As With A Sword In My Bones

The common people say that he’s a saint, or the next best thing – regal in manner and goodly to look upon, patient and forbearing, suffering, sacrificial. They pry up the turf and stones that had drunk his sacred blood (not that he’d even died there, Henry’s father says, he’d died in a fever at the Tower, puking up his guts with a cracked skull and screaming for his mother). They mint medals and present to him their sick, their simple, their afflicted and their young. Edward’s son has taken his place with his great-grandfather in popular veneration – and they say it is all Gaunt’s doing, but they aren’t thanking him.

Young King Richard had been willing to negotiate, to grant worthy demands and to help revise those demands that were overambitious. He had been young and cheerful, not tarnished over by the cynical counsels of old men and the contrivances of ambitious women. Meanwhile, Gaunt had fled like a coward, and given the young king up to rough handling – the mythical brave boy, the ill omen, thrown from the saddle to strike his head and die. He’d been confident on horseback since he was old enough to ride. Henry thinks about how it must have happened – one mistake, one surprise sufficient to make an unseasoned horse shy back, one blunder. How readily the people forget everyone else who died that day – all those of their own rank, for that matter, the mass hangings and all those who didn’t even live long enough to end up on the scaffold. They must have forgotten, if they can believe it. The young king intercedes for them in heaven, and the details are smoothed over.

Henry prays on his knees. He’s accustomed to pray for deliverance, more or less simply, before heading off to the tilt or some doomed excursion in the field (and they are all doomed, even the ones he wins, beneath his father’s jaundiced eye) and it’s all been very orthodox. The words are right, the gestures are standardized, he’s never sneered at a priest or sniggered behind a bishop’s back. His father may not have much regard for a few individual representatives of the Church, but they are by and large a family that keeps to the rules, and that pays the necessary compensation when it stumbles. It makes the whole near-theological confusion regarding dead cousin Richard all very irksome. Richard is dead and buried, snugly situated at Canterbury alongside his father before him – which is what he would have wanted, by far the most convenient and satisfactory solution, and people take issue with that too. Why not in the crypt, why not at this church or that one, why not here, why not there.

This should not happen in a man’s own lifetime – to an exuberant and stammering adolescent who swore in French like his lady mother and loved hunting, thoroughly earthbound and no champion of the common man. If Richard had been the hero of the people men say he is, he certainly wasn’t conspicuous about it. Men who renounce their high birth and estates for pious reasons are supposed to wear sackcloth and go begging, and Richard had never begged for anything in his young life. Henry sometimes wishes, during the low times, that he could renounce all this. He doesn’t know where he’d go – go gad about the continent spoiling for a fight, take to the jousting circuit and conveniently never return, go live in the wettest hovel in Wales for all he cared, so long as he were no longer the son of one king and the cousin of another.

There’s a very distinct smell that is nicer than the occasion warrants. Henry receives the impression of blotted light through his delinquent eyelids, and he is half-expecting to find Mary there when he opens them, standing in a storm of perfumed skirts and reminding him to come down to table. What hits him is a wave of light as well as scent.

Henry’s eyes are open now, and he sees spots.

The visitor is a slim youth, dressed in pale blue. His yellow hair is bound back, and his long face has scarcely begun to thin out with maturity; he looks, Henry thinks, like some awful cross between a woman, a cherub, and Henry’s own father. This strikes him as it never had before – but it is a very memorable face.

“Well, you’re no Thomas Becket,” Henry says, crossing his arms against his chest tightly.

“Do I have to be?” The apparition cocks its head a little, in a manner infuriatingly familiar.

“Forgive me, but I wasn’t praying to you.” Henry sinks back on his heels, with his knees protesting all the while.

“Be careful, Henry. The Lord answers all prayers as He sees fit. Right now I’m all you’ve got.”

