Faded And Were All Undone

Jonathan was much the happier, being mourned by one king and loved by two, and do not the loves and griefs of kings exceed those of other men? Henry wipes at his face with his glove, agitation leaving him itching. It’s already bitterly cold, and his every breath is a raw sucking-in of stinging, stinking air; English air has soaked up the green rotten smell of wet stone.

“I intend to keep you alive, which is a more generous offer than any man’s in England. You will fight beside me, ceasing your agitations and restoring that which is mine; your sons and mine will have an understanding. Swear to me and you will have nothing to fear.”

Perhaps this is how it always ought to have been. They ought to have been comrades in arms, allies in all things, not in opposition. If they were wed to their respective wives and to one another (Henry so joined to the man who did his level best to foil every possibility of Henry’s remarriage) the whole affair would have been strengthened enough not to collapse at the first whisper of suggested treason and if there’s anything that’s readily understood by all involved it’s the significance of a match well-made. Richard’s had the luxury of not caring very much, while everyone else suffers for it. He’ll care for Henry.

“You’re mocking me,” Richard says. “You will dare making a catamite of me in front of the whole court and God Himself. You, my father’s brother’s son–”

“A matter much in doubt lately,” Henry says, in black annoyance, and Richard draws himself up like a man recovering from being struck.

“I know what’s said abroad about my birth, and about my mother, the lady Joan.”

“Yes,” Henry says, distractedly, “there’s been some question of that.” He has no particular feelings, positive or negative, as regards Richard’s mother except the confused bundle of misremembered terrors that compose his recollection of the Revolt. There is always that risk present, when one’s mother is a famously beautiful and gracious woman and one’s father tremendously busy with the stuff of heroism. Many things Richard is, but a bastard probably isn’t one of them; he’d tried to convince himself of that in exile, and the suspicion hadn’t taken root even when he was quite ready to suspect his king of most anything else.

“They said the same of your grandmother. And they’ll say it again, probably. How droll – a war of succession among bastards. I take it you’re comfortable with those odds, if it will lend your claim a shadow of legitimacy…”

“Yes, I am, and you will comply.”

---

This is not an ideal compromise. God knows what will come of it in the end, the viper at his bosom; the prospect eats at him, for all this talk of security. Arundel wasn’t the first man to have the idea occur to him, surely, and his proposal is sound enough (the uncommon opportunity to reinforce his own claim without bloodshed and to shut out any other, all in one act) and all things considered it is not the same as a marriage. Richard’s wife still lives, for one; the good queen will fly to France, with her ladies in waiting to clasp her hands and weep with her. Perhaps the girl queen will return when conditions are less volatile, and Henry will have to face her eyes then; as it stands now, this will not make him particularly popular. Ten years ago it might have been welcomed as a position of counsel – he’s heard dark intimations of something similar, always the question of who and to what end, since Richard was first old enough to choose his own companions. It would have been redemptive, after a string of rotten influences. A misplaced vow of confidence could have toppled his rule long before – what Gaveston did for Edward, and Henry does not envy any of the dead men who might have filled that role. Nor does he envy the hot-headed Duke of Aumerle.

The precedent itself is unhappy, and it’s hard not to imagine John of Gaunt turning in his grave. Henry feels as if he’s attending his own execution; he wonders if Stephen of Blois felt similarly, and the odds that he is going to his own death, one way or another, are not small. (Enough kings die murdered by their wives; how many by their sworn companions? By bosom friends?)

At the very least it will keep him alive and unmurdered for as long as it takes for Henry to resolve his own crisis of conscience. And Richard will submit, or bide his time, as he pleases. In his place, Henry would have taken action long before, and some part of him wishes he could take action now and strangle him. But he is still deposed, unbound, revealed. Ruined, he cries, like an actor before a uniquely unsympathetic audience.

The moment of choice is visible; a stiffening-up, a renewed proudness. The stammering outrage leaves his voice; his eloquence being made useless, he’ll call upon it no more. Give Richard a rite to perform, and he is happy. He exchanges with Henry his garments – the sword is turned over from man to man easily enough, heavier when placed in his grip than Henry had expected for all its glitter. The belt snakes free from around Richard’s waist and falls to the floor with a jeweled clattering.

Richard says nothing. His eyes say, well?

Henry bends to pick it up, and when he stands, Richard is smiling at him.

