Falstaff

by Robert Nye

  Now Hal sat by the King beside the crown.

  It was too much for him. Before the King was decently dead, his fingers reached out and touched it. Having touched it, he had to try it on. Hal was always a great one for trying things on.

  With the crown on his head, he crossed the Jerusalem Chamber in search of a looking-glass. What did he see when he looked into that glass?

  His father’s face! Sans nose, sans teeth, the eyes bleeding, the flesh already falling from the bone. Bolingbroke was not dead yet. He had stirred, seen Harry stealing, and in the last throes of his dying agony had come up off the bed and stood behind his son.

  They say that he touched the crown with the withered stumps where his hands had been, and said: ‘What right have you to it, my son, seeing that I had none?’

  And that Harry answered: ‘Sire, as you have held and kept it by the sword, so will I hold and keep it while my life shall last.’

  Maybe.

  I can believe, anyway, that Hal knelt by his father as he died. For Bolingbroke was now beyond even the great trivia of kinghood. He fell back on his straw pallet and the death rattle rose in his throat as he prayed God to have mercy on his soul. In his last moments they say he realised that he was dying in a room called Jerusalem, which afforded him strange comfort.

  This was St Cuthbert’s Day, 20th March, in the year 1413 of our Lord, the year I caught the pox, and the forty-sixth year of Bolingbroke’s age. Hal himself was twenty-six at that time.

  Were they reconciled at the end?

  Madam, it depends what you mean by reconciliation.

  Bolingbroke’s last words were to beg his son to find himself a good confessor.

  I can believe, as I say, that Hal knelt by his father’s side, and that tears ran down his cheeks, and that he even kissed what remained of that leper mouth.

  But I shouldn’t imagine he thought to take the crown off.

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  How Pistol brought the good news from Jerusalem to Paradise

  21st July

  That night the Leper King died in Jerusalem, I lay drunk in a great blazing barn in that sweet perry-apple paradise I call Gloucestershire. I mean I was lost in a bright city. In an orchard. In an arbour. Where twilight fell with snowflakes in it and cider was like a drowned December wind, shivering on the tongue.

  Shallow was there. And Silence. And Shallow’s man Davy, who ran his estate. And my man Bardolph, who ran a great arson of a nose. There we were. Here we were gathered. Under the trees and then in the vast cathedral of that barn. A cathedral smelling of hay and dung, running with chickens, eggs found in your cap, where a man could sprawl with his flagons in warm nests of straw, and look up at Orion through the hole that gaped in the roof.

  That was a little later in the evening, though. We began in Shallow’s arbour, wrapped up in rugs and skins, eating Shallow’s pippins of his own grafting, and with a dish of caraways and so forth to help us break our wind.

  ‘Why, this is the Land of Cockaigne!’ I told my good host. ‘Where the sun shines on both sides of the hedge, and the pigs come running all hot from the spit with knives and forks stuck in their backsides ready to eat! This is Eden, Arcadia, and Avalon.’

  Poor Shallow was having trouble with his cousin, who kept falling down.

  Poor Shallow was also having trouble with himself, for the same reason.

  Sitting there under the apple-boughs, I instructed them in the wise dispensation of St Boniface. We drank the health of a hell of a lot of Popes that night.

  It grew duskier. We processed into the barn. Davy lit seven great braziers of sea-coals. Bardolph lit his nose. We were snug in the barn. The whole sky over us was like an ear of whorled cloud, listening to the frozen music of the spheres and the names of the Bishops of Rome. Then Silence, doing the dirt on his own name and everything else in sight, started to sing the most drivelling ballad I ever heard in my life:

  Do nothing but eat, and make good cheer,

  And praise God for the merry year;

  When flesh is cheap and females dear,

  And lusty lads roam here and there

  So merrily,

  And ever among so merrily.

  Don’t get me wrong. The sentiments were splendid. But the words, in my opinion, were trite enough for that Neapolitan lot who showered my mother with sonnets and such.

  ‘Wait a bit!’ I cried. ‘Good Mr Silence, I’ll give you a health for that.’

  And I did. In fact I gave him a hundred TOASTS.

