The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  The day after Master Husthwaite was buried, he left the village.

  He walked down the dale, his step firm on the road, and rejoiced in the strength of his limbs, in the openness of the unknown world before him. The day was full of weather, blue sky and clouds, sunlight and rapid shadow, a soft wind blowing little squalls of rain. In the old man’s house he had almost come to share his blindness. Now he had come out of the dark, and seeing with his own eyes the showery day, the spring, filled him with delight. The dale widened under the sky; he saw calves in the fields, lambs playing, and the river broadening as it flowed between trees.

  He had been released from bonds, and his garden at the Mountgrace that day seemed to him a narrow plot, walled in, neat and small, a constraining pattern foisted upon God’s earth.

  16

  September 1542

  Messer Marin Giustinian, ambassador of the Republic of Venice at the court of Pope Paul III in Rome, to the Signory of Venice; September 1542.

  “. . . Letters will already have reached Venice bearing news of the sudden death on 24 August of our illustrious countryman and friend Cardinal Gasparo Contarini. The sad disappointment of all the hopes placed in him for some adjustment with the Protestants at Ratisbon surely lay heavy upon him during his last months, as did the neglect, so plain as almost to deserve the name of disgrace, into which his reputation here in Rome had lately fallen. It has been observed by many that since the failure at Ratisbon the pope has swung very far towards the other party (for you must understand that the cardinals who a few years ago laboured together for the reform of the Church are now sorely divided among themselves). Cardinal Carafa, who sees heresy lurking everywhere in the Church, has the pope’s ear; it was he who secured from the pope in July the bull which opened the way for an Inquisition to be established here in Rome, and now I learn that, without waiting for the proper provision of money from the Curia, he has fitted up a house at his own expense, where he presides daily over sessions of the said Inquisition.

  “His companions of old are not exempt from the suspicion in which Cardinal Carafa holds all but the fiercest of his own supporters. I have heard that even Monsignor Pole, who earlier this year travelled as cardinal-legate to Trent for the council that never assembled, so that he returned as empty-handed as Cardinal Contarini from Ratisbon, has had the orthodoxy of his opinions called into question. Whether or not there is any substance in this rumour I have yet to discover; however it is certain that in his administration of the papal patrimony at Viterbo (that retreat from his enemies in which the pope graciously installed him two years ago or more), Monsignor Pole has acted with conspicuous leniency towards such heretics as have been there unearthed, saying always that he holds, with Saint Bernard, that the faith is to be maintained by persuasion and not by force. It is also true that the latest and most serious scandal, the flight to the Lutherans, in the very week of Cardinal Contarini’s death, of the vicar-general of the Capuchins and the celebrated Augustinian preacher Pietro Martire Vermigli touches Monsignor Pole very closely, as the said Vermigli was a devoted friend of many years and took with him out of Italy a learned Jew of Monsignor Pole’s household whom Monsignor Pole himself had converted to the Christian faith. (It need hardly be said that the apostasy of the Capuchin and the said Vermigli has added further fuel to the fire that Cardinal Carafa has set burning here in Rome.) All these things notwithstanding, I cannot myself believe that Monsignor Pole, who leads in Viterbo a life of almost monkish austerity and retirement, will ever abandon the fold of the Church for whose sake he has lived in exile from his native land these ten years and for which almost his whole family, including at last his aged mother, barbarously beheaded by the English king, have most unjustly died. I hear, indeed, that he has said publicly that he will not answer the letter he has received from Vermigli, in which the Augustinian attempts to defend his apostasy, and that he stays quietly at home mourning the death of our beloved Contarini, grieving more for him, and the failure of his cause, even than for the slaying of his family.

  “It is agreed by all to whom I have had occasion to speak in Rome that any hope of reconciliation with the Protestants is now further distant than ever, not least because of the deep disagreements between Catholic philosophers, and that neither the emperor nor the pope is likely to yield on those points which have hitherto prevented the successful calling of a general council of the Church. The emperor would wish any such council to attend to the reform of discipline in the Church (thus sorely vexing the most part of the cardinals), in order to go some way towards healing the breach with the Protestants, which is causing him ever greater anxiety and grief in Germany; while the pope must compel a council to occupy itself with matters of doctrine in order to make clear what is and what is not to be judged orthodoxy, thus driving the Protestants still further into their obduracy. In short, I see no end to these troubles.”

  17

  April 1545

  Robert Fletcher sat with his book in a window of Saint William’s College, where he lived with the other chantry priests, his breakfast piece of bread, a single bite out of it, forgotten on the bench beside him. He was aware of the morning crowd of people passing in the street outside, hurrying in the sunshine, not looking up; also of the ringing of the Minster bells, the full peal jangling and crashing above him as if for a special feast, although, as he afterwards remembered, there was none that day. Most of all he was aware of the sun striking, across the low clutter of the city’s rooftops, the great east window of the Minster, transforming its huge height and width of glass into a fiery pool flashing above the people in the crowded street. He knew that they were there, the people, the bells, the dazzling glare on the window, though he neither looked nor listened but with trembling fingers turned back the few pages he had read, to the beginning.

