The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

“If I were a hog, my lord, you would give me straw.”

  “A hog is a beast and has no evil in him. You will stay here in the stocks, without straw, until you give me proof that you are no longer a heretic defiling the purity of the English Church as your body defiles the ground you lie on, or until, one way or another, you are dead. Seven of your flock at Islington, insolent heretics every one, burn this week at Smithfield. You may yet burn with them, Master Fletcher. It would be most fitting for you to lead them into the flames.”

  Amid a flurry of respect at the door the bishop left. From halfway up the cellar stairs, where his figure with others was visible in the half-light from the day outside, he shouted down: “I shall send to know how you do.”

  Then the door was shut, locked, bolted, and the last footsteps receded to silence.

  After this he was restless. The bishop’s visit had woken him as if from sleep. He craved release from the stocks now, not because they hurt him, not because they pinned him to one filthy patch of floor, but so that he could rub the life back into his numb legs, walk about, think. His swift answers to the bishop had astonished him. If there were that much spirit left in him, there was still time to twist and turn a little before the pack caught up with him. And Bonner’s threats: Did not they too imply that there remained something in him that the bishop thought worth pursuing, something he could yet do that the bishop would hasten or prevent? While he had thought himself as good as dead, there had been all the time in the world to die in. Now that there was some time left, some life, some possibility, the time could only be short. How short? He chafed against the darkness, the stocks, his weakness from lack of food. He sat up and enjoyed the sense of his freedom to speak, of the chance there still might be to say something new. He was not old for nothing.

  He was now sure that Bonner no longer intended to have him burned. The lesson had at last been learned. The burning at Christmas of John Rough, the last minister of the hidden London Protestants, had only strengthened in those about him the conviction of their own rightness. The bishop and his friends must have understood that in many more people than the spies could ever set down on their lists, ideas that had once been difficult and subtle had been hardened and made simple in the fires of the last four years, most of all in the fires that had burned Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, and the preachers who had shared the congregations’ dangers. They might continue to slaughter the sheep. They would kill no more bell-wethers.

  But Bonner had falsely estimated the sheep. If he, now, were to recant, were to sign a paper, as Cranmer had done more than once, saying that he admitted all his errors and would henceforth acknowledge the authority of the bishop and the pope in all particulars, if he were then to be set free to go among his people and tell them of his changed opinion, what then? Did Bonner, after examining scores of them, really believe that they would troop obediently after him to the despised sacrament of penance and the hated Mass, into churches that they regarded as temples of idolatry housing the abominations of Satan? No, they would reject him as a coward and a traitor, a few perhaps daring to say that ill-treatment had curdled an old man’s mind. It was too late for one renegade, however much he had been honoured among them, to turn them away from their truth, years and many burnings too late.

  Often he had heard them repeat to one another, their faces lit with what each took in the other to be God’s own glory: “Blessed are they which suffer persecution for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are ye when men revile you and persecute you. Rejoice and be glad, for great is your reward in Heaven.”

  If he were to recant, not out of fear, but because he doubted after all where the bounds of the truth should be fixed, and if he were to go back to these faithful servants of God bearing with him only his sense of a whole somewhere which he had yet to find, would they not persecute him? And whom would they then call blessed?

  Where would it all end?

  He shifted his body with a groan. It hurt him to move because there were sores on his body from lying on the wet ground. But he was alive. His mind was working. He was very hungry and had to banish from his imagination pictures of cherries in bowls, eggs, cheese, meat sizzling over the fire.

  He lay fastened by the feet in the bishop of London’s stinking cellar and knew that the bishop was wrong, that there was nothing now to be gained or lost because of him. He had been released, not from pain, not from fear, not from life as he had earlier thought, for before the bishop came he had reckoned himself ready to die, but from responsibility for those he had taught and encouraged in their shining confidence. For months he had known that he would one day be led through crowds to the fire, to a death that he had chosen for their sake when he refused to go to Germany. Now, all at once, he was not going to be burned. The manner of his death had ceased to carry any significance for those he had known in the garrets of Islington. Nor would his recantation after all change anything for anyone except himself.

