Strong As A Tower In Hope

The pitched battle they’ve been bracing for has yet to occur. This is altogether better than the opposite and an assault from some unexpected quarter, but it leaves Henry with a generalized disappointment like an all-over bruise. The men have taken it as an occasion to unwind by a degree or two and let down their burdens, albeit extremely cautiously – the average man among them crouches in the middling dark with a hand on his weapon. The wet air hangs close on everything, and the atmosphere is pregnant with a hard promise, that this lack of a material threat can’t turn out for good.

There must be an opposing force somewhere, amassing in the next village or the next trodden-down field to counter them. Reports have differed, one man says the king has returned in full force and another says he’s dead; their uneasy scuffles with badge-wearing stragglers have been brief and brutal, but none of the king’s admirers seem to know what to expect either and shift about aimlessly. The willing cooperation Henry has encountered as he goes to claim his inheritance is troubling as well as heartening. He hadn’t known himself to have so many friends before his exile, and part of him is still tensed against some nation-wide act of deceit, some ambush of Glendower’s that has persistently failed to materialize. Perhaps the conflict he’s bracing for is merely delayed – King Richard’s forces are waiting for them further down the line at Flint. Strategy is not his cousin’s strongest suit, but he knows how to make an appearance. Henry will know when they’ve found him, he has no doubt of that. Perhaps once he’s seen the face of his sovereign this landscape will begin to look like England to him again. He’ll begin to feel English again, and not a stumbling foreigner relearning how to tread his native soil.

It’s late September and a damp autumn after a summer that by all reports was witheringly hot. Henry tugs down his hood and feels the cool air sting at his ears, becoming only belatedly aware that his hair is sticking up in one sad tuft. Night’s fallen, there’s smoke in the air and everything is as he expects it to be – looking out and yet not too closely, the better to fix in his mind’s eye the activities of his troops. Old men huddle in their coats between the trees and recite verses of Ecclesiastes with great gravity; reports of the demographics represented in Henry’s army have been somewhat exaggerated, but some of these good old men are at least his father’s age. It makes his stomach clench to think of them going about their business when the best of the old soldiers are dead, and Henry’s father isn’t there to command their respect. Boys creep as close to the fires as they can; young men group into knots around their nearest friends and neighbors, ready for movement and circumspectly avoiding the subject of what they are on the march to undertake. The night has taken on the familiar rhythms of any encampment anywhere – men unhappily awake on watch and men settling down to slumber, some more comfortable than others.

He knows these men, by their faces and their common sentiments if not by name, but there is a certain mutual trust that he’s wary of damaging if he tarries too long in observation. It’s not his place to wander around among their rows and ask each man how he’s feeling, or what he thinks of King Richard’s policies on taxation, or if he’s considered the penalties for treason as they’re likely to affect a volunteer soldier. It’s no place for a commander; while these men mind their own business, his place is somewhere else, and they’ll all get their fill of looking at him tomorrow.

Henry passes through the ranks of them as quickly as he can. The leaves have not yet begun to turn, standing stiff and green on the trees’ boughs unmoved by wind.

**

Barring the receipt of fresh intelligence, there’s little else to be discussed. The plan for when their company comes face to face with the king is fairly straightforward; it’s what happens afterward that’ll be the hard part, and even Henry can’t do more than guess at that. There’s always more to be done, always something that could be done better in Henry’s own very particular view of things, but the sphere of what one man can manage in a day is limited. His friends have dispersed to attend to their own business, and he feels the more bereft for it, selfish though it is to expect them to linger for the pleasure of their company alone. The younger Percy is the only one who remains in their impromptu meeting-hall, though his manner in hanging behind once his father’s left Henry had mistaken at first for surly dawdling. Neither of them seems to be much for idle conversation, and nearing him does not elicit so much as a gesture of greeting.

(“Dismiss him whenever you like,” Northumberland had said, with brusque good humor, “Don’t let him bother you,” and if the boy did not look half so haggard he’d have taken him up on it.)

Henry has come to question his own notions of maturity since having sons of his own. At Percy’s age he’d certainly felt man enough in every way that counted, and there had been no reason to doubt his competence, nor Percy’s here and now. If the boy had seemed dazzled upon their introduction, dropped to one knee in the muddy grass, it had passed quickly. He’s at the awkward cusp of manhood, inching past beardlessness – it’s the same age as his own Harry, though physically they’re little alike. There’s still mud in his hair, and it provokes the maddening parental urge to brush it away; a closer look drives in another spur of concern, if not fatherly then avuncular. Something isn’t quite right.

Henry’s first thought runs to some concealed injury, something that has let him subtly hunched and stiff-mouthed in his unwillingness to limp off to bed. He hasn’t seen him since the executions, so it’s certainly possible. There hadn’t been much of a struggle prior to the deaths of Richard’s minions – and that of the Earl of Wiltshire, who minion or not Henry is not positioned to judge. But it had gone bloodily enough anyway, and with the heat of righteous ire having cooled, Henry of Lancaster is left with sheepishness in its place. A significant fraction of his company are practically boys, and civil violence is a hell of a way to flesh one’s maiden sword. Harry Percy had been fearless and obliging as long as the sun shone.

