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In a mucky, sloppy, damp and dirty Eastcheap street, a man in a tattered and hooded cloak walked with his head down and no care for where he put his ancient boots. The autumn drizzle blew under the hood, and he winced and muttered a curse and crumpled his face against it.
Against a crooked wall, curled away from a rapidly expanding puddle that had found his shelter, a beggar man with one arm and one eye wheezed imprecations against the advancing winter between calling out to the people for help, alms, aid, drink for the love of God. He was a local fixture and the hurrying locals ignored him. But the man in the hooded cloak stopped and looked at him.
"Who are you?" he said. "How did you come here?"
The beggar looked up at the bearded face under the hood and grinned an evil, unrecognising grin. "Same to you, old man," he said. "Doesn't matter who you are here. You got money? Drink? A bit of charity for an old soldier?"
"You were a soldier?"
The beggar reached up with the arm that remained to him and dragged aside the rags that hid his ruined eye. "Look," he said. "That was a sword slash did that. Stuck my eye on the end of his pigsticker, rode off with it, me hollering like the devil. I had all of fourteen summers when I went to the king's wars."
"Which king?" said the stranger.
The beggar begun to laugh, cracked. The stranger stared at him in affront as he wheezed. His nose had been broken at some point; ugly whistling sounds issued from it. "Which king," the beggar laughed, "which king! Who are you that cares? God save King Richard!" – that was a shout, echoing dully along the emptying, wintery street. "Which king, ha!"
His laughter had a fury in it that did not abate. It went on for a long time. The man in the hooded cloak hesitated, threw some coins at the beggar's feet, and hurried on, with raging laughter pursuing him down the darkening street.
The old clothes he wore were borrowed from a servant; cloak and boots were his own, from long-ago exile. His direction had been given to him by careful inquiry. At the end of a twisting alley stood a house with all the doors open and the windows ablaze with light. Two men and a woman staggered out of the door together, arms all entwined over one another's shoulders, holding each other up. Their rolling, rollicking gait had them almost knock into the man in the cloak. He stared hungrily into the faces of each of the men; but he did not know them.
They were laughing and cursing at each other. Each tried to steer the trio in an opposite direction. The woman shrieked and laughed and swore to knock their heads together. Upstairs in the public house, someone leaned out of a window and roared mockery at all three. In the taproom, someone began to sing.
The man in the hooded cloak slipped inside as the drunken trio disappeared behind him. More voices had picked up the carol; young voices, old voices, cracked voices and warm ones. There were no great singers here. The room was hot and close and smelled of roasting meat. A boy's voice rose sweetly above the rest. It was an old tune, strangely sad. The drunken singers seemed to appreciate the sadness all the more because it was not theirs. Hard by the bar an enormously fat old man wiped his eyes, and wiped them again, and then blew his nose with a preposterous snort.
"A good old song, a very good old song, a noble carol," he cried, "a handsome carol. Sing it again, singers. Sing it again, I say. Shall I start you? In my youth I was a great singer. I sang so sweetly men wept and women fainted. I was a handsome youth, too, mind—" shouts of derision from his audience (and the man in the hooded cloak observed how quickly they had become an audience, this drunken, maudlin, merry crowd) "—well, say what you will! But I was handsome, this fat old carcass of mine was handsome enough. I shall sing." The massive chest expanded like a bellows. "And all was for an apple, an apple that he took—no, that's not the tune. What's the tune? Where's the tune? We should have Hal in here, where's the prince to sing for us? He sings like a swallow, that boy, he sings like a lark, though he sins like a man and a prince. Aye, I've heard him sing; shyly, now, very shy, our Hal—" snickering, now, in the crowd; smiles in the crowd, "but a' sings, a' sings, sings and sins, one or the other, or both if his lady princess harlot be by—" snickering rose to peals of laughter. They knew their Hal, these people; they liked him, and they liked to mock him.
He was not there. The man in the hooded cloak leaned against the wall.
He was not there.
