Title: Such English Balls
Fandom: Henry V, Henry IV Part 2
Rating: G
Length: 650 words
Author notes: The fic title is from the ballad 'King Henry's Conquest of France' (Child 164). For headcanon about Poins' future as a vintner, I am indebted to angevin2 's fic 'He Which Hath No Stomach To This Fight'. 
Summary: Poins has no regrets about his squandered youth. In many ways, it's been surprisingly instructive. But the memories leave their mark.



With the money he won from the guests at his sister’s wedding (he did protest, truthfully, that it was not he who suggested quoits to men who had reached the point of inebriation at which competitiveness furthest outruns dexterity, but Eleanor’s still not talking to him), Ned settles his account at the tennis court. He does it reluctantly: the keeper’s new-found obsequiousness emphasises, as it is meant to, Ned’s previous embarrassments. But it’s one of a string of premises across the Liberties of Southwark owned by the same influential landlord: it’s as well to have good standing there. And it’s a handy place to close a deal. Playing at ball with princes, you grow adept at giving your opponent the flattering appearance of a close run for his money.

‘I don’t see your, er, friend much these days, Master Poins,’ the keeper says. Ned wonders idly what the emphasis is meant to insinuate: the transparency of Hal’s incognito or the keeper’s opinion of their friendship. Probably both. There’s a bathhouse across the yard from the tennis court: they hadn’t always been discreet.

‘No? Well, we’re none of us as idle as we were. Wars bring employment.’

‘Off to France, are you, sir?’

‘I’m Fortune’s bondsman. Whither she goest.’

His loss at tennis, five sets to William Stockton’s seven, is not precisely the work of that allegorical lady. But perhaps she has a hand in the offer Stockton makes over claret and comfits, in a bath redolent with musk and cloves, of a position with a delegation of vintners seeking advantageously to renegotiate their interests in Gascony in the light of the, ah, likely political situation. It’s the sort of thing Ned thinks he might enjoy: not very risky really, but with a certain military frisson. And if he acquits himself well, becomes a friend of the firm, of the family—well, Stockton has a daughter, young to marry yet, but in a couple of years—Ned’s not the sort of man to care if she favours her startlingly unprepossessing father. He accepts; they call for more wine, more sweetmeats, though not for the company of the pert Flemish maids—Stockton is uxorious and Ned sees advantage in seeming to be something of the same temper—but music, yes, why not a little music?

The lutenist strikes up the hit song of the moment; its ubiquity on street corners and in public bars no longer makes Ned jump, but he rolls his eyes to the curtained canopy of the bathtub.

‘Naturally, the tale of an English victory against the odds accounts for its popularity with the common people,’ says Master Stockton, with the burdened air of someone with a name to drop. ‘But what amuses me about it is the thought of the look on that scar-chopped, quill-nosed, hanging-lip, pi-jaw face when he was handed a chest full of tennis balls—ha! Tennis balls! Imagine!’

Ned assumes an expression of bucolic humility and reaches under his headcloth to scratch his ear. ‘I wouldn’t know. I’ve never had the honour of being presented to His Majesty, of course. But maybe one day—with a bit of luck, eh?’

Dame Fortune does not favour this aspiration: King Henry dies of a bloody flux without ever again setting his eyes upon the only one of his old cronies to survive him, or indeed, achieving that smaller consequence of being crowned King of France. Scholars will, however, persistently remark on one of the many curious provisions of the will of Edward Poins (c. 1387-1461), the powerful but divisive mid-fifteenth century Master of the Worshipful Company of Vintners, to the effect that every poor boy belonging to the charity school he founded in 1444 should receive, on the anniversary of the battle of Agincourt, the gift of one tennis ball.