by Lucy Beckett
“I was there, my lord, when you came.”
“Were you? Were you indeed?”
The cardinal looked across at him, his smile for a moment mocking the distances of the time between.
“How many years were you a monk?”
“Twenty years, all but a few months.”
“Twenty years. Twenty years is half a life. Yet time in a Charterhouse goes swiftly by, does it not? One year follows another as one hour the next among the changes of the world. The pattern that the monks lay upon time binds it up, reduces the strength of its blows almost to nothing, so that a whole life passed between a man’s going into the Charterhouse and his dying there must seem at the end not much more than a short sleep and the awakening from it. That is why. . .”
The cardinal spoke slowly and softly again, as he had at the beginning, and stared into the fire. Robert Fletcher sat quite still, his eyes fixed on the same glowing logs, hearing the words found for what he had thought.
After a pause the cardinal, not moving, said: “When I was a boy I was brought up in the Charterhouse at Sheen. It was a safe place from the world, and I used to think that afterwards, that some day, I should come back there and be given a cell of my own, and a garden, in which to die a quiet death.
“My mother was afraid always. Her father, my grandfather, was secretly murdered. Her forebears for two generations had died on the battlefields of York and Lancaster. And then her brother whom she greatly loved—they had been left, two children alone and hated for their birth—he also was killed, for fear, for revenge.
“I saw the king of Scots myself, when they brought his corpse to Sheen after the battle of Flodden, the wounds on his body black holes, though they had washed the skin.
“And after all it was not I but she who—on the block.
“I was to be a scholar, she said, and not a monk, not yet a monk. But afterwards there was no going back. From time to time I have lived almost as a monk. I have tried to find a monk’s peace. But there is no going back.”
There was a long silence.
At last Robert Fletcher said: “No, my lord.”
The cardinal looked up.
“It grieved you, the being sent out from the priory?”
He thought. Once more the longing for the truth. Not so much to tell it as to know it, to see it whole.
He could argue an opinion with ready speech. Now that they had shed opinion, he spoke haltingly, as the cardinal had.
“It grieved me, aye. To be removed from the cloister was to be removed from my only home. It was the heavier grief because I had been taken from my home before.”
“To go into the Charterhouse?”
“No, my lord. When I was seven years old. But although it grieved me to be taken from the cloister, and I had been well content to stay if the king spared the house, which my lord Cromwell promised us that he would, I was nevertheless, after a little while, not glad, but not sorry either. It was perhaps that, instead of being held fast in that sleep, the sleep from which I would have awoken only in death, I was suddenly brought to my senses by being thrust forth into the world, and the unlooked-for waking from sleep was a waking to much more than grief.
“I don’t intend by this—I would not have you think, my lord, that I reckoned then, or, in spite of all, that I have reckoned since, the life of a monk in the Charterhouse to be of no more account than a sleep whose period is a holy death. I have in mind only to say that to return to time, as I was forced and would not have chosen to do, was to return to the element that God has set for the souls of men to dwell in. After I had been out of the monastery a while, and in the world, I began to think that to evade time, as monks seek to do, is to evade also the chances and changes, the opportunities and occasions, by which a soul is made. How can there be proof, I thought, where there is no testing? How can there be increase of worth where there is no motion towards God through trouble and disarray but, on the contrary, the same calm offering of denial and obedience, hours and prayers, day after day, year after year? How can there be virtue where a man leaves behind his fellows in their confusion and their misery, as if he were not part of the same fallen race as they, and lives in a peace that is defended from the world, as a garden is walled from the forest outside, as if he were safe with God before his death?
“All this I thought, not all at once, but piece by piece over a number of years as I had to live in the world, in time, again, among people, and saw their need, not just for understanding, of the rightness or wrongness of what they had done, but for assurance, for certain belief, that in Christ they are loved of God. When I went into the Charterhouse, I had left behind my fellows, those for whom I might have discovered such a sure belief, and when I was put back among them, I was glad.
“It was in this way that I came to be grateful to the chance that took me from the cloister where, if things had fallen out differently, I should now, no doubt, be soon to die a comelier death than any that awaits me out of it.”
The cardinal did not smile but said: “And it was in this way that you yielded to the new doctrines and drew from them the inferences that so many men have drawn.”
“Aye, my lord.”
He had become aware as he was speaking of something growing up beside his words, like a mirror image of them, something as true as they were but carrying an exactly opposing weight, as if, even while he spoke, he were disproving, sentence by sentence, what he was saying. It was not a new sensation. He had had it recently, in his room in the Tower, thinking about these things, and had quailed before it as before a choice he was too old to make. But now, because of the quality of the cardinal’s attention, because of the warmth there, and the lateness, perhaps he had the courage at last to confront the choice.
He looked down at the little cat, breathing noiselessly beside the fire.
“But in these last weeks, during my imprisonment, I have begun not to be certain any more.”
He glanced at the cardinal. The weary eyes met his. The cardinal said: “Do not be afraid, Master Fletcher. No one knows you are here.”
He could not now, in any case, have held back.
