The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  4

  October 1522

  The day before Robert Fletcher was to be professed as a monk, the prior came to his cell, slowly, walking with a stick, to hear his confession. In his own oratory he knelt in front of the old man and told him of his impatience, his restlessness, his grief at finding himself, after two years, no closer to the peace he had entered the Charterhouse to find.

  He said: “The day Master Husthwaite brought me to see you, that first day, I stood in your window looking out over the cloister. I saw the cells of all the monks, the closed doors. I listened to Master Husthwaite describing me to you, telling you that I was patient, faithful, obedient. It was not true, none of it was true. But I promised myself before God as I stood in your window that if only I should be allowed to come here I would make it true. I thought that alone in my cell I should have the time, all the time for God. And now, it is less true than ever it was. It is not that I. . . that I. . . Sometimes I wish that I had committed some great sin for which I could be sorry all my days.”

  With tears in his eyes, he stared down at the knots in the planks that made the swept floor on which he knelt.

  “Indeed I am ashamed. And yet I know not. . .”

  He could not find the words. The words he had carefully prepared in the days before he did not utter, because they seemed to him now an account of someone else’s soul. He had a sense of strength, of power within himself that thus far in his life every day had no more than scattered and wasted; he yearned to gather it together, the whole of himself, his whole soul and body, and lay it before God.

  “I have done nothing. Neither good nor evil. And now I shall not. . .”

  It was not what he meant to say. Then he saw what he meant.

  “I am afraid that what I wish for is to die.”

  After a long silence the prior said, very softly, very slowly: “Mean by sin a lump. You yourself, body and soul, indivisible, are that lump. And I myself also, and every man. We can do no more than know ourselves as we are, and offer ourselves to God who has already accepted us, already forgiven us. Who takes away the sin of the world.”

  The words floated towards Robert Fletcher like leaves on the surface of a stream.

  “My child, believe, believe what we have so many ways been told. His mercy is on them that fear him. His mercy is. It is not for you to deserve, only to trust, only to accept what is there, for you, for us all, for you only. Every hair on your head has been counted.”

  Like leaves on the surface of a stream he heard the words, like leaves, two or three among countless leaves, as if it did not matter which the old man chose to speak. He knelt, bowed to the ground, as the leaves floated by.

  Quietly the prior went on. “Our names are written upon water, and all that we do and say, but the water is God’s time. In him there is no movement from the past into the future. The flow of the water is our impression, the mark we make and its unmaking; in him is no unmaking, only the creation of the always new which afterwards he will not let die. To him we are bound; our end is in him, and therefore is no end. What you have done, what you will do, signifies nothing, nothing, except inasmuch as it takes you further from him or closer to him. The rest is in the eyes of the world, and what are the eyes of the world? Dead men’s eyes. To live well is never to despair of him, never, for he did not, he does not, he will not despair of you.

  “We are fallen men and having lost God’s glory we live in the world and stray, terrified, on dark paths towards our certain deaths. But if we had not been wretched, there had been no need for Christ to come. And unless we know our wretchedness, unless we weep for it, he does not come. There is a veil upon our hearts. But if we turn always to him, the veil will thin and fade. The veil will be taken away. With an open face one day you will see the glory of the Lord.

  “You will live, child of this house of God, you will live. Whether for an hour or for fifty years, you will live always on the edge, between his time and ours, and I pray that one day you will cross that edge for ever without fear.”

  The prior stopped speaking. After some minutes, in a firmer voice, he pronounced the words of absolution over him and blessed him. Robert Fletcher stood up. He put out his hand to help the old man from the chair in which he sat. When the prior was upright, he did not at once let go of Robert’s hand but stooped and kissed it.

  “Thank you,” the prior said. “Come with me. It is time for Vespers.”

  They went out into the cloister. The bell began to toll, and other monks appeared at their doors. The prior took him out across the wide grass towards the church. They stopped in the middle of the cloister garth, where the nuttrees were beginning to lose their leaves, and the prior said: “One thing I would have you remember. It is easy to mistake love for faith. You can love what you know but in what you do not yet know you must have faith. Faith is for the night, for the cold weather. If a monk does not recognise the difference between love and faith he will lose heart when the days shorten, as they will.”

  He leaned on his stick and waved his other hand at the yellow woods above them.

  “If a wind gets up tonight, there’ll be scarcely a leaf left by morning. Our life here also has its seasons.”

  “Here?”

  The bell ceased. Smoke curled out of a bonfire in the orchard and thinned slowly, scenting the air. Light from the west, which had already left the cloister, gilded the trunks of the oaks on the hillside like paint.

  “Here in this Charterhouse. Here on this earth.” The prior smiled at him. “When I am dead,” he said, “I commend you to the care of Thomas Leighton, who has been a monk of this house almost as long as I have.”

  The old man suddenly raised his head and pointed at the sky.

  “Look there! Imagine how small we must appear to him, a little patch of stone and grass, a few monks running about, not to be told one from another, like rabbits in a paddock.”

