Do not see my fair rose wither (Histories AU)
Title: Do not see my fair rose wither
Author: lareinenoire
Play: 1 Henry IV
Characters / Pairings: Hal, Isabel, Richard (flashback); Hal/Isabel, Richard/Isabel, Hal/Richard (sort of)
Rating: PG
Summary: After Richard's death, Isabel is escaping ghosts and Hal is chasing them.
Wordcount: 2153
Author's Notes: Part of the Big Shakespeare Histories AU, set just after To Mock the Expectation of the World. Regarding the above pairings, the timeline has been squashed somewhat, such that Hal is eighteen at the deposition, and Isabel is sixteen when she marries Richard.
There was no funeral in the end.
If he were honest with himself, Harry knew all along it would never happen. The official reason was that Richard had already been buried in Switzerland--where Harry knew he manifestly wasn't, though damned if he could puzzle out where Richard had actually died--while Beaufort shook his head and made oblique references to suicides and consecrated ground. Harry grimly favoured the theory that if there were a funeral, his father would have been obliged to attend and the corpse would have inconveniently bled.
What he did not expect was Isabelle's departure so soon afterward, although he was forced to admit that it made sense the more he thought about it. What sane woman could bear to look her husband's murderer in the eye?
She looked painfully young in black, her face concealed by layers of crape and her hands trembling as she watched the footmen carry her belongings out of the house, just as they had carried them in two years before. Words, hundreds of them, clogged Harry's throat. He had not spoken to her in nearly six months, not since the day the court declared Richard legally insane and begged Harry's father to take charge of all the Perrivale estates. They had left Isabelle here, an awkward remnant of life as it had been, but now even that could not be sustained.
The footmen had finished, and the butler stepped forward, tears standing in his eyes, to murmur something to his widowed mistress before taking her by the arm and leading her from the house. Harry stumbled down the remaining stairs, groping for words suddenly gone, and, before he could stop himself, grabbed Isabelle's hand.
"Harry?" Her voice was hoarse from weeping, and he could just see her eyes beneath the veils, large and dark and haunted. The butler, ever discreet, retreated to stand by the carriage. "I did not know you were here."
"We arrived last night," he said, lowering his gaze to her gloved hand, now trapped in his. "Oh, God, Isabelle, I don't even know what to say. I'm so sorry. I don't--"
"Stop." She untwisted her fingers from his and placed them over his mouth. "It's not your fault, Harry."
"You're not leaving...not for good?"
He already knew the answer, even before she nodded. "I cannot stay here, Harry. Not now. You know that." Slipping her arm through his, she led him away from the drive, toward what in other, kinder seasons would have been the rose arbour, but was now just a maze of thorny branches. "Everywhere, I see him, at the corner of my eye. But when I turn, he is gone. Un fantôme, on dit..."
"A ghost." Harry swallowed. "You're not the only one."
"He cared for you very much."
Harry nodded, his throat tight. "Will you go back to France?"
"I have no other place. Where else would I go, Harry? My husband is dead." Harry could feel her shaking as she spoke those words, the consonants like nails in Richard's coffin. "There is nothing left for me here. Only, what did you say, ghosts."
He knew what he wanted to say, and it seemed that Isabelle did too, for she lifted the froth of black crape to look into his face. She was smiling, a weak, fluttering reflection of the smile he recalled from her wedding day, from when she still remembered how to laugh. When Richard's sun still shone upon them both.
"You look like him, you know. Just a little."
"But not enough." Harry and Humphrey, they called the changelings in the dark-haired Lancaster family. It was a title he'd taken up with pride, for it reminded him of Richard, of their shared blood and the memory of Edward Perrivale who had built the family's fortune and whose portrait hung in the place of honour above the hearth in the drawing room. "Will you not stay for me, Isabelle?"
He could see the tears caught in her eyelashes, sparkling in the scant sunlight, and pressed on, the words tumbling out of their own accord. "I know I'm not him. But we could be happy. Surely we could."
"Harry, please don't say that," whispered Isabelle. "I care for you, I do. But it is a different world. There is no place for ghosts here."
"You're wrong." Trying to look at anything but her, he turned back to the house. "There are only ghosts now."
He had dreamt of Richard the night before, as he had every night since the news arrived. Some of the dreams were memories, others flickered in and out like shadows from a magic lantern, but still Richard glittered at the centre of them all. It was the night of Harry's seventeenth birthday, a bare few months before everything he knew had shattered, and he was laughing with Richard in the conservatory, the world spinning from too much absinthe that turned Richard's eyes greener than the ferns that tickled his face.