This can’t be real. He’s as pious and unskeptical as the next man, but he does not receive visitations from deceased family members and he does not involve himself in theological flights of fancy. Last month he’d had a fit while his horse was being saddled, and had fallen to the ground. It had hardly been a religious experience; it had ended with him sore and embarrassed and short a pint of blood at the hands of a swarm of well-meaning imbeciles. If this follows from that, and he’s about to wake up in a sickbed with his father’s voice booming in his ear from all the way across the Channel, Henry will be extremely annoyed.

“The common people are praying to you. What’s that supposed to mean?” This is putting it boldly, but how else is he supposed to describe the state of affairs? Richard ought to be wearing a crown, Henry determines, a real one with lilies and bars and thick red jewels. Anything less is an offense. Has he been demoted after the fact?

“And I hear their prayers, Henry. Every one. There’s so much wrong in England, and an awful lot of need, and none of the people who are best equipped to do anything about it will shift themselves to do so. Except on birthdays, when they’re feeling charitable,” he says with an edge of sauciness in his voice that Henry feels keenly.

That’s none of your business,, Henry thinks, but charity is very much a sanctified person’s business and it’s stupid to be resentful of it when the king his father does make a terrible show of it. Twenty-one years, twenty-one pairs of dry and wrinkled hands held out in blessing and supplication.

“Don’t be cruel.”

“I’m not being cruel, Henry, I’m telling the truth.”

“So you’re a saint now. How good for the family.” Henry is charitable and sensible and his whole position in life is his because of a freak accident. Even in death, his cousin intends to give him trouble.

“I didn’t say that. If I were a real saint, it would be easier, I could – multiply loaves of bread, or give beggars cloaks or something. People worry about their children, they worry about taxes, doing trade, getting work, bad legs and things. I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“And the rich never worry about anything, do they?” He is jeering at a dead person now, there’s no denying it. His mother would be appalled.

“Oh, save it, Henry, you’re being really inappropriate–”

“If you’re looking for something to do you could exert yourself on matters of national importance, maybe, if you could possibly find the time–”

“Do you think it feels less serious when you’re only going to lose your house and not your estates in France, when it’s only everything you own and not your treasury? Should they bow their heads and take that cheerfully?”

“They’re only peasants, Richard, what else are we supposed to do?” He can cite as many exhortations to sacred generosity as anyone can, the Lancasters have got charity down to a science – the poor have always been there, maybe a little more ragged or a little less, swarming in villages or picking through the countryside, never mind what the plague did. Henry squeezes his hands together tightly, feeling his tendons rolling in his wrists. He asks again, this time a little more insistently and a little differently – “What do you want me to do?”

“Help them, Henry. For God’s sake.”

“You know I can’t do that. I’m only the prince, is it possible you’re looking for my father?”

“Your father and I will have words, Henry Lancaster, and there will be a reckoning of accounts, but not tonight. Help them while you can.”

Richard reaches down to him, hands outstretched, and Henry takes them. His fingertips begin to tingle, then to burn.

“What was it like to die?” Henry asks quietly.

Richard bites his lip and furrows his brow. “I don’t remember. Hot, and loud. I’m glad for it, though, I don’t mind it now. It’s everything else that isn’t right.”

“You’d have taken back all your promises the moment the mob cleared out. It’s just tactics. You were a good king, Richard, but not that good.”

“Maybe so.”

“You didn’t come down to earth just to scold me, did you?”

“I’m afraid not, cousin. Don’t quit your prayers on my account; you’ll need them.”

***

Joan of Kent is dying. She’s certain of this, but she’s been certain of this for the last two years, and it hasn’t come to her yet; if it comes to her now it will be the merciful end of a procession of small horrors. She’s been dying so long that she can joke about it, though to no other audience than herself; John has stopped visiting her, and even the servants are laughing at her, her priest is dozing in an anteroom. She can die at her leisure now, propped up in bed. Nobody gives a pulled hen about the Dowager Princess of Wales, not now that she’s old and fat and has buried three sons.

