The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  He sat one morning at his table working not at the decrees of the Council but at a Greek Testament someone had left open on a lectern. He had forgotten almost all the bits of Greek he had learned as a boy when a copy of this same Testament had reached the priest’s house from Venice like a garden rose carried by chance into a hedgerow and growing among quickthorn and dock. The sounds of the letters had come back to him one by one, and he was beginning to remember the meanings of a few words.

  Sunshine streamed through the windows, lighting motes of dust. There was no one else in the library, and he had looked up briefly only when a girl had come out of the door across the court and thrown a bucket of dirty water over the cobbles.

  In the beginning was the word. He turned to the first page of Saint John’s Gospel because he remembered that the Greek was easy and he knew the text in Latin, in English, by heart. He read through the first four sentences slowly and understood them. He was pleased as his memory took a firmer grip on the Greek in front of him. He read the sentence through again. This time the last three words stopped him as if someone had spoken them aloud. Comprehended it not. That was what they said. Understood it not. And the light shines in darkness, and the darkness understood it not. Comprehend was the Latin translation, which the English Bible had taken over, but understand was a good English word. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness understood it not. And what was it now that he thought he understood? He looked at the Greek word again. Seized, it meant, grasped. Held down. That was it. The darkness did not hold it down. To hold down a light is to put it out. Then he noticed the tenses of the verbs. The light shines in the present, always, in darkness, and the darkness did not hold it down. Not with nails driven through the flesh into wood, not with the tomb, not with fear and despair and people running away. Not with man’s understanding either. Not then or ever.

  The sun shone down on the page. In its yellow light he saw the unevenness of the paper, the tiny shadows cast on its surface by the roughness of its texture, the smooth blackness of the printed letters a little sunk in it.

  From far away a new sound reached him. The door closed. Steps came towards him, stopped. He looked up. A servant stood there, who said: “My lord cardinal is in his garden, Master Fletcher, and wishes you to come to him.”

  He sat for a moment longer without moving, the letters blurred in front of him. Then he cleared his throat, pushed back his chair, and got stiffly to his feet. He walked the length of the library very slowly so that the servant, who had set off ahead of him, had to wait for him at the door.

  For nearly two months he had hoped for this, living through the calm days with a quarter of his attention on his task, thinking of the long past. Now he was at a loss. It was as if that night in June had been a dream, a dream of some other peace that might have come in an interval of a fever. He had not been well, after the stocks and the cellar floor. He could feel again in his hand, he could remember throwing out of the window, the wilting bunch of flowers that the girl in the crowd had given him. But the warmth, the kindness, the straight candle-flames, the little cat? He went down some stairs and along a passage after the servant as if he were going to meet a man he might not recognise when he saw him. Only as he walked out into the smell of clipped box in the sun and the light heat of the morning dazzled him did he think of the cardinal’s finger tracing the pattern on a carved ivory lid, and was reassured.

  Butterflies fluttered above the lavender on either side of the hot path. They met coming towards them the Italian lord he had seen at supper and several times since. He knew now that his name was Signor Priuli and that he spent much of each day with the cardinal. He and the servant stood aside to let him pass. As he bent his head in acknowledgement, Signor Priuli glanced at him for a moment. His look was keen, curious, not unfriendly, and this too encouraged him.

  They entered a shady walk between pleached hornbeams. The leafy branches were intertwined overhead, and only the odd diamond of light spangled the path. It was cool, and although there had been only stray bees buzzing in the August flowers, he had the impression of passing from noise into silence. At the end of the walk, across a sunny brick path, the cardinal was sitting at a table in an arbour, writing. He stopped as they approached, looked up, and laid down his pen. His face was thinner, the melancholy eyes seemed even larger.

  “Master Fletcher, my lord,” the servant said.

  “Good-day, Master Fletcher,” the cardinal said.

  The servant bowed and went away, back down the dark walk.

  The cardinal nodded to an empty chair at the corner of the table, close up against the honeysuckle. Its flowers were over, and little swarms of gnats hung among its sticky leaves.

  “Tell me how you do, Master Fletcher?”

  “Well, very well, my lord, thank you.”

  “I have not forgotten you all this while, although I think it likely that the bishop of London has.”

  The smile appeared in his eyes for an instant, and then died.

  “It is too late, in any case, for that. The queen will not live long, and then. . .”

  He looked down at his thin hands folded on the table. Robert Fletcher’s, in his lap, were square and broad. He had a big, puckered scar on his left thumb where he had sliced the top off it with a chisel, making the child’s cradle.

  “And you, Master Fletcher, shall you be content to see the Princess Elizabeth crowned?”

  Wanting to tell the truth, not knowing what it was or where to look for it, dizzied him as before. The ground fell away in front of him.

  “I do not know, my lord.”

  Three months ago, four, before he had been caught, he had known, had he not? Then he had thought that only the queen’s death, without her having borne a Spanish heir, and the coming of the Lady Elizabeth could bring balm to the wounds of the realm. Now he thought that the wounds were too deep to heal.

  The cardinal pressed harder.