  They were leaving him to rot to death in the dark. He was free to fend alone for his own soul.

  His new courage sank to nothing as swiftly as it had flared up.

  Where was his soul? What was his soul? Was it not his soul where they were carried, those he had failed? His father, drowned in the swollen river, choked full of spite, too drunk even to struggle against death; Will, whose misery none but he had seen and whom at last he had not taken in from the cold street; Master Husthwaite, whom he had forsaken, as he had forsaken his father and Will, for the peaceful Charterhouse, and whose spirit, when he had found him again, had fled beyond his reach; and Alice. Alice, whom he had brought to guilt and fear when she had known neither, brought to a place where she turned away from his very voice.

  He had sinned against them all, and through them against God, and what he had done to them was past his setting right. His soul: What was it but that in him which was of God, for God? And had he not spoiled it, himself broken it past mending into fragments and pieces?

  If the king had not pulled down the abbeys, would he not have stayed in the Charterhouse and kept his soul one? Yet the blame was surely his own. All that he had done, all that he had not done, part of the charge God brought. Did he not know, know for sure, that this was so?

  The questions swarmed about him like bees, attacking, whining, and he could not hit them away.

  He moaned aloud and turned onto his face, his legs, held fast in the stocks, twisted. A hog is a beast and has no evil in him. There had been a vow, made before God, and he had perjured it.

  The bolt was slid back, the key turned in the lock, and the cellar door opened. A voice he had heard before said: “Master Fletcher. I’ve brought you some straw.” And then, with some alarm: “Master Fletcher!”

  He rolled over and, hoisting himself on his elbows and then his hands, sat up.

  “I was here when the bishop came this morning. He’s gone into London for more than a week.”

  To see seven men burn.

  “There’s none here will carry tales if you have a bit of straw and something to eat.”

  It was the soldier who had given him a drink in the boat. He threw a bundle of straw down on the ground and went away, returning a moment later with a taper in one hand and a pail of water and a cloth in the other. He washed him, spread out the straw, and lifted him onto it.

  “I haven’t the key to unfasten the stocks, and the captain of the guard would have me flogged for a thief if I borrowed it, but here’s some meat. Eat it slow.”

  He took a wedge of pie out of his pocket and put it down beside him on the straw.

  “Why have you—you know nothing of me—I am not—” he said, through tears. “They’ve left me here to die. Shall I eat to keep myself alive a few days more?”

  “I’ve seen them worse than you walk out of here right as rain. The bishop may rant and roar, but he’s not the beginning and end of everything. A year or two ago, midsummer it was, this time of the year, there were three men down here, heretics, lined up in the s
tocks and only fit to die. A letter comes from the cardinal to the captain, and out they go, their wives waiting for them at the gate with clean clothes and the bishop not so much as knowing they’ve gone.

  “I’ll tell you what. I’ll get down here again tomorrow if I can, and I’ll bring you paper and pen. You write to the cardinal. They do say he hasn’t seen eye to eye with the bishop over half his burnings and whippings, though he’s not stopped many when all’s said. But you’re a learned man. A letter might work wonders for you yet.”

  “I cannot—I cannot—Thank you.”

  “You eat your bit of pie, mind.”

  He went away, with his light.

  The sun reached the corner of the yard above, where the dandelion grew by the grating, and the barred square hardened on the floor.

  A hog is a beast and has no good in him.

  7

  23 June 1558

  He didn’t know what to do with the flowers. He looked at them again, a red rose and a white, cranesbill, marjoram, bright green pennyroyal, and silvery fronds of ladslove, tied together in a bunch with a piece of ribbon. They were limp now and three or four petals dropped from the white rose. The sweetness of the moment, the gift, was fading with their scent.