Richard’s lands are his. Richard’s titles and crown are his, while he has Henry’s love – abortive, feeble thing that it is – and the assurance of his future support. Richard will live, here and not in exile, and their sons… (The word is bitter in Henry’s mind, thoughts of Anne’s grave and Isabel’s vacant womb well up like gall, thoughts of his own errant boy worse than a splinter under his skin. He can’t keep it from showing on his face; he flinches.) Their sons will be as brothers.

Bolingbroke ruefully strips off his gloves and clasps him with a callused hand. Richard kisses his hand, kisses his face, and goes to stand beside him; he might as well have been on his knees. Richard swears his vow and is made mute; Bolingbroke says the words he is supposed to say and otherwise speaks little. He takes the crown, and takes Richard for de facto consort. He’ll keep him close, if that will help.

---

Windsor is made ready for both of them. It is to be witness to the scene of the surrender of Richard’s person. He’ll turn himself over too and be grateful for it.

The bed has been hastily arrayed to better suit Henry’s sensibilities than Richard’s; Richard sits at the end of it, rigid with bowed head, a funeral figure in a blot of white against red and brown and gold. Henry has seen him like this before, this same grim and rueful attitude, when they were both mere boys and Richard not yet a king nor fully deaf to his uncles’ chastisements. He had listened closely, braced against the declared punishment with white cheeks and dry eyes, had afterward wept and repeated the same disobedience a hundred times. Henry could still remember the words as they’d rang in his ears, and couldn’t help but feel that he’d been the one to get off lightly. Children are chastised for their own good. Will Richard weep at the indignity now, he wonders? It won’t buy him the time he wants; he’s paled and screamed and shed tears and all but rent his clothing before dozens of unmoved spectators in the hope of delaying what was already overdue. It’s considerably too late to delay public knowledge; rumor would speed the news along every street and highway with all the customary narrative embroidery. The procession had well and truly sealed the new order of things; his public silence then had been perfectly eloquent, superficially gracious and seen to be nothing but yielding. Afterward King Henry had seen him dragged down from the horse and he’d stood straight and swaying, tipsy with exhaustion, ash and filth dimming his tears and dirtying his paled cheek. Henry was exhausted by then as well, sick with smiles and salutations, and had been triumphally unmoved even if the sight made his heart beat faster and his jaw tighten. He might as well have been looking at a dead man.

The rest of it’s done, and this going to bed together is as good as done. The guard at their door is not merely to assure their mutual safety. Somewhere Arundel waits impatiently for news of their coupling, whether Richard submits or refuses. Refusal is unlikely to go happily for him.

Richard glances at him as if he expects to be bidden to kneel. He’s watching for some sign to show on Henry’s face, to betray what he’s really thinking.

Henry sits down and begins to take off his boots.

Richard starts toward him with an intensity that nearly makes him flinch; a queer tense moment takes place where he is leaning over him, a haggard angel.

He catches Henry’s face in his hands and kisses him.

He hadn’t expected a proper kiss, after the miserable pressing of lips that had sealed their vows during the ceremony; this kiss is disarmingly sweet, pressed against unyielding Bolingbroke with sacramental chasteness while his sacred hands go to do something very unchaste indeed. The muscles of Bolingbroke’s thighs tense, and when Richard lifts his head, his brow is furrowed and his eyes are blandly troubled.

“Is something the matter, sweet cousin?”

Henry nearly chokes and answers him in monosyllables that this is unacceptable.

Richard presses a hand through his hair, crossly and affrighted. This seems to take the wind out of his sails somewhat, and put a hold on his tongue. The usual names for things are all out of order; the Richard who can play prettily with names and titles and echo heraldry when lamenting his own downfall should not be at a loss for words to describe anything, but at any moment Henry might insist on formal address or assert any of the cruel whims Richard himself had set the precedent for and more importantly he knew this.

He had no idea what he’d been spared, what a truly spiteful opponent might have devised; here there was privacy, minimal supervision, and quiet. No flattery and no fond caresses, no music. His advisors are remarkably silent on what else besides the lack of these distinguishes this from sodomy as vice rather than tactic. He declines to imitate the obsequious manner of Green and co., and he can’t imagine that in any universe Richard will look at him the way he once looked at Robert de Vere. He was a younger man then anyway, ripe and unrestrained, and there were moments between them Henry shouldn’t have seen, or that he scrutinized after the fact until he’d convinced himself that something had transpired there. More than once he’d had the disquieting experience of walking into a room having heard in the hall the sound of laughter from within (Richard’s laughter bubbling freely like a processional fountain) only for the two of them to fall silent upon his entry. He’d been entirely shameless, mixing promiscuously between all ranks and all titles and all men’s affections.

