of the first nothing the elixir grown

All Souls

Richard burns himself out over the first weeks of winter’s approach; he burns himself to ashes with an outrage that turns him against his own surroundings and against himself and whatever else he can reach. After that he ceases to rage against his handlers like a badly-trained hawk, and goes quiet. In the midst of his ashes he prays with equal vehemence for the death of Henry of Lancaster and for his own deliverance.

He thinks of Robert, who had already been rotten for a week before he died, struck with a wound in the leg that had spread its evil upwards to his heart. When they’d brought him to Richard much later, bound in linen and caked in lead, his hands had remained exposed – they lay crossed before his chest all blackened and folded like a wet pair of gloves. But they were still Robert’s hands, and it was easy to imagine them the way they once were.

Robert had fled to the Continent with Richard’s rings on his fingers and had died bare-handed. He’d probably flogged them somewhere in exchange for room and board, or prised out the jewels to sell piecemeal; he never did know what those things were worth. Richard feels a kick in his belly that is sheer hatred – he hates Robert for dying, he hates Robert for dying before him and never showing him how to do it. He hates Robert for being a coward. Richard hates himself for saying what he’d said – for saying he’d die for him when he had no way of knowing what that meant until he’d lost Anne.

Faint, he thinks of his half-brother John, wherever he may be – he thinks of his own sweet councilors in their graves and his mother and father in their tombs. He even thinks of that self-important old tyrant Gaunt, wherever his bones may lie. His prayers refuse to take proper shape – he stumbles over the words, and his formal pleas to the Almighty scatter themselves until he can’t think of anything at all.

*

St. Edmund

There’s scarcely an inch of thawed water left in the bucket, foul-smelling and cloudy, and his attendant won’t be back to refresh it, spitting and sneezing, until God knows when. Richard must force himself to drink for fear his throat will close up on itself if he holds out any longer. He coughs half the mouthful back up when something wriggles on his tongue that is unmistakably a small insect.

The corners of his mouth have begun to split from the greatness of his thirst, and they bleed freely when he tries to open his mouth too wide.

It wouldn’t have to be quick to serve Henry’s purposes. It could be slow. He doesn’t know how poison would taste, not mingled with rotting leaves and sour meat, but even if the slop in his bowl were demonstrably clean it could hardly be called wholesome and he cannot bring himself to eat. he imagines eating and choking over stones, maggots, shivers of glass. It turns his stomach and he retches up nothing until he falls asleep.

Richard doesn’t sleep for long; he dreams of quinces in red wine.

*

St. Lucy

He thinks of Anne, who’d died over a day – she’d been alive by dinner, a little weak from the heat and in bad temper, and he had kissed her and gone to bed and by morning she had been dying with blood in her mouth and by nightfall again she had been dead, really dead.

He’d died then too, his world had shrunk to a pinpoint of furious grief, and never unfolded again into something with air and color in it. He cannot hate Anne for anything, he cannot hate her for leaving him behind, when he wants nothing more than to fly from this place and escape anything as weak as flesh and blood.

Anne had died in summer. The daylit hours dwindle still deeper into night and the cold grows worse; they afford him a sooty little fire among other reluctantly afforded conveniences but it just makes him cough and his eyes sting. Richard startles at the smallest noise, and curses his handlers when they come to feed him, but they do it anyway, mute and cowed. They don’t even hate him, these men, his erstwhile subjects, even if they would gladly see him poisoned. They fear their noble employers and it’s Henry now whose arm might well reach from Westminster to Pontefract – Richard is at the same time an individual of terrible importance and on a personal basis completely inconsequential, and so they’ve left him alone. He’s anxiously sifted his recollections of every low-spoken word for some sign of malice or of hidden sympathy (the glint of a badge or a familiar phrase) but they simply are: too uneasy to aid their sovereign and too inhibited to hurry him on to death.

Outside the castle’s walls the world has fallen away. His exile has made an island out of it.

*

Holy Innocents

He has been kenneled like a beast and as good as collared. Richard no longer paces, anxious for exercise and alert to any prospect of impending rescue; he’s mostly very tired. He must save his strength, so he sleeps like a greyhound and thinks a great deal. His hair has grown matted and he supposes only the natural sparseness of his beard has kept him from looking like a wild man. He has done his level best to avoid filth, but still he can’t escape that he must look like a horror. Something shaken out of a reliquary, dug up out of a bog. His legs are all scabs.

Most of what he thinks about is religion, which is the same thing as politics, all while turning over in the straw and trying to find one position that’s easier on his bony back than another. They might have afforded him the courtesy of a real bed to sleep on, but he thinks of featherbeds and limbs too weak to struggle. There’s a lump in the far corner that was once a mattress, but it might as well be in Jerusalem for the good it will do him; his extremities are grey with cold, his wrists red with inflammation where their manacles have hung too long, and his joints ache badly enough to make even standing up a daunting undertaking, let alone traversing his prison.

