...on the earth, and not on him

York had related, between waves of palsied dread, that Richard was to be permitted to rest at a certain house along their way, to bathe and to change his clothes. Richard had thanked him with all the dignity he could manage. He has not lost all courtesy. And now they have left him alone, wonderfully alone.

Richard still remembers taking a bath before his coronation, that moment of clarity in between all the sacred chaos – heavy-pressed with the sense that it ought to feel different, that he should feel different, even before the words had been spoken and the oil had gone on. (Let alone the crown.) He’d been giddy with anticipation then instead of fatigue, and the water had smelled nice, and afterward his hair had been brushed until it shone, and no one could say he hadn’t looked the part of king. He’d been a boy then, and fretted over.

He knows he cannot look well, no matter what he does, poorly slept and travel-stained – for the first time in his life he has little appetite (his stomach churns too badly with choking fear) and even less opportunity to satisfy it, when everything he now is must be appraised by these men in light of what he once was. He doesn’t know whether it’s worse when his erstwhile subjects look on him or when they don’t, when all eyes are turned on Bolingbroke and the name of Henry is in every mouth, and Richard is nothing more to him than a little page, or a hireling lagging behind in long shadow. Richard cannot look well, not now, but if he can be clean and presentable for the occasion of his own undoing it might do him good.

Richard washes his hands first, then his face, and he realizes next with dull distaste that he needs to rinse out his hair. Undressing himself, he notes the particles of dust and straw that fall from his clothes – here a flake of ash, a pebble, mere shadows in comparison to stones and clods of filth. Disrobing it is impossible not to quiver a little with repulsion at his stiff and uncompliant joints, the dust and sweat ground into his skin at every crease – Richard is disgusted with himself, for being so stale and grimy and fatigued, for rankling so strongly at superficialities when the worst is surely yet to come. He will only grow uglier. The attitude of sad forbearance is chiefly an outward thing; inwardly he is sore and snappish. His heels had begun to bleed through into his shoes.

The bathwater is still half-warm but he shivers; sinking into it is like like putting on another garment, heavily scented with roses. Who in this house favors roses this much? He can’t decide for himself whether it’s meant to be a courtesy or a slight, but it feels somehow bridal, and he sickens. Fatigue and the cool air have blanched his freckled shoulders, and the veins stand out in his arms, but the autumn sun has scorched a red line along the edge of where his garments have failed to cover – likely across the bridge of his nose as well, he can feel it when he presses his eyes shut, the tug of sunburned skin. Not enough for the moon to show signs upon his downfall – the sun as well, fat and low and shining red on bare roadside and crowded lanes alike.

Richard washes his bleeding heels and tries to will some of the soreness away from his legs. Weeks of intermittent hard riding and uneasy rest have wasted him; he is one all-over bruise, but an itemized list of parts isolates what requires his attention most and what least. Numbering each place of discomfort as he finds it, and going after it until he feels whole again – if not well, then intact – is a slow business but therapeutic. Like one of those drawings in surgeons’ almanacs of men being bled, and where to go about doing it – ankles and feet, knees and legs, thighs and groin. Belly and chest and back and shoulders. All down his arms, and up again to his throat. His hands linger there for a moment, splayed like a collar, feeling for a pulse that no longer beats sickeningly quick. His body is sound. He will be well. The dread in his belly has begun to uncoil and his surroundings look friendlier for it. The tapers shine brighter, and the water looks clearer. All his hurts are superficial ones, nothing to grieve him. Christ had suffered far worse for far less. Henry wishes to be seen in his mercy; all these scrapes and pains may well be the worst of it. They won’t strip him, won’t flog him, won’t drag him from Westminster in chains.

– and he is grateful, hopelessly grateful for the little that constitutes Henry’s mercy, and when recognized this almost breaks him in two. He’s grateful that the water isn’t filthy, that he can pick the gravel out of his feet and not hear jests or flinch from thrown stones. Grateful that he is only bruised and bone-sick and tired, en route to his own deposition and doom. Richard is grateful that they haven’t dragged him from his horse and brutalized him as they had Wiltshire and Bushy and Green – thankful that his wife has not yet been ravished. What kind of gratitude is this? A man might weep, and yet Richard does not; his face is a stiff mask of disgust that feels nothing like his own. He has wept enough since Flint.

There are footsteps at the door, and Richard’s spine stiffens. He hugs his knees a little, conspicuously oversized and feeling the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.

They won’t kill him here. They will kill him somewhere else, but not here, in someone else’s shabby bathroom with uneven tiles and a leaking tub. He will die tomorrow, having laid aside the crown – not today. They won’t kill him here. Richard doesn’t even know whose house this is.

Hearing neither the heavy clank of an armed man’s impatient presence nor the more insidious approach of Northumberland for God-knows what, he turns, and it’s only a woman – a Fleming, he would think by her look, bearing fresh towels and fresh clothes along with a blue ewer. She does not seem troubled by the presence of a naked man in her tub – indeed, does not acknowledge him beyond a distracted motion of the head. She hums to herself in the course of her business and leaves as briskly as she’d arrived in a swirl of plain skirts.

This is so ordinary as to seem unreal. Richard’s mouth opens, too late – not knowing if he should have spoken with her, should have greeted the stranger or scolded her or called her by her own title and clapped a jewel into her roughened hand for her trouble. (The last of the ornaments that he’s qualified to give away is a brooch – pawned it would hardly buy him an army, but it might have done this woman considerable good.) It scarcely seems possible that this woman doesn’t know who he is, and that the masters of this place hadn’t told her the nature of their unhappy guest. If she knew, she had wanted nothing to do with him, and she hadn’t been afraid. This is cruel but it is good – he doesn’t want common men’s courtesies, not any more, not their admiration, not their notice, nothing. Her life will carry on as it had, she will receive no especial blessing for standing in the presence of a king, and just as well.

Better to become familiar with this now, small things being easier to swallow than great ones. He shudders and sinks back to stare at his unmarked hands.