The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  He looked across the garden through the still trees to the river. There were fewer lights moving on the water, and after the din of the fight, there was suddenly hardly a sound in the streets close to the palace. He turned round, so that he was facing the room, and listened. No footsteps on the stairs. No voices from the hall. No doors opening and shutting. It was so quiet that he could hear the noise of the burning wicks consuming the wax in the candles. A cloud of tiny insects hovered over each flame. As he watched, a big moth whirred past him towards the light, circled a few times closer and closer to the candle-flame, too close, and dropped to the table with a little tap. Outside, it was almost dark. The candlelight in the room glowed among the shadows with a rich warmth. He walked towards the table, delighting in the freedom of his legs to move. After a fortnight lying in the stocks, woken from every sleep by the pain of his ankles caught in the heavy frame, it was enough to be free to walk, aching and stiff, from the window to the table.

  It was to please the soldier that he had written the letter, certain that nothing would come of it.

  What did he know of the cardinal? He had once seen a young man who rocked his pruned rose in the earth to test its strength. The young man had after many years become the papal legate in scarlet robes whom he had seen for a moment that night at the palace of Whitehall.

  He had since heard talk of him, that he had always been the pope’s man, that King Henry had put a price on his head and hired murderers to kill him in Italy, that some had hoped he would marry the queen his cousin, that he hated the Spaniards. In the spring there had been rumours that he was ill, that his mind had gone, that he kept to his rooms and would not see the queen because the Spanish war, which had lost England Calais, was a war against the pope as well as against France. What was true he had no means of telling. After Cranmer’s death, when the cardinal had become Archbishop of Canterbury, he had seen an effigy of him burned in a London street, a straw doll dressed in red cloth, the people cheering as the flames blazed up. He knew that more heretics had been burned in Canterbury than by any other bishop’s court except Bonner’s; he had never heard that the cardinal had tried a heretic himself. He had written his letter to a name at the centre of contradictory tales, but remembering how many of the cardinal’s family King Henry had put to death.

  The soldier brought him pen and ink and a scrap of paper, and he sat up in the stocks and wrote against his knee, the soldier holding a guttering light close to the paper.

  “May it please your lordship to look mercifully upon your humble servant in Christ, Robert Fletcher, a prisoner in the stocks at Fulham of the lord bishop of London, in the sixty-first year of his age, condemned as a heretic which he is not and has never been.”

  There was no room to write more. The soldier took the letter, and he let it go without hope, without even desire. He would have forgotten it if the soldier had not looked each day for his release. Nine days passed. And then one morning, the morning of the day not yet over although it seemed long ago, the soldier came down with the captain of the guard and stood by, hardly able to keep his mouth shut, while the stocks were unfastened.

  “You are to be carried to Lambeth under guard, Master Fletcher.”

  He could not stand at first, and the soldier walked him up and down the cellar until some strength returned painfully to his legs. He helped him into some clothes, his own clothes, washed, and they went slowly up the steps and out into the blinding light.

  He stood by the table looking down, away from the hovering insects, and saw that there was a carpet at his feet, in front of the dark hearth. The pattern on the carpet reminded him of something. He moved one of the candlesticks closer to the edge of the table and bent down to look. He could not remember. He straightened. His head swam and he almost fell. He went back to the window and leaned out as far as he could, breathing in the cool air. When he felt better he opened his eyes.

  Under the window in the blackness of the garden he saw a bush of white roses. It was too dark to see the stems, the leaves, the brick wall, the grass, but the roses shone white with all the light that was left in the day.

  Not to have died, there in the cellar, but thus to have come back to life, was a great good.

  He heard behind him approaching steps, the creak of a door. As he moved he noticed the withered flowers still in his hand. He threw them out of the window and turned back towards the room.

  8

  23 June 1558

  The man who had opened the door did not come right into the room but stood motionless, looking at him across the flickering tapers. In his left hand he held a light; his right hand gripped the edge of the door as if he were afraid of falling. His eyes were large, tired, and patient, without guile. His whole bearing suggested fineness, a fine gentleness oppressed under a weight of care. His presence made Robert Fletcher feel like an idle boy, overgrown, footloose, clumsy, and it was this shame, this peasant strength before the other’s frailty, that brought back their past encounter, so many years before, and told him who had come to fetch him. There was, indeed, a bishop’s ring on the hand holding the door.

  “You are Master Fletcher?”

  “Aye, my lord.”

  “It is very late. I have not been well today. Will you follow me?”

  The voice was weary, contained, like the bearded face.

  They went along a gallery where a servant, sitting on a stool under a torch, got up and bowed as the cardinal passed. Another servant held open the door of a well-lighted room and, when they had gone in, closed it behind them. The room was not large and was filled with a warm silence that enveloped his senses like a coat. He had become cold, standing by the open window. Here there were no insects crowding to the candle-flames because thick hangings covered the walls. Books and papers overlapped on the table, and there were more books on a heavy chest against the wall. A fire was lit in the hearth, and in front of it a little black cat was curled, asleep.