  The air in the room was still, and although one of the casements was open to the summer twilight, the tapers in the tall candlesticks burned with straight clear flames. The table was covered with a heavy velvet cloth, and in its centre was a gilt dish piled high with grapes and plums too early to have been grown in England. He could see trees, motionless, black, outside the window, in full leaf, and beyond them lights on the river. Sounds reached him faintly from the streets, music, laughter, the cries of pedlars selling cockles, sweetmeats, flowers, now and then a cheer from a crowd surrounding a juggler or a group of girls dancing, sometimes a burst of drunken singing.

  Midsummer Eve. In the cellar he had kept count only of the days of the week, not of the date. Coming off the boat at Lambeth onto the thronging wharf, he thought he had never seen so many people, so many happy, careless faces, young men sweating as they danced, children eating strawberries, their mouths red with juice, babies crying because of the noise. He had been rowed downstream in the sunshine, past ducks and moorhens busy on the water, swans, the flowery grass high on the bank and the leaves of the willow trees brushing the surface of the river. But it was when the soldier took his arm on the wharf and they began to push through the hot, jostling crowd that he felt he had returned from the dead.

  They came to an open space at a street corner where thirty or forty men and girls were dancing in four lines. The crowd watching were clapping the rhythm of the dance, and old women were gathered in the doorways looking on, some of them with tears in their eyes. They could not pass and stood with the rest as the lines of dancers moved towards each other and back. Suddenly, at a shout from one of the men, the rhythm changed. The clapping became faster, more insistent. The dance changed shape, the lines dissolving, the men coming out to the edge of the space and standing in a big untidy ring, clapping too, stamping their feet on the cobbles, while the girls in the middle whirled round and round. They were at the front of the crowd. The soldier began to clap and stamp. They were part of the ring. He clapped with the others, laughing, his heart beating fast, his body warm with new life. Another shout. The clapping and stamping suddenly stopped. The girls in the middle, breathless, dizzy, all of them with flowers in their hands, looked round the circle, ran and stumbled to their sweethearts, into their arms, laughing against them as the men seized the flowers and waved them in the air. The silence was already over, the crowd cheering, when a girl appeared in front of him, dropped him a curtsey, and gave him her flowers. He took them. People surged about him. She was gone. He stood still, looking for the soldier who, after a few moments, pushed through the crowd towards him. He saw the flowers and grinned.

  “Lucky in love, eh?” he said, and they went on up the street through the milling crowd of people.

  He could not remember even the colour of her hair, the colour of her eyes. He had not heard her voice. She was young and pretty, and she looked at him lightly, with a little mockery because he was old, but returning the warmth in his eyes with hers, mixing her pleasure in her youth and the dance with his. In an instant over the flowers she laughed with him at the distance between them, and at her boldness, and she was gone.

  They came out of the noisy streets into the courtyard of the archbishop’s palace, and waited a long time. Clerks, soldiers, messengers came and went. The soldier stopped a few of them, pointed to his prisoner, took out a letter to show them, but they shrugged their shoulders, shook their heads, and hurried on across the court. Once the soldier left him for a few minutes and came back with some bread and cheese, which they shared, sitting on the steps of a mounting-block, their shadows on the brick behind them long in the rays of the setting sun. A woman came to the gate, weeping. She had lost a child in the crowd and had been looking for him since noon. The guards spoke to her kindly as she stood before them, rocking in her arms a baby wrapped in a shawl. No, they had not seen the boy. She told them where she lived, in case anyone should bring him to the palace, and went away, her feet bare in the street.

  He was peeled, raw, to the impressions of the day, damp, fresh, frail, like an insect flying for the first time, its grey casing shed.

  When the sun had long since withdrawn from the court, though the brick and stone still held their heat in the cooling air, a priest emerged from a door, which he shut behind him, came across to them, and said: “Your name is Robert Fletcher?”