  High up, in the last sunshine, a hawk hung, scanning the earth for his prey.

  The prior smiled and nodded as they walked on towards the church. Robert Fletcher shivered.

  On a December morning in the same year, laid on a cross of ashes and surrounded by his monks, the prior died. He was buried next day in a nameless grave according to Carthusian custom. Afterwards they elected a new prior, Master John Wilson, an honest man, sober and just in all his dealings. Thomas Leighton, an old monk of fierce aspect to whom Robert Fletcher had never had cause to speak, cast his vote for Master Wilson with the rest.

  5

  August 1527

  Don Inigo de Mendoza, ambassador to the court of King Henry VIII in London, to Emperor Charles V, King of Castile and Aragon, Count of Burgundy, hereditary lord of the Netherlands, Austria, etc., etc., in Spain; August 1527.

  “. . . While Cardinal Wolsey remains in France, I am able from time to time to speak alone with Queen Catherine your aunt, from the which privy speech the said cardinal, when in England, did all things in his power, both mannerly and unmannerly, to hinder me. The said cardinal believed himself despatched not only to sign those treaties with the king of France against your Imperial Majesty of which you are aware, but also to arrange an infamous match between King Henry and the Princess Renée of France, against such time as King Henry will have contrived to procure from Rome the declaration of his marriage to the queen’s grace as sinful and void. At this present, however, the queen informs me that the cardinal is forbidden to treat of any such French marriage, not, alas, because the king has altered his mind concerning his union with the queen’s grace, but because he is resolved to marry with a certain lady of the English court, one Mistress Anne Boleyn. It pains me grievously to send this news to your Imperial Majesty. I am requested by the queen, however, to inform you that she has no mind to yield to the king’s request that she meekly retire herself into a nunnery. She is, on the contrary, entirely and wholly confident of the lawfulness, innocence, and virtue of her marriage with the king, and of her right and duty to remain at his side as his true wife,
for her own sake and for that of the Princess Mary her daughter. She rests with full hope upon the expectation of your Imperial Majesty’s help and succour in her affairs (trusting in particular that the presence of your armies in Rome cannot but assist her cause). Meanwhile she bears herself with the dignity and courage natural to so great a lady, appearing at court with the magnificence to which she has long been accustomed, as for example upon the occasion, several days past, of the return to court of Master Reginald Pole, who is cousin to the king and a young man, as I am told, of much promise in affairs of state. He has been abroad these seven years, studying with the most famous masters in Italy (whence he has returned on account of the late disorders in Rome), and the king and queen together greeted him, with every appearance of warmth and kindness, which, in these uncertain times, it greatly gladdened my heart to see. It is my own opinion that if the queen holds firm and treads a watchful path, the king may yet desist from these his most wicked intentions. Long may the cardinal be detained in France, for I doubt not that he, to keep his high place in the king’s favour, must do his utmost to further the king’s design.”

  6

  1528

  In the Charterhouse of the Mountgrace time passed with an order, measured by the tolling bell, that gave to many years the semblance of one. The seasons followed each upon the last, bare wood, green shoot, bloom, and mealy fall, with the often repeated singleness of Christmas, Passiontide, Easter, and Pentecost, each signifying all those that had been and were to be.

  Robert Fletcher became, very slowly, a Carthusian monk. Vespers and the night offices the monks sang together in the church; on Sundays the prior, or another of the priests in the monastery, celebrated the conventual Mass for all the monks, the lay brothers, and any guests there might be; on Sundays also the monks ate together in the refectory; once a week the prior summoned all the monks to the chapter-house. Otherwise Robert Fletcher was alone in his cell, his cottage of two rooms and a loft, his garden with walls too high for him to see over.

  He learned to live within himself. At the same time he discovered that he had always to push outwards, towards God, for his manifold anxiety that he would fail God had narrowed to a simple terror that God might fail him. Used as he became to the nearness of God, God the hearer of his every silent word, God the witness of his every unobserved action, he more and more feared those hours when it seemed to him that God, constantly so close in his solitude, had crossed the boundary of his soul and become after all no more than himself, and so had ceased to be.

  During these hours he lay on his bed, staring at the dead figure hanging on the cross, and saw only death. He would live shut up in his cell from the world for no cause, for nothing, only to die at the end after empty years muffled from the necessities of other men, privileged for no reason not even to labour for his bread.

  Once this death lasted for five days. He turned the proper pages of his psalter and his breviary, and did not read the words. He walked through the cloister to the church at the proper hours and watched the other monks perform the liturgy, bow to a stone, supplicate nobody, kneel before a flat cake and a silver cup of wine. On the fifth day he asked the prior if he might seek counsel of Master Leighton in his cell.

  Master Leighton listened as he told him of the light gone out, the ashes in the hearth, Jesus no more than a good man dead.

  When he had finished he looked across the cell.

