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Everyone in England knows where the prince is tonight, or more accurately, everyone knows where he is not. King Henry IV, a sick old man, is swearing at his other sons tonight, while they morosely sip cups of cold wine from mediocre grapes; let this be his consolation, as he drinks sack and spills it, speckles his lips and his tunic as he laughs it, drowns in it by dawn. Let his father rage, he will not come near him - yet.
-
He has Poins to one side of him and a wench to the other, and both are, as people are wont to be, both bold and shy in his presence, in equal, if ever shifting, proportion. That is headier than any drink, that high regard. He does hate to admit it to himself, but as he is in the last few minutes of sobriety, he does it: that this is what his father must feel, when he is in his presence.
One hand on the small of the wench’s back, his thumb pressing, moving in circles; he watches her closely as her pupils dilate and her lips part. He and Poins debate who will buy her her next drink, when really they know it should be Hal, because he has the king’s own money, and really they know it will be Poins, because he is no one. Indeed, Poins gives way with a smile that betrays no resentment, and Hal softens the blow of his insignificance with a princely hand on his forearm. The movement of his fingers is similar to the way he is touching the woman.
“Can I refuse a prince any thing?” Poins says. Classic trick, pretending it is his idea. Falstaff is most constant in his employment of it. Hal is too: elsewhere.
“Could you? You could. You might, if you were a treasonous sort,” says Hal, and he laughs: Poins laughs, the wench laughs, everyone down the table laughs, even though they did not all hear him.
“If I were treasonous, I could do anything,” said Poins, and he turns his arm, just slightly, their hands nearly touching. Neither notices. “But I am not, my prince; as I am a loyal subject, I cannot. I could not.”
It was treason when Bolingbroke returned to England in defiance of good Richard’s decree, but it might be treason now to say it. Treason is a strange word, but just a word, after all. Until it is not.
Hal’s fingers tease the palm of Poins. Poins twitches his fingers and does not close them.
“So any refusal would count as disloyalty?” asks Hal, attempting to mask a smile, and too tipsy to succeed. “There must yet be some things you can refuse me.”
“Not yet, not yet; certainly not after so much sack,” he says, with belated laughter. Hal removes his hand, abruptly rubs drink and sweat from his upper lip.
Is Poins confused? Disappointed? No - relieved. Relieved, perhaps, but Hal is not certain. Hal is never certain with Poins; he is so difficult a man to read that his companionship savors more closely of friendship than servility, which makes Hal like him, sometime, more, and sometime much, much less.
“Dear Poins, most valued Poins,” he laughs, “one day we will find the truth of that. But I think, for one of us or the other, it will be a letdown.”
The girl is rubbing at his chest, beneath his tunic, milording him for some of the attention he bestows so freely upon Poins. He is drunk; his blood is up; his person is up. He claps an arm around her shoulder and hugs her close against him. Her breasts, nearly bare, squeeze together most attractively, and she bursts into flattered, startled laughter.
“You could not refuse a prince, could you? Now here is one whose answer cannot let me down. I think it can only let me up.”
She is too insensible, from drink and from low birth, to leave that sentence where it is and agree with her eyebrows or a pretty pout. She drops her calloused hand into his lap and giggles at what she finds.
“Nay, m’lord, never; I never did let down any man, let alone a prince, though I’ve not had any one to refuse; but had I met one, I would not be of a mind to, because I am a loyal subject too.”
“More loyal than Poins is,” he says to her, intimately; Poins hears, but what can he say? Please fuck me, too, milord, I shall not let you down either? Poins does not say this, though in theory, in physical reality, he could.
Hal fucks the girl in the best room in the brothel, though it is still the worst room he has ever seen. Poins laughs and drinks, and refrains from fondling himself as he pulls off his hose.
“You will enjoy my friend afterward, won’t you?” he asks the moaning girl, his words sharp as bites, as if he is arguing her around. “Enjoy him rather less, I hope-”
She will agree to everything. He likes to pretend she is moaning for the royal person and not the royal purse, at least until he has spent from them both.
As Poins clambers onto the bed to have his share, Hal slides his fingers into his hair. Poins stiffens. Perhaps elsewhere.
