Sparks of Better Hope

December in Eastcheap comes bitterly as ever and hot sack can chase away so much. A winter for ghosts, for hard quarrels and bloody catarrh, for sleeping with one’s boots on for fear of frozen splinters should one limp off in the night to do what’s necessary. Limp indeed, though long nights and cold beds make trade brisk for whores and by their conjunction (misery and necessity) in the twelfth month they beget many a child by harvest-time. For some residents, winter in the city – filthy, stinking, fatal – comes as a surprise this year. To others, it is as familiar as an old friend.

Hal is woken by church bells, carried to his ears on a sharp and rattling draft; these are hardly the circumstances under which the young rejoice to hear the chimes at midnight, but the nights are longest this time of year and good humor in short supply. He says a prayer in a sticking kind of voice and rolls over again.

The bedframe groans under the three of them, and the combined gravity of lean Ned, long Hal, and fat Jack threatens to be too much for the already woefully oppressed mattress. In the dark they are in tight proximity indeed, with all the accompanying textures and stale-sweat odors, but until quite recently it had been the only agreeable compromise, and if it facilitates familiarity, so be it. Now Hal shivers in the dark amid a jumble of hairy legs and stale breath and loosely clasping hands.

“Are you awake?” He elbows a little at Falstaff’s bulk and elicits some contrite sounds, but no motion as such. “Shove over, thou Jove, I’ll be stifled.” His laughing voice is a scarce croak, and Sir Jack Falstaff stirs himself to heed it by craning his neck.

“A fine outsized Ganymede you are, to match. Your voice is spoiled – would a drink help unstop your throat?” There’s still a bottle around the place somewhere, he’s counting on it, but Hal brushes it off and he’s disinclined to grope around in the dark anyway. Age and sleep both thicken the wits, and in the course of a long and highly variable life Falstaff has mastered the art of being able to sleep under any conditions, while still having firm preferences for places that are warm and soft and without lumps.

He’s still blinking, as Hal sucks in a breath to spit out some further tart reply and collapses into a storm of truly robust, damp-sounding coughing. They’re sharing more than a mattress here on a regular basis but Hal coughing up bits of the blood royal all over the both of them might be pushing it. He eventually levers his long body up onto an elbow.

“Hoarse from shouting in the new year,” he says, swallowing away a catch in his voice and wiping his mouth on his shoulder. He reaches up and back to tickle blindly at Falstaff’s cheek through the thicket of his draggling beard. His head rests on the ample surface of his belly, and his feet are threatening to escape the edge of the bed entirely, having already thrust themselves beyond the blankets.

“This time next year, I may be king, " he remarks. “Or dead, of course. Treasure me while you may.”

“Ah, how death does dog the heels of venerable men,” Falstaff rumbles agreeably, lifting his sleep-stiffened arm to put it over the boy’s shoulder. The Prince of Wales is an unlikely memento mori and he’s disinclined to take anything he says too heavily.

The yellowy light from the moon pouring through the slit of window spills over his upturned features in such a way that only the hard edge of his brow and cheek-bone catch the best of it, the softness of his cheek shadowed. His prince is unlined and unworried. His straw-blond hair is plastered to his forehead with sweat and a saintly smile plays on his lips. Falstaff is profoundly taken with this sickly cherub, here and now.

“He has mistaken my scent for yours, then, and chases a stripling calfet instead of a fat old stag.”

(Ned snores.)

“There’s more pleasure to be had from the pursuit of richer game than that of fleeter specimens, for that way the chase may be drawn out at leisure. But you are mistaken yourself, Hal, to attribute to me such a mighty rack of horns.”

“Wake up Ned and I’ll horn you yet.” Hal laughs damply and ends up sniffling.

What rejoinder is there to that? Exchanging limping puns with a sick boy in bed; Falstaff may be the spirit of mirth itself, but it’s been some time since he’s distinguished himself as great lover.

“Poins? Wake him up yourself, then, and leave me be; it’s cruel to tease an old man, Hal.”

“I didn’t mean it!” the prince says scoffingly, like he’s uncovering his own trickery, not like a man remorseful. “Have I wounded you?”

(He’d never ask such a question in front of an audience unless it were to sound out the best target for his next volley. Falstaff demurs to answer.)