He had not really expected it—had hoped not, in fact. But it was possible to hope for one thing and long for another.
He fixed his eyes on the man he came to see. Sir John Falstaff, perhaps the lowest man ever to be graced with the name of knight: a fat, chattering, rancid-smelling old fool, with his hair and beard uncombed and grease stains on his jerkin. He was roaring drunk and flushed in the cheek, starting to sing the old carol again as his people thronged around him. And they were his people and no-one else's, that was clear: his loving, admiring, sniggering, hard-drinking people.
The man in the hooded cloak was a fair judge of character. If there had been an ounce of real malice in Sir John Falstaff, he thought, he might have been a wicked man.
That would have been almost easier to bear.
This was the man. This drunken clown, this ancient fool, this harmless old sot—harmless only through laziness, maybe, but harmless all the same—this fat old lord of misrule holding court in an Eastcheap public house: this was the father Henry's son had chosen.
John of Gaunt might have been king of England.
The commons feared it, because the commons did not love him. The lords of England perhaps feared it as well. If each of great Edward's sons carried in him a piece of the old king, then thirdborn John had his quick wits, his guile, his cold, clear and merciless understanding of statecraft. His great wealth had already made him second only to the monarch in influence. His love of power was no secret. Such a king—what might such a king do? Something must be set up between him and the throne. Someone had to tug away from his grasping fingertips the crown he could have worn so well.
So it was not the boy Richard's fault that Parliament heaped the Black Prince's honours on his head before he was ten years old; or that they made a child a king; or that the child was then surrounded by flattering, ambitious, dangerous men. Henry's father was not the only man in the English court who loved power. There was influence to be had, and somebody had to have it. Just not, said Parliament, Richard's uncle.
"They are ruining him," Henry heard his father say, many times. "He might have been a fine man."
Henry understood that Richard was not becoming a fine man. He knew his cousin well. They were of an age, and had played together when they were younger, though the boy-prince Richard had been an uncomfortable sort of playmate. He had always been clever, impulsive, reckless, sentimental; had always lit up in front of a crowd. The last time Henry had seen him, nearly a year ago, after the peasant uprisings, there had been a new thing in his looks, a terrible grinning wildness. He had prayed, when he prayed, with a sick and luminous fervour that was half or two-thirds for show. He had laughed easily, and kept bad company.
Henry understood that he would not have been like that if he had a father. If Henry's father had been king of England, and Henry the crown prince, then perhaps his cousin Richard would no longer be ruined. Perhaps his cousin Richard—
"Can a man share his father?" he asked Katherine once.
Katherine was his father's mistress. Henry liked her well enough; better certainly than his father's wife. She smiled at him. "You share yours," she said. "With your sisters Elizabeth and Philippa, and with Blanche, and little Lady Catherine, and my four besides—"
But that was not at all what Henry meant. He did not have the words to say what he did mean. He saw how his father's face was haggard and his eyes grieving whenever he returned from a long trip to London. The world would have been better, if King Richard had had a father like Henry's—or else if Henry's father had been king.
Henry Bolingbroke had loved his father. He had broken every oath he'd sworn to his cousin—but Richard had broken them first, when he turned on John of Gaunt, and denied him at the last everything his long years of loyalty had earned him. When Henry had come again to England against the terms of his banishment, he had come for his own and for his father's love. Not for Richard's life; not for his crown. Those things had come afterwards. Henry had sat awake long dark hours after Richard was dead and buried, wondering what might have been, and regretting his old oaths, and his cousin's ruin.
It had never occurred to him that a father's love might not be enough.
Perhaps it was a punishment sent from heaven to a man who had betrayed his king and kinsman. Perhaps it was a judgment on Henry now to watch his own son turn clever, impulsive, reckless, sentimental—to see his heir whore himself for the crowd's adoration, and laugh, and keep bad company.
Perhaps one way or another God meant to have a Richard on the throne.