“She may enjoy you less than me, but as I have so prepared her for you, I hope you have even greater enjoyment of her,” he says, with his breath on his friend’s ear. Poins has to make himself lean into the touch, and Hal feels a clammy flash of anger dampen his mood. His fingers clench into his hair. The wench, who has been lying on her back lewdly waiting for her second bridegroom to thrust himself up inside her, cautiously pushes herself up on her elbows, uncertain of the mood.
The line of Poins’ throat begs a knife sometimes, or a kiss. Hal would not inflict either on the man, but he will gaze on the throat regardless; he does not loosen his grip.
“Think you I lie? Touch her. Go on.”
He thinks the woman might refuse, but that is only because Poins is hesitating, he’s certain. Hal cannot resist, he bites his friend, and dear Ned and the wench both laugh at it, and Hal, to ease their tension, laughs too, into Poins’ shoulder. He releases his hair, and finds Poins’ fingers; then he guides them inside her, oyster-slick. The girl gasps, her breasts quivering. The lips of her cunt are wet and swollen from princely use, but it tightens when their fingers penetrate her, two from each man; and Poins lets out an exhale that no one but Hal can hear.
“It is not so bad, coming second, is it,” he murmurs into Poins’ ear. Poins is aroused; he knows well enough what it looks like, because he is too. Poins laughs off his discomfort easily.
“Not when you’re the one who came first, my good lord,” says he, and even dares to look at him. His eyes are hardly focused, the better to not see him or how close he is, and his breath has misted his lips, which look red and moist.
For a moment, Hal thinks about kissing him. Poins would not talk. Hal knows what that looks like, too. But the girl would. Even though no one of any importance would believe her, Falstaff well might.
So instead he withdraws his fingers, slowly, and sees what Poins will not refuse.
He will not refuse to suck the taste of a woman off his fingers, even when he can feel his prince caress his tongue.
He will not refuse Hal’s hand, wet with his own saliva, to guide him into the wench’s cunt. Hal thinks he may even enjoy it. He is being caressed by his own crown prince, after all.
Hal collapses beside the collapsed wench, and laughs off his own sudden weariness. Outside, he thinks it may soon be dawn. As he cannot fuck away his own hollowness, he kisses the girl so hard she struggles to breathe; when he lets her up, she cannot catch her breath, because Poins desires to kiss her too.
-
The wench snores a little. Hal is thankful for it, because he wants to talk to Poins and they are all still naked beside her.
No preamble is needed, not after the preamble they have already had.
“Do you tumble boys so well as her? Out like a snuffed candle.”
“Why do you think I tumble boys, Hal?” Poins asks. His head in his hand, that head that is tousled now from Hal’s own hand.
“Because when I put my hand on you you stiffened as if you had known the like before.”
“Do you accuse me of something?”
Hal traces patterns on the naked body that lies between them. The pearly lines across her buttocks, the stretch marks of puberty on her marble-white skin, distract him from the rude, careful regard of his friend.
“I accuse you… of possessing a large and most ready weapon, that made very short work of a fine woman. You were a villain tonight indeed, sir.”
Poins’ face slackens, relaxes. After a moment he laughs.
“I admit I had a certain apprehension about tonight,” he says. “Lay my piece beside yours, we may find out mine is the larger of the two. One cannot permit that.”
“If such a thing proves true, you would be forbidden to speak it. For decency’s sake.” His tone is most serious, and Ned Poins’ nod of ascension is as well. Then they are both biting their lips and pressing their hands solemnly to their mouths; and then they are bursting like grainsacks, unable to suppress fully their laughter.
“Come to Ned Poins for decency,” says Hal in laughter. “May as well come to Falstaff for sobriety, to Bardolph for wisdom, to my father the king for kindness. May as well come to this fine wench for modesty,” and she starts a bit in her sleep when he spanks her, and he watches the red mark of his hand fade away again.
Poins’ smile struggles against fading with it, but Hal cannot resist turning the knife he finds in his hand.
“Were you decent tonight, sweet Ned? When you watched me fuck this girl? Where did your eyes fall most often? And when I did touch you, was it very decent of you, to be so responsive? If you have any decency, I am sure I want none of it; and that is just as well, for I could get none.”