He has a vision of Henry Bolingbroke’s body black with vermin, swarming with lice and beetles and yet still alive, still walking and talking. His carcass is cinched with a belt set with emeralds. Worms and snakes sport happily through the bars and fleurons of the crown.

Richard crosses himself with a bone-rattling shiver, and turns over.

*

Epiphany

Other men have suffered this extremity and lived. Others have suffered this and had enough of Christ’s mercy to die swiftly. It’s little comfort to know other men have suffered like this, that even other princes have been thrown from their plump prosperity by a cruel turn of Fortune’s wheel and dwindled down to nothing; Job at least had something with which to scrape his sores, and a wife to scold him. Even the vermin won’t come near him. They have too much regard for his majesty.

There’s a king he half-remembers – a pagan king in some wild place – who goes mad and devours himself. The prospect is not entirely unattractive. They’ve stopped tasting his food for poison, and his vehement mistrust is enough to match even his hunger, which no longer merely aches but claws at his insides like a living thing.

Without a knife, his half-frozen fingers are the better prospect. Their bones have begun to stand out, like his father’s had, and if he’d had any blood left the veins would too. Any trace of prettiness is gone, but they still possess sensation – he’s tested this – but they might not for long. He deliberates on which ones he’d rather lose, and on what hand – like a parent choosing which child to have thrown overboard, the very backwardness of the choice deadening him to it. He’ll need his right hand more or less intact, he’ll need to to stick a sword in the traitor Bolingbroke’s stinking guts.

His teeth circle the base of his thumb, and he tries – experimentally – finds he cannot. His teeth feel loose in his head.

He must survive this. Men have endured worse than this for lesser prizes than a recovered crown. He chokes down his next meal and waits with renewed determination for something to emerge to interrupt the hateful monotony of imprisonment.

*

St. Sebastian

He must rest lightly, which is easy enough to do on his filthy pallet with the bones of his hip driving into the ground beneath and his ulcered feet hanging over on the stones. An empty bed. He must be vigilant; rescue could come at any time, or damnation. He’s endured privation as severe as any sinner in Hell, but they can’t have forgotten about him up above – he’s been king for decades, they won’t forget him in the course of months. Someone is coming. He’ll be his own watchman.

It becomes difficult to differentiate waking from sleeping.

Richard wakes in the night to the clatter of armor in the hall, keys turning on their ring. Something else not far off sounds in his ears, muted and animal – a distorted voice, or an old dog grumbling to itself. He must lie very still. He knows his keepers’ voices and the sound of their plain-shod footsteps on stone; even his chief jailer’s voice is as infuriatingly familiar as an iron ring pressing into his wrist. Something’s happening, but the key to what it might be is distorted by the echo and so dim he can make nothing out of it. He expects an assassin. Another prisoner to halve his misery, a French delegation armed to the teeth, Henry himself fully penitent with crown in hand. In the airless dark the frigid stones sweat and Richard strains to hear, but nothing else comes.

He shivers and hunches his shoulders, shreds of damp shirt sticking to his back. His face is damp and his sick lungs ache from endeavoring not to sob out loud. Nothing, no one, his visitation has passed him by entirely. His fingernails rake runnels down the sides of his neck, as if he were capable of laying it open – his pulse surges quick like a rabbit’s and dry-throated he begins to choke.

He’s dying. He’s dying, he’s dying, he’s dying. He bites at his wrists until the blood flows and the living thing scratching at his guts stills itself.

Breath comes with a dry rattle in his chest and the pain is a blessing. His strength starts to ebb back into his body, grain by grain; its ghost creeps back to quicken every limb by the power of sheer misery. He finds that he doesn’t mind the taste of raw flesh.

*

St. Richard the Pilgrim

The pain is not too much, no agony could be too much, when the work at least is steady and Richard has nothing else to set his mind against. His thirty-third birthday he spends in prison, alone, worse than alone and less than himself. The hunger has worn him away into nearly nothing and has left him with a stomach hollow as a drum. Every passing hour has eaten away at him a little more – peeled off a strip, carved off a choice cut. So his subjects starve through the winter just the same under the soldierly Henricus Rex as under gentle Richard; it’s his blood they’ll want to suck soon enough, his marrow they’ll be scratching out with belt-knives and the tips of pikes.

Richard sees everything clearly; he possesses the ringing glass-like clarity of someone looking down from a very high place. His body hardly pains him any longer, hanging off his tipsy soul like a fine robe. He trains his too-agile thoughts on questions metaphysical.

His hair has begun to fall out.

*

St. Valentine

On the Feast of St. Valentine, Richard of Bordeaux receives visitors. He folds what remains of his ruined hand behind his back and allows the old groom to embrace him in his chains.