  For four years Robert Fletcher had been homeless, in danger, changing the place where he slept so as to remove danger from others, taking with him nothing but two books and the clothes he was wearing. For nearly two months he had been a prisoner, waking every morning to the possibility that this would be the day when they would come and take him out to die a horrible death. For two weeks he had lain in a stinking cellar, fastened by his feet to one filthy patch of ground. He looked at the little cat and felt his whole body relax as if rain were falling after a long drought.

  It was more than the room, the fire, the cat. It was also that the cardinal had not sent a servant for him, a prisoner, a heretic condemned to death, but had come himself, white and tired, to fetch him from where he had been told to wait and had almost begged his pardon for not coming sooner.

  Without disturbing the still air in the room, the cardinal sat down and extended the fingers of one hand, palm upwards, towards the chair facing his own on the other side of the fire.

  “Be seated, Master Fletcher. This is not a court.”

  As he said this he smiled very faintly, but his face immediately resumed its sad, closed expression, and when he spoke again he did not look at him.

  “The reason that I have had you brought to me. . .” The quiet voice fell silent, and then began differently, as if it were important for the account to be exact.

  “The soldier who came with your letter would not deliver it into any hand but mine, though he had to wait outside all day for me to pass by. He seemed an honest lad and spoke most earnestly for you. ‘He’s a learned man, my lord,’ he kept saying, as if. . .”

  Again the faint smile, and silence. They both gazed into the fire that burned between them coolly, with low licking flames, because it had not long been lit. He waited, tense again, in his chair. The little cat’s black fur rose and fell as it slept. He saw it, but it no longer moved him.

  The large eyes were turned to him. The voice, not raised, took on an edge: “You were a monk of the Charterhouse. Why do you lead my sheep into the marsh?”
/>   He looked back into the fire for help. The small flames licked on, giving none. He wanted to tell the truth. The truth, where was that? The truth was a living tree, and he could not break a branch from it without killing the branch.

  “It was to firm ground that I tried to lead them, my lord.”

  “Then you yourself have been misled. Outside the Church there is no firm ground for any man to stand on. The Church is a city built upon a rock. She has walls about her, and solid gates, and her streets are straight and sure. Outside her there is only the pathless fen, and if a man goes out into that darkness, his light may glimmer for a while, but soon both it and he will disappear together. Into that night you have encouraged to follow you souls for whose safety you were accountable to God. Many have died stubbornly refusing to come back to the city and the light.”

  “My lord, I have led no sect into the dark. Neither I nor those to whom I ministered had left the Church. We were faithful to the Church as it was ordered for the whole realm in the reigns of King Henry and King Edward.”

  “You speak of them, of yourself and them, in the past. Has your opinion of them altered since you were in prison? You know that we have not caught them all. There are many of them left on your firm ground. They will need ministers still.”

  He looked across at the tired face. The expression on it was not closed now but open, almost amused. There was no malice in it.

  “I am a dead man, my lord.”

  The cardinal laughed.

  “We are all dead men, Master Fletcher.”

  Then he said: “All that is left for us is the time before we die. No one has more than that.”

  It had been lightly said. It had been said. He felt like a bird flown from the tree. It would not last. The tree is rooted in the earth, and we cannot fly from it for long. The past is who we are and claims us back, always, again and again, until there is no longer any present.

  Softly in the warm room he said: “Any time is too much.”

  They were both still. Not a sound reached them from the palace, full of guards, servants, priests, from the river, the city, the dark midsummer fields and woods, the hunting owls and the foxes padding the lanes.

  The burning logs in the fire fell together as one of them gave way, and some sticks that had not yet caught blazed up briefly, brightening the light. The cat stirred and stretched out a paw, showing its claws for a moment before it drew back the paw and settled again to sleep. The cardinal got up from his chair and walked round the room, very quietly, touching things here and there, a book, a fold of the hangings, the scrolled top of a reading-desk on which a large volume lay open. The bird had flown back and sat among the branches. On the table there was a carved ivory box. The cardinal stopped beside it and ran his finger back and forth over the lid.

  “If you were a simple man, Master Fletcher, I should say to you that the Church under the forms now ordered in this realm commands your obedience, and every faithful subject’s obedience, no less than she did in the days of King Henry and King Edward. But even for a simple man that would not be honest argument. And as it is. . .”

  He stood for a moment longer, his finger resting on the lid of the box. Then he turned suddenly, came back to his chair, and sat down. As he leaned forward, the fire lit his face from below. His eyes were intent and calm.

  “As it is, and because once you were a monk in the order which of all the orders that were in England I had most cause to love, I do not ask you to obey the Church for the reason that such obedience is enjoined by law, although it is. Now, in Queen Mary’s days, it is. Lately it has not been—wait, Master Fletcher—and in a year or two it may not be again. Before long, I am much afraid, the time will come again when the law will enjoin us not to obey but to disobey the Church. Then it will be right for us to disobey the law. Then the church in England will call itself the church, certainly, as it did under King Henry and King Edward, but it will be as subjects only that it will be our duty to remain within it, not as souls before God. I am asking you, Master Fletcher, to turn back from the path you have taken, not as a subject of the queen, but as a strayed soul, not because you break the law, but because you are wrong, and your path leads only into the night.”

