much ado with red and white

Summer comes in, and the king of England is dying.

Henry has made a study of kings and their sins — their luxury and folly, their spite and their lechery, the blood of murdered men crying out from the earth. Becket’s brains cast out on the ground — the blood of Edward and Richard spilled in turn. It was Arthur who knew the sin of incest — was that the first sin, or it was some other crowned king with a buried flaw, further back still in the ages when giants walked the land? Some other man who bore the seed of sin.The seed that is buried in the line of English kings will come to flower, eventually.

This is a king’s disease. Arthur committed the sin of incest by getting a child with his own sister, all unwitting. What that would do to a man, Henry cannot imagine — that hindsight-knowledge of a fatal error like a wound. What he will do is a calculated folly, like the cutting of a surgeon’s knife.

There are no neat words for what exists between himself and his son, and no prescribed penances — it is always trembling at the edge of vision like a candle shielded by someone’s fingers, with the glare filtered to a dull glow by the screen of flesh. He wants him now, and what he will do with him is beside the point. When he has secured the object of his desire, then he will be rid of this sickness of the flesh.

He is sick of the sight of them, these children of his body, born of fleshly matter. Their roots have formed a knot around his heart, and his body is to them a private and enclosed garden. The flowers are common ones, he is told, with their scarlet petals browning with gore and their bruised stems twisted at the neck. Clove-pinks, red at the ragged edge and white at the bitter root; his sickroom smells like a confectioner’s shop, like Christ’s nails. Who will cut this sickness out of him? Call the prince from his low resorts and base companions, and have him come — the Prince of Wales will be as a surgeon to his soul. He will be his cure.

*

The scarlet bed with the brazier burning and the smell of flowers like a stillroom — the perfume of cut grasses is in the air. Surgeons and servants, his eldest sons gathered around him as if for audience, and all he sees is one man.

Henry dismisses his attendants, carrying their pitchers and implements, but John does not move from his spot — the young prince stands sentry at the far wall, watching his elder brother like a warder with his charge. He’s been frowning since he arrived, as if he knows.

“You may leave us,” King Henry says, as an afterthought.

“Are you sure?” John is dark like his father, and permanently displeased.

“You have served me well, boy. I have no more need of you. You may go.”

There will be no witnesses.

The sight of Harry makes his heart throb like a bruise. This by contrast is the sign, this is the principal indication that he has found the object of his desire — that he cannot look on his own son without pain.

He doesn’t need to ask if Hal is well — it is difficult not to take his sheer good health as a personal insult. His complexion is fresh, and his face is completely unreadable. Henry’s throat is stuck close, and terribly dry — he makes a gesture with one monstrous hand and Hal rises to his feet.

If he resents his brother for being the one to retrieve him, he doesn’t show it by acknowledging his exit. At the bedside the Prince of Wales is dressed all in rumpled blue — a short gown edged in sandy fur, deep dull blue like the waters of the Channel. Young men these days so seldom wear long gowns these days — as a consequence their bodies are exposed to any invidious eye. The grace of his legs is offset by the dust of the road, settled in the creases of his smooth close hose.

The two of them are left alone, the sick king in a scarlet bed with his crown on a silk pillow and Hal in blue like a chapel ceiling, spangled in stars. Henry cannot remember whether Richard wore blue — it would have suited him similarly, with his yellow hair and the high color in his cheeks. At times he does not know who it is here with him — and is it not true that he looks at his son and sees an enemy?

“I had a dream last night,” his son says at last, “that you were delivered of this.”

“Tell me.” Henry makes a fist in the bedclothes to steady himself upright.

“You made your pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and you washed in the waters of the Jordan and were healed.”

Hal reaches for his hand and Henry permits him to take it; his fingers are ungloved and the long white bones are terribly close to the surface.

“Have you brought me those Jordan waters now? Or only your tears? Have you come to weep for me?”

“I’d weep, if it would do you any good.”

