Surfeited With Honey

At Kenilworth, the battle is over, and all strength is exhausted. The knives and tongs are set aside now, but the smell of metal still lingers in the air, so pervasive that it is nearly a taste in the mouth. Bradmore and his attendants labor bare-headed, but they make their obsequies regardless — parting back to clear the path to where the Prince of Wales rests.

It is only by God’s grace that the Prince of Wales is not blind, or at least half-blind; Bradmore has lashed the curtains tightly shut to spare any further strain on his sight, and the brazier smoke is choking. The queer blacksmith’s-shop smell is nearly drowned out by a fug of burning rosemary. If not for the crook of the boy’s arm, the bed would have the aspect of a bier — all hung in faded crimson to block the light from the fire, with the bed linens bundled back, and the prince bare-legged in a clean shirt.

Henry embraces his son, and feels his aches keenly; the harness does not hang on him so lightly as it once did, and his bruises run deeper than ever these days, deep to the very bone. Beneath his clothes, his scabs itch like a penitential device he cannot remove.

Henry pulls back to examine him with all due solicitousness, and Hal squints back at his father’s face like a man with a headache.

“I must look like a fair death’s head,” Hal says. A chipped tooth gives his speech a slur.

“You look well,” Henry says. “Let me see you. Untie those bandages.”

Too much like cerecloth, so thick it is with balms and preparations — when the cloth falls away, it retains some of its shape, and the skin beneath it glistens. The surgeon has anointed him with honey and turpentine, and the skin of his throat is gleaming with balm — it lends him a coronation aspect that is at odds with his face. His face looks like Richard had within his coffin — pale and dirty, with the ghost runnels of blood running back into his hair. His eyes scarcely open — the slightest stream of light will prick at his sight, and even blind him, and Henry must squint at his son by the light of a tallow-candle to discern the damage.

Witness the Prince of Wales: beardless cheeks smeared in oil, long nose and pert mouth, those heavy lids hanging hooded and lashless as a Flemish Madonna. There stands a broad purple bruise at the corner of his jaw, shading into the yellows and greens of a healing gash, and his hair lies in flat points of grease. He smells of roses; his shirt carries the whiff of civet, body-warm. This is his Harry and no other. A mere scratch cannot disfigure him. Henry stretches out a guilty hand. His abhorrence of contamination is at odds with his desire to touch.

Henry sucks his teeth.

“It hurts like hell — saving your reverence,” Hal says, a little sullenly. “You’d think there would be more to do about that. But I’ve been a very obliging patient.”

“Patient long enough, I’d say. Out in the country, they’re saying the Prince of Wales is dead.”

And his father, too. The king touches the wound with the back of a fingernail.

They cannot hide away forever, father and son; they must rally or die. Henry is itching to make war again, just as his body is protesting. To escape wounds in the field only to suffer them in private — abscesses and scaly red patches mark him out like a chart, small but many and grouping closer together every day like troops in the field. Such sores begin on a man’s breast, or under his arm, or in the folds of his groin, and from there they spread.

There are greater wounds and lesser ones. The site of the prince’s gashed cheek has become a deeper wound with nursing — an extraction of a shard, a splinter of an arrow-shaft that could have just as easily been a steel bod. Hal will be blemished now forever — not in a loathsome hidden place but as plain as day, in a blot as indelible as his father’s shame. He has inherited his father’s mark, like a stamp in wax.

“Then we’ll have to show them better, won’t we,” Hal says brightly. The hole in his cheek shines like an eye. “I’ll ride out with you to prove it. Tell me, have you seen any sign of a whoreson great fat man? I’d very much like to see him.”

“Quiet, now.”

Some touch of fever has rendered Hal whimsical. His father may be old and morphewed before his time, but the Prince of Wales will be marked with a distinction. Men will look on him now and think, there’s a fellow who’s not afraid to put himself in the thick of things. He will grow to manhood wincing-proud of his scars, and he will no longer look quite so fresh and wanton.

