The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  Later the same day, when he heard that some of the mob had been imprisoned in the city gaol, he went to look for Will among them. He was not there, and, although in the next few weeks he searched the city for him, asking in every yard and lane if Will had ever been seen there, he could find no trace of him anywhere.

  Some time afterwards, passing the tallow-chandler’s shop, he saw that a leaf from a psalter had been torn and glued to patch a broken window-pane. Rain had streaked the ink, and the words could no longer be read. People hurried along the street, pushing past his back. He stood in front of the window for several minutes, looking at the torn page.

  20

  January 1550

  Messer Matteo Dandolo, ambassador of the Republic of Venice at Rome, to the Signory of Venice; January 1550.

  “. . . Although it is more than two months since the death of the pope, and although the air inside the Conclave is now so foul that the first physician in Rome has threatened the cardinals with plague on account of the filth and the charcoal fires burning in their cells, there is still no firm expectation of a new pope. Indeed, in the bankers’ shops here they no longer make wagers on particular cardinals but only lay odds that a pope will not be made in January, by the middle of February, by the end of February, and so on. I have heard that already during this election one single banker has taken upwards of fifteen thousand crowns in wagers.

  “In the past five weeks, since the arrival of the French cardinals, the number of votes cast in each scrutiny for the cardinal of England has neither advanced nor declined, but remained constant at twenty-one or twenty-two, those for him swearing that they will die in his support and the French answering that they will die in the service of their king, which is to say in the resolution to keep out the cardinal of England, he being the emperor’s chosen candidate and having the whole of the Farnese party with him. Our own Cardinal Cornaro tells me that he has felt himself compelled to make apology to the French for his support of Monsignor Pole, whom he chooses not in subservience to the emperor but in satisfaction of his conscience, Cardinal Pole being a man of excellent virtue and a faithful friend to the Republic. But it is now plain that even without the opposition of the French, the votes cast for Monsignor Pole will never again reach the number pledged for him at the start of the Conclave when he once (on the fifth day of December) failed to attain the necessary majority by only a single vote. The reasons for the certain disappointment of those, including ourselves and the emperor’s party, who were formerly convinced that they would see the cardinal of England pope are in my estimation threefold, and strangely contradictory in nature.

  “The first reason is the fear of those cardinals most accustomed to the old ways of the Roman court that, were Monsignor Pole to become pope, the whole of Rome would be constrained to lead a new life, bishops would be compelled to reside in their sees, and many of the reforms no more than whispered of at the Council would be put into immediate effect. This fear, which does the college of cardinals but little credit, was brought into the open only three days ago, when Cardinal Pacheco, a firm friend to the emperor, charged the Conclave with rejecting a proposed candidate (by whom he meant Monsignor Pole) solely because he was too good a man, whereupon a storm of abuse broke out, with, so I am told, the language of the markets tossed from one side of the chapel to the other.

  “The second reason for the fatal gulf that has opened between the cardinal of England and the papacy is singularly at variance with the first. It is the suspicion as to the orthodoxy of his opinions concerning justification, raised in the first instance by Cardinal Carafa, who charged him at the very outset of the Conclave with holding to certain errors in religion and of harbouring a nest of heretics in his household at Viterbo, by which were intended Marcantonio Flaminio, the poet, now mortally sick here in Rome, and my own friend Alvise Priuli, in whose house Monsignor Pole stayed when he was obliged to leave Trent and from whom he has seldom been parted these twenty years. It was not difficult for Monsignor Pole to refute these charges at their first making, since so many of his fellow cardinals are well acquainted with all that he has suffered in defiance of heresy in his own country and for the good of the Church; but it has, most unhappily, been equally easy for his enemies in the Conclave, and in particular for the French, to keep a degree of suspicion alive as a means of lessening his support. I have even heard that the young Cardinal de Guise openly accused him of evasion at the Council, saying that he left Trent in order to escape the debate on justification, whereas all who were present inform me that he was at the time in great pain from an affliction of the arm and shoulder and scarcely able to stand.

  “The third reason for the failure of the cardinal of England in the Conclave, despite all the efforts of Don Diego de Mendoza, the emperor’s ambassador, who leaves no stone unturned in his cause, lies within himself. He will say or do nothing on his own behalf; he will neither seek votes nor resign them to another; when on the fourth day of December he could have accepted the papacy, which then might have been bestowed on him by acclamation, he would not, although he was most earnestly pressed to do so (the vestments were already laid out for him, and the cells had begun to be dismantled), but only said that if it were the will of God he would be duly elected; since then he has not lifted a finger to dispel the doubts cast upon his opinions and his friends; in sum, he seems entirely passive in the matter, as if in truth he cares neither to be pope nor to refuse to be pope. One cardinal, compelled by sickness to leave the Conclave, told me yesterday that a more unfit person to be pope could not be chosen than the cardinal of England since he is a mere log of wood, neither the prospect of success nor the artifices practised to supplant him having the least effect upon him.

