The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  He got down off the stool and carried it to the table, walking stiffly from standing for so long. For a while he sat motionless, a piece of paper in front of him. Then he took a pen and wrote:

  “I, Robert Fletcher, being of sound mind and a prisoner of the bishop of London, do here set forth to my own satisfaction that:

  “Item: The bishops who have, for the pope, condemned many to death by burning are turncoats, bloody butchers, and unpolitic.

  “Item: Those condemned of the said bishops are innocent of sedition, faithful to the doctrine in which their betters have instructed them, constant, cheerful, and fearless in adversity.

  “Item: It is not of necessity consequent upon the aforesaid articles that what the said bishops hold to be true is not the truth, or that what those condemned of the said bishops hold to be true is indeed the truth.

  “Item: What is truth?”

  He smiled as he wrote the last three words, smiled as he had when he noticed that he was hungry.

  He added: “Written at the Charterhouse of the Tower of London the 14th day of May, 1558, and the fifth year of the Queen’s Majesty’s reign.”

  He crumpled the paper into a ball and put it in his sleeve. He rose, pushing back his stool with some force from the table, and limped about the room. It was for his own sake that he had not gone to Germany, not for the sake of those who were hunted through the back alleys of London and chained to slimy walls in Newgate. It was not because he was afraid to die in a foreign country, though he was. In the end it was least of all because he was sure even to the stake that he was right. He had stayed to wait. To wait for what? For his own certainty to dissolve, as it had dissolved again and again, all his life.

  When he was seven years old a brother he did not know he had taken him from Arden, down the lane between the banks of cow-parsley. That had been the beginning. Since then he had built in every place, out of every place, a new certainty, deeper within himself, closer, perhaps, to God, and each one had gone down before the next. It was wholeness that he had waited for, and these had all been parts, only parts of the truth. If he had gone to Germany he would have chosen one part. The exiles in Frankfurt and Strasbourg wrote books reviling what he had loved for half his life and sent them back to England to uphold in poor devils with halters round their necks the belief that they were saints of God.

  That was it. In riven England were the rifts of his own soul. A part, a side, a faction, one loyalty to be used against another; none of these could be the answer to the question he had just written down.

  Now that he knew the question, would he be given the time to discover the answer? Pilate had asked the question and turned away. He would not. Now, he would not.

  His idle peace had gone, and his lightness of heart. Though his ankle was hurting him, he walked back and forth, dragging his foot. He had lost the simple earth, the narrow dale before the beginning, and the garden of his cell at the Mountgrace, again. He was back in the unpruned wood among the nettles and the flying birds.

  “God preserve me in this mortal life a little while,” he said.

  He was not going to burn, yet. He was not going to recant, for that would be to choose a different part, to join a different faction. But when they brought him to trial, he would hide between their questions, their phrases set to snare him, and they would have to send him back to prison, to his cell. He would wait a little longer in the world if he could. The whole was there, somewhere, yet to be found, and in it nothing should be lost, nothing that had once been known and loved betrayed.

  He was no longer content to die.

  At last he sat down again at his table and prayed to God for endurance and sharp wits. When the gaoler’s wife came in with his soup he was asleep, his head on his folded arms.

  2

  June 1558

  A month passed. No one came to take him before the bishop. Three times he was brought ale and clean linen, and once a dish of gooseberries, each time, the gaoler told him, by a different woman. He did not know who they were. He did not know who was left. They would never get to the end of them, not if the queen lived another ten, another twenty years.

  There had been a week of grey, showery days. After that the weather had set fair. From his window he had watched the blue sky hardly change at all, hour after hour. The fruit on the fan-trained tree had begun to form after the blossom. One hot noon as he sat at his table he asked the gaoler about the tree.

  “Lord Edward Courtenay planted it. Fifteen years he was here in the Tower, and only a lad of twelve when he came. The queen had him freed, being her cousin and a papist. I never knew how he fared after. A real gentleman, he was, but not in his right mind when he went from here, after all he’d seen. I did hear he died abroad somewhere. They beheaded his father. And his cousin, Lord Montague, that was, him that was brother to the cardinal. They killed near on the whole family on the cardinal’s account, for his treason, they said, the cardinal that’s now archbishop of Canterbury and the highest in the land. There’s the wheel of fortune for you.

  “Lord Montague’s little lad, he was no more than four or five when they brought him here. I can see him now, playing out there in the yard. He sickened that bitter winter and died in less than a week. Must be twenty years ago and more. Then one summer, later, years later it was, they took the old lady out, Lady Margaret, the cardinal’s mother, a great lady in her day, she was, and she was beheaded, last of all. The block was up yonder, on the green. Her death was the end of Lord Edward. He was never right after that. Near seventy she was, and she died the bravest I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen a few, I can tell you.”

  “And the tree?”

  But he was thinking of the child, four years old, who had died of cold in the Tower, the same age as the son he had left in York, if he lived still.

