means and manners

“Do you inspect your wife like this before the two of you go to bed together? When she came over from the continent with all her ladies, did you demand she strip to the skin and make a show of herself? Did you search her for traps?”

“That’s enough. Take off your clothes.”

His sons don’t care for Joan, and that’s no surprise — Henry didn’t marry her to please his children, but to please himself, and perhaps it’s only natural for children to balk at a stranger stepping into a mother’s place. She will never be another Mary; what he desires in a wife at nearly forty bears little resemblance to what young men look for in their women. But he will not think of Joan now; it’s a feeble gambit, a distraction.

In hose and braies, Hal stands in the heap of his discarded garments like a man about to be knighted. Stripped to the waist, he is like the picture of a man in a book of hours, too perfect to be quite real and too healthy to seem possible in a sick man’s rooms — slim hips and smooth waist, like a young David, and all his skin unbroken. The act of stripping away covering does a comforting trick by making his body less obscene. The fashions of youth bring out everything that is vulgar, short gowns draw the eye to the shameful parts — without them, he is only flesh and blood without embellishment.

With their gold points untied, his hose are slack and without the architectural tension of lacing to give them their taut smoothness; they hang down over the tops of his long thighs. The prince will never be a hairy man; in that respect, he is like Richard, finely gilded all over, and not his father, who has always been a hairy man even before disease made him rough and coarse as an old hide. Henry can’t remember when he ever saw Richard undressed — they must have been very young men then, gawking invidiously at one another’s bodies, and Henry is left only with the impression of useless beauty without a context to justify it.

Hal doesn’t wear the look of obedience well; there is a creeping guilt in his face, an attitude of concealment in the way he casts his looks at Henry directly as if daring him to pass judgment. His free hand is tucked behind his back, and his shirt hangs from a curled fist like St. Bartholomew with his skin, in a posture that is self-consciously louche. He could be newly come from the tennis courts, or from the stews, except that he is bloodlessly pale and dry.

“Turn around,” Henry says, and he does.

There is something uneasy in his step as he shifts his weight, and he does not look away; Hal looks back at him over his freckled shoulder, so the scar in his cheek tugs and pulls into a pale furrow. Time has healed his wound into a pale knot.

The cause of his reticence has become clear. There are nail-marks on his shoulders, shallow red tracks scoring the flesh — he is marked with the dreadful raw tracks of animal passion, like the tails of a whip. Henry would be happier if they were marks of violence, he truly would be — anything but what he sees and struggles to understand.

His eye can follow the long gash of Hal’s spine and unremarkable backside to his bruise-spangled upper thighs where his scarlet hose have begun to slink down. Are these the bruises of fingerprints, or the vulgar marks of a mouth? The prince has never worn a hairshirt; his tender flesh has never been pricked by a hundred thousand barbs or scored in faint parallel lines by the roughness of horsehair. It’s a body that warrants a penance for its very existence — some woman has been here and ravished him with pain.

“Turn and face me now. Look at me, Hal. Come here.”

Hal says nothing and obliges. Henry beckons him closer, to the edge of the bed, and tugs him down by the arm. The resistance in his arm is like bronze, but he kneels anyway, folding. Even Hal’s obedience has a truculent quality, an unpleasant lack of resistance calculated, Henry suspects, to make his father look like either a schoolmaster or a beast. Rather than fully oblige, he is forced to handle him like a child’s doll — manipulating him with the hands, turning him this way and that.

There are two bruises in Hal’s throat, purple at their center and going green at their edges. There is a red mark like a scuff in the swell of Hal’s breast, a bite alongside the bone — Henry presses it with two fingers to see the blood fleeting away, and Hal flinches, complaining. It is a bruise like the bruises on his thighs, left by the pinching of a lover’s kiss.

“Who left this here?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Who was she?”

Hal looks away. “My lord, I should be ashamed to even remember the name of a woman so common.”

“Get up, sit. If you spent half as much time kneeling in prayer as you do begging for my forgiveness, you wouldn’t have so much need of it. Come here and sit with me.”

The Prince of Wales shucks his hose down with the blade of a foot, first one calf and then another, while Henry frowns — abandoning the last of his linen is only a small concession. Naked, he slithers onto the bed, gripping the patterned curtain with a great hand; Henry exhales rawly under the shifting weight. His back is against the bedframe, and for a moment he is aware of each place on his body that aches or is stiff, every small joint that no longer works like it once did. Henry’s legs are stiff and ulcerated, scarcely able to bend at the knee. But the prince has strong legs, a rider’s legs — Henry’s hand spans his white leg in estimation. Whose weight has his son borne? What low companions have oppressed him — what fornications has he been party to in some low, laughing, tallow-scented establishment? What loose women have snared him in their arms, and let their oiled hair hang in webs over his face? What cruel women have practiced on him with their spells, and poisoned him with their satanic kisses?

