As Bad As We're Painted

The prince must put away childish things. Ned knows he’s one of them.

There’s never been any future in delights like theirs. Poins knows this, that he’s chasing after something he can never catch and Hal’s time is running out like sand through a glass – he has no illusions about this. He doubts he ever even wanted to keep this up forever, the carousing at least, for fear of finding some twoscore years in the future that he’s become Jack Falstaff writ small, hateful and degraded and still sick in love with a boy who no longer exists.

What place is there for their games at court? Has he the patience for playing the Gaveston and working his hooks into the prince’s hard heart, will he sit in the king’s lap and order one man raised up and another brought down in a leman’s whisper? Will Hal weep against his shoulder as his father’s body is surrendered to the grave, will Ned stand in the attendance suffocating in gold and decked in ill-gotten honors when the crown is placed on his head? If Henry would suffer it to happen, his brothers wouldn’t; a king cannot stoop to love without losing his crown.

The thought of it maddens him – it’s Hal’s princely privilege to look down his nose at the boys who wait on him hand and foot, but he’d thought himself better than that, because Hal thought well of him enough to confide in him, to keep him company in his pranks and tricks. Poins is good enough to sleep with, clever enough to make that work for him, and foolish enough to think that made him better than a tapster or a fat old man. He’s given Hal more than he can ever take back, and Ned keeps reckoning and re-reckoning this in the tables of his mind, it’s all he can think about – he has given him his heart, has given him his faith, has given him his mouth and his lips and all the best years of his young life, best because Hal was there and it was worth his while for that much.

He will always, always need Hal more than Hal needs him. Hal has friends of higher birth and degree than Ned can dream of – how is it possible that he ever thought himself a man of quality before Hal? How did he ever come to think that he was the one who was stooping below his condition? He thought they had that much in common; as a boy he couldn’t imagine a life spent in respectable pursuits, or taking the cloth and bowing his head. The course charted for him was distasteful to him, and so he made his own way in the world, and thought it was all very clever of him. Hal, too, sets his own pace, but the course he is to keep is not one he can quit; the future is an open book where princes are concerned and there’s no need to look at the stars or draw up charts to determine their lot and inheritance. Princes’ lives are made for them at their birth and Hal was born a prince the moment his father knocked the crown from the head of the last sentimental king England’s known. Neither father nor son will have forgotten King Richard’s dear friends. Surely they were as sweet to Richard as Poins is to the prince; they, too, had nice legs and tight stockings and quick tongues.

He knows Hal. Hal will kick him aside like a stray cat. Hal will sell him out and consider it a good joke. And why shouldn’t he? Better to be hanged as a thief than to pine away as a hated court favorite. Some mercenary part of him is determined to profit by this one way or another; it whispers vicious things to him when the prince is near or when the slightest advantage shows itself. If he has to throw him away for his own safety, if Poins is a contagion that must be bled out, he’ll bleed Hal first for all he can.

Poins wishes he could bleed him dry. If he could squeeze another set of clothes out of the bargain – Hal laughing, clapping a hand against Poins’ thigh and joking about the quality of the cloth as his nimble hands creep to undo his laces and slip inside – or a pension – or a fine story to tell his own future children (‘sweet Ned, what will you make of me when I am old?’) he will be able to die content in having done well. It would be foolish not to, and it’s what Hal would do under the same circumstances, try to turn a profit off of rotten circumstances.

He wishes he did not care for the Prince as anything more than a purse full of crowns, as a pair of pretty hands, as a jest and an eager laughing mouth.

The prince and Poins have already parted ways. The world seems bare and sterile, like the sun’s gone from the sky – this is sentimental and wretched and he hates himself for it, it’s not Henry they’re all missing, the whole country is waiting on bated breath for the old king to shove off – life is somber as the cold ashes and stinking dregs of last night’s party the following afternoon. Ned Poins still dines in Eastcheap, he drinks deep and laughs loudly, but he keeps to his habits like a sleepwalker, and he guards his own privacy like a bruise. Everything is turned upside-down.

He wants the game to go on uninterrupted, he doesn’t want him to leave, in some pathetic boyish way, but he wishes he would cut him free; anything would be better than feeling the rope around his neck and never knowing when the drop will come. He knows their time can’t last; if any power on heaven or earth could speed the transition from “I know him better than anyone, I know him better than his father does, I would know him in the dark” to “I knew him once” he would invoke it with all his strength.

Harry is going to inherit a kingdom. He will go home a king. Ned will go home a second son with nothing more than his wits, and his wits he’s raked across the coals for ways of pleasing Harry, some way to make him stay. Or to consider it from another angle – he will go back home like a prodigal to his smirking brothers and to poor Nell and chafe under their pity and he’ll count himself lucky. Hal hasn’t banished him, it’s him who’ll cast aside Hal.

He knows what he must do, as clear as day. Poins will leave, before the king has cause to send him away; he will go under his own power. He’ll cut Hal loose before Hal can have the satisfaction of chronicling his faults to his face – all the things about Poins’ person that were sovereign virtues as long as Hal found them delightful would be vices again, rankest poison vices, the moment he ceases to please.

Ned intends to leave Hal before Hal can leave him.