He will never ride on campaign again, unless this cancer of flowers is cut away. A man with no breath cannot ride, and when he calls commands the petals choke him. He cannot be seen this way — sick, sagging, white and gaunt, rough with beard,

Henry can see it in his son’s face, as Hal’s pity shrinks away to a kind of cool hard awareness of advantage — he may be sleepless and ill-used but his eyes are clear, he sees everything.

“You should see Jerusalem before you’re old, Harry. I’ve never felt so close to the face of God as there, before the holy sepulcher — I felt it wash away every mean thing in me, every wrong I had ever done.

“I suppose I’ll see it some day,” he says, sanguine. “I’ll wash in Jordan waters and come home God’s own soldier.

“We’ve been apart too long. Let me look at you.”

His eldest son is fashioned ruddy and raw, long and straight and full of blood. He is too young to imagine how the weight of sickness oppresses a man, he’s too young to have aching knees and broken sleep. Even grievous wounds he wears jauntily. He is a man and not a boy; the breadth of his back and the hard bones of his shins can speak to this, the ravaged cheek and smooth considering look. The serene remove of those eyes is withering. On Richard that look compelled grown men to kneel; on Harry it will make grown men tell the truth.

Henry wants to live — to live to see his grandchildren, to look on that place where Christ walked and to feel the sins of the past decade peeled away from him like an old garment. He wants more than he can stomach. He wants something that has no name.

Henry realizes to his shame that he has begun to weep — the sight of his son, shining like Christ, has made tears to stand in his eyes. This is blasphemy, a terrible and bitter blasphemy — he can only let the tears stream freely, as the shallow breaths catch in his throat and the terrible smell of cloves fills his mouth.

“Let me wipe your face,” his son says, frowning.

He has no intention of waiting for permission, but Henry croaks in assent. Hal dries the sweat from his brow and the spittle from his cheek.

Here he has become like the depraved old king in a clerk’s exemplum — mad with lust and stricken with vanity, lost to the folly of his own lechery. Knowing this does not make it easier. What a thing it is to lie awake burning with terrible knowledge, to be pressed on all sides with the heavy cares of state and to be struck with a blow from an impossible quarter, to be driven deep with a wound

Henry mutely opens his mouth and lets the linen cloth swab loose a falling petal. Seeing is different than telling, in these things — there are those who would say this disease is nothing more than a pretty metaphor for poets, that it is nothing more than crafty-artful lovers’ talk. Henry knows the truth of it.

The cure for this disease is the satisfaction of desire — monstrous appetites must be fed, like those of pregnant women who crave the taste of chalk. Henry must keep very still, or his appetite will show on his face. The proximity makes him burn, not only with desire but with a great thrill of discomfort — Hal kisses him solemnly on the mouth, like a son kisses a father, and it is all Henry can do not to dig his fingers into the flesh of his neck to cling there.

He wants this cure more than anything. He wants satisfaction. Hal must sense the turn of the tide in him, because he pulls back, taking an uneasy knee at the bedside.

Henry falls back in the cushions, dragging up the coverlet to his sweating armpits. He is already too hot and too cold all at once — he is taken in a fever, he is all-over with prickling misery. How can a young man understand? His body has betrayed him long ago; that much is at least not new, and he can index every defective part as well as his surgeons can, every ulcerated inch of himself is as known to his own mind as if it were written in one of those narrow books the surgeon carries at his belt.

“Get out. I forbid you to see me.”

“I’ve ridden a long way, I’ve come through all this pomp and dignity, and now you dismiss me. Have I done something to offend you?”

Not the gutter wit but the apprehensive boy, a boy again and not a man old enough to have children of his own. At Hal’s age Henry was already a father some five times over.

“You don’t want to see me. You would rather I die alone here, unattended.”

“You’ve dismissed your attendants, the better to raise your voice with me. You are sick.”

As if Harry is the father, and he the son.The bed is choked with the vegetal smell of decay, and the green sweetness of broken stems. Hal tugs open his robes, plucking at bandages — he has Richard’s manner of impatience, yanking back Henry’s only covering like the dead king would have drawn back the bed curtains or torn apart a cloth wrapping. Hal’s long fingers find the stiff bandages cradling his shoulder, and begin to tug at them.

