Ne'er Seen But Wondered At

He had to stifle a flash of startled laughter with his glove, because tennis balls, really? Just a lot of stitched leather and horsehair, filling the hall with the smells of a different kind of court altogether; one of them rolled right up against the toe of his boot. No one else in the room has laughed, of course, and Ned was acutely thankful for twenty-odd years of practice not snickering during the homily. Poins could not make out the ambassador’s next words, not among the rustling of clergymen’s sleeves in the drafty hall stuffed full of muffling tapestries, but his line of sight was good. An intelligencer has more skills in his employ than simply eavesdropping and hoping something interesting will appear, and Poins had his ears pricked for any trouble from the crowd, even clergymen in scarlet, as much as for the insolence of their visitors. (An intelligencer probably shouldn’t be laughing at a grave insult delivered by a foreign agent on behalf of the King of France, anyway, but Poins is new to the job as such.)

The part of him that had gotten really good at reading people was whirring away like Nell’s spinning wheel, attempting to determine what King Henry would do next. It was a pleasant change at least from the endless legal talk, which would have bored any sensible person to tears, but this sort of sudden turn did not bode well.

Prince Hal’s ways were mysterious – the horrible empty moment after some jape has clattered out into public hearing, as if the heavenly coin-toss was still in the air to determine if he would laugh and clap his companions on the back, if he would spit barbs and cut them all to ribbons before stalking off to be alone with his own princeliness. King Henry has fewer mysteries, but Ned watches him only from a distance. Dame Fortune’s wheel also turns, for kings and minions alike. And, no doubt, for messengers. Even Frenchmen.

From his position he could see the king’s sober face darken in its already cold command. He knows that look; it came before an unfunny jest, and it didn’t bode well for anyone. Like the sky shot through with fire, before the crack of thunder meets the ear –

Do other men recognize that look in great men’s faces? All the more startling and prompting to take notice because Ned has seen him in sweeter attitudes: laughing for pure joy, or lewdly drowsy. That set to his narrow mouth, that open fixed gaze, a sudden withering blankness betraying that he’d truly been hit where it hurt and had not yet decided how it was he was going to rally. But it wasn’t sorrow welling up from the wound, nor even anger – it was something colder than wrath that thrilled the cruelest parts of Ned’s soul. Everyone in the hall must have been able to feel it, in that split instant.

The relief was palpable when Henry laughed, breaking forth in dry good humor and beginning his response affably enough. That relief was premature – that was how it always began, mildly, as if he were nothing more than a good-natured sporting fool. A king laughing at such an ugly affront, with the crown on his head and a sword at his side that could cut the French ambassador in pieces, if he so pleased. But his eyes knew; they were more than fully resolved. If war was the order of the day, that look promised blood in the ditches of France, and the Dauphin will be laughing through broken teeth. They’ve sent him a grave insult, and his response will be immediate – its eloquence would make emperors blush, and it chilled Ned to the bone.

Every word of it was honed to cut, and the rising whirlwind caught at Ned too, not least of all, little phrases like by God’s grace and our wilder days and barbarous licence – Poins would blush to hear these things, if he hadn’t heard them before, and if he did not know how little they meant. What follows is a mockery that runs red with blood – that one word, mock, hammering down relentlessly, and if he pitied the French he would weep for them now, for they are surely doomed.

There are threats which are never intended to be carried out, a load of politically astute bollocks built to put the pressure on and to come to nothing; Henry isn’t making that kind of threat. The young king makes promises. And Poins was a young king’s minion now, elevated beyond what his state of birth really warranted. Minions are allowed to laugh at their patrons’ jokes, to wring pomanders in their hands and whisper unkindly. But his laugh had caught in his throat, his whole body has frozen in place.

The hall was silent, and he can hear the voice that comes from Henry’s throat as clear as anything. Even the men who like him at court compare him to some kind of fiery young cleric – almost as if he was practiced in these speeches, having accostomed himself to smaller audiences from boyhood on. Men say that when King Richard was young, he used to stammer when he spoke – and King Henry-as-was had scarcely spoken at all, to anyone, ever. But this King Henry that-is does not sound like anyone Poins had ever known. Poins had known liars, and he had known great speechmakers, but what he hears today – what kind of a king is this?

The king was still speaking, unfolding his youthful limbs and going to circle among them idly; his attention wasn’t just for the ambassador, God help him, but for every man in attendance. It was a promise. And yet all these men looked so surprised that the king had responded in kind, his voice rising to a feverish state of vehemence.