“If, as my lord… insinuates,” says Poins, now sobering enough to choose his words, “my eyes fell most often on my lord, why not? I have seen many a bawd in bed before, but never a prince. If I responded when you touched me, my lord, why, the reason is the same. Were you displeased? I promised you loyalty. What greater disloyalty could I have shown you than to wilt at your noble hand?” He is trying to keep his voice soft, in case the wench is feigning sleep, but he struggles. He is angry, and cannot be; he is frightened, and uncertain; he is… frustrated, perhaps?
Poins could want him. Stranger things have happened. Moreover, Poins cannot not want him. He is going to be the king; who does not desire a king’s desire? If the king wants his cock, or his lips, or his heart, such as Poins has one, is that not valuable currency in a new regime?
Hal wishes the girl out of the room, but if he wakes and sends her out, Poins will known his purpose, and have time to prepare his response.
“Your loyalty is all I require,” he says carefully. “I do not ask you for decency.”
“You shall have them both, if you want them,” says Poins. “Both, one, or neither.”
Hal glances up at him; Poins has a moment, just a moment, of calculation, and then he leans over the girl’s naked back, and kisses him.
His mouth is pliant, but hard, as men’s mouths can be; Hal is certain he does not kiss like a woman, either. But though the kiss was impulsive, his lips taste of cold math. His tongue seeks out another flavor without finding it.
“When is sodomy a sin?” Hal asks, his breathing ragged. “Is it when one behaves as a woman? I’ve always thought so. But…”
“You have often sinned with me, and gone home clean,” whispers Poins. Hal turns away abruptly.
Dawn breaks with the moment, and Poins’ expression does not change. He speaks of anything else, everything else. But Hal cannot speak of everything. He cannot speak of anything that matters.
-
Hal rides home and he is not clean. Though he has washed with a cloth and a basin of water, scrubbing sin from his armpits and whore from his groin. He has not yet scrubbed away Poins. Perhaps he will never have Poins to scrub away.
The boy in the stables is half-asleep when he leaves his horse, and the early morning sunlight is grey and misty even within the fortress. But Hal has no time to creep to bed. He cannot but cross the great hall. As soon as he appears, like a spectre, with the first rays of sun, the voice that haunts his sleep prevents him from sleeping.
“Where have you been?”
Sober and in company, Hal would not dare speak back. He would not give his brothers the cannon fodder of public poor behavior. But now it is dawn, and his father is alone, a dignified, sad old man, who but for his crown might not be king at all.
“Good my lord, my good father, you lie up like a wife for me. Surely that is not the natural order of things? Even from a mother or a queen, it would be at best unusual.”
“At best?” His father’s voice is subtle but menacing. Now he emerges from the shadows, more grey than black, and his face is more grey than pink. Not even sallow, his father is bloodless. He is a man of laws and maps on parchment, no longer a man of flesh and blood. Or so Hal would prefer him to be. “At best, the crown prince would not come sniffing around his father’s hall, like a dog yearning for a piss! At best, you would have been here all night, I would not sit up for you at all!”
All night? Surely, even his father does not find that what is best? But he would not know, because Hal won’t gift him opportunity to find out.
“Peace, my lord, I pissed already.”
He waves his hand at his father, but this is a mistake. He forgets, sometimes, that the brittle-looking man is still steel. The king grabs that hand and bends it backwards, and the sound that escapes his lips is more whimper than challenge.
He wishes he could outlast him, but he is too tired, he drank too much, he ate too little… he too much loves the man who is now hurting him.
“Father, please,” he whispers. His father changes his grip on his wrist so that it is more imprisonment than injury, and roughly he pulls him closer. A shaking arthritic hand barely touches his cheek, and then he realizes his eyes watered.
“Do you know,” breathes old Bolingbroke in a ragged voice, “what it is, to be the King of England, and know what you love best in all the world is at any hearth but yours?”
I don’t, thinks Hal, and I shall never; but Richard knew it, did he not?
“All of England know my son is gallivanting in Cheapside. All of England has his pocket picked, his daughter seduced, his sheep driven off, his face spat in, by my son. Can you not one night be at my side? Can you not one night do your duty?”
His father has released him and is rubbing his aged face. Hal realizes, with a startling unease, that Henry is not merely old, but truly unwell. He looks like a paper pulled out of the fire. The edges curling, ashy. It makes him want to smooth them out.