It is not a broad wound, but deep, and it can only be tender. The fresh tissue at its edges is cool and pink, happily without sign of inflammation, but the scab is so dark it is nearly black, and it shines like pitch. Henry probes the borders of the wound, and Hal grimaces.

Of course, the youth may hate him still. He may be biding his time quite patiently, all the better to strike when it will be least anticipated. Hal puts up a hand to his cheek, very fine but for the broken nails. Those overhung Plantagenet eyes are fixed on him, but their thoughts are no doubt elsewhere, as are the King’s.

There is a shallow ditch around the hole, an indentation like a lipped mouth — the infant tissue will fill it in with time, but for now, Henry can span it with his fingers and fancy himself probing its depth like a surgeon. The surgeon has worked day and night with honey and pith to narrow the entrance wound to a tighter passage, but the suggestion of a pit is still present, like a worm beneath an apple skin. The sight of it suggests a queer permeability, and a fatal wound somehow survived. God’s grace, and good fortune.

“You’re hurting me,” the prince says, too low for Bradmore or any other man to hear, but Henry strikes him silent with a look.

This is his valiant son; he has borne his first wound got in battle and he has killed his first man. It would have been a simple thing, to sin by omission and to let Douglas’ hand do what a son’s must not. It would have been no more than Henry might deserve. It would not have been necessary to strike a blow and to kill him outright, it would have been enough only to dearly wish him dead, it would have been plausible enough for a prince to plead that his eyes were smarting with blood and he did not know who lay before him at the point of a sword — it would have sat uneasily, but Henry is not a king whom many like. In the end, filial love carries the day; it is good tactics.

In his mind’s eye, Henry can pierce this place to the knuckle, and feel the wet embrace of bleeding flesh on all sides. What would happen, if some rough instrument were to refresh that wound — to worm it apart again or meet unyielding bone? To pierce like the Holy Spirit into a man’s innermost parts, and to divine his inner nature. Henry spends much of his life now on his knees, practicing discernment. He would like to read his eldest son like a book if only he could.

Hal scarcely seems to breathe now — his eyes are open, and his pink tongue touches his front teeth. Henry wants to work his finger into the wound like a tongue into a mouth and to hear his son’s shame turn to gratitude. What will the king of England give in thanks for the return of his son? A hundred Masses, an annual pension to the surgeon who brought it about, not as generous as for a whole arrow-shaft plucked out but some recognition of the service done to the nation in all his patching and concocting. How like the wounds of Christ, shining-edged and perfectly almond-shaped — he will have a psalter stitched and gilded in exactly this shape, like a spear-point’s punched exit-hole flowing with water and scant blood, and he will read from it every morning.

From somewhere in retreat, the surgeon Bradmore makes a choked sound, like a throat clearing.

“What is it,” Henry says, “that warrants such an interruption?”

“My liege, the Prince of Wales must rest.”

“Must he?” King Henry turns to the sweat-faced surgeon with his face set once more to a properly dark look. Bradmore is a dark man by nature, with curling black hair and worried nostrils, and interruption of such a train of thought has made Henry brusque. “He’s upright and talking, isn’t he? You’re selling your work short.”

“I have done all I can, with God’s help,” Bradmore protests. “He’ll look better in the morning.”

But this much is a lost cause, as the king cleans his hands on a vinegar-smelling cloth and shakes off all thoughts of Christ’s gashes.

Hal has taken this momentary interruption as an opportunity to withdraw himself, folding his arms across his chest; he is sweating through his shirt. Henry kisses his son, bracing him briefly by both elbows to keep him from further retreat — Hal exhales damply like a rascal deer, with his greasy smarting cheek sticking to Henry’s beard. All his strength is rigid and uneasy in Henry’s grasp

“Go send my commendations to John,” Hal says in a broken voice. “And find me a good fresh suit of clothes. Please.”

He does not sound like the Prince of Wales, nor like a riverbank wanton with murder in his heart; he sounds like a man in pain and confusion. Henry releases him and goes.