She does not weep when she sees him there, at the foot of her bed; she has wept enough, and yet she still feels her face go tight. What she sees is as crisp and clearly delineated as the illustration in a book of hours: finely attired young lad standing in the eerie diffusion of gilt light, burnished yellow light in a dark room.

“Took you long enough,” she says. “I’ve missed seeing you.”

“I’m sorry,” Richard says, genuinely anxiety-struck for an apparition sent from heaven. Or just as likely a lewd piece of trickery sent from Hell, or some wan lost spirit from another place altogether. “I’m sorry,” her son says, “I should have come sooner.”

“You must be busy, doing whatever the Almighty has you doing. Consider yourself pardoned.” (This seems diplomatically open-ended, when her dull gut terror for seven years has been that there’s nothing at all in Heaven, an uninterrupted tedium without a squeak of praise. Whatever it is he’s supposed to be doing, he’s come to visit her now.) “You look well, my boy.”

His face splits in a nervous smile, all small white teeth. He always did have good teeth, something he’d gotten from her side of the family for certain.

“I’m very well indeed, mother. It’s so wonderful to see you – father wants you to know he sends his love.” As plainly as that, as if he’s only gadding about in Aquitaine and sends his merry-faced sporting son back with his regards. Edward has been dead upward of ten years, and she is beginning to forget his face. It seems too soon for that.

Joan feels her throat go tight. Her hands lace together among the bedclothes, and the small pressure of it gives her a little comfort; she isn’t the kind of noblewoman who faints at little provocation, as flattering as that might be to her delicate sensibilities.

“…and your brother–”

“He’s very happy. He’s with father now, they get along well.” His smile is almost imperceptibly faint now, but still heartening.

“I’m glad to hear it. That’s all I need to know – that you’re happy where you are.” Squarely in God’s grace, wherever that might be. Safe and whole again. For the boy’s sake she won’t ask after anyone else, when she’s lost more kinsmen and would-be paramours than she can count. Some part of her wants to ask after Blanche of Lancaster, and to ask if the dead read books, what she thinks of the tribute she’s been offered – if she wouldn’t like a jollier set of poems, written more to her own taste than her husband’s. The current political situation must be deeply awkward for the dead.

Underneath his freckles, Richard is pinkening. “How’s Robert, if you know?”

“Robert’s doing fine, sweetheart. Philippa’s expecting again, and they have a little son…” Her hands twist uselessly in her lap, as she tries to think of reassurances for her poor dead boy – that his best friend’s gone on living without him and by all accounts seldom speaks of him, that he’d wept in gray-faced silence during the funeral service and couldn’t look her in the eye, that his son is a fat and cheerful four-year-old called Diccon by his nurse. Philippa is holding on to herself as well as can be expected under the new regime, as well as any of them are.

“That’s good. I try to check in on them sometimes, but I’m too ashamed.”

Like that, he crumples in front of her, hugging her knees like he had as a little boy. A stray lock of hair has worked its way loose from the circlet he wears – she can’t focus too much on what it is he wears before her eyes start to hurt, a ghostly approximation of what a living person might wear, an angel in a pageant scattering gilt coins – Joan tucks it back behind his ear, and scuffs at his cheek with her thumb.

“I can never stay as long as I’d like,” Richard says, and she can feel his stubborn jaw move against her knee, like the agitations of a living creature. Whatever he may be now, flesh and blood or something more finely-sifted than that, he’ll always be her son.

“That’s all right,” Joan says, “I understand. I understand now. That’s all right, sweetheart, you can go whenever you like. I won’t be long after you anyway.”

“You’ve got nothing to be afraid of. I just wanted you to tell you, in case you were worrying about the whole thing.” Richard straightens up with a cough; his long nose is slightly pink. If Joan had been a Flemish painter as she is an English lady, she’d have painted all angels like this, sheepish and mildly damp.

Joan of Kent is dying; she has a dead husband and three dead sons. She rearranges her heavy legs beneath the bedcovers and makes room for Richard to sit and stay with her until morning if he likes.