“Do you love me best in all the world, your Grace?” he asks his father.
King Henry growls at him and makes a violent, short-tempered gesture with his hand. All affection there is now gone.
“Get you upstairs,” he says.
Hal sighs.
-
He is subjected to the whole tirade of the day’s orders undertaken while Hal either slept or slunk off to drink, gamble, and whore. The political unrest Hal does not reach out his hand to steady, or the jealousy of the brothers who take up his duties without earning a kingdom or a father’s preference, or even the comforting of an aging king, which a son should yearn after: these are laid at Hal’s door til they are piling up and falling over. He will not pick them up. He does not want them.
“What manner of person do you frequent?” His father’s ranting leans towards peevishness; he is tiring now, and Hal begins to peel off his jacket. He would not even have dared open his mouth minutes before; now he dares turn away entirely, sigh and drop whole clothes onto the floor. “Whose company is so very grand, that you abandon your state for it? Who is like to a kingdom?”
“You are tired, my good lord,” he says, with a wan smile. It begins to bother him, the old insomniac, for more reasons than the infringement on his privacy. He wishes Henry would leave him, so that he could sleep and wake, refreshed and insensitive of his father’s cares again. “You stayed up too late.”
“I stayed up for you,” Henry grouses.
“You stayed up for little, then,” he responds, and this time, it is his turn to interrupt his father before he can even argue. “For a prince who shirks his duties? A neglectful brother, heir, and son? A rusty warrior, a silent politician? As little a friend to his friends, as he is a prince to them. I shall not tell you their names, these people and their so very grand company. They are very like a kingdom, though. In that they are unforgiving, with long memories, and multiplying demands, who want more from me than I want to give them.”
He turns to wring out the sponge in the basin, letting his father be stunned for a moment. That is what he is expecting: this calculated glimpse at sentiment and honesty will overwhelm the old man with tenderness, as it often does. When Henry approached, he expected to be gruffly embraced. Instead, his father is murmuring, “Allow me,” and touching the hem of his tunic. The prince was eloquent, but when he protests, he sounds like a child. But Henry lays a finger on his lips.
Hal knows that if the king wants to bathe him, much is forgiven. He forgets sometimes how much of his father’s good will can be purchased with eloquence, eloquence that hints at future deeds and action no matter what were the deeds and actions of yesterday. But he is sick of buying him off. He would not have minded Bolingbroke to storm off in anger, so long as he was off.
And at the same time, he wants forgiveness from his father the way he wants absolution from God. He puts his arms up so that his father can pull the tunic over his head, and he lets his father pass the sponge over his skin. There is a chill in the early morning air. Cold air, cold water, and his father’s hands leave gooseflesh on his bare skin. Then Henry lays a cold hand on his cheek and draws him into a reluctant embrace, letting his son, baptised, shivering, find warmth in his arms.
“I would never have guessed you would wait up for me, my lord,” he says, his stomach knotting. Self-loathing and revulsion war with the bitter gravity of nostalgia and the remainder of the sack in his belly.
“Ah, well,” his father chuckles. He feels the weight of his father’s cold rings in his hair as he strokes it.
“Am I a man or a child?” he asks drily.
Henry smooths his hair and claps his hands on his bare shoulders. It is a fond and paternal gesture. Now that his hands have been on Hal, they are warmer.
“You are a man, but you will always be my child,” he admits. Lines are so deeply engraved around his eyes one fancies he could bleed from them. Hal regrets this even as he does it, but he kisses his father, gently as a good-bye.
The currency of a king’s desire. Prince Hal is the wealthiest man in England, if he will just spend the fucking coin. King Henry draws him closer. He has grown to be his father’s height, but the king always feels just a little more tall than he is.
He cannot stop his father from parting his lips, or himself from responding. It never goes well when he tries, if he tries to put a word on this, or make his father feel shame; shame is a blade without a handle.
Poins hesitated before he kissed him, but Henry never does. That is the only reason he can give himself for why he ends up kissing back, every time.
“I can never sleep when you are away,” says his father. He sounds fond and resentful at the same time. His son has inherited this feeling. “Come to bed.”
Hal still wants to sleep. He will get to, eventually. He simply must do this first.