Love cannot save England. Love cannot even save one man.

("Cousin," Richard repeats again, "would not this ill do well?", while Edward's womanly tears run down between his fingers. Aumerle has frozen uselessly on the spot; his lips still are parted in a disbelieving smile, but his hands have dropped to his sides. He has a dull awareness that the king's face has fallen.

He wants Richard to kiss him again, but he hesitates too long, or looks too sad. The king draws back in a rustle of gilt-edged sleeves to set the crown upon his head again. His extemporized philosophy ends there.)

--

Edward swears to the Holy Virgin and to God and to every sympathetic-seeming saint that he will speak of the kiss to no one, and he doesn't. He doesn't tell his father, or his mother, or the priest to whom he confesses. He takes no part in any conspiracies, nor in any treason. In another life the kiss would have won him; in this one, it destroys him.

The next six months -- the nightmare that they are, the better part of them spent hiding behind his mother's skirts or half-dead with exhaustion on his knees in a church -- he can think of nothing else. Aumerle thinks of it when he hears Mass, he thinks of it when he rides and when he sleeps and when he eats. He thinks of it the first time he goes hunting again, after the abortive uprising in which the Earl of Rutland had no part; the memory of it is like some spirit he has driven out of its resting place under the ground. All day long his mind is full of nothing but yellow hair and the taste of salt and the crush of a perfect red mouth. He thinks of it with secret pleasure; he thinks of it and is frightened; he thinks of it and weeps. Had Richard meant to do it like that, like a lover? Surely not, surely they were both mistaken. Had he hoped to buy his treason with a kiss, or had he only meant to stop his mouth?

By October, Aumerle has convinced himself that he imagined it entirely, or worse, that his mind has taken something of sacred innocence and dragged it through the dirt. By November he feels he must be going mad. By February, he scarcely thinks of the kiss at all. He has other things on his mind. When he and a hundred others file past the bier to look their fill on a corpse's hollow cheeks and smudged-out eyes, he doesn't see anything he recognizes.

Week by week Edward remembers less; each day another sliver of significance is pared away, the colors dull. He finds that he cannot remember what he wore one clear day on a beach in Wales, or if the king's eyes were green or gray before they were smudged out by starvation, and that this is a mercy. He can go about his wretched day without being needled by the memory of a kiss he neither expected nor deserved. It's as if it hadn't happened at all. When noble men speak of the King, whether to curse him or thank him, they mean King Henry now; in time Aumerle forgets the word ever meant anyone else. A man might cling to that for reassurance.

When he thinks of the erstwhile King Richard, later in life, it's as he was before; broken and short-tempered and never within any man's reach, certainly not his own. By the end of his life he thinks of the old king only in adjectives from other men's descriptions -- that he was fair, that he was foolish, that he is dead. Edward remembers that, and forgets, and forgets.