Henry understood his father's haggard looks better now. As a boy he had believed that if only John of Gaunt could have been a father to Richard, Richard might have been saved. As a father and a king he knew that there was nothing worse—no, nothing worse, surely, than watching a boy you loved damn himself.
He tried not to watch Falstaff too narrowly. A man—even a man as drunk as Falstaff was—could hardly help but notice being stared at by a hooded stranger. But he did watch, over the course of a long and weary hour; and he wondered what it was that Harry had in this man's love, that he did not have in his own father's. Falstaff showed no hidden second self, no flashes of secret nobility, no sign of anything that should have appealed to any man of quality. He had a kind of facility with words, not the true eloquence of the educated man but a certain quickness of tongue which perhaps suggested more quickness of thought than that gross frame seemed to promise. He said many things that were plain lies, and many more that sounded like lies, and none of it seemed to concern any of his courtiers, who regarded rank falsehood with tolerant amusement and brought the old man more to drink.
He could not pay for the drinks—but it seemed his Hal would. Falstaff grew maudlin, telling the hostess and anyone else in earshot what a good boy his Hal was, what a good kind witty madcap scapegrace boy.
The king watched silently until he could bear it no more. "You see," Falstaff was saying wisely to a man with a nose as red as daybreak, "you see, the apple is the thing that makes all the difference—a good cider or a bad one—"
"That's no difference at all to you!" the hostess put in tartly.
"A good apple or a bad one—but all apples are bad in their way, in their own way, ask any bishop and he'll tell you true, for we are bad apples every one; and all was for an apple," breaking into song again, "an apple that he took—hum, hum, the song goes on—Deo gratias! So you see, a bad apple is a good apple too, in its way; else no apples are any good at all. Is there more cider? I'll have it, for your own good; bad health for you young fellows, cider; the prince must not have cider. Where's the prince? Where's my sweet Hal? Tell him, no cider!"
"He's not here," someone called out.
"What, what? What's that?"
"He's not here!" half a dozen people shouted at once, raggedly, laughing; and the king tugged his old cloak tight around him and slipped away through the open door. Not a single eye followed him. They did not know him here. Nor, he reminded himself savagely, did he need these creatures' love.
Full dark was on the alleyway, and a dull steady rain was turning the dust of the street to thick clinging mud. The king of England did not remember the beggar until he was past the hollow where the crippled soldier sheltered. He stamped his feet a time or two in the sucking mud, shaking his head; and then in one swift movement he took off the cloak, old but still good, and turned back with it draped over his arm. The chill rain quickly began to soak through his clothes. Cold swift drops fell on his face like little silver daggers. He trudged back through the muck.
But another was there before him.
"Who's this? Now, Dick, this is no weather to be abroad in!"
"Nor to be at home in, God save you, sir," said the beggar, "if this be your home; now get you home, boy, get you home."
"He's only half as cold as you, Hal," put in the prince's companion, "for there's only half as much of him. Here's no weather for standing around in; come. It's two o'clock or more, and Falstaff will be singing by now."
"Then as flowers of chivalry we should defend the ears of the innocent and stop him," Harry said. "But up you get, Dick. God save anyone from a night like this. Your arm, Ned!"
The beggar needed the arm to hold him upright. He was missing a leg, the king saw, as well as an arm. "He's heavy for half a man," the prince's comrade complained.
"Or you're half a man that can't lift him. Come, it's two o'clock or more; Falstaff will drink my purse dry before I've time to open it." The beggar was muttering fervent thank yous and God bless yous. Harry would take him to the warmth and the light, the king thought, and sit him among the singers. It was an easy, careless, thoughtless kind of charity. It was a better charity than a cloak.
He watched the mismatched trio go, and did not call out to his son.
It was cold and dark when the king returned to the king's own chambers, and he would not wake a servant to light a fire at this hour. Instead he sat sleepless in the dark for a very long time, remembering his cousin Richard, whom the people had once loved, and whose corrupted and suffering court had been, as Henry recalled, full of music.