  “Oh, aye, the tree. It came with some books, from Italy, if I remember right. Done up in a sack, it was, with its roots in a crock of earth and moss and leaves packed round it. He would plant it, though I told him it would never thrive after coming so far. But it did, and there you are. It never fruited till after he’d gone. One of the guards looks after it now, and the apples. He thinks the world of a tree. He worked as a boy in the orchards at Evesham. They grew a lot of fruit, the monks did, down there.”

  The gaoler went away, and he sat on at the table, his head in his hands.

  He saw old Martin the lay brother, dying, laid on the cross of ashes, the monks gathered about him, sunshine outside the open door. As he leaned down himself to give the ritual kiss of farewell, Martin whispered: “I have asked the prior to let you have my knife.” A little pruning knife with a short, keen blade. Always afterwards he had used it for his apples, his roses, out there.

  He shivered and wiped his forehead on his sleeve. This cell and that were not the same. Not.

  It was the hottest day yet. The sky over London was no longer a clear blue but sultry with oppressive heat. Now and then thunder growled far away. The gaoler’s wife had told him the day before that people were beginning to die of summer fever. He thought of the prisoners in Newgate and found that he could not remember the faces of men he had seen every day for months. They were part of a world he had lived in long ago, whereas in his cell in the Charterhouse, if he but opened his eyes, his crucifix, his books, would be there in their places, here—

  His head was swimming, the air stifling. The water the gaoler had brought him to drink was warm and foul-tasting. His stomach turned, and he stood up, swallowing several times, a cold sweat on his face.

  Perhaps in a few days he would be dead.

  The thought gave him a pang, and he began to pace about restlessly, hot and shivering. He wanted to take his clothes off and plunge into icy water as he had often when he was a boy, in the river below Easterside. If he died, Easterside would die with him.

  He thought of the last time he had seen Will and stopped in the middle of the floor, hitting his clenched fists together so violently that the pain made him wince. There
were amends he could never make, not if he lived for a hundred years. Yet it had not been for his own sake that he had left him there, stretched out in the gutter in the cold. It had been for Alice’s sake. Had it?

  Had it not been to escape from his father, and Tom, and even poor Will, that he had gone to the Mountgrace? At Easterside there had been suffering, lovelessness, evil like a spreading infection, in him as well as in them, and he had run away from it. He had tried to leave it behind, and he never had. Thirty years later he had seen his brother in the gutter, an old beggar lying in filthy rags, and he had left him there because he was not brave enough to pick him up. That was the truth.

  And Alice, who had died alone? And the child?

  The gardener might weed and burn all day long, all summer long. The nettles were still there beyond the garden, and the brambles and the quitch grass, and at night they sent their yellow roots under the wall.

  A phrase he had read somewhere came to him. We are all beggars, and that is the truth. The truth, the truth.

  He groaned as he shivered again. His head ached and his throat was parched. A month ago he had set himself to find the truth. He touched the crumpled ball of paper in his sleeve. He had been going to use the empty days of his imprisonment, however many there might be, to discover the whole that he believed was somewhere, through the parts, the other side of them. Instead the fragments had become smaller and smaller. Only pieces remained, moments that came back to him so clearly that when they faded he looked round his cell, dazed, as if he had never seen it before. What they had died for, screaming at the stake, and what the others had killed them for, he could scarcely remember, and when he made the attempt only meaningless sentences formed in his mind.

  Perhaps he was going mad. Perhaps they had shut him up alone to send him mad. But he was a monk of the Charterhouse. He had been alone for twenty years. He had always been alone. Had a month in the Tower, in the light, without the rack, without hunger, on the contrary, with straw to sleep on, a stool, a table, clean shirts, sent him mad?

  He crossed the room, drank the rest of the warm water, and climbed on the stool after moving it to the window, to breathe in some fresh air. His legs were trembling, and he almost fell. The air outside was hotter and heavier than the air in the room. It had a sweet, dusty smell. A sparrow was hopping about in the grey earth under the plum tree, fluttering its wings and sending up little flurries of dust. Silence hung even over the river. Thunder rolled again in the south. He felt dizzy.

  A sparrow in the dust. Two sparrows fighting in a dried-out rut, and him waiting, waiting, in the long grass for Robin the miller to die.

  They had told him he was a child of God. Was that what they had told his son, in York? Or was he growing up as Master Goldthorpe’s son, his grandmother his mother, his grandfather his father, so that he himself might never have begotten him? He did not know. He would never know.

  From somewhere close by, muffled by thick walls but not far away, came a scream, a man’s scream, a long cry, Robin’s death, after all, that he had waited for. . . He stared down at the apple tree, gripping the bars of the window with his hands. He would not go mad. The leaves hung limp in the heat. The scream came again, different, higher pitched and fainter. What was it? In God’s name, what was it?

  He remembered and gripped the bars tighter. The gaoler had said: “They brought a Frenchman off a Flanders ship last night. He’s to be racked, very likely, for traitors’ names. They say there are those going in and out of France who would like to see the Princess Elizabeth queen before Queen Mary dies a natural death.”