"I can feel the earth spinning, did you know that?"
"That's because you're drunk," Richard informed him wryly. "Better in here, though. Absinthe makes the wallpaper move, I've found."
"Wallpaper?" Harry shaped the word with a tongue that suddenly felt heavy as lead. "That would be bad, I think. Moving wallpaper."
"It was." The eyes were darker now, greyer, heavy with something Harry could not quite pin down. "I'm being morbid, and on your birthday. Do forgive me, Harry."
He waved his hand and nearly sent the glass flying across the room. "Forgiven. Everything's forgiven. I don't even know why you asked."
"Is it so easy?" Richard did not seem to see him anymore, his eyes fixed on the abandoned glass and the tiny pool of green liquid that remained at the bottom. "Can you say that, and, just like magic, you turn back the clock?"
Harry squinted, trying to focus on his face. "I don't think that's how it works." Deciding that standing up was better left to other, less drunk, people, he slithered across the floor to look Richard in the face. "Will you tell me what's wrong?"
"Wrong?" Richard smiled briefly. "All the world's wrong, Harry. Pieces missing, lost forever, and I can't get them back. She left me here, Harry, in this abyss where I cannot find her. I tried, you know, to find her, but I was too frightened. It was just one door, and I could not open it."
"I...don't know what you mean."
"Shene House."
Although it would have been an exaggeration to claim that those two words sobered Harry up, they certainly left him speechless. "It's true, then," he finally murmured. "You did try to kill yourself."
"Try." Richard laughed humourlessly. "You give me too much credit, Harry. I thought about it. Resolved upon it. And then...I could not bear it. To be burned to death, to feel the flames eating me alive, what man would choose such an end? And I turned away from her. I was too frightened of the means that I abandoned the end, and then she was gone forever--"
Harry did not know what possessed him then, if it was his father's voice from some indefinable distance muttering something about nancy-boys, with his wife's bed barely cold, or the memory of a party not so long ago and a young actor named Henry Greene who had draped himself across Richard with all the possessiveness of a housecat. Perhaps he just wanted to know if the rumours were true, or it could have been the simple, primal desire to draw Richard out of that ghost-ridden abyss by any means necessary, but, whatever his twisted, stumbling reasoning, he lunged forward and pressed a clumsy kiss to his cousin's mouth.
Richard froze, words unspoken and hanging in the air. Then, finally, through a half-swallowed breath, he whispered, "What are you doing, Harry?"
"I..." Harry flushed. "I don't know," he finished lamely. Then, marshalling what few shreds remained of his dignity, he sat up. "I was curious."
Richard looked at him, brows raised. "Were you, now?"
"There are rumours about you, you know." He felt oddly calm now, even with Richard's eyes fixed on him. "You needn't worry. I won't tell anyone."
"I should certainly hope not, considering your part in it." He was frowning, gaze grey as gunmetal. "Did your father put you up to this?"
"What?" It was Harry's turn to stare in horror. "No! He doesn't have any idea. He'd kill me for even thinking about..." He stopped, took a breath. "But what about Isabelle?"
At that, Richard's frown softened. "This has nothing to do with her, Harry. You don't even need to ask."
"But she loves you. And if you're..." he trailed off, looking at the tiles below. "I know it's more complicated than it looks, and I won't pretend to understand all of it, but surely she deserves someone who loves her in return."
Richard did not speak for a few moments, and Harry had the uneasy feeling his cousin was looking straight through him. "Will you promise me something, Harry?"
Heart hammering, he nodded.
"If something should happen to me, will you make certain Isabelle is cared for?" Richard held up one hand and shrugged. "As you said, she deserves that."
It wasn't what he'd said, and Harry didn't quite want to contemplate what sort of thing Richard suspected would happen to him, but he took Richard's hand and nodded again. "I will, Richard."
It was the last time he'd seen Richard. His father had acted quickly and silently, and the news of Richard's exile--to that undiscovered country, it turned out--hadn't even arrived at Eton until well after the fact. And now Isabelle was retreating beyond his reach, and he would break the last promise Richard had ever asked of him.
"I promised him," Harry said, finally looking back at Isabelle. "I promised him I'd make sure you were cared for."
"And I will be," she replied, trapping his face between lace-shrouded palms. "I can't stay here, Harry. I could not bear it. And you...you belong here. With your family."