(He stifles an incredibly blasphemous thought, that God too loves all the world. Not like Richard. Had his laughing pageboys and pink-cheeked serving girls grown up to wave their rusty billhooks in Harry Derby’s army and to heft clods of filth at men on horseback? If the plague hadn’t killed half of them – the best of them. Inane young men don’t live long at court; they spring up and are scythed down again.)

Images of Richard as he once was flit behind his eyes to torment him. Past holidays and processions, Richard proud in gold with serene eyes and trailing sleeves, Richard sorrowful in prayer,  Richard blazing like a saint on horseback. The man who is represented in his memories seems realer somehow than the one before him now, certainly grander. This one he could break like kindling, and if he touches him is sure to tarnish him.

He’d loved everyone but his own lords and kin. The ones that counted, in the end; see what Northumberland cared for who Richard chose to take to bed, if his own rights had been seen to and not neglected. (Henry resolves to treat such men with cautiousness.)

“So I’m to play the pathic tonight,” Richard says, mild as a dove. “Does it become me to be unkinged and unmanned besides? Very well. I’ll accept what you have to teach me, name your lesson. Will it be a lesson in patience then, or in humility?”

Henry’s temper flares, but the pinched set of his mouth merely grows more grim.

“You swore you were willing. Keep to your word or leave.”

Richard trills with laughter, musical and madly embittered.

“Where would I go? You have my will, but the privilege of my heart is mine. I can withhold nothing else,” he says with arch finality, and wriggles out of his shirt.

Bolingbroke is silent.

He’s still narrow and smooth, a profoundly strange body – his long legs are sweetly soft and plump enough that one wishes to bite them, his knees are sharp and still-bruised, there are shadows marking his ribs and he has a stomach like a carved corpse’s, the sum total is all white and gold-threaded. He’s beautiful and desirable and hateful.

In that moment his face is easy to read; he’s brazening through fear, and he knows he is hated.

“We needn’t really do it, of course you know,” Richard says, with a strange note of conspiratorial confidence in his voice. He leans forward. “No one’s about to check and find out.”

“Richard–”

“Unless, of course, you’ve been holding out for the opportunity. Did you thwart God and drag an anointed king through the mud for the chance to sleep with him? Has it been worth the effort thus far? Do I satisfy?”

They could have avoided all of this. Why not me? I loved you as well as any, Richard, why not? Why am I so much worse than the manner of man you’re used to sleeping with?"

“My friends, Henry, because they were my friends and not my jailers–”

“They subjected you to their folly and you let them. You’ll find there are different ways in which a man can love–”

Richard grimaces with a mouthful of teeth showing. He’s angry, yes, but fearful.

Bolingbroke’s mouth hangs open slightly. His throat feels very dry, and something catches in his chest, like a knot tightening.

“I don’t intend to hurt you,” he manages lamely, “But I mean to have you.”

“Then let’s not waste our time, cousin,” Richard says, flatly matter-of-fact. Bolingbroke hates him more than ever.

His cousin has a talent for this; let him exercise it.

Desire comes in, late and resentfully. Some inward part of him has rejoiced to see him so struck with a blow from which he cannot recover; this seems somehow far more sordid than that which they ostensibly undertake to do here. He isn’t doing this for what they might both gain, as two friends companionably joined together, or to reinforce that he has no ill-will toward his sometime sovereign; he isn’t even doing this as the king, acting out an unpleasantly physical demonstration of royal prerogative and the extent of his contempt for his predecessor by making use of his body. He’s not sure exactly how long he’s wanted to sleep with his cousin. What he is certain of is that even in the most venal of his innermost thoughts he didn’t want it to be like this. He’d admired him for more years than they’d been at war, even if it had been in a secretive, desperate kind of way; but he hadn’t expected anything to come of it, not in his wildest worst hopes.

