The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  Both the soldiers sat up and pulled their cloaks over their heads. They looked like cowled monks, their heads hidden in their cloaks, bunched against the rain.

  The boat went on, upstream, in the rain, until the night was dark.

  “That’s it,” at last the boatman said. “Summer or no summer, there’ll be a barrel and a fire lit, it’s to be hoped.”

  He saw a row of half a dozen lights flickering in the darkness over the boatman’s shoulder. They came closer and closer. The boat knocked against a wooden jetty, and the boatman threw a rope round a post and knotted it. Cursing, the soldiers dragged him up onto the wet planks.

  “If you untie my feet, I can walk.”

  “Bound hand and foot, the bishop said.”

  “Where would I run to, here?”

  “I’m not carrying him. Let him walk. If he can.”

  The rope had swollen in the rain, and it took the second soldier a minute or two to undo the knot. When at last he loosened it, the pain in his ankles became much sharper. He rolled over onto his elbows and knees. The soldier helped him to his feet, and he stood, swaying, as the blood left his head.

  “Walk.”

  But he turned his head and looked back. He could see nothing but the utter darkness. Close to the jetty, the reflections of the lights wavered on the water, the rain pocking small circles in them as they moved. Out there somewhere they were still coming, flocking to the shore.

  The soldiers took his arms, and he walked, through a hall where men sat, cheerful and noisy round a fire. Broken bread on a table, a ham, apples in a bowl. Two of the men looked up as they passed, laughed, and pointed. Glances from some of the others. One had a girl on his knee. They went down some steps into the dark. The first soldier swore and went back for a taper. A long passage. More steps. A door. They unlocked it, pushed him through it. It banged shut behind him. He stumbled and fell against a wall. For a moment while they turned the key and shot a bolt, the light from the taper showed under the door. Then, with their receding footsteps, it went away.

  In the pitch dark he lay against the wall. He was very cold and shivered convulsively. He thought of the gaoler’s wife, her care that he should not hurt himself falling off the stool, her hot soup, hot salty soup tasting of bacon and cabbages. If he had answered the bishop differently, no less truthfully but differently, they might have sent him back to the Tower. If he had said: “I faithfully and truly believe that in the Sacrament of the Altar there is present the very body and blood of Christ, and as to the rest I do not know. I once knew, I have known, but I know no longer,” he might now be lying on his straw with the apple trees under his window.

  Then he thought of the child in the white shirt and was glad they had not taken him back to the Tower.

  Had there also been children on the bank, stretching out their hands over the water?

  He was cold, and hungry because the fever had left him. He was not going to die tonight. He needed food. He crawled up two steps. His head met the door. He pulled himself up to his knees and struck the door with his bound fists. The hall was near enough for him to hear laughter, but his beating on the door sounded faint even to himself, flesh and bone weak on the heavy oak. He rested his head on his arms. The effort had warmed him a little.

  He stank. The foul smell of his clothes, of his body, his painful crawling, brought back to him a picture from the far past. An old man, crawling. . . He lay in the dark, remembering.

  He was fifteen or sixteen, walking with his father in the rain. Down the dale between steep banks where mist hung in the trees like wool, they walked to the abbey of Rievaulx, for his father to see the bailiff. His father left him at the forge, went away for many hours. An old man crawled into the yard on hands and knees, ragged, stinking, coughing. The old man sat against the dung-stained wall of the smithy and cursed the monks. Between every few words he coughed, spat lumps of bloody phlegm into the mud.

  “All yon gold and silver, gold plate for my lord the abbot to eat off and a silver bit to his horse’s bridle, and what do the poor get, while the fat monks go out hunting? A black crust and the bones from under the scullions’ table. And the cold nights, starving cold it was, last night, in the stable with the rats running about, listening to them in there in the warm, laughing and drinking round their fire. Our holy mother the fat monks! Living off the fat of the land while the likes of us is left in the cold to die. I fought for the king, let me tell you, this last summer, for King Harry of England at Flodden Field, so that the fat monks should sleep safe in their soft beds, and what thanks do I get? We killed the king of Scots, do you hear, and half his knights. Too many to bury, they said, so we left them to rot, for the crows to pick at. They go for your eyes first, did you know that, boy? Don’t run away! Don’t leave me here to die!”

  He was running, stumbling through the mud. The old man, on his knees, screamed after him: “Come back here! Come back! Don’t leave me here to die! They peck your eyes out while your body’s still warm!”

  He ran as fast as he could from the yard, down a cart-track that led to the abbey stables. Round a corner against a wall he stopped to get his breath. He listened. He could hear nothing. After a while he peered out. The old man had not followed him. He could not see him anywhere. He waited some minutes longer. He walked on, towards the abbey.

  The great buildings stood in a silence deeper than the silence of the rain. He walked in a leafless orchard, past a many-windowed hall. He walked through a garden, between rows of leeks and tattered cabbages, and up, under the east windows of the church, the glass in the lightless day as grey and blank as the stone. He followed the long north wall, passing many flat gravestones. At the end of the church some steps led down towards the door. He stood out of the rain under the stone vaults of the porch and listened to the water running from the eaves. When he began to shiver, standing still, he gave the door a push. It opened without a sound, and he slipped inside, closing the door behind him.

