The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  “Have you any answer to make, Master Fletcher?” The gentle voice.

  His eyes fixed on the bishop’s face, he very slightly shook his head.

  “Item: That you have not conformed yourself duly to all the laudable customs, rites, and ceremonies of any of the said churches.”

  “Item: That you have not been confessed of your sins at due times and places.”

  “Master Fletcher?”

  The bishop banged the table with the flat of his hand. “Leave him in his accursed silence, Doctor Chedsey. We know him to be a persistent heretic, a liar, an oath-breaker. We need not press to speak a man whose word is only empty air, a blasphemer, a false prophet, a man vowed to most holy chastity who took a whore in pretended marriage and would not put her away when he was three times offered forgiveness by the always merciful Church. He will not recant. His silence condemns him more certainly than the vain words of the young men we had before us this day condemned them. Those young men, and many like them, have been fed lies by this old one. They have all been watched, and I tell you this, gentlemen: since last Christmas when John Rough was brought to justice, the heretics that meet in secret in this city and diocese of London have been nursed up and encouraged in their blasphemy and their disobedience by this same Fletcher that you see before you here. This Fletcher has made arrows of them to pierce the heart of the holy Catholic Church and the blessed Sacrament of the Altar too. If we burn the arrows, should we not with the more zeal burn the fletcher?”

  The tinder flared again at his back, the joke repeated in whispers.

  He said: “Did a sheepdog take your duck, my lord?”

  At once he felt about him the fear of others. He was not afraid.

  He saw the bishop’s face harden with anger; he saw him choose to laugh. The court laughed also, following the bishop’s lead, and he heard cowardice in the laugher, easy relief.

  “You see how his sins have turned his wits? This is no simpleton, no fool like many we have had before us here, hinds let loose, men fancying themselves expositors of Scripture who can scarcely write their names. This is a learned man. We have it here. . .”

  With feigned meticulousness, the bishop held up several papers, one after the other, and peered at each of them.

  He heard them behind him, quiet, waiting to laugh again.

  “Here. The surveyors of the chantries set it down. ‘Robert Fletcher. Fifty years. Well learned.’ There it is. Ten years ago he was well learned. He is brought before us as a heretic and a man of evil life, but we know he is well learned. For what, therefore, do we look? We minister to him articles touching on matters of faith and religion in which he is well learned, and we look to him for learned disputation, for the commentaries of a monk and the quaestiones of a scholar; we look to him at the very least for answers. And what do we find? A dotard who is shaking so with fear that he cannot stand. He sits and trembles, and we hear nothing from him, nothing, that is, except the chattering of his teeth, until at last he speaks and then. . .”

  Obediently they laughed.

  “Then he babbles like an infant in its mother’s arms. We look for another Master Ridley, and he talks to us of dogs and ducks.”

  “My lord.”

  “One moment, Doctor Chedsey. I am in no doubt that his sins have sent him mad, but his madness shall not save him from his sins. Let the rest of the articles be read. If the prisoner does not answer, he is none the less guilty for his silence. Unless he chooses now to return from his wickedness and recant his vile heresies, he will burn for them whatever he may say or not say. Our blessed Lord has taught us that it is never too late to come home with the lost son, but I daresay it is too late for one who has lost his wits.”

  He said, very softly amid the noise of laughter and people leaving at the back of the court: “My lord, it is not I who have lost his wits, nor is it I who will burn.”

  For an instant Bonner stared. Then he shouted: “The articles! Read them!”

  But the bishop’s spite had woken Robert Fletcher as if from a dream.

  “Item: That you have not received at your said curate’s hands (as of the minister of Christ) absolution of your sins.”

  The fire was out. This time he understood the words. His whole body ached with fever. He longed to lie down. He longed for his pile of straw in the Tower, for silence. He bent his head.

  “No. I have not,” he said.

  Had he not taught young men convinced by the evident truth of his words, and devoted women, that the contrite soul before God has no need of a priest’s absolution, that the sinner’s faith alone in the forgiveness and safety of God can loose him from his sins, that without this faith no prescribed words or deeds are of any avail, just as to it they can add nothing? Had he not himself sent out of the Minster scores of Easter penitents, their duty done, the sacrament received, their hearts still full of jealousy and greed that they had no light to see? With despair he had watched them go out into the streets, and with joy he had read later that no priest has power to remit sin.

  He remembered all this without warmth, knowing that it had been so. He remembered also a November afternoon at the Mountgrace, the old prior, frail as the last oak leaves just clinging to the boughs, kissing his hand after hearing his clumsy confession, after absolving him.

  The clerk read on.

  “Item: You have not by your mouth, nor otherwise by your deed, expressed or declared in any wise that you without wavering or doubting do think and believe that the faith and religion now observed in the Church of this realm is a true faith and religion in all points.”

  Not without wavering or doubting. He smiled at the words. Was any man certain of anything, after all the changes of religion in England, after all the ruin and waste, who did not hate more than he loved?

