Title: Thrice Wider
Fandom: Henry V -- Shakespeare
Rating: Teen and up
Length: ~1800 words
Content notes: major character death (canonical), morbid-typical stinks and bodily fluids (medium graphic), period-typical underage marriage/sex Mary de Bohun was married the age of about 11 to the 14-year-old Henry Bolingbroke, on the understanding that the marriage would not be consummated until she was 16 (typical of aristocratic marriages of the period). In reality, Henry was not at all reluctant to begin a sexual relationship with his young wife. Mary became pregnant aged 14, (Henry got in trouble with his father over it) not with the future Henry V, but a child who was stillborn or died shortly after birth. Readers can, in any case, take it for granted that Falstaff is probably fibbing about everything, even in extremis, and that Shakespearean elasticity can be applied to everyone's ages (indeed, it has to be).

The material world of this fic belongs to the late sixteenth, not the early fifteenth century.

Yonks ago, I offered a prompt meme using semi-randomly-generated lines of poetry. This is #6 in that series, for gehayi, who drew the line ‘The void as low as where this earth’ from Dante Gabriel Rossetti's 'The Blessed Damozel', and prompted for a Shakespeare fandom. I couldn't think what on earth to do with it until this fan_flashworks prompt arrived almost simultaneously with the thought 'What if Falstaff really was Hal's father?' So sorry for the wait, gehayi, and thanks for the additional nudge, fan_flashworks!

The title is from Henry IV Part Two, V, v.
 

Summary: Falstaff makes a deathbed confession. Mistress Quickly doesn’t quite understand why it’s important.



It took a lot to make Nell gag. Both her personal and professional lives gave her many occasions to retch, and it was politic upon most of them to be able to stifle the impulse. But Sir John’s bedchamber challenged even her formidable resources: sour ague sweat and a piss-miasma strong enough to make her eyes sting; acrid unhealthy shit and a dense reek of puke; rotten meat and old cheese, and over it all, the fetid, waxen stench peculiar to deathbeds. She had brought up a posset, expecting to be cursed for presenting a knight and a gentleman to that wretched villein, small beer, but she sensed now that earthly victuals were not what he wanted. She moved a brimming po from a joint-stool at the end of the bed, set down the tankard and her candle upon it, and went over to the window. A pot of gillyflowers stood on the sill: she plucked the ones that were not entirely wilted and tucked them in her bosom, set the pot aside and opened the shutter. The candle-flame wavered in the breath of night-air; she wondered if she were admitting ill humours—the moon was full and the river was dropping—then decided it couldn’t possibly matter. She took a good lungful before turning back and picking up the candlestick. Her hand shook as she parted the bed-curtains. She was being daft, she told herself. She’d laid out more dead bodies, many of them unshriven, than most people’d had hot dinners—not than Sir John: there were not enough corpses buried between here and (she wracked her brain for a location suitably remote) Staines to equal the number of dinners Sir John had eaten in his life, but perhaps that was it, there was thrice more of him than of other men, and his carcase would be thus three times as terrible.

But he was not dead. The supine hump of linsey-woolsey and soiled brocade in the bed smelled worse than death, but it emitted a tremendous groan that was to someone of Nell’s experience quite distinct from a giving up of the ghost, and began to wheeze. A foot, swollen almost beyond recognition as a human member, mottled purple and crusted with dirt, cracked skin and scab, poked from the sheets. Nell touched it gingerly. It was icy cold.

‘Ooo-augh,’ he protested, and tried to pull away.

‘You were ever ticklish, Sir John. Here, I brought you up some caudle.’ She set the candle on a shelf beside the bed and reached for the pewter mug. ‘Will you do a poor old woman a courtesy and take a little, in token of the friends we have been these thirty years?’

He raised his matted head an inch or two from the pillow. The flesh of his face had fallen away, and in the shadows cast by the candle-light his nose stood out, pointed like a quill and bone-pale against his blotched and grubby face. His eyes clouded with incomprehension.

‘Who,’ he gasped, ‘the hell are you?’

‘It’s Nell, Sir John. Nell Quickly—Nell Pistol, I should say, but I haven’t got used to it yet.’

‘No—you’re a f—f—fiend.’ His great belly wobbled like curds in muslin. ‘The scarlet woman! A whore astraddle a—’

‘Fie, Sir John! I’m a respectable widow with a lawful wedded husband living downstairs!’

‘—beast, with seven heads and ten horns—’

‘I’m sure I haven’t even two, and if I had I’d give them to my lord and master, for everything I have now is his.’

‘—and two backs, that you have and there’s—’ He flapped his hand ineffectually, unable even to free it from the bedclothes, ‘thy cup, full of the sins and filthiness of thy a bum—abom—harlotry—’

‘Sir John,’ she said, sitting on the side of the bed. After all, he’d accused her of worse, and in less fearful straits than he was now. ‘It’s just a nice mug of warm ale. Calm yourself. This is mad talk. Settle down.’ His eyes rolled, then closed; his head dropped back, and a snoring sound rattled from his throat. Nell leaned against the bedpost and sipped absent-mindedly at the mug.

When he came to again it was to sit almost upright and roar the single word ‘Sack!’ over and over.