  He had bought the book because of the face of Valentine Vries, tied to the back of a cart with ropes and dragged through the mud.

  When he saw that face and followed with the rest out to the Knavesmire for the spectacle, he had been in York only a few months. He had found without difficulty a place among the chantry priests in the Minster; he was better learned than most of the expelled monks who came to the city looking for work, and he discovered that the Carthusians, although he never met another in York, retained a respect that the other orders had lost. So he had slipped easily into the easy passage of days and weeks, saying the required number of Masses in the dusty little chapel in the Minster that was his chantry and on Sundays and feast-days singing with the vicars-choral in the high choir while beyond the screen the people came and went and children cried. He was grateful for bed and board and for the ordered regulation of his days. He had long been accustomed to obedience: not to choose, but to perform at the proper time the duty to which he was bound, and so to obedience he returned as if to a sleep from which he had woken, after all, earlier than was necessary.

  One day at dawn he had come to the window hearing shouts and trampling feet in the street.

  “They’re burning the heretics today. Vries and his wife, a Dutch cordwainer. . . They pull them through the city, poor devils, over the bridge and up through the Bar. . . You won’t see much for the crowd there’ll be.”

  He went out, nevertheless, and joined the press of jeering, shouting people who, unlike a truly festive crowd, fell silent when what they had come to see passed by, so that he could hear approaching the rattle of wheels on the cobbles, and the bumping of the man’s head. He saw the woman first, kneeling on the cart, her head hidden in her hands, and then the man, his ankles tied to the cart, the back of his head scraping the stones and his arms outstretched as if he had already been crucified. But the man’s face was entirely alive and entirely at peace, as if he were lying under a tree on a hot summer day and watching the leaves move gently between him and the sky.

  He followed the cart with the crowd, out under the Bar and down through the mud to the Knavesmire. Although he soon fell back in the throng and lost sight of the man�
��s face, he knew that the expression on it would not now change. When he saw the two heaps of faggots, piled high above the people, he quailed and almost vomited. He turned back towards the city, running, but did not reach it before he was overtaken by the smell of smoke and burning flesh. He could not look back. He heard the woman scream three times, three dreadful shrieks carrying over the plain in the sunshine, but there was not a murmur from the crowd that had gathered to watch, nor a sound from the man who also died.

  “A martyr’s death. A martyr’s death,” he said to himself as he walked back, driving the nails of one hand into the palm of the other so hard that the marks did not fade for several days. It was of himself that he was thinking and of the death they had avoided at the Mountgrace by putting their names to the king’s papers in the quiet chapter-house.

  Some hours later, when the smoke had stopped rising from the Knavesmire and the people had all gone home, the difference struck him. The London Carthusians died, as the monks at the Mountgrace might have died, for the long past, for a good in the certainty of which they were sustained by the certainty of the ages. Something new threatened that good—the taking by the king of a power that had never been his—and they died to defend their own, their ancient ground. What was more, he himself had recommended yielding to the king so as to keep safe that very ground, although in the end the yielding was to no avail. But the cordwainer had not died for the past. The cordwainer had died for something new, something he had seen that others had not seen, and that he saw still as they dragged him through the streets and the blood from the back of his head stained the cobbles. And his new thing was not the king’s, not by any means the king’s, since had not the king ordered his death also?

  No more heretics were burned in York, although it was well known that the number of those who owned to Luther’s opinion as to how their souls might be saved was slowly growing, and that among that number were one or two of the richest men in the city.

  The day after the cordwainer’s death, Robert Fletcher said his Mass as usual in the cold chantry. He pushed Valentine Vries to the back of his mind, but he did not forget him. Several times here and there in the city he listened to arguments about the sacrifice of the Mass or the existence of purgatory or the merit to be gained from pilgrimages and relics. Voices were raised, fists banged on tavern tables; old men in corners crossed themselves and crept fearfully away. In those who spoke with bitterness and fury against the Church he never caught even a glimpse of whatever it was that the cordwainer had seen.

  Five years passed before he made a choice of his own.

  He heard that a rich clothier, once a Halifax man and known to have shared the Protestant beliefs of his weavers, had died and that the widow was selling books she was afraid to keep in her house. He went to the house and bought the smallest of the half-dozen books she took from a chest that she first unlocked.

  “And you a priest, sir,” she said. “For shame, to give room to such wickedness.” She locked his money away in the chest as if it too were tainted with evil.

  He walked home with his heart pounding, nursing the book inside his coat. It was called On the Liberty of a Christian Man, and he knew that Luther himself had written it. The copy he had bought was a Latin translation, hastily written in a small, cramped hand with many abbreviations. He slept with it hidden under his bed, saving the reading of it for the morning light.

  Now, the next day, the morning light glittered on the window of the Minster above him as he laid the open book down on the bench. He looked over his shoulder into the room as if he had never seen it before. They had all gone out, leaving dirty jugs and dishes among the crumbs on the table. He saw that the top of the table was after all a fine piece of oak, a fine smooth piece of black oak, well planed and beeswaxed, and the jugs and dishes shone among the crumbs, round and clear-glazed.