  It was he who was old now, almost as old as the old prior, waiting for the winter gale. Would they send him back to the Tower? No. To Newgate, to the chains and the filth? He looked towards the man who had spoken gently. Doctor Chedsey’s attention was elsewhere. He was writing. Several times he dipped his pen into the ink and wrote, with deliberation. He paused, fingering his beard.

  He suddenly envied the old prior, with a deep envy that brought him almost to tears. That was how he himself should have died.

  The clerk was still reading, but no one was listening now. Behind him they were waiting for the long tale of his offences to be done, for the bishop’s sentence.

  Doctor Chedsey continued to write.

  The bishop was not looking at him but staring over his head. The fingers of his right hand silently drummed the table.

  In a few moments the clerk would reach the end of the articles, Bonner would rise, speak, give him over to soldiers, who would hurry him away, roughly, by the arms. Tomorrow through the streets to Smithfield, the post above the faggots. Then it would be too late. He did not fear the flames. But he was saddened to the bottom of his heart that there would not be enough time. Somewhere almost within his reach was a whole, the whole that as a boy on his knees in the cell at the Mountgrace he had longed to lay before God. All that he had loved was part of it, the short grass in the summer and the sheep on Easterside, the woods above the Charterhouse, Robin at Arden carving a spoon out of a piece of cherrywood, the child in York who did not know his name. If he let them burn him now, the fragments would still be fragments. He would have lost his chance, his hope of understanding, his last hope of seeing as a single light the rays that had struck upon him again and again at different times, in different places.

  His prayer flashed like a sword. Be merciful unto me, O God, for men would swallow me up.

  “Item: That you have not faithfully and truly believed that in the said Sacrament of the Altar, there is really and truly the very body and blood of Christ.”

  “Oh, yes, my lord, I have.”

  He had stood up. His head was clear. His heart pounded. He was steady on his feet.

  There was a gasp from many throats and then absolute silence. Doctor
Chedsey stopped writing and looked up, his pen still in his hand.

  “My lord, you have heard me charged with being a monk, long ago, and with being, after that, a chantry priest. So it was. The reason that I ceased to be a monk you know. The reason that I ceased to be a chantry priest you also know. You all know. In King Henry’s reign parliament declared that there were to be no more monasteries. In King Edward’s reign parliament declared that there were to be no more chantries. It is the duty of a subject to obey statute-law. Is it not, my lord? As a subject, I obeyed those laws. When I had ceased to be a monk, I read and came to believe that a man earns no merit by leaving the world and renouncing possessions, marriage, freedom; not because renunciation is evil in itself, but because we can earn nothing from God. Our salvation comes through faith in the merits of Christ freely bestowed. We have not deserved it, we do not, and we never can, deserve it. When I was still a chantry priest, I read and began to believe that the single sacrifice of Christ on the Cross was sufficient to redeem us all from sin and that nothing any other man may do can alter the judgement that will take place between each several soul and God, while every day I was offering Mass, alone, for the souls in purgatory. I did not want that power, my lord, and I became convinced that it was not a lawful power for man to take. So when parliament removed me from my chantry and took for the king the money I had been paid for Masses, I gladly laid down a task I no longer desired or understood.

  “I had never preached before, but when I was fifty years old I became a preacher and went out to bring news of God to men and women who all their lives had received the sacraments of the Church but who had never heard in words they could understand of the darkness in their souls and the light that Christ brings. Saint Paul said that in the church he had rather speak five words with understanding, that by his voice he might teach others also, than ten thousand words in an unknown tongue. From the English Testament I read the Gospel to these men and women, and they heard for the first time the words that Jesus spoke to them. For you would not deny, my lord, that he did speak also to them? Yet you have burned them at the stake because they would not forsake the words they had received with understanding, for a tongue known only to the learned.

  “These things I have done, and others too in accordance with the law as it then was, though not as it now is. But you know as well as I do, my lord, that no honest man could have obeyed the law in every point with the whole consent of his heart as it has changed and changed about these past twenty years. There have come to us all times in which we have had to see the law through the eyes of our consciences, and it is not the least honest of us who have from time to time chosen to disobey it.

  “All this I grant; but a sacramentarian I have never been. I do believe that in the Sacrament of the Altar is really the very body and blood of Christ. This I have ever believed and ever shall, with the priest who taught me when I was a child, with the monks in whom I had my being half my life, with Archbishop Cranmer, with Luther, and with you, my lord. And transubstantiation is but a little word to call down a great mystery to the logic of the schools, and you do wrong to burn for it those to whom it is no more than syllables of a tongue they do not know.”

  The bishop rose, fury in his face.

  “I thought as much! This Master Fletcher is mad. Nevertheless, like all his sect, he rails when he is stung. Indeed he is learned-mad and not too far out of his wits to pick and choose among his heresies like a lady over her silks.

  “You will not save your skin, Master Fletcher, by bandying terms with me. Out of your own mouth you are condemned! You sever yourself from the Catholic and universal Church when you so much as speak of Luther, the arch-heretic, father under the devil of all the lies in Christendom. Salvation without works, away with purgatory, away with Latin, down with transubstantiation—all blasphemies, all lies, though you twist and turn between them like a running hare. Thomas Cranmer died a heretic and a traitor to the queen’s majesty and you dare to say that he and I were one in the most holy Sacrament of the Altar!”