  “Cardinal Carafa, meanwhile, has almost as many votes cast for him at each scrutiny as Monsignor Pole has, but as everyone knows that he is a candidate proposed by the enemies of the emperor and by the French only in order to keep Monsignor Pole from his majority, no one has the least expectation of his becoming pope.

  “It would be rashness approaching that of those who stake money with the bankers to predict any early conclusion to this Conclave, already so unusually protracted: as long as the French cardinals remain, Monsignor Pole will not be elected; as long as the emperor’s cardinals remain, Cardinal Carafa will not be elected. Plainly a third choice, acceptable to all parties, must sooner or later be made, and all those who wish to see no cardinal carried lifeless through the wicket must surely hope that some such candidate may be found before many more weeks have passed. There is no doubt that, whether later or sooner, Cardinal Farnese and Cardinal de Guise will come to some accommodation between themselves.”

  21

  June 1552

  He waited as he always did for the Minster bell to strike the hour before he raised his hand to the knocker. As he listened for the footsteps of the servant who would open the door, he straightened his back with pleasure and filled his lungs with the fresh morning air of an early summer day. This keen expectation of delight he now felt every time he stood here, twice each week at the same time, and it was this moment as much as any that would follow that he looked forward to all the rest of the week.

  At the beginning, six months ago, when at this hour it had been scarcely light, it was the house itself that had been balm to him, the big new merchant’s house with the fire always blazing inside the carved chimneybreast, clean rushes on the floor, and the heavy oak coffers shining with wax. The boys he came to teach, Master Goldthorpe’s two sons, had more of their mother’s gentleness in them than of their father’s bold ambition; nevertheless they worked diligently for him, and he had soon begun to take a pride in what he was able to add to the grammar-school Latin that had been flogged into them as children. But it was Alice, their elder sister, Alice, who had begged her father to be allowed to join her brothers’ lessons because she had already taught herself out of their schoolbooks more Latin than they would ever know, it was Alice whom he came for now. He knew it as he stood
there, in Fossgate, in the morning sun, Robert Fletcher, priest of Saint Denis in the city of York and tutor to the family of Master Richard Goldthorpe, alderman. He knew it, and pure joy seized him so that he almost laughed aloud.

  The servant opened the door and looked at him as if he were surprised to see him there.

  “What is it, man? Is it not Thursday?”

  “Aye, sir, ‘tis Thursday, but—well, you’d best come in, Master Fletcher.”

  He crossed the threshold, moving his neck a little against the stiff linen of the shirt he had bought the day before. Age, which had flecked with grey his brown hair and beard, had thinned them not at all, and as he splashed his face and body with cold water that morning, he had looked down with satisfaction at his flat belly and shaggy chest, no less taut and strong than twenty years before.

  He walked in these days, for the first time in his life, with a cock-bird’s arrogance and glanced without shame at girls in the street who had something about them of Alice.

  Alice.

  The door shut behind him. The house received him. He breathed its clean smell. The panelling of the hall that had been warm and dark in the winter was today dark and cool, a haven from the brightness outside. There was no fire now but roses in bowls on the oak chests and a sheaf of lavender hanging upside down in the chimney. He crossed the hall to the small parlour where they had their lessons at a table in the curve of the window. He opened the parlour door.

  Alice was there, alone, sitting on the seat that ran round under the window. She did not rise as he came in. She did not look at him. He shut the door very softly behind him so that the latch fell with hardly a sound. He came no further into the room. He thought that she must be able to hear the beating of his heart. She sat so still that he noticed the alarmed squawk of a bird in the garden outside, frightened, probably by a cat, as it flew off.

  “Where are the boys?” he said at last, knowing as he spoke that they were not coming for their lesson, that they were not in the house, that he did not care where they were.

  “They have gone to the Mercers’ Hall with my father, to hear the Guild Court. My mother asked me to send John to say that you were not to come today. I did not send him.”

  Her voice was so low that he only just heard what she said. Still she did not look at him.

  “Alice.”

  Then she looked at him, and at once he looked away. He thought that if he stayed where he was he might fall to the ground.

  He walked towards the table. He cleared his throat and said: “Have you prepared some verses for me?”

  He stood before the table, tracing a crack in the grain of the wood with his finger. She was looking up at him, but he would not meet her eyes. After a while she said, in a clear, firm voice, “I have tried the next twenty lines of book six. I found them hard, hard to—”

  She stopped. He helped her.

  “Is the book here?”

  She moved for the first time since he had come in, taking the book from her lap, where she had held it, her finger marking the page. She laid the open book on the table. He had to sit down beside her. He left a space between them as if her flesh might burn him. She seemed scarcely to be breathing, like a child in a deep sleep.

  “Read the lines first.”

  She waited for a long time, looking at the page in front of her as if collecting her scattered understanding of the difficult words. She began to read:

  Tum pater Anchises lacrimis ingressus obortis:

  O nate, ingentem luctum ne quaere tuorum—

  The poet mourned the death of a Roman boy who had been buried by the Tiber fifteen hundred years ago, with armfuls of lilies and useless purple flowers. She read the lines as if the cut-off life were something that had slipped between the two of them as they sat in the June sunshine.

