The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  When he walked away, down the long south aisle towards the far, pale figure of Christ crucified in the window at the very west end of the Minster, the bells had stopped ringing. He came out of the cathedral into even, midday sunshine.

  He walked briskly round the outside of the cathedral to Saint William’s College. As he opened the door, a man rose from the bench by the window where he himself always sat and approached him, hand outstretched.

  “Master Fletcher.”

  “Aye.”

  “Do you not know me, sir? I am Geoffrey Hodson, of the Mountgrace.”

  For an instant he stood as still as a stone; then he made himself smile, move forward, shake hands.

  “Master Hodson—forgive me. After so long a time—”

  “Not yet five years, Master Fletcher.”

  “Have you come for me?”

  Hodson looked at him with stern, youthful eyes. He waited with foreboding, as if Geoffrey Hodson had the power to pull him back into all that he had thought to lay at last to rest.

  “I come from the prior,” Hodson said. “He is living, alone, in the hermitage above the Charterhouse, the cottage with his chapel beside it that the commissioners allowed him. He has sent me to seek out the monks yet alive, to ask whether any would be willing to return to the Mountgrace. Not to the cloister, which is ruined and slighted and overgrown with weeds, but only to his cottage, to dwell with him there in something near the old way. There is room for two or three, and his pension would support so few in the necessities of a hermit’s life. I shall go myself, but, till now, I have found none other able—”

  “Master Hodson,” he broke in. “I am a chantry priest here in the Minster. I have also other work to do, fresh work, preaching the word of God. I begin to understand that to withdraw from the world as we once did, to wear the habit, to fast and repeat the office, cannot in itself free the soul, and that it is not works but faith itself that must bring liberty to all men, if only they may hear and believe the truth.”

  He faltered. His words, too newly learned, seemed to him to be without substance, to skitter on the surface of something else, more secret, darker. He gripped Luther’s book tightly in his hand.

  Geoffrey Hodson studied his face.

  “Master Fletcher,” the young man said at last, his voice hard, “you were the one whose return the prior most eagerly looked for. Have you forgotten the day of the first oath, and the day we heard of the martyrdoms in London, all you said then? And are you now inclined towards heresy? Justification by faith alone and meanwhile do what you will? I shall tell the prior—what shall I tell the prior? That you now believe your years at the Mountgrace to have been no more than wasted time? I will tell the prior that.”

  Hodson looked at him with contempt and went to the open door. He turned and said:

  “Farewell, Master Fletcher. You were always for the winning side, that I do recall. God grant our paths do not cross again.”

  He banged the heavy door shut behind him.

  Robert Fletcher sat down heavily by the long table, now bare and swept of crumbs. He remembered Thomas Leighton, who had laughed at him and said, “We’ll make a monk of you yet.” Then he remembered that it was from Thomas Leighton that he had long ago heard Luther’s truth.

  From his very depths, he groaned aloud.

  He saw Thomas Leighton’s freshly dug grave and the cowled monks standing round it singing in grey summer rain.

  Recordare Jesu pie

  quod sum causa tuae viae

  ne me perdas illa die.

  He thought of the pale figure on the cross in the west aisle window. He looked out of the window at the people still passing in the same street, unaware of his gaze.

  Good Jesus, give me simple faith and free me from my sin.

  He opened the book and began to read it once more, slowly and carefully.

  18

  July 1546

  Don Francisco de Toledo, ambassador at the General Council of the Church assembled at Trent, to Emperor Charles V, King of Aragon and Castile, etc., in Germany; July 1546.

  “. . . And so, in despite of our most strenuous endeavours to delay the discussion of doctrine until after the enactment of at least some such reforming decrees as would give satisfaction to the Lutherans, the Council has been engaged, these ten days past, in the early preparation of a dogmatic decree concerning the question of man’s justification. I greatly fear that if, as seems likely, anathemas against justification by faith alone are shortly to be pronounced, all hope that the deliberations of the Council might open the path towards the reconciliation of the Lutherans to the Church must now be abandoned. Before the legates of the pope set the conduct of the Council in this unfortunate course, there remained some possibility that your Imperial Majesty’s war against the League might appear to the world chiefly as the necessary suppression of rebellious subjects; now, although I have used all possible means available to me to prevent such an outcome, the Council’s actions must needs give this lawful suppression the evil fame of a war of religion.