  The old monk sat upright at his table, his eyes closed. When he opened his eyes they were keen, a little mocking, not unkind.

  “The fool said in his heart, there is no God,” Master Leighton said, and laughed. He leaned forward and clasped his hands on the table.

  “You’ll do, Robert Fletcher, you’ll do very well, my lad. We’ll make a monk of you yet. Not everyone who goes under the name of monk is a monk, let me tell you, any more than everyone who calls himself a Christian is a Christian. But never forget this: no one but God knows which is which. No one. Now: Do you understand that? No one but God knows which monk is truly a monk or which Christian is truly a Christian.”

  “Aye, Master Leighton.”

  “If you understand that, you are already there, though you may not understand why. For in that ‘knows’ and in that ‘truly,’ God is. Is he not, Master Fletcher?”

  Robert was bewildered. He shook his head. The old monk laughed again.

  “Let us travel by a gentler path. ‘The fool said in his heart there is no God.’ Can you repeat the words that come after? No? Dominus de caelo prospexit super filios hominum, ut videat si est intelligens, aut requirens Deus. The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children of men to see if there were any of them understanding, or seeking God. Now you, according to all you have said today, do not lack understanding. You understand two things many do not. One is the blindness of faith. We see but through a cloudy glass. If I tell you that Britain is an island, you believe me, not because either you or I have walked about its coasts and seen for ourselves that it is nowhere joined to France, but because we know that other men have made such a proof of its nature and we might do the same. But if I tell you that God in Christ’s Resurrection has saved you from death, there is no such proof to be had. There are words only, nothing but words in a book, however often repeated and however venerable the book. You believe me because you choose to, blindly, in faith. You believe me, if you do, because your belief changes everything for you, death into life. Or, rather, it changes nothing but your understanding, the meaning, for you, of life and death, and that is everything. This, the greatness of the change, is the second thing you understand.

  “No doubt you did not know it at the time, no doubt both you and your good schoolmaster would have been scandalised to hear it said, but you became a monk in order to discover whether God is or is not. A monk, after all, is a man; but he is a man who finds himself at the extreme point of what it is to be human. Every man needs God, to rescue him from the meaninglessness of his mortality. ‘Requirens,’ seeking, aye; also, needing. A monk has shed all that other men may hide behind. Houses, land, possessions; coupling, wife, children; the liberty to wander through the world, always to try something new, even the liberty to dream that he might try something new; even his own will: he has shed them so that he may have no covert into which he may creep. If God is not, what has the monk to keep him from the cold? And the Carthusian, a hermit bounded even from his fellows by silence and the walls of his cell, has least of all.

  “So that the darkness you have seen these past five days is a true darkness, the darkness of a man’s life without God. But take courage. It is the light that shows you how dark the darkness is. In this world we shall not know God as we know that Britain is an island. We may only lack him, need him, seek him, understanding that, if he is not, we have no souls and are but flesh and will. We are here to listen to his words, which have all been spoken in the language of men except that once, that single day, when Jesus was raised from the dead and God justified his word to us for ever. If Christ be not raised, your faith is vain.”

  Master Leighton stood up and spread out his hands.

  “You will forget what I have said. My words are nothing. They are gone already. Dust. Air. Go back to your cell and believe. Read the Acts of the Apostles and ask yourself why those men, no wiser or braver than you are, who had every one of them fled in despair from the cross, afterwards worked in this fallen world miracles of faith of which we have not yet seen the end.

  “You are a monk, Master Fletcher. You are close against the truth. But I am promising you no easy passage. Many times you will have to fight, though you are out of the world, battles as hard as any that are fought in it. Some of them you will lose. But you are close against the truth, a weaned child against the cheek of God.”

  The old man stopped speaking. His head dropped as if he had fallen asleep as he sat at the table. He said in a weary voice:

  “Go back to your cell. Pray also for me.”

  He went, light-hearted, cured, for the time b
eing.

  Soon he indeed forgot much of what Master Leighton had said to him. Sometimes the hours of drought came back. When they did, he filed into church or chapterhouse with the other monks and fixed his eyes on Master Leighton’s face until he recovered the force of his words that day, though not the words themselves. Once at Vespers Master Leighton met his glance across the light of a single candle and smiled. Robert Fletcher bent his head, in token of thanks.

  7

  March 1529

  Robert Fletcher stepped back from the rosebush to see the shape his knife had made. He had been kneeling on the damp earth, too close to see the whole bush, peering at each shoot to choose the bud he would favour, the bud above which he would make his neat cut. He felt the blade of the knife with his thumb. He picked up the whetstone from the path and sharpened the blade until it was so keen that it rustled as he drew his thumb across it. He stood, stone in one hand, knife in the other, and looked at the bush. It was lop-sided. He had cut into the wood more ruthlessly, with more decision, as he had gone on, so that the side on which he had begun was taller and looser than the side where he had stopped. He made a shape in the air with the hand that held the knife, describing the perfect outline that he meant to impose on the bush.