  The leaves of the tree hid him again; the pull of the earth was familiar.

  “My lord, it was not as a subject only that I chose the path I took, and it is not mere stubborn disobedience that has kept many others in that path since the authority of Rome was restored. They also have run foul of the law for conscience’s sake, just as you would have me do if Rome’s authority is cast off again. They believe that the English service that every man and woman can understand, the supper of the Lord, the bread and wine freely given to all who ask for God’s grace with a contrite heart, are of the Church, are of the ancient Church of God as it was before the corruptions and oppressions of recent times grew up about it as a thorn hedge protecting the power and wealth of a few and concealing the word of God from the poor and ignorant. There are many in England now, and out of it, both simple and learned, who believe that they saw in the last days of King Edward the church as it truly is, and who, as you know well, my lord, are ready not only to break the law for it but to die for it too. They believe that they are right, right before God, and that those who obey the pope are wrong, whatever the law may require, to bring back all the rules and conditions, fines and dues and measured-out days of purgatory, without which, they are told, they shall not see God. They are not wild, unruly men, my lord, nor traitors to the queen. They take their stand in faith, as souls before God, as you would have them do, and the only difference between them and you is that their faith is in the church whose authority is that of God whereas yours is in the church whose authority is that of mortal men.”

  The cardinal looked at him searchingly over the warming firelight.

  “You put their case very skilfully, Master Fletcher. Do you take your stand on it?”

  “I put their case because the bishop of London is still burning them, and your court in Canterbury too, my lord, I daresay, and they do not deserve to die, nor can they put their case so well themselves.”

  “That is no answer to my question. But it answers one I did not ask. You are a priest. You ministered to them, said their service for them, baptized their children, strengthened the dying, taught them. Above all you taught them. You gave them the words through which alone they became able to see themselves as far from God, close to God, sinful men saved in Christ, the words through which alone they were able to grasp the new vision of the church that you were holding up before them. You brought them the word of God. And when they misunderstood, when they were in despair at the weight of their sin or thought that they could save themselves by their own actions, when their zeal carried them away and they wanted to destroy more of the old Church than you thought was right, or when they seized on passages of Scripture and used them in isolation to encourage each other in courses that you knew were wrong, you corrected them. Did you not, Master Fletcher? You corrected them. You fetched them back to the right path with more teaching, more understanding, more words. And what were you using but the authority of a mortal man? And you are using it again, now, to put their case for men who cannot put it for themselves.”

  The cardinal was flushed, feverish. He had not finished speaking. He got up, threw some wood on the fire, and began to pace about the room.

  “Once a part of the Church separates itself from the whole and confines its truth and rightness as the church to those who follow a single leader or those who live in a single land, it has lost the authority that it had as part of the whole, the authority of unity, the authority of tradition. Without what it has lost, it must nevertheless curb the folly of fools and restrain the excesses of the reckless, unless each individual man is to become his own church. So what does it do? What is there left for it to do, having thrown off and despised the ancient authority of the whole Church, but to lean far more, and far more dangerously than ever was done before, on
the authority of mortal men? Outside the Church men alone, weak and fallible men, have no choice but to set themselves up to choose for each other what shall or shall not be right, what shall or shall not be the truth. Is that a charge you wish to bear, Master Fletcher? Inside the Church the living truth brought by Christ, the living authority he gave to the Apostles, are guarded by God, and heretics delude themselves who think that, running from the Church, they run from man to God. They run from God to man. Your church is but a limb cut from the body. The limb will die; the body cannot die.”

  Again the tree. The cardinal also saw the severed bough, the leaves drying, brown against the summer green. But the cardinal’s vision was of a whole outside himself. He could see his bright city and the heretics fleeing into the dark. He could see his towering oak from the ground where he stood, and the dead wood fallen beneath it. It was not as simple as that. It had not been like that. His own tree, his own truth, was obscure, hidden inside himself. When he died it would crash to the ground with him and all of it would die together.

  He moved in his chair and after a while lifted his gaze reluctantly from the fire. The cardinal, pale as if after great exertion, was standing against the table, supporting himself on it with one hand. He wavered slightly, and the hand on the corner of the table tightened its hold.

  “You are not well, my lord.”

  Robert Fletcher rose towards him, to save him from falling. With a little gesture of his other hand the cardinal stopped him.

  “I am well enough. The air is heavy. In London.”

  He saw the effort that he made. He stood upright, letting go of the table, returned to his chair, and sat down.

  “Go back to the beginning, Master Fletcher. Were you ever in the Charterhouse at Sheen, long ago?”

  “No, my lord. I was at the Mountgrace, in the county of York, all the years that I was a monk.”

  “The Mountgrace? I came there once, for Easter as I remember.”