  The church was very cold, much colder than the rain. There were more tombs, sunk into the tiled floor. Huge pillars rose about him in the stillness, disappearing into the darkness of the roof. He walked down a side aisle past a series of dusty chapels. As he reached the vast shadowy space of the transept, he heard a small sound echo: pages being turned. He stopped, startled, and from somewhere out of sight in the dark choir an old, unsteady voice began to sing. A few others joined it. For a while the frail sound quavered, thin among the stone arches and the shadows. Then it ceased. Shuffling. The dull thud of a heavy door. He turned and walked quickly back down the church, his own footsteps echoing, and out into the rain.

  Everywhere the same silence as before lay damp and chill. He went back to the smithy the way he had come, pausing every few yards to look for any sign of the old man. There was none. At the forge he opened one after another the doors that gave on to the yard. Tools, logs, hay. In the hay a litter of kittens mewed, and their mother arched her back and spat. Nothing else. He went into the forge and sat on the floor, close to the banked-up fire. There was a jug with a little cider left in the bottom. He drank it. The rain pattered on the roof. He slept.

  Drunken shouts and laughter woke him.

  He stumbled out into the yard. The light was failing, and it was still raining. Coming up the lane through the dusk was a loud, disorderly procession. Seven or eight men, abbey servants, carried shoulder-high a hefty body, its arms hanging down, head lolling. Losing their footing in the mud, they marched along, bellowing out the dirge for the dead. The body was the body of his father.

  As the procession reached the yard the corpse raised its head. His father saw him standing there gaping, slid to his feet between his bearers, and, his arms still round two necks, shouted and roared with laughter.

  He picked up a bucket of water and threw it into his father’s face. His father stood there, astonished, dripping; when the other men let go of him, he shook himself like a dog. In the sudden silence the group dissolved. He took his father’s arm and p
ulled him out of the yard.

  The wet fields darkened round them as they walked back towards Easterside without a word.

  In the wood the sky above the branches still just showed grey. There was no sound among the trees except for the rustle of their boots brushing though piles of last year’s leaves.

  They almost fell over the old man before they saw him, and his father saw him first, stopping, staggering, with a growl of surprise.

  He saw the toe of his father’s boot shift a hand that lay open on the leaves.

  “Dead,” his father said, bending down. “Stone dead. Still warm.”

  The eyes were open, turned to one side so that the face in death looked no less treacherous, no less terrified, than it had in life.

  “I know him—I saw him—he fought for the king.”

  “Leave him be,” his father said. “They’ll find him from the abbey. Dig him a grave. Give ’em owt to do.”

  On the white of one eye a fly crawled.

  Would they come in the morning and find him also dead, his eyes open, lying across the cellar steps?

  From the old man shouting, for comfort, for help, he had run away, but he had not been given leave to escape. He ran away, and the old man lay down to die in his path. And Will, whom he had left at Easterside to be beaten and cursed while he went to the Charterhouse to sleep in a quiet bed, had he not done the same, lain down in his path to die?

  He thought of the soldier who had given him water and washed the vomit from his mouth and nose. He himself had only looked and gone away.

  He was no longer cold, no longer hungry. He found that by not moving at all and by breathing shallowly he could lie without touching his wet clothes, though his bruised wrists and grazed back still throbbed with pain. The morning would come. After a few days Sunday would come, and the bishop. The bishop and the bear-baiting, both on Sunday. He smiled in the darkness.

  Above the cellar where he lay he heard the rain begin once more, gather force, drumming on the earth, a hard, clean downpour like the storm he had walked through from the Tower to the bishop’s court. Walking with the soldiers along deserted streets, he had seen torrents flowing down the gutters, carrying towards the river the garbage and filth of dusty, hot weeks.

  He listened to the good rain. No bursts of laughter came any longer from the bishop’s hall.

  Some words came into his mind, sentence by sentence, as if they were being spoken.

  “Wash me throughly from mine iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions; and my sin is ever before me. Against thee, thee only have I sinned. Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts; and in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom. Thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it; thou delightest not in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and a contrite heart, O God. . .”

  He was almost asleep.

  The boat pulled away from the bank, into the middle of the stream, and all the others came crowding to the shore, stretching out their hands. There were so many of them, and one small boat. As he watched, someone came towards him across the water, and the great throng of people melted away from the far bank, and with them their longing.

  The pain in his body faded as the crowds by the river dissolved from his sight, and he slept.

  5

  June 1558

  Don Gomez Suarez de Figueroa, Count of Feria, at the court of Queen Mary in London, to King Philip of Spain and England, in Brussels; June 1558.

