by Lucy Beckett
Thomas Leighton was the last monk who died in the priory of the Mountgrace.
In July 1539 Beauvale Charterhouse in Nottinghamshire was surrendered; in November, Hull. The Mountgrace was left, for six weeks, the only Charterhouse in England.
They came there, the king’s men, in December, in the bitter cold. The sky had been overcast for days with the sickly heaviness which precedes snow. In the cells at midday it was too dark to read.
Four of them came, in the afternoon. Horses were stabled, fires lit in the guesthouse, meals prepared. Soon the tolling of the bell summoned the monks to the chapterhouse. They listened as the document was read that surrendered the priory and all its possessions in the counties of York, Lincoln, Warwick, Nottingham, Leicester, and Norfolk, lands that had been given in the past by this man and that so that prayers might be said for their souls for ever. This time, again, all of them signed the paper. Later they sang Vespers in the church. The commissioners did not appear. The monks shivered in the choir, and a north wind howled in the hanging woods as they went back to their cells.
In his cell Robert Fletcher stood in front of the stack of logs that had been given him to fuel his fire for the whole winter. He gave the stack a furious kick, and several logs toppled to the ground. He remembered Will, in the yard at Easterside, tossing great lengths of tree trunk behind him so that no one could come near, and shrugged his shoulders. Then he piled on to the embers in the hearth more wood than he should burn in a week and sat up all night beside the blazing fire, never lying down to sleep. The hour for the night office came and went. No one rang the bell.
In the morning labourers arrived, the commissioners’ hired men, blowing into their cupped hands in the cold, and began to strip the lead from the church and the wainscotting from the cells. The monks went again to the chapter-house and were given clothes and some money. In the church a man on a ladder was taking the panes out of a window. Books were stacked on the altar, and on a table chalices and patens were pushed together beside a pair of scales. Outside, a group of men and boys from the farms, and one or two old women, waited to be paid. In the cloister, on the grass, was a heap of bedding.
Robert Fletcher went back to his cell with his new clothes in his arms. He saw that the door of his cell was open. In almost twenty years he had never once come back to his cell and found the door open.
A man came out, edging through the doorway a big, splintered piece of panelling. A second man followed, carrying the stool from inside the cell, with a pile of bedding folded on it, and several books perched on the bedding. As the man leaned back against the door to hold it open, something slid from the top of the pile and dropped with a clatter to the stone floor. It was the crucifix that had hung on his wall. Robert Fletcher threw down the clothes and bent to pick it up. He held the wooden cross for a moment in his hands before he saw that the figure of Christ had come off the wood as the crucifix hit the ground. It lay on the flags, face down, sprawled like a man punched from behind in a brawl. He stood aghast, staring at the small silver Christ, stretched in the dust.
The first man propped the length of wainscotting against the wall and stooped, putting out his hand. Robert Fletcher snatched the figure up before the man touched it.
“We’re to take all t’ silver to be weighed together,” the man said.
“Not this, you’re not. Not this!” The words burst from him.
He pushed past the second man and went straight through his cell into the garden. He knelt on the path and dug a hole in the frozen earth with his bare hands. There were tears running down his cheeks. When the hole was long enough he buried the figure, right way up so that it looked up at him, its arms outstretched, as it had all that while looked down, and piled the earth in on top of it. The cloud of forgetting, he muttered to himself as he made the grave; the cloud of forgetting, as the magnitude of his loss poured over him.
Later the monks stood and watched while the bell was brought out of the church. Eight men lowered it to the grass, where it remained, on its side, fallen in a stillness that, after many thousand hours rung to summon them, seemed at last to dispatch the monks more finally than any order from London, so that some of them backed away from it in fear. Robert touched its rim. The metal was so cold that he took his hand quickly away as if he had been burned.
While the monks were preparing to leave, snow began to fall, white thick flakes hiding the sky and the hills, coming down with the early dusk over the emptying buildings.
An hour later Robert Fletcher walked alone out of the gate. The wind had dropped, and the snow covered the grass, the church, the cells, the forsaken bell, with quiet. When he had walked two or three hundred yards up the path through the wood, he looked down. He could not see even the outline of the great cloister, the outer court. He could see no light. He was alone under the trees in the falling snow as if the priory of the Mountgrace had never been. He thought of the bared stone walls of his cell, the books gone, the fire out. He thought of his garden, the plants cut down for winter, the ivy and the nettles beyond the wall in wait for the spring.
That night he walked only as far as the neighbouring village, knowing that ten miles of open moor lay between him and Easterside. He slept in a shepherd’s cottage, thankful for a place by the fire with the dogs. The next morning, his new clothes still drying out as he walked, he set out over the snow-covered hills in glittering sunshine. The cold and the brightness made his eyes smart, and he trudged with his head down, angry at the stupidity of what he had seen the day before, at how little there was for anyone to gain from the destruction of the Charterhouse compared to the scale of what was lost, angry for the fear of the tenants and their families, who were used to fair treatment from the monastery, angry most of all for the frightened old men turned out of their home into the winter world.
