by Lucy Beckett
“Who is it? Who’s there?” His whisper sounded to him very loud.
She moved across the bare floor into a patch of moonlight.
He lay back and shut his eyes.
“Alice. What have you done?”
“This morning my father told me that he has betrothed me to Master Constable, a gentleman from Beverley who has several times been to our house.” She spoke without haste, solemnly, as if she were telling a child of the death of someone he loved. “My father said that Master Constable is a fine gentleman who has built a fine house and owns so many hundred head of sheep.
“So I have come to you. If I stay even one night with you, they will say that I have lost all, brought disgrace on all. They will cast me off for ever and never let me come to my father’s house again. And so—” She stopped.
He threw back the sheet and stood up. He did not touch her. He did not look at her. He went to the window and pressed his forehead against the casement-frame, his back turned to her. It was now that he had to decide. Now. Luther had said that priests should marry. The parliament in London had said that they might. Many had. And monks?
He saw again the heap of lead on the grass at the Mountgrace, the bell on its side, the chalices piled on the chapter-house table, the king’s spoil. He was no longer a monk. He should send her back to her father. That would be the end of it. Nothing, any more. Long-familiar emptiness. Empty arms. He should send her, and she would go, without a sound, as she had come. He pressed his head further into the rough, warm wood and moaned. He had never known such fear. The necessity to decide was so powerful that for a moment he could not support it. He saw himself, with disbelief, as if from outside his body. He saw a man leaning against a casement, a man who would choose one course or the other, now, in this endless instant. Now.
He lifted his head slowly, feeling the pain from the mark the wood had made. He looked out at the idle moonlight glinting on the cobbles.
“Stay,” he said.
He turned and caught her as she ran to him. She was shaking from head to foot as if she were freezing cold.
When at last he let her go, he saw over her shoulder a bundle and a basket dropped by the door.
“What have you brought?”
“Most of my clothes. A cheese. Some strawberries.”
“I am not so poor that I cannot feed you,” he said, and both of them laughed.
That night they lay quiet, she in his arms, he dazed among crowding dangers. Triumphant pride such as he had never felt, and gratitude for what she had done, cut him to the quick as he held her there.
In the morning, with the sun slanting across their bed, he took possession of her body as though it were the whole world he so much loved. She cried, and laughed, and afterwards she slept, her peaceful limbs tangled with his.
He would carry her always.
He lay, woken from his dream.
22
October 1553
Don Juan de Mendoza, councillor and special envoy, at the monastery of Dillingen on the Danube, to Emperor Charles V in Brussels; October 1553.
“. . . I this night concluded my conversations with Cardinal Pole, papal legate dispatched from Rome to England and for the furtherance of peace between your Imperial Majesty and the king of France. After staying here for the space of two days, during which time I have been courteously entertained by the legate in the name of the bishop of Augsburg, to whom this house pertains, and have talked three several times alone with the said legate, I shall begin my journey towards Brussels tomorrow, avoiding the cities of the Rhine that are said to be plague-stricken still.
“I communicated to Cardinal Pole at some length the substance of your Imperial Majesty’s commission, that in your Imperial Majesty’s judgement the time is not yet ripe for either legation to be proceeded with, neither the regulation of religion in England, Queen Mary having but in July ascended the throne and many of her subjects being known to regard the restoration of papal authority in England with distrust and fear for their ill-gotten spoils, nor the intervention of the cardinal, as the representative of the pope, in the pursuit of peace between your Imperial Majesty and the king of France. To my considerable astonishment, knowing as I do the singular marks of love and favour which your Imperial Majesty has bestowed upon him these many years past, I found the cardinal most unwilling to accept your Imperial Majesty’s considered opinion in these matters, and most of all in the question of his return to England. Indeed, so firmly did he take his stand on the pope’s instructions to him to proceed without delay to England for the settlement of religion in that realm, arguing that he himself, as an Englishman, knew the custom of the realm and the character of his countrymen well enough to judge better than your Imperial Majesty the ripeness of the time, that I was obliged to dispute with him for more than an hour as to which course would indeed most become your Imperial Majesty’s honour and the quiet of all Christendom. Finding him immovable as to his bounden duty to continue his journey towards England, I was at last compelled to inform him (which I hoped most sincerely I would not be brought to) that if he persisted in making his way northwards from here, he would be constrained by express orders from your Imperial Majesty to stop at Liège, or in some other place near to your Imperial Majesty’s court, until your Imperial Majesty should be at leisure to give him audience, and that I had no means of assuring him how soon that might be. Hearing this, he asked for some respite to consider all that I had said, because I had pressed him for an answer as to his intentions, and later informed me that he preferred to stop here in the abbey of Dillingen to await further instructions from the pope.