  “. . . It grieves me greatly to inform your Majesty that I can now offer but little hope of further succour from England in your Majesty’s present campaign against the armies of the French king. The truth is that the realm is in no fit condition for war; affairs of state these two years past have been by the queen’s unwieldy and contentious council so mismanaged as to appear, were it not for one or two egregious blunders, not to have been managed at all; the harvest promises to be worse even than that of last year; trade has been much interrupted, and is now pursued with less vigour than at any time since I was first in England; above all, the people look sickly upon the war, as an enterprise appertaining to the Kingdom of Spain into which they have against their will been dragged by the accident of the queen’s marriage to your Majesty, and there is none in great place who has the inclination to persuade them otherwise.

  “I must own to your Majesty that I am, in this regard as in others, sorely disappointed in the cardinal, in whom I had hoped to find a loyal and trusty servant to your Majesty, seeing that it was to you and to your father the emperor that he owed the restoration of his fortunes and indeed, during his many years in exile, the preservation of his very life. But alas, he seems a dead man. His health, though not good, is not so poor that it may altogether account for the sloth with which he chilly conducts even the most pressing business; and although I have in daily conversation with him now and then been able to warm him a little, and the fall of Calais did somewhat stir him, the result is yet far from all I could wish. He has, for example, had the power these three years, and especially since he became archbishop of Canterbury, to send into the shires a good part of her Majesty’s Council, thus rendering to the part remaining some semblance of unity and some readiness of decision, but he has done nothing. As to the government of religion in the realm, he has ceased even to urge on the rooting out of heresy with the zeal which it would become so exalted a prince of the Church to show, leaving all to the bishop of London (who has lately become so hated among the common people that riots are feared whenever he goes in the streets of the city). And I have thus far been unable to move the cardinal, for reasons which he will not vouchsafe to me, towards allowing members of the Society of Jesus to come into England for the better instruction and edification of the people, advantageous to the Kingdom though it would in my opinion be to accede to this request of the Society. After these many months in which I have failed in all my endeavours to persuade him to act, I must conclude that the cardinal is a virtuous man, no doubt, but tepid; and I do not believe the tepid go to Paradise.”

  6

  June 1558

  A small grating in the cellar roof, at the far end, let in a faint grey blur. For a few minutes in the middle of most days the sun sharpened the blur to a bright square on the floor, crossed by the bars of the grating and further shadowed by the less distinct leaves of a plant growing near it, perhaps a dandelion. When there was a breeze outside these shadowed leaves shook a little across the barred square. Twice it rained at night, and he woke to hear drops falling through the grating onto the earth floor. He would have liked to feel the rain on his face and, in the daytime, to look through the grating up at the summer sky, but on the first morning they had clamped his ankles in the stocks screwed to the wall so that he could only sit or lie on one patch of the floor. They had untied his hands so that he could eat the bread they brought him once a day, and drink the water. The water was his consolation. It was clean and cold, and they brought it in a big jug that held more than he needed to drink. He used the rest to wash himself as best he could.

  The stocks had holes for two more prisoners. He was thankful to be alone. He heard rats but saw none. The fever had left him weak, and he slept much of the time, so that he was afraid of losing count of the days. He wanted to be ready for the bishop on Sunday. The boy who brought him the bread and water did not come at the same time every day and would not answer his questions. He put down the things beside him, picked up the empty jug, and disappeared into the darkness, locking and bolting the door. Perhaps he was frightened by him. Perhaps he was sickened by the smell.

  On Sunday the bishop came.

  When the door was opened he heard that there were several people outside and thought they had come to fetch him. He wondered whether he would be able to stand alone. Then he heard someone say: “There he is, my lord.” There was a forceful movement, a rustle, and a voice, Bonner’s voice, immediately above him, said: “Now, Master Fletcher, how do you like your lod
ging? We have hidden your preacher’s light from the world, have we not? How do you like being kept down here, stored away like old clothes in a cupboard?”

  “Stuff is put in the dark, my lord, to keep its colours from fading.”

  “We have sharpened your wits, eh? Bread and water will soon blunt them.” He turned away and said: “Leave him in the stocks. Change nothing.”

  “My lord.”

  “What is it, Master Fletcher? Do the stocks bite? They will bite harder by and by, and you will be hungry, and thirsty too if they should chance to forget to bring you both bread and water.”

  He began to speak, but the bishop raised his voice as if he were in court: “Are you ready to renounce your errors? To acknowledge the right of your ordinary to command your obedience in all the things of religion? Will you tell your followers to leave their heretical ways, throw away their prayerbooks? Will you tell them to cease reviling the pope and the Mass or they will all be burned, every one of them, every man and every woman, and their children will be whipped until they bleed. If you tell them these things—”

  “They do not follow me, my lord. They do what they were told by the king in parliament and took for the truth.”

  “If those who have taught them were to tell them it was not the truth, they would soon alter their minds.”

  “You are mistaken, my lord.”

  “You could save their lives, Master Fletcher. And your own life also. If you recant, I will have you taken out of the stocks, washed, fed. If not, you are already condemned. To the stake, if you reach the stake. Otherwise—”

  “My lord.”

  “Your answer?”

  “I would ask you that I might be allowed a little straw to lie on.”

  “Straw! Straw! You lie in my cellar, a filthy heretic, and ask for straw! You know I could have you burned tomorrow.”