The prince kisses him with a wonderful light lasciviousness, then wriggles against him bonily. The sweet breath of youth is all in Hal’s hair, like the subtlest of perfumes. Falstaff isn’t about to roll him out of bed, not least for all the offended yowling that would surely result, and he is more than content to turn a blind eye to whatever it is Hal and Poins maintain between the two of them, but a rare qualm emerges from some long-forgotten mildew-crusted cellar of his mind. Hal is a funny young fellow, and he may think himself an accomplished man-about-town, but he is terribly green, and while Falstaff can’t be said to have much respect for stainless youth he knows when to leave well alone. There is something cold and queer under the surface of Hal’s raucous humor, like teeth behind a kiss; its absence here strikes him as strange.

He himself is old, and as dissolute as it is possible to be when simply hauling oneself out of one chair and collapsing into another can leave one winded. Hal is carefree and keen and cruel, and he is young. Falstaff is his own philosopher with his own school, and if he has anything to impart, it is that the likes of them should hold love at arm’s length when they can, and have little to do with it.

“Go back to sleep, Hal.”

Falstaff loves his prince as truly as he can love anyone, but his eyes ache, and he is bone-shakingly tired.

Hal hoists himself up from the very edge of the bed.

“To another year, then.”

He kisses him on the mouth with closed lips, and lies back down again against his broad sour chest.

Hal sleeps fitfully, safe against the fat man’s breast, with Ned’s fitful cold hands seeking his own, and dreams of the Nine Worthies; nine hard, cold, affectionless men whom he cannot bring himself to love, but admires. Falstaff is old, and full of wine, and sleeps like a stone; he doesn’t dream of anything at all, except perhaps of Hal.

By the next morning Hal’s cough is already worse, he sweats and aches and his eyes are fever-bright. The next few days are a haze of delirious worry punctuated with intermittent bursts of the usual riotous good humor; nothing short of imminent demise could keep Hal from holding court in Eastcheap and even then he’d want them to prop him up in a chair and pour ale in his mouth at regular intervals. His lean young body is nearly bent double sometimes, jostled by fits of coughing that shake him to his foundation, and he can scarcely swallow. Poins makes a better playmate than nurse, but he does his best to help; he helps him get his boots off and change his shirt and a hundred other small tasks. Hal may grouse at Falstaff and rebuke him soundly, in his hoarse and diminished voice, but he is nothing but sweet with Poins. He’ll run and fetch for him better than any tapster, if the prince turns on him that pitiable weak smile, but he’s never quite foolish in love, just willing to work to an advantage.

It’s Ned who broaches the worst-case course of action.

“Hie home, then, for Epiphany. The King would be glad to have you, and at least you haven’t any open wounds, or any visible sores. I’ll go with you,” Poins says, “it’s safer that way.”

" I doubt he’s missing the sight of me much. My father is not an especially festive man. His predecessor liked to flatter himself by celebrating twice, and hosted us well many a time.”

“And how was Christmas with King Richard?” Poins halts just short of saying, even sardonically, good king Richard. He can make the best of knowing the heir apparent, but the thought that princes necessarily socialize with kings – more than one king, in Hal’s case – is a little beyond his scope.

“Pious. Perfumed. Sad, mainly, but we always ate well.”

Mistress Quickly does not have a mothering bone in her body concerning anyone but her girls, but she is understandably reluctant to have the heir apparent die of fever while under her roof. The second-most obvious alternative is that sick Hal and his purse might occupy a room in London with a good fireplace of its own, or some suite of chambers that he didn’t share with a half-dozen knaves and a fat old man on any given night (not to speak of countless vermin). He might have the finest physicians to nurse him out of it – his father’s physicians, if he liked. In some perverse way he must enjoy being fussed over, even if it means being miserable. He commands an audience here even in infirmity.

He’s back in his father’s arms by Epiphany, and they don’t see him again until mid-February. The prince seems to have rallied well enough, though the cough Ned himself dutifully picked up upon his leaving still lingers in his lungs. Hal’s unruly hair is cut, and the jubilant color is back in his cheeks; he claps both of them in his arms and calls them his true brethren, for all that will get them.