Patience

John Barwyk isn’t a cruel man, but it’s difficult to access one’s personal scruples when a man can see his breath even once he’s gone indoors. Their prisoner has a brazier with a fire in it, and a chamber to himself where he can’t be tormented, whether by fellow prisoners or sheltering beasts; there’s more straw in his mattress than in Barwyk’s own at home (far away as home seems, detained by a dying man who won’t die fast enough) and the mess in his bowl is from the same pot as his jailers’ dinner. They aren’t Turks. They haven’t caged him, or branded him, or broken his legs; they haven’t stuck him through with a red-hot poker.

Pomfret’s only captive is beginning to suffer for his captivity, regardless. After a long stretch of soundless inactivity from within, John had almost dared to hope that the poor creature was dead – but that was nothing to look forward to but the cessation of these particular duties, until another half-dead rival is deposited at Pomfret Castle for safekeeping. Today it’s John who’s the poor bastard to bring him his food and sift out whether he’s still living. Beaufort has allotted his guest a certain quantity of wine, though it’s unlikely to make his heart glad; it shines black in the bottom of the pitcher.

Richard takes a while to stir once his keeper has entered the room – the shifting of his limbs chases out the vision of him as a corpse frozen to the stones that had briefly been entertained in his keeper’s mind, but it’s a near thing. The fire still burns, and lends a little light; his chains have spooled loose around him and though John has never known his prisoner to be anything but resentfully docile, he still braces to be lunged at or for a fist to connect with his belly.

As the prisoner rises into the light, he makes quite an eyeful – his cropped hair sticks to his head in thick pieces and his gaunt face has grown long; contempt glitters in his grit-smirched eyes. But apart from this cursory challenge his presence is dull and lusterless, and that flame of resentment quickly dwindles and dies into a kind of uncomprehending regard. As if the fact that Barwyk hasn’t come to kill him is a disappointment. His chained arms remain folded, and he reaches to receive neither bowl nor cup until John has scooped some out himself. He tastes for poison, an additional step he sometimes remembers and sometimes forgets, trying to make up for this laxness in protocol by a generous demonstration of it in the dim light – the constituent parts of the meal don’t matter, not in the dead of winter, simply that it is. Henry Bolingbroke wouldn’t need to poison a man, with supplies already so scarce they might all famish here at Pomfret by the time the next month arrives.

(He tastes the wine, too, for good measure. It’s not bad, though it sours the pottage still on his tongue.)

“There. Are you contented?”

Richard lowers his head and thanks him in a small voice; or John supposes the ex-king might be cursing him, he only has a little French and his hearing has never been as good as it was. He takes his dish in hands that are parched like an old man’s, and recedes a step or two to indicate his willingness to partake – once he had cursed them out in terms that would have peeled paint, and thrown his cup aside, but that was very early on in their acquaintance and he’s more mannerly now. The relief that surges in John’s gut – that he needn’t stand around at the end of a drafty hallway a moment longer, that the wretch will eat and that he’ll live another day – hardly feels like an honorable response. But it’s a hard season for compassion, and the king might well prefer to be left alone.