  I had grown a little tired of toasting Popes (much as they all deserve it, and I stood in need of the indulgences). So, instead, I proposed a general anthology of TOASTS TO GIANTS …

  To Adamastor! To Brontes! To Cacus!

  To Agrios! To Caligorant! To Colbronde!

  To Alcyoneus! To Corflambo! To Cormoran!

  To Alifanfaron! To Dondasch! To Erix!

  To Aloeos! To Eurytos! To Fion!

  To Amerant! To Galabra! To Goliath!

  To Angoulaffre! To Galapas! To Garian!

  To Atlas! To Godmer! To Grim!

  To Balan! To Grumbo! To Gyges!

  To Blunderbore! To Hapmouche! To Irus!

  To Juliance! To Kottos! To Marguttes!

  To Maul! To Ogias! To Orgoglio!

  To Otos! To Pallas! To Ritho!

  To Slaygood! To Tartaro! To Thaon!

  To Typhon! To Widenostrils! To Anak!

  To Pot! To Vust! To Seriously!

  To Downright! To Muckle! To Outrance!

  How many is that, Bussard?

  Fifty-one.

  That gives the general shape and idea. A cup of sack or cider for each giant. And I wasn’t too fussy about disliking some of the giants for personal reasons – e.g. Ritho, who wanted King Arthur’s beard to line his robe.

  My giants could not silence Mr Silence. He sat huddled, his rug up to his ears, his nose dribbling into his wispy grey beard.

  Be merry, be merry, my wife has all;

  For women are shrews, both short and tall;

  ’Tis merry in hall when beards wag all,

  And welcome merry Shrove-tide.

  Be merry, be merry.

  And so on. I ran out of giants before he ran out of doggerel.

  KNOCK. KNOCK. KNOCK.

  (Well done, Pigbum. Caught Hanson with that the other day!)

  Mr Silence was toasting me now:

  Do me right,

  And dub me knight,

  Samingo.

  This Sir Mingo being a loyal knight of your immortal Bacchus I preferred the ditty to the crap about beards wagging all, but at the same time –

  KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK.

  ‘I think,’ said Shallow slowly, ‘there is someone at the door.’

  ‘There isn’t a door.’

  ‘I think,’ said Shallow, ‘that there is someone knocking at a door which is not there.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘In that case, it will be Pistol.’

  ‘It is Mr Pistol,’ Shallow said to his man Davy. ‘Let in Mr Pistol.’

  And at this point it is my distinct recollection that Pistol arrived through the hole in the roof of the great barn, sliding down a rope of hay twisted, his moustaches waxed to fine points, a scarlet cloak about his shoulders. Nearly getting roasted on a brazier in the process.

  Remember. It was late into the night. In effect, it was later. It must have been dawn. It was certainly Pistol, and he had galloped all the way from London, horses dropping dead beneath his thighs, new horses supplied, my incredible Ancient.

  ‘What wind blows you here?’ I asked.

  ‘Not the ill wind,’ roared Pistol.

  Silence looked at the flamboyant intruder. ‘Is this gentleman’s name Puff?’ he said.

  ‘Puff!’ boomed Pistol. ‘I’ll puff you, you silly old cunt!’ He dismissed Silence with a snap of his fingers, and turned to me, cloak swirling. ‘You are now one of the greatest men in the realm,’ he announced.

  I saw a rat
leap in the corner of the barn. O Desdemona, not a patch on you!

  ‘Could you just give me your news as if you belonged to this world?’ I said.

  ‘Fuck the world,’ said Pistol.

  I began to be interested. Pistol was always extravagant, but here was extravagance with knobs on. He was rolling his eyes and twirling his moustaches like a Spanish minion.

  Shallow drew himself up on a bale of hay, trying to make a bearskin do service as ermine round his shoulders. He spoke with what was left of such dignity as he had ever possessed: ‘Pardon me, sir. If, sir, you come with news from the court, then I take it that there’s but two ways – either to tell it, or to conceal it.’ He sniffed. He looked in that moment more than ever like a forked radish, or like something made after supper out of a cheeseparing. He waved his hand round the barn in general and at the seven braziers in particular as though they proved something. He said: ‘I am, sir, under the King, in some authority.’