But as he neared Easterside, at last saw it from the other side of the dale, small on the flank of the hill with a thin line of smoke rising, he forgot his anger and his pulse began to race. What would he find there? After nineteen years, what would he find?
A woman he did not know opened the door to him. From behind her a cowed girl of about ten peered at him, frightened.
“Is this Thomas Fletcher’s house?”
“Aye.”
“Is Thomas Fletcher here?”
“He’s out wi’t’ sheep and won’t be back while dinnertime. What do you want wi’ him?”
She looked at him more closely, with some suspicion.
“Who are you?”
“Is old Tom Fletcher dead?”
“He’s dead these seven year and more, and good riddance to him.”
He saw an idea occur to her. Her face hardened. “Be you—Who be you?”
“I am his son, Robert Fletcher. I have been a monk at the Mountgrace since I was a lad. Yesterday they—”
She drew back a step and began to shut the door.
“Don’t shut the door. I won’t hurt you. I shall ask nothing of him, only to tell me—”
The girl retreated to the back of the room. With the door half shut the woman said:
“There’s nowt here for you. He said you would be coming here one of these days. You’re to go away and not come back, he says. He won’t have you begging here.”
“Where is Will?”
“There’s no Will in this house and never has been,” she said, and slammed the door shut. He heard her bolt it, at the top, at the bottom. He heard her shout at the child and the child begin to cry.
He turned and walked away down the hill, his footsteps creaking in the snow, to where the beck flowed black and swift under icicled branches. He stopped on the plank bridge and watched the water.
Where was Will? Dead? If not dead, where was he? Where could he have gone, who had to have his food set before him like a dog or a small child? And Master Husthwaite, who must have been as old as his father, perhaps older? Surely he must be dead?
He looked at the black water flowing and thought of the village on the slop
e of the further hill, the church among the trees by the river. Either the village held an old man whom he had known, by whose fire he had sat winter after winter all his youth, or it did not. If it did not, what reason was there for staying here? And if he went on, where was he to go?
He looked up from the water. His freedom oppressed him. The midwinter sun was already well down in the sky, but the length of the day weighed on him, an unfamiliar load. In the monastery he had lived light, from one ordered hour of prayer to the next, his silence full of words, a certain number of pages to be turned measuring each day as the liturgy’s turning of sorrow and joy measured each year. Even his body seemed heavy, as if he had been swimming downstream for a long time and had at last begun to wade ashore, the weight of his limbs increasing with every step against the pull of the water.
When the sun had almost set behind Murton moor and he was very cold, he left the bridge and walked uphill again towards the village. He met no one. Smoke rose into the clear, icy air from the cottages in the village and from Master Husthwaite’s house.
For a long time he stood in the road, motionless, afraid. Afraid of what? Perhaps only of another stranger opening the door.
When it was dark enough for the glow of the fire to be visible through the panes of the window, he went up to the door and knocked. No one came. He knocked again. He heard a voice inside the house say: “The door is open.” The voice had altered, become higher and thinner, but he recognised it. He pushed open the door and went in.
He drew back at once. There was a smell of dirt and poverty in the house, and for a moment he almost turned and left. He must have been wrong about the voice.
“Who is there?”
He had not been wrong. He walked further into the room, facing the window, the last of the light, so that he could be seen. Master Husthwaite, gaunt and hunched, with a long tangled beard, sat in his chair by the glowing fire, staring straight ahead of him.
“Who is there?” the old man said again, not turning his head.
“It is I.”
But he said once more: “Who is there?” and did not turn his head. He was blind.
The shock made Robert Fletcher almost fall, and he put out a hand to the wall to steady himself. The wall was sticky with cobwebs and grease. After a while, taking the time to speak gently, so as not to shock in his turn the old man sitting there, he said: “It is Robert Fletcher, sir, come back from the Mountgrace, which was yesterday suppressed by the king.”
Master Husthwaite did not move, nor did his still and hollow face change at all.
“Do I know you, Robert Fletcher?” he said at last.
“You knew me many years ago, when I was a boy. You knew me well. I was the lad from Easterside. You took me in. You taught me. I helped you in the church. We read books. I went for a monk, at the Charterhouse. But now—”
“My books are all sold,” the old man broke in. “They were nothing to me at last, nothing, for all the care I had. Are we not taught to set no store by worldly things?”
He spoke in a slow, toneless voice.
“Books. So much dust.”
In the firelight Robert Fletcher saw two tears trickle from the sightless eyes. He took a step forward. The rushes on the floor were matted together with dirt.
“Do you remember me, Master Husthwaite?”
The old man said: “Have you brought my supper?”
A little later a cottager’s wife, a woman Robert Fletcher thought perhaps he remembered, came into the house carrying a bowl of soup with pieces of bread floating in it. She started, almost dropped the bowl, seeing him standing there. She did not recognise him.
“I am an old friend of Master Husthwaite,” he said. “I knew him long ago.”
He took the bowl from her and gave the old man his supper, feeding him spoonful by spoonful from the bowl, kneeling in front of him on the filthy rushes. The woman watched.
“Poor soul,” she said, as if Master Husthwaite were also deaf. “Poor old man. He didn’t know you, sir, I’ll be bound.”