“I have begun to see the same things, the same difference between a life lived out of the world and a life lived in it, newly, as if—as if, having become accustomed to the evening light, I had passed through the darkness and now see, in the morning sun, all the shadows lying the opposite way. All that I have said, of the necessity for the soul to contend with the changes and occasions of the world, of time as the air we are meant to breathe, the element in which we are meant to dwell, of the trouble through which we may move towards God—all this, I have begun to think, tends in the opposite direction from that which I have followed for so long.
“I do not make myself plain. I am sorry, my lord. Let me try.” He paused for a moment and then went on. “If it is wrong for a monk to reckon that by self-denial and certain observances he has earned his salvation, then it is no less wrong for me to require myself, or any man, to earn salvation in the fiercer world outside the cloister. The soul’s safety is not to be earned. There is no merit with which we can compel God to redeem us. He has redeemed us. There is only the soul’s good, God himself, nearer to us or further from us according to our openness to his grace, according, not to our love for him, but to his love for us. And the monk, of all men, should know this openness of soul, because he has abandoned so much that shelters men from God.”
“For we have to live, all of us”—it was the cardinal who went on—“both in time and out of time, and the monk, keeping the cloister, has already defeated some of the power of time though he is in it still.”
He remembered the height from which he had watched them scurry in the shadows during the last days at the Mountgrace. Then he remembered the abbey church at Rievaulx, dusty and cold, the old men left alone to sing the office because they were not fit to ride a horse.
“But, my lord, it only should have been so. It was not. I have not been mad all these years. Y
ou remember them too, the great abbeys and the small, the riches, the idleness, the decay, faith gone out of them and works performed without love, the wealth of the Church going to waste that should have been the wealth of the poor.”
“And has it become the wealth of the poor since the abbeys were brought down, Master Fletcher?”
The cardinal leaned forward in his chair.
“No. That sinful men make little or bad use of rules and customs, books and stones, long ago devised and built for the good of many, is no reason for casting aside the rules, burning the books, and pulling down the stones. It was not that these things made sinful men; it was rather that sinful men brought these things into contempt. The disgrace should have been spared from the things and confessed by the men. And the case of the whole Church is no different.”
His voice quickened. “You do not yet know it, but what you have said shows this to be so. I could draw out for you—but tonight it is late, and you are very tired.”
Indeed his strength had suddenly left him, and he had begun to tremble with exhaustion. The cardinal rose and stood with his back to the fire, looking down at him, his face in shadow.
“I will say only this. The new light that you have lately seen shining for you from the other side of the sky is no new light but the same sun that shone also in the evening. The sun is the same. The earth is the same. Only the shadows change, and the way they lie. You do not have to choose between one way of seeing all these things and the other, because both are true. The truth is in the whole, Master Fletcher, in the whole. And the Church—what is she, Master Fletcher?”
His face must have been clear in the firelight; something in its expression had halted the cardinal. He looked up at him, who had changed so many times in the hour they had passed together, but whose kindness had not wavered.
Robert Fletcher shook his head.
“I no longer know—anything, my lord.”
“You are tired. You shall sleep. Much talking, and the journey from Fulham, and the crowds in the streets, and your days, no doubt, in the bishop of London’s cellar, have worn you out. Come.”
Getting up out of his chair was slow and painful. His ankles, bruised by the stocks, had become stiff, and when he at last stood upright, he almost fell. The cardinal put a hand under his arm to steady him. Tears came to his eyes. He reached the table and held on to it as the cardinal had. They were both old men, he thought, stumbling among thickets of words.
The cardinal went to the door and spoke to the servant outside. After a moment the man came in with a cup of wine.
“Drink it, Master Fletcher,” the cardinal said. “It will give you a little strength.”
He sipped the wine, which lessened his trembling and at once made him lightheaded. It had been many hours since he had eaten bread and cheese in the courtyard with the soldier. The soldier. . . If it had not been for the soldier, he would perhaps by now be dead, have died alone, of hunger, in the cellar, watching the shadow of the dandelion shiver in the barred square.
The cardinal was writing on a piece of paper. He scribbled his signature at the bottom, sanded the ink, folded the paper and gave it to the servant.
“Take Master Fletcher to the clerks’ chamber and see that he is found meat and drink and a clean bed. The letter is for Signor Bernardi. Be sure that he receives it when he wakes. I have no doubt that he will have been asleep long since.”
The faint smile accompanied these last words. Robert Fletcher hoped that he would see it again.
“Good-night, Master Fletcher. God be with you.”
“Good-night, my lord, and—good-night.”
He left the room, the warmth and light, with the servant, and the servant closed the door behind them.
9
July 1558
By the middle of July he had become accustomed to days in the palace at Lambeth as quiet and ordered and as like to each other as any he had ever spent.
They had given him work to do, a plain English digest to prepare from two heavy Latin volumes of canon law, the decrees of the recent Council at Trent. He knew nothing of the Council and so far had learned little from the ponderous paragraphs of the early decrees. Slowly and carefully he worked away; he had not been set such a task since he was a boy struggling with the difficulties of Master Husthwaite’s Cicero.