A family that's killing itself by inches. He did not say the words, bit them back before they punctured the fragile peace of the dead arbour. "I can't make you change your mind, can I?"
She shook her head. "Non, chéri. But I thank you for trying." Turning, she began to untwist her veils from where they had caught on some thorns, fingers deftly plucking at the trapped threads as though they were harpstrings. Harry could almost hear snatches of remembered melody and wondered idly if she intended to take the harp with her. "I must go, Harry," Isabelle's voice drifted into his reverie. She was watching him now, uncertainly this time. "I shall miss the boat train otherwise."
"Godspeed, then," he whispered. There was no boldness in the kiss he gave her, no trace of the curiosity and fascination Richard had prompted, only the echo of words unspoken. Isabelle was shaking in the sudden gust of wind.
"Dieu te garde, Harry." Her skirts whipped round her as she ran from the arbour, stumbling on the neglected gravel path and frantically pulling the veils over her tearstained face.
The arbour was silent now, save for the faraway rattling of the carriage as it rolled along the drive. Even the ghosts, it seemed, had retreated, at least for the time being.
***
The Boar's Head Tavern was already full when he arrived at half past seven. He'd stolen one of the decanters from the study--Richard had always kept his favourites hidden away behind an innocuous-looking landscape--and stumbled through the door, pausing to catch his breath as the room swayed around him.
"Back for more, are you?" Someone caught his elbow, and he had to blink and stare for several seconds before convincing himself that it wasn't Richard, come to chide him for stealing his best Scotch. "I thought you'd learnt your lesson, Henry Lancaster."
He had to fight to keep the revulsion from showing on his face. "Obviously you've never met my father. Otherwise you'd know I never learn. Now," he lowered his voice as he caught sight of Jack Falstaff in the far corner of the pub; more specifically, caught sight of the sizeable pile of money sitting in front of him, "I believe there's a man here who owes me some money."
Poins' grin flashed beneath the gaslamps. "He'll talk an opponent to death. And he loves to bluff."
"My dear Poins," he said, teetering on the verge of open laughter, "I assure you, after this past week, I've acquired the most perfect poker face a man could possibly want."
"Will you wager on that, sir?"
"I'll wager you the last of this." He pulled the decanter out of his coat. "And, by the way, the name's Hal."
Author: lareinenoire
Play: 1 Henry IV
Characters / Pairings: Hal, Isabel, Richard (flashback); Hal/Isabel, Richard/Isabel, Hal/Richard (sort of)
Rating: PG
Summary: After Richard's death, Isabel is escaping ghosts and Hal is chasing them.
Wordcount: 2153
Author's Notes: Part of the Big Shakespeare Histories AU, set just after To Mock the Expectation of the World. Regarding the above pairings, the timeline has been squashed somewhat, such that Hal is eighteen at the deposition, and Isabel is sixteen when she marries Richard.
There was no funeral in the end.
If he were honest with himself, Harry knew all along it would never happen. The official reason was that Richard had already been buried in Switzerland--where Harry knew he manifestly wasn't, though damned if he could puzzle out where Richard had actually died--while Beaufort shook his head and made oblique references to suicides and consecrated ground. Harry grimly favoured the theory that if there were a funeral, his father would have been obliged to attend and the corpse would have inconveniently bled.
What he did not expect was Isabelle's departure so soon afterward, although he was forced to admit that it made sense the more he thought about it. What sane woman could bear to look her husband's murderer in the eye?
She looked painfully young in black, her face concealed by layers of crape and her hands trembling as she watched the footmen carry her belongings out of the house, just as they had carried them in two years before. Words, hundreds of them, clogged Harry's throat. He had not spoken to her in nearly six months, not since the day the court declared Richard legally insane and begged Harry's father to take charge of all the Perrivale estates. They had left Isabelle here, an awkward remnant of life as it had been, but now even that could not be sustained.
The footmen had finished, and the butler stepped forward, tears standing in his eyes, to murmur something to his widowed mistress before taking her by the arm and leading her from the house. Harry stumbled down the remaining stairs, groping for words suddenly gone, and, before he could stop himself, grabbed Isabelle's hand.
"Harry?" Her voice was hoarse from weeping, and he could just see her eyes beneath the veils, large and dark and haunted. The butler, ever discreet, retreated to stand by the carriage. "I did not know you were here."