  He and the soldier stood up. He was suddenly afraid, and his knees almost gave way. It seemed as if the day, so vivid, that first, new day, might also be the last. He touched the soldier’s arm, steadying himself.

  “I am Robert Fletcher.”

  The priest looked at him sharply, then at the paper in his hand.

  “You are brought from Fulham at the order of my lord cardinal?” He spoke with a foreign accent.

  “Aye—”

  “You are to come with me.”

  He turned in terror, now clutching the soldier’s arm. The soldier smiled and gently freed himself.

  “God be with you, Master Fletcher,” he said, and walked away through the dusk towards the gate.

  He followed the priest—perhaps he was Spanish, perhaps Italian—along passages and up stairs until they came to this hushed room with its velvet and its lit tapers. Then the priest said: “Here you will wait,” and left him alone. When the door closed he expected the sounds of a key turning, a bolt being shot. They did not come. Was he not even a prisoner any more? Could he open the door and, if he met no one on the dark stairs, go, by himself, somewhere? Where? He thought of York, and of the child he had seen playing in the yard of the Tower. He thought of the long road north, the towns on the way, inns, horses, spies, money, nights after days. He thought of the rat-holes of Islington. He had never imagined further than being caught, imprisoned, tried, burned. Germany? The language he could not speak, angry Englishmen with their factions and their certainties, waiting for the new reign. He thought of Arden, far in the past, himself a child set to watch the sacks filling with grain, shouting out each time one was full. He thought of the Tower, the gaoler coming up to tell him what was happening outside, to other men. He was stripped even of the cellar at Fulham, the soldier bringing him clean straw, the shadow of the dandelion leaves. He was no longer locked in and was the more afraid, the more trapped. Where was there left for him to die? Everywhere and nowhere, as when he had gone out of the Charterhouse gate into the snow.

  Shouts came from somewhere in the streets, and a swelling murmur of other voices. A fight had broken out in the crowd. He moved to the window and looked out. He could see nothing but the archbishop’s garden, quiet and dark, and the trees beyond. The noise was coming from the other side of the wall on his left. It grew louder, angrier. He could hear the men fighting being egged on, cheers and groans from the cr
owd as the advantage went this way and that, even, as the bystanders held their breath, the thud of fist on flesh. He remembered the midday crowds, the same crowds, the laughing faces, the dance. These men had stood in the ring and clapped together the rhythm of the dance. Old women watching them had wept for the music and their own youth. Now there were two men fighting, full of hate, their faces cut, their fists covered in blood. They would have to be dragged apart before they killed each other, and the old women were crouching, frightened, behind their bolted doors.

  Another silent garden, another wall, with the savage world beyond it, the wild flowers and the fighting deer.

  Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us.

  His garden at the Mountgrace. What had it been after all? A patch of peace marked out against the wilderness? A burrow to hide in from hawk and fox?

  Mean by sin a lump. Just as, a few days ago, he lay in the stocks and studied the shattered pieces of his soul, so he had knelt, long ago in his monk’s cell, and meant by sin his own body, not only his own body but his own self, beside which God stood, infinite and merciful, to receive his pardoned soul. But was not the lump indivisible, all men born to hatred and pride, all men twisted together in the rope of evil, all men?

  The fight beyond the wall grew fiercer. Then there was a woman’s scream, a sudden silence. Did one of the men lie dead, bleeding on the cobbles? There was a noise like a sigh as many turned away and began to mutter quietly to each other. He heard a new voice shouting commands, clearing the street, sending the people home, perhaps the voice of one of the soldiers at the gate. He thought of his own soldier. Where was he now? Eating and drinking with the rest in the guardhouse? Gone back to Fulham or Saint Paul’s to take more prisoners for the bishop of London, to bind their hands, fasten them in the stocks, and comfort them? Or had he a home, a door in an alley, a mother, brothers, sisters? Was there also evil in him? He too was twisted into the rope, or his goodness would not so have shone.