  It was true. It was all true. It changed everything, all that he had been and now was, all that he had lived in the Charterhouse in the assurance of his virtuous days.

  The phrases turned in his head as he sat there.

  He took up the book again.

  A Christian man is the most entirely free lord of all, subject to none.

  A Christian man is the most entirely dutiful servant of all, subject to everyone.

  In what manner does a man become just, free, and truly Christian, that is, spiritual, new, and inner? It is clear that no external thing, by whatever name it may be called, can in any way conduce to Christian righteousness or liberty, any more than it can lead the way to unrighteousness or bondage. This can be shown by a simple argument. What can it profit the soul if the body is well, free, and active, if it eats, drinks, and does as it likes, since in these respects even the most impious slaves of vice may stand very well? On the other hand, what harm can the soul take from illness, imprisonment, hunger, thirst, or any external discomfort, since in these respects even the most godly men—free men in the purity of their conscience—may be afflicted? None of these things touches the liberty or servitude of the soul. Thus it will profit nothing if the body be adorned with holy garments in the manner of priests, or live in holy places, or occupy itself with holy offices, or pray, fast, abstain from certain foods, and do whatever labour can be done by the body and in the body. A far other thing is needed for the righteousness and liberty of the soul.

  He closed his eyes and saw the pile of habits on the frozen grass at the Mountgrace, a group of men beside it, in new clothes, some of them weeping.

  “To clear the ground completely: even contemplation, meditation, and everything the soul can do are of no avail.”

  He saw The Cloud of Unknowing, tied up with office-books and psalters, to be taken to London with the silver and the lead.

  One thing, and one thing only, is necessary for the Christian life, righteousness, and liberty. It is the most Holy Word of God, the gospel of Christ, as he says: “I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” Therefore let us accept it as certain and firmly established that the soul may lack all things except the Word of God, without which, in turn, there is no help for it at all. Having the Word, it is rich, lacks nothing: for it is the word of life, truth, light, peace, righteousness, salvation, joy, liberty, wisdom, power, grace, glory, and every inestimable blessing.

  He stopped reading for a moment, to let this richness peal and clash about him like the bells ringing above his head.

  You may ask, “What then is the Word of God, and how shall it be used, since there are so many words of God?” I answer: the apostle explains in Romans ι that it is the gospel of God concerning His Son who was made flesh, suffered, rose again from the dead, and was glorified through the spirit that sanctifies. To have preached Christ is to have fed the soul, to have made it righteous and free, to have saved it—provided the soul believed in the preaching. For faith alone is the saving and efficacious use of the Word of God: “If thou shalt confess the Lord Jesus with thy mouth, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.”

  Nor can the Word of God be received and cherished by any works whatsoever but only by faith alone. Therefore it is clear that as the soul needs only the Word to live and be just, so it will be justified by faith alone and not by any works. For if it could be justified by anything else, it would not need the Word, nor in consequence would need faith.

  He closed the book and went out into the street with it still in his hand. He was dazed by what he had read. Also he knew, and the knowledge jarred like a false note sung, that he had been told these things before, long ago. He could not remember who it was that told him. He had not then understood, and he knew now only that if he had understood, much might have been different. He shook his head, as if to banish the echo of the false note.

  He walked slowly, looking at the people as they went by, faces marked with care, bent old women, young men swaggering, or hurrying close to the wall, older men weighed down with poverty or equa
lly weighed down with wealth. They must hear, they must know, they must all be set free. The book he had read over and over again in his cell, his holy place, was only for himself, or, at any time, for very few. But this, this was for them all; no matter how poor or how encumbered with the things of the world, no matter how alone or how surrounded with parents, wives, children, they might be. This was for them.

  He went into the Minster through the south door. Passing by his chantry without a glance, he walked through the arch beside the screen and up beyond the choir, beyond the high altar, to the Lady Chapel under the east window. There was no one there. The bells were still ringing. The tall silence lay undisturbed under their din.

  He stood with his back to the great stone spaces of the church, with his book, among tombs. The light he had seen from outside, from the other side, striking the window into a blazing surface, he saw now pouring through the glass, split by the intricate lead, coloured red, green, blue, gold, purple, colouring the white stone where it fell, and quiet, as if the brilliance on the outside had been as loud as the bells.

  He knew that now he had seen what Valentine Vries had seen.

  It was not that everything had changed. Was it not rather that only he had changed and that what he saw looked new to him because of how he saw it?

  That was it. Nothing had changed, yet all was new, because of his new understanding, his new eyes; as the wild light outside, reflected, cast back by the surface of the glass, was here given passage, cooled and coloured as it streamed in to the stone.

  He stayed at the foot of the wall, the still light high above him, for a long time. With deliberation, he put what was past behind him, all the dead, his father, Master Husthwaite, the destroyed Charterhouse. He would take hold of what was to come even if it were not more than a day, an hour. He would let nothing darken his newfound sight, and in the freedom he had discovered he would do what he could that other men should know.