  He had never thought that he would hear the prisoner racked. Another scream. Why did the man not tell them, anything, lie to them, so that they would stop? He listened, sickened, sweating.

  Nothing. Silence lay like a scarf over his ears, as it had all day. His hands let go their grip. Nausea filled his mouth with bile.

  The door at the bottom of the next tower opened. He saw a child, a boy in a white shirt, come out and set up three skittles in a row on the cobbles. He stepped back two paces and knelt down on one knee. He had a wooden ball in his hand.

  Robert Fletcher stumbled off the stool and vomited on the floor. He stood for a moment, shaking from head to foot. Then he fell onto his straw bed and wept.

  Some time later the gaoler unlocked the door and said: “They’ve come to take you to the bishop. When you’re ready, Master Fletcher, when you’re ready.”

  Unsteadily, his limbs weak and trembling, he faltered his way down the stone stairs and out into the thunderstorm.

  3

  June 1558

  He tried to stop his teeth chattering.

  A clerk was also standing up, reading in a loud, level voice: “Robert Fletcher, sometime monk of the Charterhouse of Mountgrace in the county of York, sometime chantry priest of Saint Blaise in the cathedral church of Saint Peter in the city of York, sometime priest of the cure of Saint Denis in the said city, deprived for marriage in the year of our Lord 1554, twice afterwards in the same year contumacious, excommunicate in the same year, a preacher while unlicensed and excommunicate in the city and diocese of London, you will answer the articles that shall now be ministered to you.”

  He knew the voice was loud, and he could see the man standing there, not four yards away, reading from a paper. Yet the words seemed to float towards him from a great distance. He could see them coming past, pieces of ash. He watched them go by and tried to grasp them, but could not. They were light and black and entirely dead.

  “First, that you, being within the city and diocese of London, have not, according to the common custom of the Catholic Church of this realm of England, come to your own parish church, nor yet to the cathedral church of this city and diocese of London, to hear devoutly and christianly Lauds, the Mass, Vespers, sung or said there in the Latin tongue after the common usage and manner of the Church of this realm.”

  The voice stopped. He knew that many faces were turned towards him, but he kept his gaze fixed on the clerk, for fear of falling. The clerk did not move his head but stood waiting, looking down at the paper. What was he waiting for? He became aware of a sound behind him, a crackling sound like the crackle of a fire beginning to catch. People were whispering behind him, quietly, only quietly, but the noise was so loud that he ducked his head and put his hands over his ears.

  “Robert Fletcher, what have you to say to the article?”

  The voice came from in front of him, above him. He took his hands from his head and looked up, almost losing his balance. There were four of them sitting there, behind a long table. On the table were papers, pens, ink, a big silver seal. They were dressed in black and white ecclesiastical robes and had black square caps on their heads. He could not tell which one had spoken. He looked from one face to the next. All four were staring at him, waiting. As he looked, the four black and white figures with their staring faces blurred in front of him and began to move, together, slowly from side to side.

  “What have you to say?”

  The same voice. Which face did it belong to? He tried to stop them moving, but could not. Another voice, from somewhere close beside him, said: “My lord, the prisoner can scarcely stand.”

  “Let him sit then. It’s already late.”

  A chair was pushed forward. He flinched at the sudden scrape on the flags. He thought something was falling from a height, a burning rafter dislodging, crashing, bringing a shower of sparks down suddenly through silence.

  He was helped into the chair. His clothes were soaked through, and the clammy shirt on his back made him shiver as he sat. The four figures at the table came to rest. The one on the right leaned forward and said, in a new voice, softer than the others: “We are waiting for your answer to the charge, Master Fletcher.”

  The crackling behind him had stopped. He turned towards the speaker and, after a moment, said:

  “I am very sorry. . .”

  He wanted to say that he had not heard the charge, or, rather, that h
e had heard the words but not understood them as they floated on the air.

  “Is that all you have to say?”

  The harsh voice again. The man who spoke he now saw more distinctly. He was the oldest of the four, though not as old as himself, and his chair had a higher back than the others, and carved, gilded arms.

  “Very well. We shall proceed with the articles. You will address your answer to me.”

  This must be he. This man who sat with his hands eagerly clasped on the table and his head thrust forward, an expression of impatient attention on his face, must be Bishop Bonner himself, who had condemned so many to the stake and taunted them, he had been told, as they left the place where the sentence had been pronounced. This was that place.

  The clerk began again: “Item: That you have not come to any of the said churches to pray, to go in procession, or to exercise yourself there in godly and laudable exercises.”

  Something in the bishop’s face took him back. Back to Easterside and the fire Will started, the burning barn. Had he not seen, just now, the ash float upwards as the rain began? He was frightened when they told him to get the mare out of the stable, and she had reared and plunged at the flames and galloped away down the field, trailing the halter rope behind her.