sour herb of grace

Tomorrow, then, Hal comes again. Satisfaction is not requital, and once is not enough. The king’s surgeon has gone over Henry’s scabby breast with a forked steel blade and shorn away every living seedling from his sore places. If only it were so easy to cut beneath the skin, to cut out the green sap and let the red blood run. The priest has shriven him; the barber, in turn, has cropped his head and shorn his beard. Somewhere in England men cut the summer grasses, and in Henry’s royal gardens they pluck out the weeds by the root.

He had hoped to build his son anew again after battering him down and to remake him in his own image. Now nothing is certain. Once he is well again, and the weeds are plucked up from the garden of his body, he will make a pilgrimage to some distant holy place and dedicate himself for an offering.

“You’re not going to bathe with me today,” Henry says. “Get out.”

The bathtub is certainly grand enough for two, but the thought of sharing proximity so soon with the body of his son is faintly repulsive. He had hoped to avoid him a while longer.

“I bathe with all my friends,” Hal says lightly.

“Then don’t. It isn’t good for you.”

Henry means, to mix so promiscuously with the common folk, but when he recalls their own intermingling his throat grows dry. Can the shame be seen on his face, or is it concealed? After such a night it’s a wonder that Hal can stand to be in the same room with him by daylight. It’s a wonder any man alive can bear Henry’s company when his sin weighs on him so heavily — it hangs on him like a garment, like a visible sign.

“Yes, of course, I’d forgotten. Hot baths accustom a man to luxury, and my blood is already hot enough. Aren’t we friends? Let’s start again and it’ll be as if we’ve never met before.”

Henry manages a laugh. “If only that were possible.”

He ought never to have let this boy leave his side — familiarity would have killed this poison before it ever took root. If he had only seen more of him, if he’d been there to see Hal grow into manhood and in better company — he would see Hal for what he is, his son and his heir, and not a strange thing to be desired, not a relic of King Richard’s years like a carved hart or a gilt letter. For God’s sake, he would have Hal be a stranger to him or nothing at all.

He begins to rise from the tub, instinctively guarding himself. “I’ll leave you to it, Harry.”

“Please don’t go. I need to speak with you.”

“Then I’ll have hot water brought to your rooms.”

“Don’t bother — I’m here, aren’t I?

“What have you come here for?”

The prince of Wales is already undressing — gold-tipped laces tugging through silk-thread eyelets, ranks of buttons coming undone at one sweep. Henry drops back down again, splashing unhappily. He can hardly expect modesty from him, after last night — how can he deny him anything, now? How can he do anything without arousing worse suspicions? Let men think they are sharing secret counsels, that the king has summoned his son to impart some last grave wisdom from a dying man’s throat and not to use his own flesh and blood for a cure.

“I’ve come to make you glad,” Hal says. He rubs a towel over his chest and shoulders until they glow pink. In the morning light, his body is slim and hale, firmer to look at than it had been to touch — and Henry cannot look at him without remembering how it felt, how it was to grip him by the arm or to move his leg into a more convenient position. Holding him in memory is like holding a hot coal.

Henry reaches for a cup of wine, making his fresh wounds prickle. He won’t look at the boy if he can help it. The king of England has already been soaked and sponged and scrubbed; all that remains is to take in the damp heat of the bathwater and to let salts and herbs do their work. He has done what he has done to salve his ailing body and to bring his mind rest. Having spent his seed in an unsuitable place, he can go back to being ashamed of himself; this shame is a promising sign of recovery.

Hal sinks into the tub with a young man’s grace. His long legs unfold in the tub, bumping against Henry’s ulcerated limbs painfully. It can’t be intentional, but it makes Henry frown and tug back anyway. Hal is a tall man, more like his grandfather than he is like Henry — or whatever strain made Richard, that is borne out in him too.

King Richard was never a broad man but he had the uncanny ability to magnify himself to fill a room, spreading out sleeves and skirts and long gracious legs to edge out lesser men. Hal is broader through the shoulder than the dead king was, better equipped to bear arms and thicker in the thigh from riding, but these trifles do little to efface the resemblance. Men may know better to remark on it, but they know the similarities just the same. In some families the blood is strong.