None of these men know King Henry at all, Poins realized, not one of them. Not his uncles steeped in the blood royal, not his brothers, not the archbishop of Canterbury. They don’t know what he can do. Ned has known for years, and has loved him for it, at least as much as he ought to fear him. And Hal knows he knows it.

In passing him, once the others had hurried off to spread the news of war as if the devil himself were at their heels, Henry gave him in particular a look – and such a look, honey-eyed, infinitely understanding. Ned’s not falling for that again, and instead of dropping in an instinctive bow, he remained level, daring him to say something when he’d been at no loss for harsh words just moments before. No rebuke proved forthcoming, but a great deal of mutual knowledge flashed forth in that look. More than anything, Henry had been asking without words, did I do well?

**

Later and alone, when Henry was undressing for the evening and with Ned’s hands making quick work of it (unskilled as another man’s attendant, expert at stripping Hal down to nothing) Henry turns that look on him again. Poins was ready for it then, and didn’t avert his eyes. This was the Henry he knew, not in robes of state with a crown on his broad brow but stretching his long legs on a bed bigger than Poins has ever seen that threatens to suffocate both of them in heaping featherbeds. If they were in Eastcheap, they’d take it to the floor, or against a handy bit of wall that wasn’t shedding too much plaster; in carved palaces things are a little more delicate, as evidenced by the time of their first reunion when Hal had been so happy to see him he’d thrown him over a table and the damn thing had dismantled itself. Ned still has the bruises to show for it.

“And what did you make of that performance? I thought you might appreciate some of that rhetoric. Did I do well?”

“You always did enjoy raising the stakes on another man’s jest.”

“Just returning the volley,” Henry said affably, his hand staking a highly questionable claim on Poins’ thigh through his hose. “Will you come with me to these wars? Don’t say yes just for my sake, there’s plenty for you to do on English soil, and I won’t be humored.”

“Yes, yes I will. I’ll go to France and kill the French and make a mint off ransoms.”

He didn’t know much about soldiering; his skills were ideally matched to a certain kind of peace and to killing time in between receiving his allowances, not for coming down on the haughty foe like the scourge of God. But he won’t be left behind; if Hal must grow and change to meet the new scope of his ambition, Ned will follow him like a faithful shadow, if this takes him over the seas to Scotland or to France, to Jerusalem or to the ends of the earth. Poins is flexible, adaptable, he’s changed his manner of living before and he’ll do it again even if it means getting his hands out of other people’s purses long enough to take up a sword; he won’t be a coward again, and he’ll have a better captain than most.

“Better for a man to enrich himself at the expense of the French than that of his friends,” Hal said darkly. His sharpish face was pressed against Ned’s throat, busily raising marks, his breath sweet and warm and his beard beginning to prickle. Ned could only think of the ever-obliging Henry Scroop; something has begun hatching, here in the dark.

Ned stroked the back of his neck, regretting that he’d ever let him cut his golden hair, though Henry was hardly a boy any longer. Was this what it was, to be older and wiser?

“You don’t think I’d try that, do you?” Ned said, managing not to append again.

Hal sat up a little, adjusting his long legs, and kissed him again as if to admonish him. Ned countered it in a manner not exactly contrite.

“You’re a thief and a rascal, but somehow I doubt your capacity for treason.”

“Another pair of eyes and ears, you said. I’m only a base creature, and overambitious, too. If there were a plot, I might well determine I should join in before you heard a whisper of it. "

“But you wouldn’t do that, would you?” His voice was a teasing wheedle, but underneath it, the spark of something real.

“If we’re ever in a pinch and I don’t sell you out to the other fellow, it’s not because I’m not capable of it, it’s because I don’t want to. When you invited me to come to court with you, I half-believed you were setting me up for a fall. That you’d try to make a fool out of me. It’s no more than what I would have done, if I were you. But you didn’t, and why’s that?”

“Because I didn’t need to,” Hal said, lamely. “That isn’t the same as–”

It was better for both of them that he didn’t finish. “You love me too well. There but for the grace of God go I, because you love me much too much for all that.” Ned headbutted him lightly, and Hal pulled him down again into a tangle of too-long legs and embroidered bed hangings.

“Do you love me, Ned?” Hal sighed lasciviously against his cheek, while Ned’s hands worked the tension from his slim straight back, cramped from riding. The King of England’s own hand were otherwise occupied, but it would take more than a stiff cock to keep either of them from running their mouths.

“I do. I’ll away with you to France, or a man might be forgiven for thinking you needed me, and a loyal subject would never dream of depriving his sovereign of anything that might give him advantage.”

“Is that so?”

“So it is, my lord.”