Every morning, after hearing Lauds sung in the archbishop’s chapel, he sat down at his table in the library and applied himself to the books lying ready for him, open at the page he had reached the day before. A change in the light or any noise in the courtyard outside, a shout, the bark of a dog, a door opening, would distract his attention. He laid down his pen and gazed out of the window, scarcely noticing those who came and went through the gate, watching with his mind’s eye the pieces of past time that came back to him. After a while the palace clock would chime the quarter, any quarter, and he would return to his thick folio, pick up his pen, and begin to compose his next sentence. He had been given no term for the work, and no one asked him how it went.
No one asked him anything. They addressed him courteously by his name, wished him good-day and goodnight, nodded to him at table, and otherwise left him alone. At first he thought they had been told to treat him in this way; after several days, watching those who also sometimes read or wrote in the library, who ate alongside him in the hall, who silently walked ahead of him into the chapel, he saw that few unnecessary words were exchanged between them. This withholding of familiarity in a silence as contained, almost, as that of the Charterhouse was no more than the manner customary in the cardinal’s household. Most of the priests and clerks, and some of the servants, were Italians. They wore black clothes, as everyone knew the Spaniards of the queen’s court did, but there were no Spaniards at Lambeth.
He had not heard the London Protestants, the burnings, or Bishop Bonner spoken of by anyone.
He sat at his table and watched a light rain falling on the empty courtyard. The cardinal was at Richmond with the queen, for whose recovery from sickness prayers were said every day, and the passage across the court of soldiers, priests, and messengers was less frequent than usual. The rain fell coolly onto the grey cobbles, the brick paths between them, the mounting-block.
From his seat at the table in Master Husthwaite’s parlour, long ago, he had looked out, when the Latin was fuddling his head, at the mud cottages on the other side of the lane, their cabbage-plots sloping down to the river, which, higher up the dale, drove the wheel of Arden mill and then flowed past the church, the graveyard.
The graveyard.
He was sitting on the hillside above Laskill one morning in July, watching the Easterside sheep being brought down off the moor for shearing. He was ten or eleven years old. At the bottom of the hill on the far bank of the river stood the abbey woolhouse, a long barn where the fleeces from the whole of Bilsdale would be collected, weighed, packed, and stored until the lines of wagons came from the abbey to take them out of the dale. The Easterside flock was sheared in old stone pens, empty the rest of the year, in the lowest part of the field on the near side of the river.
He watched the sheep pour through a gap in the stone wall. Two sheepdogs ran back and forth in the heather chasing stragglers. When the last few sheep had come through the gap like the last grains of sand through an hourglass, the sheepdogs raced through after them and poles were slung across the gap to close it. His own dog sat beside him. His hand lay on her neck.
The sheep fanned out again over the field. The dogs began to separate them into groups of five or six and chivvy them into the pens where the men were waiting. The first half-dozen sheep were thrown to the ground and pinned, eyes rolling in terror, under the knees of the shearers.
His dog suddenly stiffened under his hand, then shot forward across the grass, running downhill so fast that her belly was almost flat on the ground. In the far corner of the field a strange dog had appeared, a huge black dog that stood with its front paws braced and its tail high, looking at the sheep milling
about in the field. He called his dog. She did not hear. The black dog sprang towards the sheep. They scattered in flurries up the hill, their feet pattering on the turf. The sheepdogs lay side by side at the pens, cowering, though Tom and the other men kicked and cursed them. The black dog bounded into the sheep, singled out a three-months lamb still running with its mother, took it by the throat, shook it three or four times like a rat, and dropped it to the ground. Blood leaked over the white wool, dripped from the dog’s jaws. A moment later, while the lamb still twitched, the dog had killed an old ewe in the same way. All the men were coming up the hill now, shouting and waving sticks, shears, coats. One or two took stones off the wall as they came, and threw them. But the dog was hunting out of their reach, killing among the running sheep.
Then he saw that his own dog was also among the sheep, hunting with the black dog. He saw her let go a lamb, which dropped and twitched. He saw her bloody muzzle. He screamed her name as he ran, again and again. She never paused or looked towards him. The sheep were crowded into the top corner of the field, dashing this way and that. On the grassy slope behind them ten or twelve lay still. The men had reached the gap. The poles were unslung and the sheep began to stream through into the heather. He could see their fleeces bounce past as the men gathered at the gap, their sticks raised in the air.
“No!” he shrieked, “No!” hurling himself at Tom, who shook him off so that he fell backwards on the grass.
At the very last instant the black dog saw the men, stopped suddenly, raced off down the hill. But his own dog followed the sheep right up to the gap. A coat was flung over her head and the sticks came down on her back. He ran away, along the top of the field, away from the sound of the sticks on her back, past Will, who stood rigid, watching the end, into the lane, down to the beck, up the other side. At last, when the pain in his chest was so great that he could not run any more, he fell with his face in the grass under the hedge and sobbed.
He cried for a long time, his sobs shaking him, choking him, leaving him worn out at last and shivering at the edge of the lane in the sharp grass.