Henry had wanted him, not even thinking of his beauty, not dwelling on his body — it didn’t begin with beauty, it began with the desire to understand, the desire to possess. If only it had stopped there, he wouldn’t be where he is today, eaten up by a lover’s disease. Even if this man were not his son, he is still the last imaginable person with whom Henry would volunteer to be yoked in sodomy — Hal is beautiful, he is young, he is impatient, he is foolish. And he cannot leave well enough alone.

The Prince of Wales begins again as if picking up a dropped thread in the conversation rather than puncturing an uneasy pause: “At any rate, I was always under the impression that children were an encumbrance to you. You were always packing up to go somewhere else until we boys were old enough for soldiering.”

As if men were put on earth to tend the nursery, and as if Henry were the agent of his own exile. Hal ought to hate King Richard and instead he hates his father — the perversity of the young. Henry frowns. “It was hardly by my own choice.”

It’s such an absurd complaint to bring out, now of all times. He couldn’t have taken half a dozen children barely old enough to say their prayers into exile — on crusade, over the ocean, to the continent.

“Well, you might have written.”

How ridiculous he sounds, how sullen. “I wrote many letters concerning your wellbeing, for all that you’ve appreciated them. I wrote to your tutors, I wrote to your uncles — I wrote to your mother when she was alive, may God rest her soul, and it never did you a bit of good.”

Hal unfolds his long arms over the tub’s linen-lined edge, loose-jointed and easy. “But you never did write to me.”

“When have I ever let you want for anything? Have you ever gone hungry? No, no, I understand, all this richness embarrasses you. You’d have been better off as a tanner’s boy, sleeping ten to a bed and feeling up your sisters.”

“Tell me, father, have you ever slept in a poor man’s bed?”

Hal’s wet foot presses in between his ankles, bony and insistent. He has long narrow feet, which once might have made a felicitous concession to courtly fashion; that passing Italianate fancy for everything that seemed to elongate the leg could only have truly flattered one man alone.

Henry stiffens, raising his head. “I know this imposition hasn’t been easy for you.”

“That’s a nice word for it. The king imposes himself, and his suspects suffer imposition, no matter what their degree. To retrieve me from my usual haunts, oh, yes, that was an imposition. To bend my knee and bow my head is only discipline. To take me to bed—”

There is a faint ring of mimicry in his voice, a mockery of round tones and somber declarations. Henry knows when he is being goaded.

“Did I use violence? Did I seize you at the point of the sword and carry you away? If you knew even a portion of what I’ve done to keep you in a manner befitting your blood, you wouldn’t dare spit on your patrimony this way.”

Hal’s voice is plain again, his face void and unreadable. “I should spit in your face.”

Quick as a serpent striking, Hal presses a hand between Henry’s scabbed thighs, just at the top where they meet. Henry jerks back, sending the bathwater splashing,

“For God’s sake, Harry—“

“This is what you want, isn’t it? I’ve taken my medicine cheerfully, now take yours.”

“For Christ’s sake, let’s settle this in privacy.”

Henry dismisses his servants with a pounding heart and a sudden pain in his head — Hal is driving needles into him, there is a stake driven into his brains and Hal is the one wielding the hammer. His body courses all over with cold chills, despite the temperature of the water.

 

Once they’re alone, Hal lowers his voice — when it’s of least use, now that the horror of this disease has been spoken aloud. “Do you not want me, now that you’ve had me once? Have you soured on me so soon?”

“I want you here with me. I won’t send you away now that I’ve called you here. But I don’t want you for that. Not anymore.”

“You wanted the use of me, and now you’ve changed your mind? This cure of yours certainly works fast.”

“For God’s sake, I cannot be a father to you now. What do you want me to say?”

“Say you aren’t satisfied with me. Say it isn’t me you’re wasting away for, say you haven’t had enough of me to be cured of your disease. Tell me what you want from me, and I’ll give it.”

Henry groans, pressing his face in his hands. Confession has not absolved him, absolution has not washed him clean. His body aches with remorse for what he has done, it burns with the guilt of its members, and the uneasy recollection is with him still — the memory of how Hal’s firm young body had ceased to resist. How can he compensate him for what he’s done?

