Nightingale of Grace

When next he sees him in the street, that familiar lanky outline and that battered blue coat picked out in gold, Ned laughs – grabs him by the waist and pulls him in for scrutiny, still laughing. The relief alone would have done it, but here’s his dearest friend and his next round of drinks all in one, all in one piece and alive, and who wouldn’t be glad? But the Prince of Wales is alive and well, God be thanked – his arms clasp back and his body responds in amicable kind, though when Hal releases him and Ned catches the look of his pale gray eyes he feels his own heart lurch like he’s just stepped for a missing stair. The prince is alive and back in London for a celebratory drunken tumble, no doubt. He radiates heat; no dead man could do that.

“Look at you, Henry, you’re certainly looking impressive–”

Edward goes to touch his face and his fingers light against the cicatrice that marks his cheek – a weal sunken in on itself and pitted, still an angry red. An arrow did that, not a dagger. What a sign of the essential unfairness of the universe that Sir John Falstaff, that hateful old tub of lard, comes back crowing like a conquering hero with scarcely a scratch on him, while the Prince of Wales takes a bolt to the face. A little to the right, and it’d have neatly split his aristocratic nose, a fingerbreadth higher and he might have lost an eye – he’d never say so, but it must be so, and the downward tug of the weal lends him a dour aspect. A little lower and he’d have lost some teeth. But just so, as precisely placed as if God Himself had readied the shot, and he’s lost nothing but his fresh-faced good looks.

Prince Harry isn’t laughing, and he looks to Poins with some expectation. There is something indefinably different in his bearing, some new rigidity; he’s thinner and drabber and still has the waxy look of someone who should be in bed, or at least sitting down. He can sit as much as he likes at Mistress Quickly’s table and fill them all in.

“Well? Anything to say for yourself?”

His voice is flat. Ned backtracks, reeling. “My lord, I’ve never been so glad to see you in my life. We’ve all been worried sick, rumor on the battlefield being what it is.” (You don’t look dead to me, he nearly says next, but not being a complete idiot, doesn’t.)

“So they made a soldier out of you after all, did they? I can’t believe it – I must have just missed you.”

Cringe. He had gone and done his part as a dutiful English son not to get murdered by rebels, and he doesn’t even have anything to show for it. He can hardly strip his sleeves and point to all the wounds he didn’t get by making sure he got outside of the other man’s way quick enough to stab him first, and the wickedest bruises lose their power to impress after the first six hours.

“I did ask to see you, Hal,” Ned says. “But your surgeon said he’d have me tried for treason if I interfered with his work, so I thought I’d better make myself scarce.”

Hal smiles quite coolly and inclines his head away from Ned’s hand. (Poins prudently withdraws.) “He would, that one, he’s ambitious. Mopping up bits of princes has given him a taste for nothing less, and he doesn’t like to share.”

“Knew you’d make it, though. It’d take more than that to knock you out of the running.”

(There had been blood – much blood. That Edward remembers with sober clarity, he’d never seen that much before and it had nearly taken the spirit of quarrel right out of him, knowing that much was in a man and could be uncorked at a moment’s notice. That pacifistic spirit hadn’t lasted out the slog back to Eastcheap, though, he’d broken a Welshman’s nose over some stupid jest while still on the road and now he has even more reason to make himself scarce.)

Hal smiles gawkily, and his cheek puckers. For a moment Ned doesn’t know if he’ll – horror of horrors – go soft for a moment and move to fold him in his arms, sweating and badly-starched, or if he’ll cuff past him and trip him up too on his way to the door.

“I need a drink,” he announces instead to nobody in particular, “for God’s sake. Who’ll drink with me?”

Ned’s heart stops; he’s frozen to the spot, and can think of nothing else but his own blunder, and all that blood. His answer comes out as a lamed rattle, but Hal’s already turned his back on him and is gone.

Men come back from the wars and they are different, this is a fact as far as Ned Poins knows it. They grow superstitious and beat their wives. The Prince of Wales is a changed man, and Ned might once have been confident taking it for another jape, a sort of tidal change that would sweep back again before too long. Hal’s earlier reformations had seldom managed to stick, and Eastcheap cobblestones under his feet usually set him upright again. But Henry has been altered now, and the outward shows of that alteration are like the first leaves to turn in a season – time to reap a profit while the opportunity still affords itself. When Hal’s good temper ebbs it’s like a change in the weather, and Ned knows enough to shun the cold.