  ‘Under which King?’ demanded Pistol.

  ‘Under King Harry.’

  ‘Harry the Fourth? Or Fifth?’

  I heard a fox bark on the hill. A shiver ran down my spine.

  ‘Harry the fourth,’ I heard poor Shallow say, and then I saw Pistol giving him the V-sign.

  It was like a dream. Silence, indeed, had fallen asleep in the hay, his head in a manger. Shallow collapsed by slow degrees down the bales until he was quite bumped down and sitting in a heap of dung. He touched it wonderingly with his fingers and then smelt them. He smiled. He did not seem to care.

  From a long way off, a million miles away, from among those stars dangling at Orion’s belt, I heard Pistol’s voice, that hoarse tiger-voice, yet it seemed to me no more than a girl’s whisper: ‘Harry the Fifth’s the man. I speak the truth.’

  I took a little sip of sack. ‘What?’ I said, softly. ‘Is the old king dead?’

  ‘As a doornail,’ snapped Pistol.

  Then I rose up out of the hay with a roar like a lion.

  With a roar like three lions. The lions in the arms of England.

  I flung one of my flagons to my right. It rang like a bell, smashing into a brazier, sending sea-coals flying in all directions like stars.

  The other flagon I hurled up – up – up – up – a giant throw, a throw worthy of Balan and Blunderbore and Grumbo and Outrance, clean through that hole in the roof of the barn.

  I think I hit the moon, and she bled sack.

  ‘Saddle my horse!’ I shouted.

  The sea-coals set fire to the hay.

  ‘I am fortune’s steward!’ I shouted.

  The bales blazed. The whole barn was on fire.

  ‘Get on your boots!’ I cried. ‘We ride all night!’

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  About the coronation of King Henry V

  St Mary Magdalene’s Day

  I meant all day.

  There was not much left of the night. The sun rose up before us out of the road as we galloped on towards London. I galloped. And Shallow. And Pistol. And Bardolph. Silence we left behind in Gloucestershire, to sleep off the effect of his songs and my toasts to the Popes and the giants and the sack and the cider and the night’s general merriment. Of course we dragged the old greybeard out of the burning barn and tucked him up safely in bed before we clapped spurs to our horses.

  Shallow was inclined for the first few miles to keep looking back over his shoulder at that blazing barn. A perilous regret, since it involved him twice in falling off.

  ‘My barn! My great barn!’

  ‘Think nothing of it. Think of it as a torch lit for King Hal!’

  ‘But there wasn’t such another barn in Gloucestershire.’ ‘You shall have bigger barns. For me to burn. I shall be rich. You shall be rich. We are all rich already!’

  On we galloped.

  Snow in our teeth.

  But the wind was up, and the snow did not settle, and we found roads enough, and stables enough, and fresh stallions enough, and altogether made good progress towards London.

  There, on a barge, the body of Bolingbroke would have been going for its last journey in this world. The barber surgeons would have washed him and disembowelled him and embalmed him, then wrapped him in a well-waxed winding sheet. Westminster Abbey would be a twinkling forest of candles and tapers. The bells of the City were sounding the Leper King’s knell.

  From Gravesend, where the black barge stopped, the coffin was taken to Canterbury on a horse-drawn bier. Hal and his brothers rode around it, their pennons cased, their shields draped with black velvet.

  Bolingbroke, King Henry IV of England, was buried by fitzAlan the Archbishop in a grave in the chapel of St Thomas a Becket, close by the tomb of the Black Prince.

  Worcester, I did not like the man, but liking is neither here nor there, and no doubt God will have more time for him. I never liked his father either, that maniac John of Gaunt. (His piss was congealed ice.) They were a tough lot. Usurpers. But then, with success, suspicion and patriotism set in, as they often do, and I daresay the King died of his conscience as much as the leprosy. I never admired that statute De Heretico Comburendo, which was Bolingbroke’s contribution to the law of the land. You know why he brought that in, of course? To save money. Fig me, but they were all so mean, those spawn of Gaunt’s! Bolingbroke was not so concerned about heresy as it endangers the safety of the soul. It was where it threatened to disrupt the safety of the Kingdom that it worried him. And by giving fitzAlan the power to hunt down heretics and burn them he saved himself a great deal of money in costly proceedings against subversives.