“For pity’s sake, stop. I never wanted this. What’s past is past. Let it be over.”

“Tell me what you want from me. I can’t give you what you won’t ask for.”

“What do you want me to say?

“Say what you want. I’ll do anything, so long as you keep your word to me. I would cut my throat right here if you asked me to. I only want to know what you want from me.”

“I want you to obey me.”

“Then let me be your faithful subject.”

To love is to obey, and Henry has never succeeded in achieving that. Hal kisses him on the mouth, wet-skinned and lingering — his hands are dripping wet, where he takes Henry’s shorn face in his hands. Henry knows that he is old and that he is haggard; he can only grow uglier and dwindle. His son has stolen away all his strength and left him with nothing. Do all fathers feel this way? Eaten up like a cancer.

Henry coughs and chokes; Hal takes his soft cock in his hand; his manipulations are slow and sure, and the blood runs to meet him. Henry’s prick stirs to fill his hand, for that offending part is only too eager to sin again — he has never been so eager to sin in all his life, it must be the blight of some unmapped star, come to lay a baleful influence over the beds of kings.

Not even his surgeon touches him like this — no woman, no mistress. Hal draws him out with lewd touches, finding his shameful places as if to coax them out; he cups his member in his hand, pressing into the head of it with his thumbnail, and Henry quails.

“You must make confession as soon as we’re through, I insist on it — my confessor will see to it, he understands the position I am in, he knows—“

Henry turns his face against his shoulder, covering his nose and mouth and eyes with one wet hand. He wants to draw in close to him until they are joined into one, the old king and the new. Hal’s wet hand catches him by the back of the neck; his eyes peer into Henry’s own with level intensity.

“Don’t talk, only breathe. I’ll bring you through it.”

Hal’s tone is stern, as though he is the tutor and Henry his pupil. There is nothing merry about him, nothing reckless, he undertakes this as a grave duty and that is sickening — trying to stir his father’s sick desires to a purpose. Who taught him this? Who showed him these lewd ways — what friend, what cousin? Boys know these things; they inflict them on one another and they abuse their own members just as carelessly.

Cousin Richard would have done it like this: not suffering to rub himself between the thighs of his minions as if they were boys but despoiling their mouths and hands. That is what makes Henry quicken and stir, the thought of Richard flung carelessly against one of his treacherous favorites, with a great spanning hand at work beneath the surface of the water. Everything fragrant with rose petals and burning with hot blood — King Richard come again, sensuous and useless, calling him nearer to close the distance between them. See the very image of the late king, beardless and glittering —with rings on his fingers, like the garnet ring that glistens on the little finger of Hal’s left hand, the hand that is so busy in Henry’s lap. He cannot catch his breath, he cannot clear the passage of his throat. It is no longer pleasure that bears him forward to his climax but grim obligation.

Hal slips against him like a lewd woman, pressing into him with his outer thigh, and Henry gasps with the pain, gasps with the burst of pleasure it gives him.

See the very image of Richard at his last, furious and spitting with anger with shattered glass under his feet — Richard at the end, the dead man’s face uncovered and laid bare for his last procession, so that all men might see his waxen brow and clouded eye. Richard slain by Exton’s hand and entombed at Langley, laid up under stones that will not be overturned until the Last Judgment. On that day, cousin Richard will rise up in pieces, and give testimony against the men who slew him.

Once Henry has spilled his guilty mess, he will scour himself raw and beat his breast, he will tear at himself with his nails, he will prick himself with needles and score himself with thorns — only to be rid of this mad desire for the image of a dead man. It will all be over so soon.

As soon as he has spent, Henry jerks back, retching. He is choking, but what he vomits up now is only a purgation, only the last of the corruption leaving his body — his sick desire has been satisfied and true remorse is taking its place, cutting through him like the blade of a plough.

“You should hate me,” Hal says, rising briskly from the water before the stain of blood can meet his flesh. “That might cure you.”

If the prince is moved to compassion by the sight of his father’s suffering, he keeps his compassion to himself. There is blood in the water, and scarlet petals.