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Hawthorne Brandybuck:
A star or two still twinkled in the skies when Hawthorne Brandybuck slipped out of bed and put on her clothing. The corridors of the Dragon lay dark and silent. As the hobbit padded down the hallway towards the Common Room and the kitchens, she took a quick look at the small chambers where Ruby and Buttercup slept. Their doors were still drawn tight; no sounds came from within.
Hawthorne smiled in delight. She had managed to get up before the other girls and would be free to do whatever she wanted in the kitchens. How pleased they would be when they later arose and discovered that breakfast was already being served! Hawthorne was hoping to offer a meal of hot eggs and biscuits served up with a rasher of bacon. It was true that she had never cooked any of those foods before, but how hard could it possibly be? Back home in Buckland, the Harfoot servant girls whisked out the breakfast after bustling around in the kitchen for only a moment or two. If they could do it so efficiently, certainly a smart Fallohide girl such as herself should have absolutely no trouble.
She tiptoed across the Common Room. There were already a few folk sitting at tables waiting for the food to be cooked and served. One of the hobbits had her head bent low on the tablecloth and was making snoring noises. Several other Men and an Elf had satchels sitting near their chairs, apparently expecting to take off on the road as soon as they had finished their early morning meal. Someone had unlocked the front and back doors of the Inn and, every so often, a tradesman came in to drop off their wares for the day.
Hawthorne went straight to the kitchen and began taking out the foods from the pantry and larder that she would need to make her meal. There were fresh eggs, sweet butter, a good haunch of bacon, a slab of rendered fat, a large burlap sack with flour and a bottle of thick cream all waiting for her on the counter; these had been delivered earlier by one of the farm lads.
Within only a moment, she had set out her frying pans, bowls and spoons beside the stove and tied on an apron. Thankfully, one of the house lads had already started the fire on top of the stove so she did not have to worry about that. Someone had forgotten to drop off the peat so the oven was not yet lit. She decided to make a pan of fried biscuits rather than waiting for the peat to be delivered. She could always use baked biscuits for her second batch. In any case, she had a personal hankering for fried biscuits so that seemed like a good idea on several grounds.
Cracking the eggs into a bowl, the hobbit carefully mixed them with the cream and beat the mixture until it was frothy and smooth, dumping the whole thing into a fying pan. She set the bacon in another pan on the side burner and quickly made up a batch of biscuits following a recipe that her servant had kindly written down for her from the night before. It took her only a few moments to prepare the biscuit dough.
At this point Hawthorne was feeling very pleased with herself. She knew that fried biscuits needed to be cooked in the fat so she filled the third frying pan almost to the top with oil. The bacon was sizzling on the stove, and the eggs almost done. She pulled the eggs off the burner and set it to the side, slipped the biscuits into the fat to fry, and then decided to go out and have a look at what was happening in the yard.
It took her several minutes to make the rounds of the courtyard gathering a bouquet of flowers that she intended to place on top of the serving bar in the Common Room. She was about to gather a second bouquet of flowers when she noticed a wisp or two of smoke floating out the back door of the Kitchen. Dropping the flowers and wrenching open the door, she was met by a burning smell and a thick column of smoke spurting up from the frying pan where the biscuits had been. Worse than that, they were tendrils of flame leaping up from the rendered fat.
Hawthorne kept her wits about her and reached for a large bucket of water that was always kept near the door. She did not notice another pail of sand that was also kept next to it. She hurled the contents of the water pail directly at the oil, thinking this would quell the flame, but it only rose even higher. But now the tiny flames had grown considerably in size and were beginning to crawl up the wooden beam that sat on the wall just behind the stove.
Hawthorne looked on in horror. This was not what she had in mind. Ruby and Buttercup would not be pleased. In fact, they would be very angry. For a minute she wondered if she should try to battle the blaze herself, but then realized that this could only lead to folly. She raced out into the Common Room of the Inn calling for someone to help:
"Help! Help! The Inn's on fire!
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