“Has the surgeon bled you again? He should take it from the head, not the heart.”

“Don’t touch me,” Henry says, “unless you’re ready for what you’ll see.”

“Do you think I’ll flinch from the sight of a wound now? I’m the son of a king, I was born for bloody fields and carrion birds. I’ve worn your wounds for half a dozen years.”

“Not like these.”

The last bandage comes away, lacquered with grease until it is stiff like a shell, and with it come the green leaves. The joint of Henry’s shoulder is taken up with great patches of blossoms like blisters — scabbed with crushed petals, and stinking like a mown-down garden. Hal cannot keep the naked horror from showing in his face, and it strikes Henry like a blow.

“What is this? What have you done to yourself?”

Henry grabs him, pulls him close. “Do you believe me now? Will you come when I call you now? Or will you make me wait?”

“I didn’t know.”

“You knew. Every London waterman knows the king is sick with a filthy disease, and likely to die from it.”

“You know that’s not true, or you’d be ruled by committee now, you’d be governed like a boy. They’d have you answering to a stable of regents, like old King Richard. Or young King Richard, I should say.” This burst of arch cruelty could scarcely be more measured — something has gone away behind his face.

“Don’t talk to me about things you don’t understand. You don’t know anything — you’ve never let me teach you.”

“I know what you want.”

“Then you know what the cure is. It won’t take much on your part, and it’ll mean everything to me.”

“You already know that I love you. I’m your natural son. If you want me to go down on my knees like a dog at Westminster before everyone we know and bare my breast for you to strike at, I’ll do it. Only don’t ask this of me.”

“Why?”

“It’s the kind of sin you’d have blushed to name once. I know what you want, and I won’t do it. Ask for anything else and I’ll give it to you, but not this.”

“You’ve done it for love of joy before. In fact, it would be harder to find some person of low degree who you haven’t fucked. Don’t bother protesting, it’s the truth and your own confessor says it.

“Rather than begetting bastards.” There is a strange fierce smile on his face, a shameless tilt of the head. “A prince should know enough to be politic.”

“That is sodomy, by definition.”

“And what you’re now proposing is — what, exactly?”

Incest is a word for clerks, and you’re no man’s daughter. Who taught you that word? What made you think it signified anything?

“I am dying, Harry, I will die. Give me the loan of your body, and you’ll have my blessing.”

There is no word for what he is and for what he desires, for the compounding of two mortal sins into a balm. In poison there is physic. He will have his Harry in small portions,

The prince has fallen to sullen silence, but the color is still high in his cheeks, making the scar stand out white. His eyes have fixed on the glass dish of oil at the bedside; it gives off the sacramental odor of lilies. Henry pictures his fresh-pared fingernails scratching at oiled flesh and his stomach quails a little with sick desire.

“With all due respect, you’ve been dying since I was ten years old. What makes this different from every other time you’ve recalled me to your side only to rally again?”

Hal makes a gesture; Henry snatches his hand from the air.

“Put your hand here and tell me you think I’ll live.” He takes his hand and thrusts it into the mess of his left shoulder — the vegetable matter there is wet and clinging, coming away easily like loose turf. The stiffening of Hal’s fingers gives him a thrill like triumph — the prince is at a loss for words. His imperious wits have failed him. “You know that I love you. I’ve done terrible things to secure your patrimony. If you loved me, you’d do this much in return.”

At length, the prince recovers his speech. His face has gone terribly white; he is trembling.

“How can you say this as if it’s reasonable? I’ve kissed enough relics, now let’s kiss my son? How long have you wanted your tongue in my mouth?”

At once Henry is taken in a fit of coughing that shakes the whole bed frame — he crushes a cloth to his mouth but not in time, and the blood gushes out between his fingers, wrung out from somewhere deep and strange. There is no longer any pain, which the surgeons say is a grave sign; his mouth is full of the spill of blossoms and the stink of crushed rue like a new-turned feather bed. Hal is cringing with disgust, jerking back as if this complaint is catching — no, when the king suffers he suffers alone. He should taste what fills Henry’s mouth — broken petals and blood.