Richard settles his long thighs on either side of him and takes a moment to compose himself, tossing his hair out of his eyes and caressing Henry’s side with a hand like you’d soothe a horse. It’s as if he knows what is correct to do in abstract but not here. Perhaps he’s out of practice. (It’s more years past than Henry cares to count since the last time he himself fooled around with other boys, and that all harmlessly, without any real intention. He’d taken the lead then and it’d been easy.)

His hands ghost over where the anointing oil left its tracks; his soft thumb snags against the hair of Henry’s chest. His downturned face cannot be read, or at any rate Henry is not keen to interpret it.

He kisses him again flightily in a scrape of beard, touches his cheek and throat with the backs of his fingers. Henry stiffens when his throat is touched; every pore and hair of him is keenly agonizingly aware of their proximity. He could be killed, here, either one of them could have done something very very foolish by coming to bed, and what if Richard’s hand were to slip, if he were to grasp and squeeze–

The king’s garments begin to feel alarmingly constrictive, and a sweat’s broken out on his skin. Perfumed Richard is as cool as stone.  

Henry submits to be wreathed in hostile kisses and he sinks down cramped against the headboard to let him do what it is that they must do. He fumbles in his laces and draws himself forth, Richard is crushed against him and if Henry in his heart of hearts harbors significant reluctance his body begs to differ, he is swelling at attention and flustered under warm firm hands with Richard in his lap and grasping their cocks. He twists against him and slides gaspingly and there’s struggle but no heat, no sparkling interplay between the two of them but two unbeautiful bodies rudely employed. Henry’s no fool, but where distasteful pursuits are concerned Richard exceeds him in practical knowledge. Another slick compromise is reached, with Richard braced on his side. He guides him between his thighs with a hand that trembles.

The initial resistance of flesh against flesh is disconcerting, very much unlike the act with a willing woman – perhaps Richard wouldn’t know. The thought is so offputting that he almost has to stop, it feels like he’s being disloyal to a memory – Richard did love Anne, passionately and strange, and now Henry’s seizing his share of what the new queen ought to possess. Henry has never found any trouble with the act, finding poor laughing Mary a solace and joy and other women since more than obliging. He’s never had need of rape, let alone the desire. Richard is no more than half-willing, both familiar and detested, and yet he still desires him. He wants to have him. It’s the sort of misdirected, unfocused slurry of desire and anger that he associates with combat, or the heat of an argument. His blood is up. He doesn’t know what to do about it.

Richard reaches back, trails his hand down his side and the gap between them, grazes his belly. The nails of his fingers trace prickling tracks.

Slim as he is, Richard’s famously tall, strong enough to make for uncomfortable jostling and abundantly bony. Even the outward capitulation comes with a struggle. Richard complains even as he presses himself against him, and his need is particularly strong then despite himself – Henry can only grit his teeth and rearrange his limbs, trying for more friction or better access against the hot slick meeting-place of his thighs. Richard suffers this very prettily, but he’s slippery as an eel and Henry fears he’ll leave finger-marks on him; there are neither scars nor other marks on his person beyond the rare freckle. Bolingbroke feels monstrously coarse by comparison, and very powerful.

Richard breathes a sound of complaint, a distressed ‘ah–’ as if he begins to speak and thinks better of it – until Bolingbroke brings up his hips and his hands sharply and he silences himself, twisting his face against the bedspread.

Each pressing thrust works his cock mercilessly, straining the distinction between pain and pleasure in a way that makes him see stars. Richard’s quick short breaths become whimpers.

Not after long, the thing is done. When he finally spends himself, hard and hot, it’s Richard who gasps, and he just clenches his jaw and buries his face against the nape of his neck. “O God,” he says, the word a disoriented casting-about for something sensible in this. “O God.”

 

Richard, king no longer and now king least of all, works himself free of exhausted arms and legs and eases into sitting up. Henry lies back to stare at the bedcurtains; his head and jaw still throb. It’s impossible to flatter himself into believing Richard enjoyed that bitter clinch, but there remains the thing which is incomplete.

Richard wrings out his own satisfaction with hotly whispered words about the fates of men who lie with kings. Henry can’t keep himself from watching, and he wishes he couldn’t hear him.

When he collapses against Henry’s shoulder, his cheeks are damp, and Henry involuntarily recalls his minions Bushy and Green, how they wept for fear with their own curses in their mouths and how they died. He recoils and Richard sinks down, wrecked.

---

They retire to their separate beds, that night and every night after. Richard declines to take his meals and Henry sets to writing his eldest son a letter.