  When she had finished, he sat motionless. He stared down at the table as if the grain of the wood had a message in it that he must decipher. A bee flew past them, through the open window, and out again, its buzz vanishing into the humming air.

  Words came to him, one sentence, then another, and a third. He considered speaking them and decided not to. There was time to decide. Instead he said: “What is there for me to teach you that you do not find out for yourself?”

  She said at once: “Many things,” and then, more quietly, “A great number of things.”

  She had come with her old nurse to his church to hear him preach. He had seen her sitting there, near the back, her head bent. She had never stayed to greet him afterwards, nor said, in front of her brothers, anything about having visited his church.

  Now he said: “Why do you come sometimes to hear me preach?”

  She looked up at him so quickly that he was surprised into meeting her glance.

  “Because I believe what you say.”

  He closed his eyes. What she had said bent his back, burdened him. He felt as if a heavy weight had been thrust into his arms and he had been told to walk on as fast as before. And yet was not this what he had wanted, what he had wanted from them all, for three, four years? As he opened his eyes he shook his head.

  “It is not what I say—not me—you should believe. I am no more than—”

  But the look on her face stopped him. She was not listening to his words. Her eyes had trapped his at last and would not let them go. He looked at her in wonder. Her mouth trembled a little. He put his hand on the open book, as if it might blow away. He would have liked to pick her up, to carry her out of the room, out of the house, into the sunlight and the world and never to come back.

  He looked down at the table and immediately felt tears rise to his throat.

  “Alice, why have you done this? Deceived your mother—”

  “You know very well.”

  He shook his head again, to shake out of his eyes what he had seen in hers.

  “Alice, dear child—”

  He must do what he could.

  “I am old. I am poor. I have nothing but a little learning, a few books. Your father is a rich man. Your mother is of the Fairfaxes and kin to half the gentlefolk of Yorkshire. You are their only daughter. And more, and most of all, I am a priest; and although your father wished me to come to his house and to teach his children Latin, there is no doubt that he would not—that he would never—”

  She put her hand on his, where it lay on the book. She said: “You are alive, and free, and so am I,” and, so softly that it was almost as if she had not said it, “The archbishop himself has married.”

  He looked at her hand lying on his, and the sight of it moved him more than its light touch. He looked at it, bidding it farewell. Then he said: “I am going now, Alice, out of your father’s house. I shall not come back. Your father will hear that I am sick. And indeed—perhaps I shall be sick. And you are not to come to my church any more because I could not bear to see you.”

  She cried out as if he had hit her and covered her face with both her hands.

  As he left the room he heard only her tears.

  He walked out of the house into the sun, along Fossgate and Pavement past the prosperous houses and the merchants’ halls, down to the crowded lanes by the river, the wharves where half-naked men were unloading bales of cloth from flat-bottomed barges under furled sails, the bridge with its cluster of roofs and casements leaning over the water. He did not believe that he was going to lose her. He was alive. He was free. The sun was striking glitter off the river and the houses and the backs of the bargemen gleaming with sweat. He was not going to lose her. He wanted to stop the people he met, any of them, all of them, and tell them that he was fifty-four years old and that never till now had he understood anything, had he known this wild glee, this drunkenness. He smiled at them as they passed by, and one or two of them turned to stare at him.

  There was a gap between the houses in the middle of the bridge. He turned aside to the edge of the bridge and stood above the water facing the south, watching the shining river flow out of the city towards the sun. He laid his hand
on the stone coping and looked at it as if it were an unfamiliar thing, new and strange, something discovered that he had never seen before. He saw again her hand upon it, felt it, light, warm. He closed his eyes against the glare and bent his head. The unreasonable happiness flooding his chest would choke him, would make him cry aloud. He clenched his hand on the coping and was pleased that the stone scraped his knuckles, drew a few scratches of blood. He was awed by her courage. That she had given him already, her courage.

  He straightened, watched for a moment longer the dazzle on the water, and walked back up the hill towards the Minster, now looking at the people he passed with astonishment as if only he, and none of them, were alive and full of health and strength.

  There was a shadow somewhere, not that he might lose her, something else; but he could not remember what it was.

  Three weeks later the fine weather had not broken. It was the kindest summer anyone living had seen: rain fell several times at night, swelling the crops, keeping the gardens green, and washing the streets; every morning came clear and blue as the one before.

  He lived through those days as if about to wake from a dream in which he could nevertheless choose to dwell a little longer. He did with ease all that he had to do. He spoke the right words without searching for them. He ate and slept little and was neither hungry nor tired. When there was no work for him to do, he walked out of the city into the fields with his English Bible under his arm and sat under a tree reading the psalms slowly and half aloud, as if he had written them himself and were pleased with every word he had lit on. He had not lost her. He kept away from her father’s house and never went into the part of the city where he might meet her.

  One night he started suddenly from a deep sleep, anxious and afraid. Something was wrong, had knocked him from peace in a single instant. He sat up, his shirt sticking to his back. It was a hot, dry night, and there was someone in his room.