  “The most unwelcome news of all is that the cardinal of England, Monsignor Pole, who alone among the princes of the Church, as your Imperial Majesty is aware, is regarded in Germany as holding the cause of the reunion of the Church truly at heart, has left both the Council and the city. The reason I have been given for this unlooked-for departure of him who, of the three legates of the pope, has always listened most attentively to my representations, is a severe pain in his arm from which he has suffered acutely already more than a month. Indeed it is true that he has of late looked very pale and much aged (I believe he is not above forty-six years old although in appearance a good deal older), but I think it by no means impossible that his indisposition is caused more by his distress at the turn events have taken here than by a mere affliction of the body. Your Majesty will remember that it was he who, in the first session of the Council, addressed the fathers with an impassioned plea for their own acknowledgement of guilt, as neglectful pastors who had led their sheep astray, to which the whole Council, though since showing little willingness to act upon his words, listened in astonished silence. It cannot be doubted that behind that address lay his earnest hope of guiding the Council towards such confession of grave fault and abuse in the past that the Lutherans might after all be persuaded to send representatives here. Furthermore, I have been told by one who was present that a month ago, when the list of errors to be condemned was being drawn up, Monsignor Pole insisted upon undertaking to answer for the Lutherans lest it be said that they had been condemned without a hearing. And at last, on the twenty-first day of June, when the present debate began, he implored the whole Council, considering, as it now is, the question upon which our salvation wholly depends (these were his very words), not to shun the writings of the Lutherans as the advised deceits of enemies and in all parts necessarily false, but to read them with an unbiased mind.

  “From all these evidences it is clear to me that, watching day by day the destruction of those high hopes with which he entered upon the work of the Council and by which he has for many years set such store, he has succumbed to grievous disappointment, and that it is this which has broken his health and caused him to leave Trent. For, useful to your Imperial Majesty as his support has long been, he is all in all devoted to things of the spirit and no man of policy. He knows not how to alter his sail to any change in the wind and so has altogether left these dangerous waters, to the sorry weakening of your Majesty’s interests here. This very morning I learned that the other legates sent to Signor Priuli’s villa, where Cardinal Pole is lodged, to ask the said cardinal’s opinion concerning an article in the draft decree under discussion and that he has refused to reply, giving absence, insufficiency, and indisposition as his reasons. (I have heard it whispered that he has himself inclined to certain Lutheran doctrines; but his well-known loyalty to the Church, unshaken by much personal tribulation, leads me to regard such rumours as slanderous and to conclude, rather, as I have sai
d, that it is his deep desire for that unity of the Church which he even now sees slipping beyond hope of recall that has brought him to his present sad condition.)

  “Meanwhile the debates on justification proceed with much display of learning, more rancour, and even more slowness (happily, for your Imperial Majesty’s purposes), so that I doubt whether the decree will reach its perfected form before September or October, by which time your Majesty’s present campaign will have its own tale to tell.

  “The difficulty of supplying this distant city of the mountains, which now contains such an unwonted number of strangers, not to mention the avarice of the local tradesmen, has led to great increase in the price of meat, bread, wine, and fodder. If your Majesty would give instruction for the immediate transfer of funds from Augsburg or Venice, I should not be obliged further to diminish the household which your Imperial dignity requires me to maintain.”

  19

  June 1549

  “And therefore, my dear friends, now that the word of God in the Bible is given to you in your own tongue that you have known since you were children in your mothers’ arms, now that the holy Mass is said for you in your own tongue that is as natural to you as the air you breathe, I beseech you only to listen, only to hear what God speaks anew to every man that comes into the world. It is not in the oft-repeated mumbling of old prayers half understood that we shall know God. Such prayers are no more than charms told over while our minds stray among the things of earth; but prayer may be speech between ourselves and God. And the Latin that is gone for the good English that you now hear plainly had no magic power in it; it was no more than an old tongue long since fallen out of use among the people.

  “And so I beg you to listen with all your might, to hear and take to heart, today and henceforth, the word of God that will be given you. For it is not in coming dutifully to church, not in fasting or almsgiving or going on pilgrimage, though all these things are good, and not in anything the priest may say or do on your behalf, that you will know God. No, it is in yourselves, in your minds and understanding, in your sorrow for your sins and your love for Christ who has redeemed you from them, in your faith in him and your trust in the word that he is, that you will know God.”

  As he stopped speaking, he glanced along the few rows of people in the little church, his people, those whom he so much longed to lead into the path he had found for himself in these last years. Some of them were looking at him, most not. Two or three had mistrust, almost fear, on their faces. How could he soothe that fear from their eyes? What better words could he find, for the next time? He was there only to try to open their hearts. He did not want them to believe what he said because it was he who said it. He wanted them to grasp the truth for themselves and recognise it as their own.

  He turned to the altar and picked up the new book, the book of the common prayer, which was the present cause of their suspicion. It had arrived two weeks before, its pages fresh and stiff from the printer, a heavy volume for each church in the whole land. He had read through it with joy. Smaller copies some of the booksellers in the city already had to sell, to anyone who wanted to buy one and had a few pence to spare. He had been given the proper tool, the very tool he needed for what he had to do, and he was grateful to the boy king in London and his council for it, and for all that had been done since King Henry died to clear away the old, overgrown, tangled hedge, the thickets of tradition and superstition and fear, that had stood between the people and the truth.

  He knew that not many in York agreed with him. He knew that there were those who called him heretic and that some who should have been in his church today had gone to Mass elsewhere or not at all because they believed that what he would say to them came from the devil. But the archbishop himself, who was of the new opinion, had found him the living when the chantries were dissolved, and now that he had the new prayerbook in his hands and the people, some, at least, of those who could read, had it in theirs, surely they would begin to understand. All would be well. Surely all, in time, would be well.