Another boy on his first impromptu campaign would be shaking in his boots in expectation of the work yet before them, or off drinking himself into bravery with other boys of the same age and only lower rank. Percy stares into the fire, the rest of him still as any stone, and it’s only his sword hand that shakes – beneath his cloak he sits flexing at the stiff fingers of his right hand as if he can rub the tremor away. His father had remarked on no actual injury earlier, and the boy had made no complaint, so Henry is not about to ask him to push up his sleeve and let him probe around for the suspicion of a bruised muscle or wrenched-out joint they’re in no position to have re-set anyway. But between his close-lipped reluctance to speak and the things they’ve seen and done, Henry has the suspicion he’s seen this before.

The trouble isn’t born of total inexperience. Everything about his performance has been wholly adequate, and he’s accustomed to following orders and holding his own in combat. But skirmishes with unruly Welshmen are a different animal entirely from seeing fields trampled and statesmen of his own nation, even ones of low repute, beshitten with fear en route to their execution. Percy had been one of the party to drag them out of hiding; perhaps he hadn’t liked what he’d seen. If he were too comfortable, too enthusiastic about English bloodshed on English soil, that would be a matter of some concern; that’s not what Henry has set out to accomplish, and if this particular infection can only be cured by the knife, it’s not his own preference. Harry Hotspur has seen men die before today, in all likelihood, but battle is one thing and execution another. Pronouncing the sentence had made his own head ache. These are the tremors of a young man not entirely hardened yet to his task – like green wood steaming and spitting sap when thrown on the fire. Percy has the dubious privilege of being a boy and a man at the same time, and this is a sort of growing pain.

Henry remembers how apprehensive he’d been when he’d first seen Mary with his eldest son in her arms – not at the child’s size or fragility, though he’d been so glad the child had lived that it had drowned out any other thought for the first weeks, but at the overwhelming force of personality manifesting itself, how lively the little creature had been, alert and wriggling and making faces in his sleep. From his fairly broad experience of babies, he hadn’t imagined them to develop something like personal character until much later – the thought had been comforting, that the soul was present as a sort of unmarked material without the stamp of a personality until the child was old enough to crawl, if not to talk. His own Harry had announced his disposition from his first hearty cry; doubtless so had Northumberland’s. Northumberland’s son had once been small and lumpy and purple too, had smelled like his mother’s breast and no doubt looked as bald and surly as his great-uncles. But this is veering dangerously into sentimentality, and as soon as he catches himself about to apply this reasoning more broadly this fact shrivels in an instant from something miraculous to something dry and barren. He and Richard had been year-mates once, and it had been Henry gone paralytic with terror in expectation of having his head lopped off while Richard sallied forth to address the rebels. Both of them had been tender then and unstamped by experience.

“Harry, he says, trying not to sound coaxing. “You’re free to go. I have no need of you.”

(Bolingbroke wonders where his own Harry is. He wonders if Richard would have harmed him, if it had come to that.)

“I’ll keep watch for you tonight. I’m not easily frightened,” Percy says, raising his chin. And indeed he’ll take him at his word – he’d been thrumming like a well-oiled wheel that morning, eyes bold and attention fixed. The signs of real mettle are written in his young body and his record of performance shows promise for his maturity. Henry cannot detect a trace of apprehension on the level of intellect.

Hunkered down next to him, Henry feels like a beast. He sees

“You intend to keep watch and defend my person with an arm like that?” It won’t do him any good to upbraid him, but Henry can’t keep a tinge of wry humor from bleeding into his voice.

“Nothing wrong with it,” Harry says. His eyes widen under his heavy brows; he’s a bad liar despite his curt adolescent conviction. “I’m not in any pain.”

Not in any pain, but his hand still won’t work, which isn’t encouraging. Henry can’t call to mind what he felt like after his first time witnessing an execution – much less his first time participating in one, the extremity of the situation had a way of washing out the finer details, and it’s easily been twenty years. No doubt a man could have blundered into some honest injury in such a state of upheaval.

“Is it a sprain?”

“You can’t sprain a hand! Look, I’m all right, I’m all right–”

He goes to draw his knife as a demonstration (a movement that still makes some part of Henry brace for a struggle) and fumbles at the handle. His fingers spasm shut.

“For God’s sake, boy, I’m not going to ship you back to Worcester for something like this. Hold out your hand – fingers flat.”

As expected, he can’t manage it – not unfolding his half-balled-up fingers, he can scarcely seem to lift his arm. Henry holds him by his sleeve and tugs off his gloves, feeling like a nursemaid who’ll any minute now be licking a handkerchief and scrubbing at his cheek with it. It’ll do him no good to coddle him now, and it won’t help him to call this sickness of soldiers what it is or that it may dog him well into adulthood, hellishly enough for a young man wholly resolved to be a soldier. He’s had to do something he’s not sure if he wants to do, and Henry’s right there alongside him.