“Several times in the course of our conversations I mentioned the question of Queen Mary’s marriage, saying that in your Imperial Majesty’s judgement the settlement of this question ought to precede the regulation of religion, for the better ordering of the same, and once suggesting that were the queen to marry an Englishman, discontent among the nobility might thereby be considerably increased. But on this matter he would by no means be drawn, except only to say that his own opinion was that the regulation of religion should precede all else. So that I could not tell whether he himself entertains any hope of marrying the queen; nor did discreet conversation with some of his household produce any better results, the news that your Imperial Majesty intends and purposes that the queen may take the prince your son as her husband being received only without surprise.
“I trust that your Imperial Majesty’s ambassador in England will before now have contrived that the queen herself should write to the cardinal showing him the necessity of some delay in his journey and moreover that its successful conclusion will rest in large part upon your Imperial Majesty’s pleasure. For the unlooked-for resolution of his replies and the ardour of his whole bearing lead me to suppose that his long exile from his native land, together with his austerity of purpose in worldly affairs, will make him difficult if not impossible to turn aside from his chosen course once he has arrived in England. So that it would be well for your Imperial Majesty’s design as to the queen’s marriage to be perfectly accomplished before that day; for who can tell what forces Cardinal Pole might be capable of mustering on his behalf should he present himself as the queen’s suitor (to which end he might readily be dispensed from his deacon’s orders)? And even if his sole purpose be the restoration of the Roman obedience in England, I firmly believe that your Imperial Majesty’s ends will be better served by the English people’s first having accepted the marriage of the queen to the prince of Spain.”
23
April 1554
It was as cold as January. People walked quickly through the streets, their faces muffled, turned away from the raw east wind. The great walls of the Minster loured over the city, a sullen grey under the grey sky.
He opened the door of the baker’s shop. The familiar gale of warm, yeasty air blew up at him.
“Shut the door, Master Fletcher! The cold wants keeping out.”
“All well?”
He went through the shop and up the stairs at the back to the little room over the yard. Alice was sitting under the window in the grey light. As he came in she dropped her sewing in her lap. He looked at her, at the bed, the table, the two stools, the old chest the baker had lent them, the almost finished cradle in the corner, as if he had been away a long time. She stared back at him, her mouth half open, eyes wide, fearful.
He closed the door behind him and leaned against it. He was very tired.
“It’s finished. Done. They’ve taken the living from me.”
She raised her hand to her mouth and bit it, but the tears came all the same.
“As we knew they would, Alice. As we knew, we understood. They were not harsh, not unjust. There was nothing else for them to do. It is the law of the land, now.”
“I don’t understand. I don’t. That such a law can be altered. That they can punish you for nothing you have done wrong. For what was right and lawful when you did it. What will become of us now? And all because. . . because I. . .”
He crossed the room to her and knelt beside her, taking her hands.
“Hush. Don’t cry. We knew it would be so. I shall be a schoolmaster. At the archbishop’s new school it is laid down that any may teach who has learning, clerk or not, married or not. We shall not starve.”
“I don’t care if we starve. I care that they should take everything from you that you—everything, and for me, when I. . . The archbishop is in prison. They will alter the government of his school.”
“If they do, there will be all the more need for schoolmasters. There are not so many learned men in York that I shall not be able. . .”
She looked straight at him.
“How did the rest do?”
He looked at the work lying in her lap.
“They,” he searched for words not to hurt her. “They chose the other path.”
Then she really wept, burying her face in his shoulder.
“I knew it. I knew it. You were the only one. You should have sent me back to my father. They would have had to take me in.”
He held her against him, gently because of the child, and looked past her head through the small panes of the window at the leaden sky. Did she mean now? Or then, at the beginning, almost two years ago now? It didn’t matter. She meant it. She had often said it before.
He waited for the storm of tears to pass.
Five of them had been summoned that day to appear before the special court in the Minster chapter-house, five married priests. He was called last because he had been a monk, and his offence was therefore the more grave. The other four had all admitted their fault and undertaken to put away their wives. He supposed this meant returning them, disgraced for ever, to their families. They were told that after a public penance had been performed, in the Minster and in their own churches, they would be restored to the priesthood.
When his name was called, he stood up without fear. Old Doctor Rokeby, the canon lawyer acting as judge in the court, asked him several questions. One was: “And did the said Alice Goldthorpe, of this city, have knowledge, at the time of the so-called marriage, of your monk’s vows?”
“No.”
Doctor Rokeby had looked up from his papers for the first time and given him a keen glance.
She had not known when they married that he had been a monk of the Mountgrace, and she did not know now. She did not want to know. Whereas he listened greedily to everything she could tell him of her childhood, her mother, her books, her old nurse, her dreams and nightmares, she wanted his life to have begun on the day he walked into her father’s house to teach her brothers Latin.
She was afraid of the river, in which an apprentice of her father’s had drowned when he slipped between the wharf and a moored barge. But he had taken her there on summer evenings when the setting sun turned the green water to a golden flood, until she liked to go with him to the bridge and watch the moving water. Once when they were leaning over the wall side by side, he had begun to tell her how he used to sit by the river under Easterside when he was a boy and watch the water flowing, and how that water, joined by many other streams, came at last to the city and flowed beneath the bridge and out to the sea. She had turned away from the wall and said: “That was long ago. Before I was born.” They walked back to their room above the baker’s shop, talking of other things.