  “And to see them that wait in Germany come back to claim the government of the church from the bishops? From each other too, no doubt, since they agree only in what they would destroy. A few will welcome them, those to whom you preached and ministered, for example, Master Fletcher, but only a few. Nevertheless I fear that they will not be much resisted.”

  The bitterness in his voice had passed as quickly as the smile.

  “If there had been the time. . .”

  The ground was solid again, outside himself. And they were back as they had been in front of the fire. So that he said: “No, my lord. If the queen were to live another ten, another twenty years, there would not be the time to mend what has been done in the last four.”

  The cardinal looked him full in the face. His mouth quivered before he spoke.

  “What do you mean, Master Fletcher? The queen has always desired to restore what was lost, and, as for myself, I came only to mend, to mend what had been broken by others.”

  “Forgive me, my lord.”

  But he had already recovered.

  “No, no, Master Fletcher. I wish to know what it is you are saying.”

  He smiled.

  “I am long past injury. And also you have been closer than I to England. While you were yet in the Charterhouse I was in exile, and leave was not given me to return until after the queen’s marriage, which. . . You have been these many years among the people, in the cities, in the streets, while I, even here. . .”

  He waved a hand at the shaded walk, the neat box hedges, and over towards the sunlit orchard where in the distance a man was scything grass under the apple trees.

  “The gardens of the great are the same everywhere.”

  Robert Fletcher thought for several moments before he spoke. What he was to say must be both true and just, not only for his own sake but also for the cardinal’s.

  Where to begin? When had the breaking, the destruction started? So far back. The abbeys. Heaps of bedding on the frozen ground. The fallen bell. Later, the mob in the street in York. Will with the iron bar ra
ised to strike. The leaf from the psalter patching the cracked pane.

  And the word was God, and the darkness understood it not. Yet then he had thought the destruction would clear the darkness, would free the word from a language the people did not know and from laws they had been wrongly taught would save them. The mob that day, what had it freed? Nothing good. The lust to smash and pull down. As the destruction of the Mountgrace had freed only wealth to make needles’ eyes for those who might have been better men without it.

  He passed his hand across his forehead. How many at the time had seen these things for what they were? He looked again across the table. Perhaps the cardinal had. And yet it was he who, since he had come back, had been the queen’s right hand and therefore himself a destroyer.

  “When King Edward died, my lord,” he began at last, “there were many in England so weary of change, so doubtful, thinking that all they had seen torn down had better been left standing than gone to line the pockets and build the palaces of turncoat lords, that they were willing and glad to see Queen Mary crowned. I had never been in London then, but I know that in the north there was great rejoicing at the old ways brought back, and I feared we should lose all but a few of those we had gained to true faith and freedom through the English Bible and the English prayerbook. There was little grief in York when the archbishop was sent into prison for marriage, and of all the clergy in the city who had taken wives, not more than one or two refused to put them away.”

  “And of those you were one, Master Fletcher?”

  “I was one, aye, my lord.”

  “Your—wife. Where is she now?”

  “She died soon after, of childbed fever.”

  “Did the child live?”

  “Aye. He may yet live. He does not bear my name.”

  Then the cardinal said: “It was a great betrayal, Master Fletcher, and a weakness I can scarcely understand in one professed for twenty years in the rule of the Charterhouse.”

  He spoke coolly, as if of a man not present.

  He remembered her standing at the door of his garret, brave, frightened, eager. What she had given him had been herself, all that she was, and he had accepted it as a burden to be carried for ever. As a strong beast he had borne her on his back when she was alive, and after she was dead. He bore her still and would until his own death.

  “It may have been a betrayal, my lord. If so, it was she that I betrayed, and I am sorry for it. I betrayed nothing of myself in carrying her, and weakness, I am sure, it was not.”

  There was a silence. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the man scything in the orchard, laying the grass in long swathes to the ground.

  “And yet. . .”

  And yet had there not after all been weakness? Could he not have given her her own strength, not carried her with his, and taught her to use it for herself? Often he had told her of the God he had newly found, loving, forgiving, and she had listened, loving him, loving the God beyond him whom she had learned to know through him. But at the end he had stood, a dark obstruction, between her and God.

  “And yet, Master Fletcher?”

  “I brought her only sorrow.”

  The cardinal made a slight movement of his head and opened his folded hands, signifying that he was willing to let it pass.

  “I broke in upon an account I asked you to give. Will you go on, Master Fletcher?”

  But the chill of his earlier words remained, and he allowed it to seal his resolution.

  “I came to London, my lord, the winter after, and since then until I was taken I lived in hiding doing what I could for those too poor, too encumbered, or too loyal to run away to Germany and wait. Three years I was with them, among them, and during that time I saw them change. I watched the new faith they had been given—given by the king, my lord, by his bishops, his preachers, his prayerbook—become hard and clear in their minds. I saw others join them, among them some whom religion had never troubled before. They listened to what was said, fastened upon it because it was uttered with such certainty, and became in their turn no less clear and hard than their fellows. But this change was for the worse. Refuge from the truth in observances, pride in works, hatred and suspicion—all those things which should have dissolved in the new vision of God’s love—have not only returned into souls who once understood their worthlessness, but have increased a hundredfold.”

