Jack and Henry: A Shakespearean Chimera by Rachel Rodman continued...
Act 2
"The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil; and the devil hath power
T' assume a pleasing shape...and perhaps...
Abuses me to damn me."
-Hamlet
A Pleasing Shape
When Henry was twenty-five, his father took him (again) very firmly to the side, and appealed to his remaining sense of the good. He reminded Henry of their great angel predecessors-of Edward III, and of all the intervening generations, back to William the Conqueror. He encouraged Henry to consider the degree to which he had shamed them.
This touched Henry, somehow, in a way that all previous remonstrances had not. He had always harbored a grave respect for ghosts. He imagined these grand figures, grouped into a post-mortem choir. Together, they pointed and sobbed, and lugubriously repeated: "O, Prince Henry..."
At his father's feet, Henry made hasty new promises. (He insisted, in addition-rather unconvincingly-that he had committed all of his outrageous sins quite deliberately...so that, against it, his later reformation (which he had planned from the beginning) would seem only the more astonishing.)
To underline this fresh obedience, Henry promised to marry the princess of Denmark. The act framed a useful political alliance, and his father delighted in it.
To his demon companions, who hooted and catcalled at the back of the wedding ceremony, Henry gave an embarrassed little wave.
Her name was Claudia. She belonged to a distinctive lineage, which, in some parts of Europe, was regarded as inferior. In Scandinavia, in the distant past, angels and demons had lived in relative harmony-loving and breeding, and sharing political power. In modern times, by contrast, all new Scandinavian children-particularly princesses-were subjected to vigorous baptisms, in which all spiritual traces of the demonical were eliminated. After their baptisms, such children retained only a demon's physical strength, and an appreciation for mischief, which colored their sense of humor.
In Claudia, there were also anatomical traces. Henry (who, of course, harbored no anti-demonic prejudices) found these endearing. On her head, mostly hidden by her sculpted hair, were the faintest nubs of horns. On her back (as he discovered, during the consummation) there was a small vestigial tail.
Her heritage was also reflected in her jokes, which could be very dark. "Your father is so young..." she would tease-as if (1) she found his father attractive, or as if (2) she regretted the fact that he would not vacate the throne very soon. Sometimes (though Henry would never have admitted it to her) he found it difficult to determine which thread of the joke she was actually intending to emphasize.
Whenever she teased, Henry waggled his eyebrows, in a fake admonitory way, which made her shriek with laughter. "I am also young," he would say to her. To underline this point, he nipped at her ears, in an exceedingly virile way. Sometimes, he also thrust back his shoulders, and flourished bits of cloth over his head and neck, in order to model a crown and royal robes.
"You are a baby," she would agree. She pulled him beside her-wherever they happened to be-and proceed to tickle him, until he gooed and gaahed.
Of Jack, Henry was increasingly neglectful. He ignored his letters, or, at best, dashed off guilty little notes, rebuffing his advances. "I have promised my father..." he wrote. Or: "Please stay away..."
His father's death-a year later-was very sudden. To the garden, one afternoon, the king retreated for his customary nap. As his father slept, Henry (reading an Art-of-War manual, on his balcony) heard a cry. It seemed too faint to signify any great distress-it seemed, instead, like evidence of a guilty dream, which are common to non-hereditary kings, like his father, who had earned their thrones by questionable methods.
Afterwards, when the body was examined, the interior of the left ear was notably inflamed. "Venomous flies," spat Claudia, with great authority. The learned men of the court agreed with her. As Henry grieved, the court alchemists were commissioned for a cocktail of insecticides. With it, Claudia herself painted the palace gardens and its environs, lacquering each leaf (and its undersurface) and each blade of grass.
After the coronation, Henry's dreams were haunted. In them, his dead father appeared, wearing his old war uniform and helm. A bank of mists seemed to obscure him. Were they the clouds of Heaven? Henry thought, Or the smoke of Hell? He found it impossible to interpret the ghost's expression.
The ghost also made a very short speech, but Henry could not hear it. Competing noises-generated (and Henry could not tell which) either by the songs of the saved, or by the screams of the damned-all but obscured it.
In his dreams, night after night, Henry attentively watched the motions of the ghost's half-visible mouth. During the day, with his analytical mind, he tried to deconstruct it.
The answer came to him slowly-all the more slowly, perhaps, because he did not want to believe it. After decoding the message, he re-studied the dream, hoping to hear something different, or, at least, to obtain some additional information.
"I was murdered, Henry..." the ghost would say, before the mist and the static became too thick. In the dream, Henry tried to run after, calling out desperate questions-"By whom, father? By whom?" He could not, however (though he cried and implored), derive anything further.
In his bedclothes, he would wake, shaking and sweating, and Claudia-dear Claudia-would hold him.
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