, quick-blistered with a little coat of butter and thyme.
‘Love spears’, he’s heard this vegetable slyly called.
He even braved the Stone Quarter, hood far down over his face, to buy a firkin of Thorin’s Hall ale, so that two of the three mugs on the table could be filled with that. The third contains water, for the thirst it is to quench is not dwarvish, but that of the bouquet of roses, unblemished red and white. Rose is in the candles, too, which are no smoky tallow but exquisite, pricey beeswax, made with rosewater for an even sweeter aroma.
He lights them, looks over the scene, and frowns.
This isn’t good enough, he thinks.
Tiarvi will think me pathetic. Distasteful. Foolish.
And anyway, flowers as a centrepiece is awfully… hobbittish, or mannish.
Then again, this town in which the two of them work, out in the open air, cold rain, and harsh sun, is one of men and hobbits. So perhaps doing as they do is not so foolish. And Tiarvi is kind; Byrge’s gesture will most like be taken amicably, and if it is odd (which it is), that will be forgiven.
He hopes it will be forgiven.
He hopes even that it will be liked, though he tries not to, for the more he thinks about it the worse the palpitations get.
So he stands there, still, and tries not to; instead he just turns to face the door and waits.
His company’ll be here soon.
