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‘It’s a bit of a change from your other catechism, Jack, that’s all I’m saying.’
Jack stared up at the canopy of the Boar’s Head’s best bed. The painted cloth depicted a monkey playing the bagpipes, a fox preaching to geese, a boar mounting a sow, and a disgruntled cat, all framed by a border of open-mouthed magpies. He didn't take any of it personally, but he nonetheless felt almost impossibly thin-skinned, weighed by a great sense of inchoate doom, as he always did in the brief interval between waking with a hangover and his first drink.
‘Don’t you think most of it makes a good deal of sense?’
Hal shifted onto his side, propping himself on his elbow. They had hired a girl for the look of the thing, one of the vast Nightwork clan, cynical and complaisant over her essentially intermediary function. But at some point in the night, Jack didn’t remember when, she had departed, and her leaving hadn’t interrupted anything, so that was that. He should feel triumphant: wasn’t this what he had wanted ever since he’d returned to court after that perfectly ghastly business with Ursula, second daughter of Sir Henry Boxe, and the breach of promise suit, to find the Prince of Wales no longer an angry, gawky boy obsessed with the minutiae of battle order, but a bored, debonair young man, not handsome but with an absolutely undeniable physique, just hanging to be shown a good time? No, he concluded, it was not. What he wanted was for Hal to love him back, and that could never be.
‘Not really. It’s not any easier to believe that it’s bread and Body and wine and Blood all at the same time than that it actually changes from bread and wine into Body and Blood, only appearances remaining.’
Jack thought it was, but he couldn’t quite explain why. He took refuge in frivolity. ‘I am most substantially myself when wine is coexistent in my veins with blood, why not Our Lord?’
Hal slapped Jack’s stomach, setting it quaking like blancmange. ‘Not bread, though. If you can prove to me you take even as much with your dinner as you do at Mass I shall make a beehive of my basinet, resign hope of the crown, and live out my life an anchorite and faithful subject of King John the Second.’
Jack had in fact eaten bread with his capon last night, and he had not been a communicant in good standing since the morning before the battle of Shrewsbury. But there was no fun in saying that, so he embarked upon a mock disquisition of the humours instead, hoping that if he could make him laugh hard enough, Hal would roll into his arms again, and he could touch the firm, lean musculature under the golden skin, minister to his Prince with his fingers, lips and tongue and be honoured in turn with a gift of taut royal thighs climbing upon him, clasping him, and athletically working him until he spent.
But Hal was not amused. His lower lip protruded and he flopped over onto his back. ‘What would they think of all this, then?’ he interrupted.
‘—who would what of all what?’
‘Your—Loll—Wycliffite friends.’ He raised his right hand in benediction and intoned, liturgically, ‘The corollary of this conclusion is that the private religions, beginners of this sin, were most worthy to be annulled but God, for his might, of privy sin send open vengeance.’ Christ’s prepuce, Jack thought, that was Hal all over, seeming to pay no heed to anything but drink and pranks, but actually being able to quote the Conclusions extempore.
‘That’s just priests. And,’ he countered, ‘Experience for the privy assay of such men is that they like not women. And you can’t say I don’t—’
Hal’s dominant left hand—he had such fine, tapering, well-shaped hands, but they were too big, far too big, a third as big again as Jack’s own—darted out and grasped Jack’s balls, too hard for pleasure of the usual sort, and yet not quite hard enough for positive, winding pain.
Jack howled, aware he was being theatrical. Hal brought his face very close, so that the long point of his nose touched Jack’s snub.
‘You don’t like women as much as you like me.’ He cupped Jack’s stones and let his middle finger stray behind them and towards his arsehole.
He was right, though perhaps not quite in the way he thought he was. Though even that—Jack was as stiff as the Lord Chief Justice’s mace. ‘You, dear boy,’ he puffed, ‘have the soul of a torturer.’
Hal gave a misericord grimace, essentially affirmative in character. His finger worked steadily, breaching Jack’s defences and filling the breach. To his horror, Jack felt the beginnings of the inexorable tug and clench of climax, deep below the mounds of flesh that meant he had barely seen his own prick for a score of years.
‘Be careful, Jack. My father burns—with his St Anthony’s fire, or whatever it is he has. He’s a tormented man, and tormented men grow superstitious. He would not scruple to see others consumed in livelier fires, and you would make a fine mound of tallow grease to ease his sores.’
He tried to forestall it, he really did. But he was no match for this cruel youth, who had englamoured him, given him philtres, made him burn. As Hal tore his hand away, scraping Jack’s chafed and sweaty thighs with his three rings—the heavy signet on his forefinger, the plain gold on his smallest, his mother’s too-small square-cut garnet perched, eccentrically, above the second joint of his ring finger—Jack spilt, helplessly, joylessly, copiously, onto the undercurve of his belly.
Hal looked down at him with withering disgust. ‘God’s bones,’ he said, ‘sometimes I wonder how I even know you.’
The one thing that might have brought Jack genuine relief—to burst into tears—was also as far beyond him as stars in the firmament: his eye-ducts had been dry since, aged seven, he had entered the house of Sir Thomas Mowbray, and nothing could fill them now but the rheum of approaching death. With the last shred of his strength, he sat up and forced a chuckle.
‘Look what you’ve done to me, you whore’s melt. I’m naught but a gib cat,’ he coughed. ‘Make yourself useful, you long streak of piss, and call for me some sack.’