Delphinium 'Del' Grubb was born into an affluent and rigidly respectable family of Grubbs located in Long Cleeve in the North of the Shire. She is remotely connected to the North Tooks and the Bagginses but her closest family ties are with the Grubbs, Chubbs, Hornblowers, and the Sandheavers. In fact, her family deigned not to acknowledge the connection to the Bagginses or the Tooks as they were nowhere near as respectable as the Grubbs were and are.
She had a strict but happy childhood which was horribly interrupted at the age of four when her smial caved in, crushing her family. Del and her older sister, Hope, the only girls in the large family, besides their mother, had a bedroom towards the front of the smial, further away from the cave-in, and were able to dig themselves out. They were the only survivors. Their parents had not left a will and the girls, and all of the Grubb possessions, were snapped up by their evil Aunt Emeralde Boring, their father's least favorite sister. They were taken out of the North Farthing, away from family and friends, to the town of Scary in the East Farthing where they became little more than slaves to their Aunt Emeralde's rotten family. Cut off from everyone they knew, in shock and in a strange land, they felt they had no one to turn to and suffered abuse for over three years until Hope found employment as an archivist with the Shire network of libraries and escaped Scary with Del in the middle of the night. They were threatened, by letter, with broken necks if they dared to return. In a bit of cosmic justice Emeralde Boring met her end when she fell head first into the Brockenborings Quarry and broke her own neck. Good Riddance. (Gossip has it that her son pushed her.) Del never forgot the nightmare of that time.
Hope and Del did not go back to the North Farthing but wandered throughout the Shire, and even as far as Bree, from library to library, eking out a sparse living. Their trust in others, even in their own kin that they loved, had taken a severe blow and they preferred to remain self-sufficient. They developed entertaining and cheerful, but false, personas that ensured their acceptance into a variety of families. The older Del got the more angry and frustrated this made her. She felt like a grinning hypocrite. The sisters had several adventures and saw a great many strange things on their travels. Del became an expert rock thrower, which came in useful when she was hunting a meal or defending herself. She actually preferred the wandering life and didn't mind the instability. She loved the stars, the hidden paths, the glorious adventure of it all. She began to get a little wild and Hope was worried about her.
They eventually came to Bag End, when Del was 10 years old and Hope was 21, to gather information on the Great War and laughed at how scandalized their parents would have been at that. Not the GARDNERS! Not FRODO BAGGINS! Frodo, King of the Unrespectables, did not for a moment believe Del's cheerful act and she respected him for it. She was also greatly entertained by his occasional bouts of raving lunacy and would aid and abet his bad moods and delusions no matter how injurious that was for both of them. She became friends with Daisy Gardner and developed a crush on Sammie Gardner, Frodo's 'nephew.'
Their initial visit lasted only a week but several subsequent visits followed until that one fateful day when Del became seriously ill with a life-endangering fever. Unable to leave, Hope decided their itinerant life needed to end and became Frodo's servant, providing Del, at last, with a stable home at Bag End. During her recovery Del was fussed over by Sammie who read to her and brought her flowers and put cool cloths on her head. Her crush turned into something deeper but she couldn't show it because Sammie had already picked out the love of his life, Aster Digg-Tooter. Del could only stand aside and watch their happiness with hungry eyes. She became determined to mold the prissy, fearful girl into someone worth having and actually became friends with her when she protected Aster from her bullying brother, Basil. It IS possible to be friends with someone you can't stand. Her other good friends included Meli Took and Molly Brandybuck and the Six of them became Masters at finding trouble. The children had taken on the names of birds and Del happily became Delphinium Buzzard. She enjoyed herself as much as her darkness and anger would allow her and retained her sense of humor.
This went on for years. Del couldn't find a reason to love Sammie less but the object of her desire remained out of her reach. She never tried to steal him away from Aster but she didn't exactly keep her feelings a secret either. Her sister, meanwhile, had fallen in love with Boromir Brandybuck and at the end of two terms of service to Frodo, 14 years, she left Bag End at the age of 34 to marry Borry and settle down in Buckland. Del, at 24, went with her. She stayed in Brandy Hall for two years and was a great help to Master Meriadoc Brandybuck. She had always been artistic and became an innovative portrait painter which earned her a decent income.
But she was dissatisfied and left the Shire on the day Sammie gave Aster a Promise Ring. She wanders the Wild, from Gondor to the Lonely Mountain, furthering her knowledge and art, and sends gifts and letters to the people she left behind.
Maybe she'll come back someday.
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