‘Just like the old days, Sir John,’ she said, smiling and arranging the bolster to support his neck. She tried to get him to sip a little of the milk-and-ale, but he just dribbled it into his beard, and she ended up finishing it off herself. He complained of his cold feet and she tucked the covers around them.

She must have dozed a bit then, for the candle was an inch lower and she heard the watch cry eleven in the street below. She got up to close the casement.

‘Boy?’ rasped Sir John. ‘My boy?’

‘He’s in the scullery, packing for the wars. I’ll have him sent for.’

‘No—no. He has cares enough. Uneasy lies the head, you know.’ He tossed his own in demonstration. ‘Give him—give him a message, for I won’t see him again in this life.’

‘Nonsense, Sir John. He’ll be up to you in just a moment, to bid you farewell. He’s going to the wars, young as he is. My husband too. For England’s glory.’ There was a clout at her feet, none too clean, but nor did that matter much. She picked it up and mopped his greasy brow with it. His hand, that he had struggled to lift an hour ago, flashed out with uncanny, morbid alacrity and grabbed her over-partlet. The flowers fell from her bodice onto the bed. His breath smelled earthy-strong.

‘Tell him. I knew his mother. I knew his mother in a green field.’

Nell had always suspected as much. She nodded understandingly.

‘Beside a glassy stream, in a green field, I knew her. At Arundel, when I served my lord Norfolk.’

Well, that couldn’t be right. The lad was still a squeaker, twelve years of age at the outside. But everything came together for the dying.

‘She was married, God forgive me.’

‘There, Sir John.’ She freed herself and patted his brow again. ‘Are you sure it’s not a priest you want?’ If he had a year and a day to live it would not be enough to confess all his sins. And he certainly hadn’t the year, anyway.

‘No priest.’ He cocked his head; the sharp angle of his nose made the gesture oddly birdlike. ‘Rather have a capon I could eat. And she was sweet as a jenny wren, only sad, because her husband wouldn’t swive. He—he said that she was too young. I was young myself—’

He must, Nell thought, be running two occasions together. Even Sir John could not claim to have been young a dozen years ago, and nor had she ever known him, for all his faults, express a taste for girls unready for bed-pleasures. Rather the opposite.

‘—just about the age he is now—too young to resist her, so fair she was.‘

Nell could well believe he’d started early. She was touched, in a way, that the old man should vouchsafe to her such a distant and fond memory, his first time with a girl, like enough. She patted his hand. ‘A maid and her swain on a May morning, and if God won’t forgive them he’s not the man I took him for.’

‘And passing handsome I was, if I do say so myself. She—wept on my shoulder and said was it for this that her aunt stole her away from the nunnery, that she should live as a nun, but married to a prig with his arse all over rashes and—and his face all over comedoes, the Latin is good, comedo, a glutton—and God forgive me I kissed her and I laid her down on the grassy bank by the clear water and I lifted her kirtle and touched her knee and it was warm as bread new baked and she said oh Jack go upward and I went upward and I touched her thigh and it was as warm as flesh new roasted and she said oh Jack go upward and I went upward and there was as hot as fire and sweet as cates but her name was Mary and I doused her flames but being young they lit again and again I put them out with my hose—‘

The words were coming in torrents now; in vain Nell tried to quell them. ‘Sir John, ‘she protested, all this talk! It’ll tire you—‘ She should go down and get the men, fetch Sir Hugh the priest. The fever-stage consumed a man's lifeblood quickly, burning like brandywine set alight to play at flapdragons.

‘And—nine—months—after—he—he—he was—born—at Monmouth,’ he panted. ‘There are—good—men—born at—Monmouth.’

Nell had a vague notion that Monmouth might be somewhere beyond Rotherhithe. ‘I’m sure there are, Sir John. There are good men born at Windsor too, and Westminster. I’m going to fetch the boy now.’

‘God—God—God—’ His eyes were like tar-pits in the rough scrubland of his face.

‘Now, tilly-fally, Sir John, no need to be calling on Him, just yet. Say “godspeed you” instead to your friends that are bound for the wars, which I’ll fetch them now.’ She picked up the candle from the shelf.

He had noticed the gillyflower that had fallen from the neck of her gown, and was plucking at it like an infant, staring in foolish absorption at the petals stuck to his fingers.

‘I knew her in a green field,’ he mumbled. ‘And a crystal stream flowed over sapphire pebbles.’ He kissed his fingertips, and earnestly staring down at them as if the grimed, overgrown nails were not his own, said, ‘If only I could see him once more. Please, tell him. Tell my boy who his father is.’

‘Of course, Sir John,’ Nell said soothingly. ‘My word’s my bond, as I am a worshipful victualler and an honest publican—well, that’s my husband now, but we’re one flesh, aren’t we, so near as no—‘ She drew the bedcurtain, knowing that she had no intention whatever of fulfilling this promise. What good could it do a nice little lad like him, too clever by half, but good-natured, to know that as well as being page to a drunkard, a gourmandiser, a fornicator, a debtor, a thief, a renegade and milk-livered rogue undeserving of the name of soldier, he was his bastard too?

‘Carnations,’ came a loud, discontented voice from the shrouded bed. ‘I never liked them. Nasty pink things. Never could abide the colour.’ Nell smiled wanly, blinked hard, and shut the door upon the last coherent words of Sir John Falstaff, knight.