  He began to read the preface for Pentecost, for it was Whitsunday.

  “Through Jesus Christ our Lord, according to whose most true promise, the Holy Ghost came down this day from heaven, with a sudden great sound, as it had been a mighty wind, in the likeness of fiery tongues, lighting upon the Apostles, to teach them, and to lead them to all truth. . .”

  He knew that it would take time. But had not much already been done? He would not have believed that King Henry’s death could have seemed to him, an obscure priest serving his chantry in a forgotten corner of an ancient, cluttered cathedral, so like the lifting of a weight from his back. It was right that the chantries had gone. Had he not felt for a long time only encumbered by the law, by the obligations laid on him in the crabbed wills of those long dead, as he said by himself those hundreds of Masses for names that meant nothing to him, his muttered words rising in the empty chapel like dust in sunlight? And it was right that the English prayerbook should have come. In the city people might be afraid of the changes. “Woe be to thee, O land, whose king is a child,” they said. But they were afraid only because they were unused to the liberty of the truth. They were like prisoners who, for the weakness of their limbs, cannot walk for a time after their shackles have been struck off. Slowly they would learn to stand by themselves, to walk in the sunshine, in the clear light, free men.

  He was full of hope, his own past quiet in the shadow at his back, the darkness he had left behind.

  The next day there was a riot in the city.

  He was pushed into the doorway of a tallow-chandler’s shop as a mob of men and boys, running, shouting, scattering people to huddle frightened against the walls, came pouring into the narrowest part of Petergate, iron bars in their hands, billhooks, hammers, mattocks, anything that would break and smash. One of them ran with a velvet altar-cloth over his arm, not noticing that the end of it trailed wet and heavy in the mud. Something in their faces as they went by, close to him but not seeing him, or anything else but the destruction afoot, reminded him—reminded him. . . A zeal for destruction, a glassy look in the eyes, a frenzied strength in unaccustomed arms and shoulders: it was Will that he, seeing them run, remembered. Then he saw Will.

  He saw Will, taller than most of them, older than nearly all of them, running among twenty or thirty others with a huge crowbar in both his hands, held high above his head. The look in the eyes of the rest had in Will’s reached a pitch of pure annihilating force that made the other faces seem only weaker reflections of his.

  He watched him run by, his own legs powerless to move, trembling as he supported himself against the tallow-chandler’s greasy threshold. He could not have stopped him or any of them. The shock had winded him, taking all his strength from him. He saw their backs turn the corner round the church of Saint Michael-le-Belfry. He took some gasping breaths and started to run after them, calling Will’s name again and again, until he could not hear his own voice in the deafening clamour about him. He turned the corner.

  They were gathered in a dense, roaring mass, in front of the bolted door of the church. He could not see Will.

  They started to batter down the door.

  He stood and watched. An old woman was standing beside him. When a panel of the door gave, with a rending split, she laid a shaking, frail hand on his arm. She raised her face towards his and said in a voice high with rage: “The great men from London! They’ve emptied the abbeys and taken the saints out of the churches and broken the chantry altars to pieces. It’s them that’s shown the way to waste and spoil. If the rabble do likewise, the archbishop and them’s only got themselves to blame. They tell us we haven’t to pray for the dead no more, my daughter says. And who’ll pray for them when they’re dead and gone, I should like to know?”

  He looked at her, her sharp features, her sure old eyes.

  “The dead are with God and do not need our prayers.”

  She looked at him with scorn.

  “Not i
f they haven’t been with God in this life, they’re not.”

  She waved an angry hand towards the mob at the church door.

  “Look at that. You look at that and tell me if that’s the will of God. There’s poor men there will suffer for the sins of their betters. The times will never be righted now, and that’s the truth.”

  They had broken inwards the middle of the door and were jostling to get through the jagged hole. Then they fell back as one man came out again, stepping over the splintered wood, carrying a heavy load. There was a fresh roar as they surged forward, and soon above the baying voices and the outstretched arms books were tossed up into the air, one after another, leaves coming out as they fell and floating lightly to the ground.

  “There was a time they’d never have dared lay a finger on a book,” the old woman said.

  Other people crept into the street from behind him and picked the pages out of the gutter. The books were psalters, old Latin psalters marked for singing, the words written out in the patient scripts of long-dead hands.

  Now there were new sounds, cracking timber and the shatter of smashed stone, from the darkness inside the church.

  He stood for a few moments longer, undecided.

  Then soldiers appeared in the street, which at once emptied, and clambered in their turn through the black hole in the door, pulling their pikes in after them.

  He could not bear to stay to see Will dragged out from the church and beaten in the street. He turned and walked quickly away into the maze of alleys and yards that lay towards the market and his little church. The streets were quiet, the people indoors, afraid. He knelt down at last in his empty church, alone and comfortless.