Afterwards he helped her put him to bed, a narrow truckle-bed without sheets, which stood where once the table had been at which he had copied thousands of lines of verse.
He slept on the floor himself, in front of the hearth, wrapped in a blanket that the woman brought when she came back with more soup, for him.
“You must be half-starved, sir, travelling in this weather.”
He stayed for three months.
He washed the old man every day. He kept the room clean. He bought better food, eggs, cheese, white bread. He bought shirts and firewood and another truckle for himself, since the house was quite empty. He spent nearly all the money that the commissioners had given him. He talked to the old man, read to him often from the English psalter, which was the only book left in the house, twice or three times recited to him such lines of Virgil as he could remember. Not once, never once, did he reach, behind the simple demands of the present, which were those of a dying animal, the man he had known. Where was he now, that man, with his long past, and the much longer past which had given him all his subtle sense of who he was? Where was he now? Already with God although his body still lived?
He learned that the blindness had come upon him suddenly, five years before, and that since then he had scarcely stirred from his chair. He was no longer able to walk and refused to feed himself. Another priest had had to be paid to do his work. He had sold everything, saying that his blindness was the judgement of God upon all that he had loved and that he was fit only for the grave.
Never in those three months, as the life left in his body slipped day by day away, did Master Husthwaite give any sign of knowing who Robert Fletcher was, nor did he once call him by his name.
One Sunday in March, when he knew the end to be not far off, Robert Fletcher went to hear Mass in the church by the river. He stood at the back, as he had as a boy, and listened to the long-familiar words which he had himself countless times repeated in the Charterhouse. Words. Was it not words that Master Husthwaite had shut from his life in his despair, and were not words everything, everything of God that man may know, the water of life? And the bread and wine on the altar? The word of God made flesh? God’s word—or only more words?
After the Mass he went out into the chilly sunshine. The villagers were going home, walking away up the path between the graves. He turned from them and watched the brown river flowing as in the past. He noticed a dead tree in the field across the river. All its twigs, its slender branches and fine shoots, which should bud into leaf in the spring, from which it might yet grow, had gone, so that only the thick, bare boughs, black and stark, remained. The tree would fall in a gale one day, and the great boughs would be found to be light and rotten, good for nothing but burning.
The woman who had brought the soup on the first evening touched his sleeve.
“How does Master Husthwaite do?”
“Not well. These last few days he has sunk very low.”
“And him such a holy man. I am very sorry, Master Fletcher, we are all sorry, to see him die so. More years than I can count he’s been Hawnby priest. There’s many in the dale will not remember the time before he came. Mind you, too fine for us he always was. A man like him, with all his books and that, and a gentleman, wanting for nothing, the Lord knows why he shut himself away at the back of beyond, wasting among poor folk what he might have made much of in the great world, even in London, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“He did not think it waste.” He spoke quietly, and she did not listen.
“And to be so brought down—I always say a thaw is evil weather. When the days warm. . . But then, what does he have to stir himself for now?”
He did not answer, and they stood side by side in silence. He did not raise his eyes again to the tree but stared down at the rushing water.
“The river’s well up,” he said.
“There’s been a deal of snow to come down off the moor. They say the bridge at Laskill’s gone. Though
the water’s nowhere near as high as it was the day, it’ll be six or seven years back, about this time, the middle of Lent it was, when old Tom Fletcher was drowned at Shaken bridge.”
“Old Tom Fletcher?” He looked up sharply.
“Oh, Master Fletcher, I beg your pardon, sir. I had quite forgotten—you never did seem like one of them, somehow, and with you being away so long. Though you have a look of your father, now I come to think.”
“I haven’t spoken to my brother since I came back. He will not see me. Tell me what happened at Shaken bridge.”
“You mean to say you never heard?”
He shook his head. Every night at the Mountgrace, every single night to the very end, he had prayed for his father, thinking of him crouched over the dying fire.
“Well, sir, it was a Friday, about this time of year, as I say. He’d gone to market early in the morning. That was the one thing he never let young Tom do in his place, not ever in all those years. And he’d left for home long after dark, late even for him, as came out after.”
It had been one of his tasks at Easterside to listen far into the night on Fridays for the sound of the wagon lumbering into the yard. He had had to take the horse from the shafts and unharness it after the slouching figure of his father, wrapped in an old blanket and too drunk to hold the reins, had slid to the ground and stumbled, cursing, off to the house. Sometimes he fell on all fours into the mud, and he had to drag him to his feet and push him through the door into the smoky kitchen.
“There’d been pouring rain all that day and all the night before. And what with the snow melting too, the river came up and up all the time he was away. Rising as you watched, it was, even here in the village. And of course by the time he set out, not taking a lot of notice, as you might say, of the road, the bridge at Shaken was down, washed right away, and the water through the ford eight or ten foot deep in the middle. The horse, knowing the way home as he did, must have taken the wagon straight into the river at the ford and tried to swim, perhaps, shafts and all. But the force of the water had brought rocks down all over the ford bed, the wagon stuck fast in the boulders—and there they found them in the morning, drowned both, horse and master, your father fallen half out of the wagon into the water, being asleep I daresay, in the dark.”