"We arrived last night," he said, lowering his gaze to her gloved hand, now trapped in his. "Oh, God, Isabelle, I don't even know what to say. I'm so sorry. I don't--"
"Stop." She untwisted her fingers from his and placed them over his mouth. "It's not your fault, Harry."
"You're not leaving...not for good?"
He already knew the answer, even before she nodded. "I cannot stay here, Harry. Not now. You know that." Slipping her arm through his, she led him away from the drive, toward what in other, kinder seasons would have been the rose arbour, but was now just a maze of thorny branches. "Everywhere, I see him, at the corner of my eye. But when I turn, he is gone. Un fantôme, on dit..."
"A ghost." Harry swallowed. "You're not the only one."
"He cared for you very much."
Harry nodded, his throat tight. "Will you go back to France?"
"I have no other place. Where else would I go, Harry? My husband is dead." Harry could feel her shaking as she spoke those words, the consonants like nails in Richard's coffin. "There is nothing left for me here. Only, what did you say, ghosts."
He knew what he wanted to say, and it seemed that Isabelle did too, for she lifted the froth of black crape to look into his face. She was smiling, a weak, fluttering reflection of the smile he recalled from her wedding day, from when she still remembered how to laugh. When Richard's sun still shone upon them both.
"You look like him, you know. Just a little."
"But not enough." Harry and Humphrey, they called the changelings in the dark-haired Lancaster family. It was a title he'd taken up with pride, for it reminded him of Richard, of their shared blood and the memory of Edward Perrivale who had built the family's fortune and whose portrait hung in the place of honour above the hearth in the drawing room. "Will you not stay for me, Isabelle?"
He could see the tears caught in her eyelashes, sparkling in the scant sunlight, and pressed on, the words tumbling out of their own accord. "I know I'm not him. But we could be happy. Surely we could."
"Harry, please don't say that," whispered Isabelle. "I care for you, I do. But it is a different world. There is no place for ghosts here."
"You're wrong." Trying to look at anything but her, he turned back to the house. "There are only ghosts now."
He had dreamt of Richard the night before, as he had every night since the news arrived. Some of the dreams were memories, others flickered in and out like shadows from a magic lantern, but still Richard glittered at the centre of them all. It was the night of Harry's seventeenth birthday, a bare few months before everything he knew had shattered, and he was laughing with Richard in the conservatory, the world spinning from too much absinthe that turned Richard's eyes greener than the ferns that tickled his face.
"I can feel the earth spinning, did you know that?"
"That's because you're drunk," Richard informed him wryly. "Better in here, though. Absinthe makes the wallpaper move, I've found."
"Wallpaper?" Harry shaped the word with a tongue that suddenly felt heavy as lead. "That would be bad, I think. Moving wallpaper."
"It was." The eyes were darker now, greyer, heavy with something Harry could not quite pin down. "I'm being morbid, and on your birthday. Do forgive me, Harry."
He waved his hand and nearly sent the glass flying across the room. "Forgiven. Everything's forgiven. I don't even know why you asked."
"Is it so easy?" Richard did not seem to see him anymore, his eyes fixed on the abandoned glass and the tiny pool of green liquid that remained at the bottom. "Can you say that, and, just like magic, you turn back the clock?"
Harry squinted, trying to focus on his face. "I don't think that's how it works." Deciding that standing up was better left to other, less drunk, people, he slithered across the floor to look Richard in the face. "Will you tell me what's wrong?"
"Wrong?" Richard smiled briefly. "All the world's wrong, Harry. Pieces missing, lost forever, and I can't get them back. She left me here, Harry, in this abyss where I cannot find her. I tried, you know, to find her, but I was too frightened. It was just one door, and I could not open it."
"I...don't know what you mean."
"Shene House."
Although it would have been an exaggeration to claim that those two words sobered Harry up, they certainly left him speechless. "It's true, then," he finally murmured. "You did try to kill yourself."
"Try." Richard laughed humourlessly. "You give me too much credit, Harry. I thought about it. Resolved upon it. And then...I could not bear it. To be burned to death, to feel the flames eating me alive, what man would choose such an end? And I turned away from her. I was too frightened of the means that I abandoned the end, and then she was gone forever--"
Harry did not know what possessed him then, if it was his father's voice from some indefinable distance muttering something about nancy-boys, with his wife's bed barely cold, or the memory of a party not so long ago and a young actor named Henry Greene who had draped himself across Richard with all the possessiveness of a housecat. Perhaps he just wanted to know if the rumours were true, or it could have been the simple, primal desire to draw Richard out of that ghost-ridden abyss by any means necessary, but, whatever his twisted, stumbling reasoning, he lunged forward and pressed a clumsy kiss to his cousin's mouth.
