if you were sick (they'd make you bleed)

It’s no comfort in the end that Richard brought this on himself — it doesn’t lift the black weight from Henry’s shoulders or allow more than passing petty satisfaction to think that his enemy deserved these things or called them on himself like a curse. He knows when it began, in an abstract sense — before either of them were born, probably — but like a chronicle no one will write, there needed to be some concrete first volley for a man to point to and say, there it was, it happened here, it began thus. There it was – a material moment when things soured between them, not as political actors or their respective fathers’ sons but as two men, both guilty. Henry won’t forget it.

He can’t say where it came to pass, in what chapel or what estate, but he knows exactly when — the temperature of the air, the color of the light, the tiles in the floor that he’d been scrupulously inspecting as the service wore on. Henry had done everything possible to keep from looking his cousin in the face, which was generally the way Richard liked it, and then what happened had happened anyway.

The feverish turn at the end of a summer marked out in bloodletting— it was the first time the king had spoken to him since December, excepting by proxy. He’d gotten sharper in the face since then, no thinner but impossibly more brittle. Henry hadn’t seen him smile in – a year, maybe. The color had left his cheeks.

Like something from his nightmares, the king turning with his face all grave, turning with ready eye and seeing him – him and no one else. It had come low and quiet, not a proclamation for the room or a hard whisper but an aside for his cousin alone:

“What are we going to do with you, Henry?”

Looking up in his face, Henry had felt a spur of genuine dizziness. Richard looked older than ever before. Radcot Bridge had scrubbed the youthful freshness from his face.  

There’d been laughter in Richard’s voice, the kind of mad laughter you have to suppress in church, but any humor had stayed horribly clear of his eyes – no longer gray but colorless in the yellow light. He could chill you to the marrow with those eyes. In the July heat, Henry had felt a chill begin at the soles of his feet.

What are we going to do with you? A knife in the back, an accident, a smothering, a public insult. All the things that King Richard might do to someone who’d displeased him, even as passively in comparison as Henry. Exile had never crossed Henry’s mind, even then. Exile was for other people — people Richard liked, even. Henry was no longer a person Richard liked. In that silver instant, he’d become something to be addressed. An obstacle.

(A *problem.*What was that supposed to mean? Nine words that might as well have been spoken under the king’s breath? It meant nothing at all, it was a weak nicety and an idle nothing and a declaration of intent all at the same time. It could have meant anything. It meant everything. The cost of that long brutal spring had been taken out in blood, but it couldn’t last forever, it had to come back somehow, the chain would pull taut, the wheel had to turn—)

Richard had never been the same after Parliament had cut down his friends by the dozen — as a man, as Henry’s cousin, how could he be? If it had been something nasty he’d said that Sunday morning in the yellow light, some dark innuendo about locked rooms and feather beds — but he had sounded exhausted, thinly desperate and short on options. Anything else Henry could have taken in stride, anything more wouldn’t have haunted his sleep for twenty years and more — insults, accusations, curses, all the things Richard would fling at him later. Anything else but mild dismay and arch displeasure.

That had been the seed of treason, a handful of brittle words on a hot morning — the dizzy jolt of guilt that had run through him in an instant. When Henry was a boy he’d seen lightning strike a leafless tree on the outskirts of his father’s favorite hunting-ground — if it wasn’t already dead the tree had been dying, stubbornly ugly and still formidable despite its barrenness, but lightning had burst it in two. It had shattered to the roots with one strike. Here lies King Richard, killed by suggestion. It had just taken a while, that was all.

(Long after Richard is dead, Henry will turn that over in his sleepless mind like a stone worried into smoothness by the touch of a hand. The memory will lose some of its finest details — the color of the tiles in the floor, the red halo of his cousin’s hair, whether his voice had sounded cruel or kind or only tired. They were younger then, and these things were clearer at the edges. Henry is an old man now, and the margin for doubt in his mind has only grown.)