“You don’t want me to get better,” Henry rasps in his blossom-broken voice. “It’s a natural thought, in your position.”

“You are my father,” Hal says, but his tongue is stumbling, he doesn’t know what to say that will get him out of this, he wants to get out of this, but Henry has him, like a hare in a noose. “This is not right.”

“What does a hot young polecat know of what’s right? A young, livesome, effeminate boy who keeps low company. It’s you who did this to me. You must be my cure.”

His son does not say, how did I do it, how am I responsible; he knows. “I’m not denying that, but as your God-given son I only think it’s right to try something else first—“

“The next cure is the knife. No one survives it. This is easier.”

“A sick man can’t afford to commit a mortal sin. You could die any moment.“

“I’ll make a prompt confession, and so will you. Should I bring my confessor here to see it is well done, and decently? He’s a Godly man, he understands my – infirmity.”

“If you love this priest so much, let him do the honors.”

The one thing worse than the act would be the witness. There is no other living soul he would rather have here with him, in this terrible close chamber with its painted stars and harps, none other but his son.

“You are my cure, Harry. Only you. I should curse you — I should lay a father’s curse on you, for your disobedience. I should hate you. God knows why I don’t.”

Hal’s face is savage in resolve. “If I go to bed with you, will you resign the crown?

“If you do this for me I’ll do it gladly. I’m ready to be rid of this majesty. I’ll set aside my crown for — by Christ, I don’t know. You can take it, I don’t want it any more.”

Those would be the words that excite his son’s pity — for pity is the most he can hope for, pity would be enough, pity is more fitting for a son than hate. Hal is rigidly attentive, like a dog with its ears pricked.

“Do you give me your word?”

“I do.”

“Then let’s do what we’ll do, and be done with it.”

“Take off your clothes.”

Hal removes his gown and unlaces himself, like a man drawing out his own entrails — clumsily. Does he dress himself in the mornings, when he tarts himself up like a common tapster and sleeps in a rented bed with fly-bitten hangings, or does he impress another man into service? The sleeve slips away from his shoulder, baring a slash of white sleeve; Henry cannot keep from watching closely, nor from the anticipation of more body bared in the unpiecing of parts. The boy looks like the God of Love, standing there in hose and braies — the pale linen linings show through where the unpointed laces hang down, and his pale legs stand out in gooseflesh. His shirt hangs from his hand.

“Is this sufficient?”

“I want you naked.”

Hal tugs down his linen and draws off his hose; his cock and balls are softly flushed, drawn up with fright. Henry feels choked nausea rising in him again, and thin hot desire.

At last his son casts away his shirt and slips in beside him, under the bedclothes. The mattress sags beneath their weight, and the bedcurtains seem to draw closer. Like King David in his cold bed, Henry thinks — the warmth of Hal’s body is like a furnace. For all his beardless cheeks, he has prickling hairy legs, and cold feet that quest for one another under the covers.

“What would please you? What do I need to do to show you how well I love you? Tell me and I’ll do it.”

“I don’t know.”

The king could weep, if it would do him any good. He only wants to be close to his son — so terribly close, to take back into his substance what was once created,

“You want me to show you? If I’m so practiced in vice, I’ll be your tutor.”

“There’s nothing to teach.”

“How would you have me? Do you know what men do together? Have you thought on it much, here on your sickbed?”

What men do together in army camps, and Turkish palaces, and the very streets of Sodom — wherever men are weak and given over to lechery and bent to unnatural purposes. He has known Hal in his dreams; when he sleeps he dreams of his son, of his son’s golden hair and white thighs and white neck, and what he dreams of is obscene. To know him waking is something else.

“Come here and lie next to me.”

He does not say, don’t make me use force, but if it takes the last of his strength, he will use it.

“I will.”

“You’ll give yourself to me without reservation, without withholding, and I’ll never ask as much of you again.”

“I have. I will.”

His strapping son sinks down next to him like a drunken man, or a person knocked flat by a blow. He presses the heels of his hands to his face, and grimaces.