“If you mean to keep an index of my body and its qualities, you should start after you’ve completed your own. Who gave you those scabs? Who cut your cheek trimming up your beard?”

“You come to me flaunting your excesses and expect me to overlook them. You did this to rub it in my face, what you’ve been doing. How could I not see it, when you’ve written it plainly for me?”

Hal squirms like a boy, clutching the bedclothes in his hands for lack of anything else to seize on. “You shouldn’t look for things you don’t want to find,” he says, too mortified even to cover his shame.

“If you go about treating your body like some common hostelry — someplace for all persons to go into and come out of — you’ll only injure yourself, and cheapen your own good breeding. You’ll go looking for your noble nature one day and won’t know what you’ve done with it.”

“Is that what’s become of your majesty, with so much pawing and handling and letting of blood? You want me kenneled up in your bedroom. No other bedfellow is good enough for the Prince of Wales, I should always be here—”

“Have I ever kept you from your rightful companions? Anyone with an authentic claim on your attention? Your brothers, your cousins, your knights. Or from pursuits fitting your state in life?”

“You’d love it if I spent all my time at the lists. You’d be happy if I came to you on crutches, all covered in bruises with my head bashed in. You’d be the first to stick your fingers in all my gashes.”

“I wish you would, Harry — I wish you’d spend your time preparing yourself for war and not pursuing idle pleasures. Your body will betray you one day — it’s important to me that you know this, I don’t want to see you smiling. In the year of Glendower’s rebellion — that was my second parliament, with heretics on all sides and men baying for blood, you know what happens when a man is punished for heresy, I saw that all these things were done. My body was failing, but I served the Holy Trinity as best I could. Still, at night I burned with lust. I found women and I knew them. That’s when this sickness of the body began.”

Hal is not smiling any longer, but frowning, with reddish brows drawn close together. He is practically in his father’s lap, all bare freckled skin and long bones; Henry can count the glinting hairs on his nape, newly-barbered.

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Learn from my example, and chasten your flesh. I’ve given up on telling you how to spend your time, or where to go, only don’t waste yourself. The summer of the rebellion, I lay with a woman who was not my wife and begot a son with her. One night of lust, and I’ll be repenting for it the rest of my life.”

Hal looks patently put-off. “You never told me that.”

“It was none of your business then. You were a boy. Now you’re old enough to curb your appetites.”

“Your father had more bastards than he could count, and he lived to a ripe old age. But returning to the subject of your son, my half-brother—”

“My father was a sinful man.” This line of inquiry bewilders him — it’s one thing to call himself a sinner and a wretch but another to extend his guilt to a greater magnate than himself, the man who gave him life. “He would have been the first to admit it.”

“And what we’re doing right now, that’s no sin. Only to look and touch, that’s no sin.”

This is a politic use of the word we.

“Please don’t start this. I am very tired. You’re too forward, Harry.”

Hal’s prick lolls red and soft against his thigh, limp and perfect. It must amuse him, to be so openly lewd in front of his own father. Henry cups his balls in his hand and feels their animal warmth against his palm. There is a steady pulse there, alongside the generative animal heat — when he closes his grip Hal makes a soft sound and straightens up, with the long muscles in his thighs trembling.

“You’re the one holding my cods,” Hal says. “What do you want me to say?”

“If you don’t climb down off me I’ll have to do something you won’t like. Learn to govern yourself.”

Hal presses his hands to his face and breathes out; his cheeks are burning red, and the welt of his scar is white. This is his prince finally shame-struck — too humiliated for words, with his tongue working inside his mouth and a fast pulse of fear beating in the pit of him, young and strong.

“I’ll be more circumspect,” Hal finally says.

“Be kinder to your body. Don’t abuse it.”

Henry releases him, a little regretfully, and Hal folds up away from him like a mathematical instrument in brass.

“May I put my clothes back on? I’m starting to feel the cold.”

You’ve had your fun for today, he means — or maybe he means to hunt down his father’s bastard and interrogate him about his intentions toward the royal succession.

“Yes, of course.”

“Thank you — bless you. Whatever I’ve done, I won’t do it again.”

Henry kisses him before he can dart away, not like a father — he can feel Hal’s neck stiffen and his head turn away, and it ought to make him ashamed but it tightens his resolve.

Henry breathes the smell of him, the smell of good health and sweet youth. If he could he would draw a bite out of the prince’s neck, to mark him — he would leave an indelible sign on him as a seal to consecrate him, as a warning against others who would misuse this young flesh. He would mark him out as royal property, with a perfect badge. Only when the Prince of Wales makes a sound does he release him — Hal nearly falls off the bed, so quick is he to make an exit.

“Now dress yourself and go. Remember that you’re mine, Harry.”