  “So you were, my lord, so you were, at the beginning, at the middle, and at the end.”

  “He died a heretic and a traitor, and so shall you. So shall you, Master Fletcher, so shall you, but not until I have cooled your insolence.”

  Bonner stood up and shouted to the far back of his hall: “Take the prisoner, bind him hand and foot, and have him brought to Fulham. I shall see him there on Sunday, when he has passed a few days in the stocks.”

  Two men came and took him by the arms. They dragged him through the people, faster than he could walk, and as they went the crackling began again, very loud, as if they were at the heart of the fire.

  4

  June 1558

  On the river his fever came back. At the wharf they tied his hands together, and his feet, very tight, with lengths of rope, They pulled him across the dirty cobbles and bundled him, almost threw him, into the bottom of the boat. He lay there, his back scraped, on a pile of chains, while above him the soldiers joked with the boatmen. They told stories, all three of them, and shouted with laughter. One of them had a flask, and several times they passed it round, each of them taking, he could hear, a long, greedy draught. He might have been an old sack at their feet.

  After a while the heat—for the sun still burned through a heavy haze, and the storm had not cleared the air—the movement of the boat, and the throbbing pain in his head stunned him to near insensibility. He no longer heard the banter over his head and the slapping of the water on the sides of the boat as the oars rose and fell. His head was filled with the sound of his blood pulsing: when he moved a little to ease his aching limbs, the chains shifted and chinked under his ear.

  He opened his eyes and saw against the purple sky a soldier with his head tipped right back and the flask to his lips. The pain in his head, his back, his wrists, his ankles, narrowed to a keen, desperate thirst. He raised his head and the chains bit into his shoulder.

  “A drink,” he said, twice before they heard.

  “A drink? For you?” the soldier said. “Who do you think you are, you old heap of rags?” He poked him with his foot and laughed.

  “Oh, give him a drink,” said the boatman, leaning forward on his oars. “He’s not long for this world by the look of him.”

  “It’s finished.” The soldier held the flask upside down and a few drops ran out.

  “Give him some water, then.”

  “What for? He’s wet already.” A kick. “Aren’t you? Soaking wet. Soaked to death.”

  But the other soldier grabbed the flask, filled it in the river, and bent down and held it to his mouth. He swallowed down a few gulps of water and immediately vomited. The second soldier poured the rest of the water over his face and over the chains he was lying on, to wash away the vomit. He looked up at him but could not speak, and shut his eyes again.

  The first soldier said: “You don’t want the fever, do you? Leave him alone. Can’t you see he’s got the fever? Dying like flies, they are, where he’s come from. I’d rather go and fight their war in France than have this filthy job. Carrying lousy prisoners up and down the river and ending up dead ourselves very likely.” He spat over the side of the boat. “Makes me sick.”

  “It’s old men and children are getting the fever. We’re young yet.”

  “Don’t you count your chickens, my lad,” said the boatman. “I’ve seen them all go down, young men and old men, boys and girls. You don’t sleep safe in your bed till you’re six feet under the ground.”

  “What about you then, greybeard?” said the first soldier. “Aren’t you afraid the angels’ll get you next?”

  “I’ll see you all out,” said the boatman as he rowed. “Many’s the dead man who’s travelled in my boat. More than I could count.”

  The soldiers fell silent, except that after a few minutes he heard the voice of the first again.

  “Toss you for Bess on Sunday after the bears.”

  But the other said: “You can hav
e her,” and then: “Is this the reach?”

  But the boatman said: “You want a bit of patience. It’s a long pull up against the tide.”

  The pain receded with the shore that they had left. From time to time he remembered that he was being taken up the Thames to Fulham, to the bishop’s palace, but the fact meant less and less to him, until the names became like foreign phrases heard and not understood. He lay on the chains, drowsy, lulled by the water moving under his head and the lessening heat of the day. In his mind the words of the boatman came and went. Many’s the dead man. . . Somewhere in the distance he saw on the bank of the river a thronging multitude. They stretched their hands out over the water towards the opposite shore, while behind them more came so that as he watched the crowd grew greater and spread further along the bank. And he was already in the boat they stretched their hands toward. The boat moved on, the oars rising and falling, and always as he looked back he saw the people flocking, smaller and smaller across the widening flood until he could no longer see them but only sense their longing for the shore.

  Portitor ille Charon; his, quos vehit unda, sepulti.

  Six feet under the ground. Many’s the dead man travels in my boat.

  He opened his eyes. The light was almost gone. Above him, against the livid sky, he saw the soldiers propped, as still as corpses, their halberds across their knees. Between them the boatman rowed on, tall and black.

  Was it over, then, the fire? Had he passed through the end and forgotten it already? And all the people on the shore, were they the living? The dead?

  O unjust God, to leave your children so.

  As he watched the sky darken behind the boatman’s head, there was a flash of lightning, and then another. A gust of wind came across the water, big drops of rain. The rain on his face, his side, his bound hands, recalled his pain. He tried to move away from it, but could not.