It was as if she were afraid of discovering a rival, a different love. Perhaps she was right to be afraid.
“And are you now willing to put away the said Alice Goldthorpe your pretended wife to whom you are unlawfully married, to separate yourself from her and live apart from her and never more to seek her company, so that you may return to your priestly life and duty?”
“No. I am not so willing.”
His words seemed to fall like stones into a new depth of silence. He went on: “I had rather live still with my wife and be counted no longer a priest, if it may so stand with the law.”
They had muttered together for a while, and at last Doctor Rokeby had risen and said in a loud voice:
“You are deprived of the charge of souls at Saint Denis in this city. You are no longer a priest of this see, nor may you be of any other in this realm. You will appear again before this court at such time as you may be called.”
And so it was done. What was done? He knelt with Alice in his arms as her crying became the small, last sobs of a tired child and wondered what it was that had taken place in those few words he had exchanged with Doctor Rokeby. Was it that a truth had been declared? Or had after all nothing happened? So that if he were to go down to the church and say the communion service, forbidden in churches since the autumn, or, now, again, the Latin Mass, which he had said for twenty years of his life, and consecrate the bread and the wine, he would be breaking the law, aye, but would anything else have changed since yesterday? “Do this in memory of me.” He was a priest, commissioned by Christ himself. What did Doctor Rokeby or all the laws of England have to do with that? And if it were true that nothing, nothing of substance, had taken place between himself and Doctor Rokeby, was he not yet, even as much as he was a priest, also a monk? If Queen Mary could not unmake his priesthood, had King Henry and King Edward unmade his monkhood, cancelled with the ruin they had decreed the vows that had been made between himself and God?
Alice had lifted her head from his shoulder and was gazing at him, red-eyed. He had forgotten her. She kissed his forehead because it was her turn to comfort him, and so he smiled, to show her how brave they were.
“Forgive me,” she said. She had returned to the hour in which they were. “It’s the child—that makes me cry so, when I should not.”
It was not true that it was the child. She had often wept before, despairing tears behind which he could not reach her, and he knew that it was because she thought their marriage guilty, doomed to some retribution that she could not foretell. “I am to blame,” she would say, sobbing as he held her; “I am to blame, and I shall pay the price, for you, for this, for everything.”
Now she said: “The child has kicked a great deal today.” She put his hand on her belly, and he felt the baby move. She laughed and said: “I daresay he’s impatient to be born.” But she bit her lip.
“Don’t be afraid, Alice. You are young and strong, and your mother bore three healthy children and lost none.”
He had said it before, and she was not listening.
“You will not leave me, will you, not now?”
She never called him by his name.
“I will not leave you.”
She shivered.
“You’re cold.” He stood up and looked for her velvet cloak. Her old nurse had brought it the first October with some other winter clothes. Not daring to come in, she had left them with the baker’s wife. Alice wore the cloak often in the cold weather; it hurt him to see her wrapped in it, in the little room.
“No. But light the taper. I
t’s so dark. And no flowers yet, anywhere, since the snowdrops died.”
He lit the taper and put it at the window so that when it was really dark the light would be doubled. On his way back from the Minster he had seen an old woman selling bunches of primroses from a basket.
“It’s Monday. I’ll go down to the market for some eggs.”
She picked up her sewing and smiled at him.
“Come back soon.”
It was colder than ever outside in the streets, and the wind whipped cruelly round the corners of the houses. He walked fast, his head bent, his hands tucked inside his sleeves.
A priest and not a priest, a monk and not a monk: somewhere, in some crack of the years, or perhaps only that morning, before Doctor Rokeby, he had lost himself. He had Alice; that was an unalterable fact. But between him and Alice there was no private space in which he truly existed, for them both. He was always with her and always alone because she feared the knowledge of him that he longed to give her, pushed it away. This knowledge was knowledge of the past. The past was where he himself, whatever of himself remained, was to be sought and found, and she wished only for the safety of the present. Guilt had eaten up the clear courage she once had, and he had been unable to take her guilt from her. She, who had first come to him because of the burning truths he had seemed to utter, could not any more believe in them, could not believe in all that forgiveness, all that love. She was bound to feel to blame, for ever, for the loss of his church, his preaching, his people. And the Mass? “Do this?”
He could no longer tell the good from the bad in what he himself had done. And without that judgement, without, therefore, repentance, how could he be forgiven? He walked through the streets and alleys. They grew darker, colder, emptied of people, until the very roofs and leaning walls seemed to close in upon him, full of menace. He bought the eggs in the market where the last street-sellers were packing up their wares among the rubbish of the day, the cabbage leaves and fish-guts, the offal and chipped bone from the butchers’ boards. He bought the flowers. He turned for home. Was he forgiven? O God, he said aloud, and the certain words that had changed everything, the words of faith in which he had put his faith, he could no longer fit together. They were shattered propositions of which he had lost the meaning. He could not remember what they had to do with him.