Henry pulls him over onto his side with the iron strength of a dead man, fitting against his back and his thighs and the split of his backside like a hard contour — pressing him forward onto the edge of his hip and making him groan. His body is sleekly resistant. Richard looked like this once — in hysterics on a stone floor, like a man who does not yet know he is defeated.

Henry presses his fingers in the dish of oil like a priest dispensing chrism; cringingly eager, he finds the secret places of Hal’s body, tightly furled and resistant.

He goes about moving his limbs into a more convenient position, as though Hal were a sick girl and not a man — some girl sick with nerves at her marriage to a haggard old man with retrograde appetites. His own desire is no longer an appetite but an agony to be slaked, and the ache in his loins is a viciousness that could tear him in pieces if he’d let it.

At the first press, Hal loses his courage:

“Oh, God. Oh, Christ. No, I’ve changed my mind, reign forever for all I care. I’ve changed my mind—”

“Not now,” Henry says.

There’s no turning now. He fucks into him like any hole, and his heart breaks.

it is a hunger and a horror to see him humbled and bent, laid down and laid low — Henry weeps pitifully against his back, but he does not flag, he does not lose his mettle. The tightness of his passage is punishing; Henry must grip his thighs to keep him in place

Hal is pretending that it is someone else’s weight on him, that it is one of his loose companions or some stranger buggering him with all the exquisite pain of being had conveniently. Henry can facilitate that if it will make this easier. He presses his face in the cushions; the back of Hal’s neck is sweating, and it joins against his palm seamlessly.

He should wear his hair long; the color of it is like neglected gold. Henry presses his mouth to the nape of that bent neck, between the fingers of his own hand, and sucks a bite.

He can’t keep himself from finishing — pouring himself out inside like a cataclysm. Henry presses his fingers to the site of their joint shame — his seed is body-hot, and perhaps there is blood mingling with the marrow-matter of his spending. Hal sucks an irritable breath, tightening against him. How like a wound — a pierced place, made raw and slack with pressing. His fingers slip inside the raw place and Hal’s body jerks against him, crying out. This matter is the product of his sickness. Now he knows for certain that his love is all spent. His desire is satisfied, and he may at last begin to recover.

*

“I am not cruel,” he says afterward, not expecting an answer. “Am I?”

His hand is on the crease of Hal’s thigh; the long bones of his tortured feet graze against the backs of Hal’s long calves. He strokes at him impotently with his blue-veined hands, as tender as one supposes he can. An apology is beyond both of them.

“Don’t ask me that.”

Afterward the prince lies beside him, quite docile. His son does not sleep, though they’ve lain there an unbearable while; no doubt he is listening to the labored draws of royal breath, and praying that they may diminish into nothing. His son’s body is all twitching softness, uneasily shifting extremities. Between their breathing there is only disquieted silence, as if something has been irrevocably broken.

Henry slips from bed, to his aching knees.

He is sick of sin now, sick of his desires and sicker still of having them satisfied — he has spent himself, he has committed the last sin too black to be named, and now he can recover himself. Now he is cured, and this retrograde urge in him has been put down. Now he can return to his business as a Godly king, and a better father.

Henry prays voicelessly, with hands folded so tightly that his knuckles are ready to split. He has done a terrible thing, he will be atoning for it until the end of his life, but he will not die. He will live long enough to make great reforms, to wear the crown and atone for how he got it, to lift up his children until they are among the greatest names in Christendom — all of Europe will come to see the men his sons will become, with such a humble and merciful father, contrite of his sins. The pain in his guts has dimmed to an empty throb; the garden-rustle of blooming matter in his chest has settled to a solidity like a fist. His own polluted body is salted with sweat, as if he’s come from a game of tennis.

When he opens his eyes, the prince, his son, is looking down at him from over his bent knees.

“I quite wish I’d taken you up on confession, now.”

He is wan-faced as he jokes; he crosses his ankles and presses his heels into the mattress’ edge. Hal looks diminished, collapsed like a folded garment.

“Tomorrow, then. Do it tomorrow.”