“No pain, is there? Nothing pinching?” He turns his hand over, pretends to inspect some marks on the boy’s squarish hand still sticky from its glove. “There’s the trouble, Harry – don’t grip your sword so tightly when you don’t need to use it. You’ve given yourself a cramp.”

Harry gives a hoarse cry of dismay, turning to look him in the face with a flicker of something like distrust. “What do you want me to do about it?”

“I’ve seen this on crusade, among many men your age,” Henry puts forth smoothly. It wasn’t a lie; there had been no shortage of boys witnessing righteous butchery, both pagan and Christian. “It never lasts once you’ve given the affected limb a rest.”

This is a lie, but he hopes it isn’t a wicked one. Henry fastens his cloak for him and claps him on the shoulder; the tension in him uncoils a little palpably beneath his hand.

Harry Percy smiles at him pleasurelessly and rises to be dismissed.

**

Henry rubs at his jaw, grown tight from exhaustion and too much talk – his weariness is another thing that he can’t seem to keep from inadvertently trumpeting out to everyone present through the set of his mouth and the glancing of his eyes. Whatever he’s experiencing shines through his countenance plain as day. Someone had told him once he had an honest face, though they’d neglected to clarify if this was a compliment or a gibe –  it was cousin Richard that said this, on some better day out on the river together, and realizing that makes his stomach drop, and calls to mind the king’s own sweet face. Richard is frank enough about displeasure, but most other things are kept barred up within a front of serenity.

Henry doesn’t think he’ll sleep tonight after all. The number of nights in his life where he’s kept vigil until morning must be relatively few – not all of them sad occasions, or all that memorable.

Henry has nearly forgotten how it feels to sleep within English walls, not to depend on a foreign host’s courtesy or the shelter of a tent blazoned with another man’s colors. (Not that he rejects that courtesy – or tents, by and large, he has an appreciation for bare utility when paired with quality of material –  but being a guest and depending on the hospitality of a friend is dimly painful nonetheless.) His pavilion is a borrowed affair and there’s nothing to complain of regarding its dimensions or its capacity for keeping the damp off. Alongside the material works of war it holds the same continental jumble he’s carried with him through exile: books and more books, unstrung musical instruments and unworn jewelry, a collar for a favorite hound he’d meant to give to Lucia Visconti before leaving. The migratory lifestyle has suited him well enough in the past, so the portable nature of its furnishings can hardly be what’s grating at him like a stone in his shoe. His own rightful appointments, sturdy structures in his own family’s colors, have no doubt been broken down to parts and shuttled off to someone else’s use, the badges and embroidered letters picked out and obliterated. But this much territory is his own for now, so many paces up and down and to the far wall. Not bad, for a man who can’t shake the feeling that he shouldn’t be here at all. As a boy he had once borrowed a key that wasn’t his and crept into his father’s chambers while Gaunt was away doing business in France. It had felt like this, even if he’d stood in there a hundred times waiting for his father to finish going over his accounts – worse than breaking in with theft in mind.

Henry goes about the business of preparing for bed, banking the fire and changing the dressings on his suffering back. The cloth bindings digging in under his arms are mercifully inconspicuous under his coat during the day – he tends to them gingerly, with the voice of his hosts’ physicians still rattling around in his head. He hasn’t broken out in sores like this for years.

He settles down before the bed out of habit – he’s not quite ready to cry out to God from a reclining position, though it would suit his current state of Biblical affliction. Henry sets his sword in front of him, running crosswise in front of his knees. His much-jostled legs protest at being made to kneel, or at the broad imitation of a better sort of preparation – though he does seek to regain a dukedom, so it’s not all pious parody. Tomorrow they’ll stand before the castle walls at Flint and call for parle. It’s no small undertaking under any circumstance to bargain with a king. But Henry of Lancaster is bargaining for his inheritance, and all reasonable men find him to be in the right.

It’s been only a few days since he’s last made confession, and so he turns to his prayers with minimal mental fumbling – the ones done out loud, the ones every soldier knows and that boys like Harry Percy learn at their father’s knee. And the inward ones in cluttered vernacular phrases that come like gasps of breath.  Please, God, let his cause be right, and let him get what he came for. Please, God, for the things he hasn’t confessed or remembered to confess. God, for any vow he’s broken, or has yet to break, for his sons and daughters, for his father’s soul, for King Richard wherever he may be–

This cuts too near the quick, and he must press his folded hands to his mouth. Wherever the king is, it’s none of Henry’s business whether he sleeps soundly or whether he wears away at the flagstones with furious pacing – it’s none of his business, and he doesn’t want to be thinking of him now like an ordinary man fretting in his nightshirt and coif, and not a royal sovereign set forth in gold to be contended with. The mental image renders him unfairly small.

Henry thinks that he ought to settle his gaze on a cross, or a relic, or some other emblem of the justice to which he hopes to appeal, but all that he has seems blasphemously inadequate. He ought to fix in his mind his father’s tomb, that solid representative of what exactly he intends to avenge. Instead his mind’s eye will let him see only what he longs to see tomorrow – King Richard’s face, whether turned on him in anger or in reconciliation. Henry swallows tightly and turns again to his prayers.