  BUT—

  The King is dead! Long live the King!

  And so to Harry’s coronation …

  There was a decent lapse of time, naturally, between the burying and the crowning. After an hour or two of galloping at full-tilt with a stomach full of sack and a head full of stars, the certainty of this began to break in upon me. Since at about the same time one of my horses collapsed under the weight of my womb it was just as well …

  We proceeded towards London in a more leisurely manner thereafter, as befitted our new dignity, as was consonant with our position as men of substance under the fresh dispensation. We followed, if I recall it right, a most delicious and circuitous route, and contrived to get drunk in seven counties on the way.

  The young King was crowned on 10th April, which was the Sunday before Easter, in the midst of a great snowstorm. All the bells of London rang. The royal trumpets pealed. The streets were lined with soldiers holding lances.

  I was a little hurt to receive no invitation to the Abbey. But as yet I suspected no treason, Worcester. In my euphoria, in my hopefulness, I trusted my friend, the new King, where he was being crowned by the Archbishop just down the road there, in the Abbey Church.

  I waited with my party in the snow, not a hundred yards from the cathedral doors.

  I waited patiently. I let snow fall on my hair and in my beard. I let myself be jostled by officious soldiers. What did I care? When I saw Hal again, and he saw me, all would be well, all would be put right, and I would come into my own.

  ‘Stand here by me, Mr Robert Shallow,’ I said. ‘I will see that you are brought to the King’s notice.’

  Pistol’s red cloak was stained with mud and sack.

  ‘Come here, Pistol,’ I said. ‘Stand behind me. If I’d had time, I’d have had new liveries made for all my men.’

  ‘You could have,’ piped Shallow, ‘with that thousand pounds you borrowed from me—’

  ‘Think nothing of it,’ I said. ‘These poor clothes show my zeal.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Shallow.

  ‘My earnestness of affection.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Shallow.

  ‘My devotion.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Riding, as it were, day and night—’

  ‘With some few stops for drinking,’ growled Pistol, twirling his moustaches.

  ‘For drinking the King’s health!’ I sai
d. ‘But not to deliberate. Not to remember. Not to take much thought of myself at all.’

  ‘Or my barn,’ said Shallow.

  ‘And now to stand here,’ I said, shaking my bare head so that the snow flew round about me like a plucked goose. ‘To stand in the street all stained with travel, and sweating with desire to see him. Thinking of nothing else. Putting everything else into oblivion.’ I stamped my feet with the cold. ‘As if there was nothing else to be done but to see him.’

  ‘Harry Monmouth,’ said Shallow.

  ‘Harry the Fifth,’ said Pistol.

  ‘The King,’ said Bardolph.

  There were shouts from within the Abbey. The trumpets sounded.

  The tall doors swung open.

  I strained to see. Those lances lining the route were a nuisance. The snow was everywhere, whirling, falling, tossed up again in the bitter wind.

  ‘God save the King!’

  ‘God save the King!’

  ‘GOD SAVE THE KING!’

  And there he was, mounted now, in full panoply, riding from the Abbey steps, coming towards us, approaching me.

  I used my belly as a battering-ram.

  In a trice, I was through the line of soldiers and standing in the middle of the street.

  I stood in the middle of the street, in the falling snow, in front of Harry Monmouth with the crown upon his head.

  ‘God save your grace!’ I cried. ‘King Hal! My royal Hal!’

  For a terrible moment, it crossed my mind that he was not even going to draw rein. He was mounted on a great black horse, which struck horribly at the rush-strewn cobbles already an inch deep in snow, and as I say it seemed for a second that he had every intention of letting that horse trot on, and buffet me, and strike me down, and ride right over me.

  But no. Black gloves moved on those reins, and shortened them. He stopped.

  ‘God save you, my sweet boy!’ I cried.

  King Henry V did not look at me. He turned round in his saddle and addressed Gascoigne.