Richard froze, words unspoken and hanging in the air. Then, finally, through a half-swallowed breath, he whispered, "What are you doing, Harry?"
"I..." Harry flushed. "I don't know," he finished lamely. Then, marshalling what few shreds remained of his dignity, he sat up. "I was curious."
Richard looked at him, brows raised. "Were you, now?"
"There are rumours about you, you know." He felt oddly calm now, even with Richard's eyes fixed on him. "You needn't worry. I won't tell anyone."
"I should certainly hope not, considering your part in it." He was frowning, gaze grey as gunmetal. "Did your father put you up to this?"
"What?" It was Harry's turn to stare in horror. "No! He doesn't have any idea. He'd kill me for even thinking about..." He stopped, took a breath. "But what about Isabelle?"
At that, Richard's frown softened. "This has nothing to do with her, Harry. You don't even need to ask."
"But she loves you. And if you're..." he trailed off, looking at the tiles below. "I know it's more complicated than it looks, and I won't pretend to understand all of it, but surely she deserves someone who loves her in return."
Richard did not speak for a few moments, and Harry had the uneasy feeling his cousin was looking straight through him. "Will you promise me something, Harry?"
Heart hammering, he nodded.
"If something should happen to me, will you make certain Isabelle is cared for?" Richard held up one hand and shrugged. "As you said, she deserves that."
It wasn't what he'd said, and Harry didn't quite want to contemplate what sort of thing Richard suspected would happen to him, but he took Richard's hand and nodded again. "I will, Richard."
It was the last time he'd seen Richard. His father had acted quickly and silently, and the news of Richard's exile--to that undiscovered country, it turned out--hadn't even arrived at Eton until well after the fact. And now Isabelle was retreating beyond his reach, and he would break the last promise Richard had ever asked of him.
"I promised him," Harry said, finally looking back at Isabelle. "I promised him I'd make sure you were cared for."
"And I will be," she replied, trapping his face between lace-shrouded palms. "I can't stay here, Harry. I could not bear it. And you...you belong here. With your family."
A family that's killing itself by inches. He did not say the words, bit them back before they punctured the fragile peace of the dead arbour. "I can't make you change your mind, can I?"
She shook her head. "Non, chéri. But I thank you for trying." Turning, she began to untwist her veils from where they had caught on some thorns, fingers deftly plucking at the trapped threads as though they were harpstrings. Harry could almost hear snatches of remembered melody and wondered idly if she intended to take the harp with her. "I must go, Harry," Isabelle's voice drifted into his reverie. She was watching him now, uncertainly this time. "I shall miss the boat train otherwise."
"Godspeed, then," he whispered. There was no boldness in the kiss he gave her, no trace of the curiosity and fascination Richard had prompted, only the echo of words unspoken. Isabelle was shaking in the sudden gust of wind.
"Dieu te garde, Harry." Her skirts whipped round her as she ran from the arbour, stumbling on the neglected gravel path and frantically pulling the veils over her tearstained face.
The arbour was silent now, save for the faraway rattling of the carriage as it rolled along the drive. Even the ghosts, it seemed, had retreated, at least for the time being.
***
The Boar's Head Tavern was already full when he arrived at half past seven. He'd stolen one of the decanters from the study--Richard had always kept his favourites hidden away behind an innocuous-looking landscape--and stumbled through the door, pausing to catch his breath as the room swayed around him.
"Back for more, are you?" Someone caught his elbow, and he had to blink and stare for several seconds before convincing himself that it wasn't Richard, come to chide him for stealing his best Scotch. "I thought you'd learnt your lesson, Henry Lancaster."
He had to fight to keep the revulsion from showing on his face. "Obviously you've never met my father. Otherwise you'd know I never learn. Now," he lowered his voice as he caught sight of Jack Falstaff in the far corner of the pub; more specifically, caught sight of the sizeable pile of money sitting in front of him, "I believe there's a man here who owes me some money."
Poins' grin flashed beneath the gaslamps. "He'll talk an opponent to death. And he loves to bluff."
"My dear Poins," he said, teetering on the verge of open laughter, "I assure you, after this past week, I've acquired the most perfect poker face a man could possibly want."
"Will you wager on that, sir?"
"I'll wager you the last of this." He pulled the decanter out of his coat. "And, by the way, the name's Hal."