  He saw the cardinal look up as if to speak, but he had not reached what he had to say and went on without a pause.

  “And what has brought this change about? The burnings, my lord. More than any other thing that has been done these twenty years, the burnings have made men’s minds hard and clear where they should be—pliable before God, yielding to his touch, forgiving in their darkness beneath his light.

  “And as for the rest, those who were tired of the hasty alterations in religion, those who were sorry to see the chantries gone and much that was old and loved in the churches destroyed before their eyes, those in London who remembered their own grief at the deaths of Sir Thomas More and Bishop Fisher, at the monks in their habits disembowelled in the street for resisting the king’s marriage to a whore—there were many such. Where is their goodwill now, my lord, their goodwill towards the queen, towards the old Church and the ways restored to which they had been long accustomed? Gone in the smoke of the fires. They have seen their neighbours burned alive for holding to what they were taught by learned men with all the authority of king and parliament at their backs. Often they cry out to die more quickly. Have you heard them, my lord? They die for the truth they have seen, even if only once, and those who watch them die see in their deaths that truth, and see also the blindness of those who kill them.”

  As he spoke his gaze was fixed on the cardinal’s folded hands. He knew that he should stop, that he was abusing something of great value freely given him, kindness outside the expected cruelties of faction and the law. But his own words had roused in him at last an anger that had gathered slowly over months and years, anger at the stupidity of them all, of those who died, of those who killed, and the sight of the frail, still hands folded peacefully on the half-written page undid what was left of his restraint. He would go on now, to the end.

  He leaned forward, putting his own clenched fists on the table, far apart.

  “But there is more, my lord. The worst harm that the burnings have done your cause and your Church, the harm that will be the most difficult and the last to mend, is that the people think of those who die that they die not just for the truth but for England too. The queen’s marriage was the start of it, then Spanish priests at court and in the universities, Spanish soldiers in the streets, and then the Spanish war we had to fight, and lost because of Spain, and all this time Englishmen roasted to death in the rain in London and Canterbury—yes, my lord—for refusing to accept the queen’s foreign Church.”

  The cardinal raised his hand at last. It shook.

  “The Church is not the queen’s. She is not foreign. She is not mine. She is the Church of God, the body of Christ, and those who refuse to return to her as she has been in England not for four but for a thousand years refuse to return to the fold that Christ founded for us all when he said to Peter—”

  “I know, my lord. I know what you see when you look at the Church. I put no case. I have no case left, myself, neither theirs nor yours. I tell you only what the people see when they look at the Church, now. As children those who are old enough were taught to pray to Saint Thomas of Canterbury, the archbishop who died at the king’s hands, a martyr in defence of the Church. Now many of them have seen, or think they have seen, which in the end comes to the same, another archbishop of Canterbury die at the queen’s hands, a martyr in defence of the Church.”

  “But it was Master More and Bishop Fisher who died in the same cause as Saint Thomas of Canterbury, while Cranmer stood at King Henry’s side while he had them put to death! For that and for many other things, and above all because he led the English Church into the darkness in defiance
of his own consecration oath, he deserved the stake.”

  “The people do not see it so. In the eyes of the people Master More and Bishop Fisher died because they would not agree to King Henry’s marriage.”

  The cardinal was no longer listening. He had spoken quietly. His hands were again folded on the table, and he sat looking down at them. Then he said, still more quietly: “And yet it may none the less have been folly—”

  “Folly? You call it folly, my lord? It was a great wrong!”

  Robert Fletcher was standing up and shouting across the table.

  “To send to burn a repentant heretic—it was a sin, a sin not only against mercy but even against justice. And to call it folly is to take more account of the anger it caused among the people than of the deed itself, as my lord Cromwell did when he left the Charterhouse monks to rot in prison rather than have them butchered before the people as their prior had been. No, my lord. Archbishop Cranmer was a convicted traitor, and his death on the block would have been no more than the just penalty for his crime under the laws of the realm. But for the always merciful Church—those are Bishop Bonner’s words, my lord—to send to the stake an old man who not once but four, five, six times had renounced all those opinions in which he had differed from its doctrine: that was murder, mere revenge by the Church upon a body that housed a soul contrite before it. You will say that he withdrew his recantations at the last. So he did, and thus became the inspiration of many who have since died in the same way for the new religion that he brought to light out of the tangled briars of the old. But it was before the last, my lord—I have heard it from men who were there and saw all that passed—that Doctor Cole in his sermon said to the whole crowd that the archbishop was to be burned to make even the death of Fisher of Rochester. He made mention also of the queen, the council, reasons of state. But this was the burning of a heretic, not the execution of a traitor, and he preached his sermon not as the queen’s servant but with the voice of the Church. And what he said that day, my lord, showed our Church in England to be no more than a frightened tyranny exacting vengeance as if its rulers had never heard the words of Christ’s forgiveness. By their fruits ye shall know them. There were more than Cranmer who made their choice because of what happened that day. Often the people see what is not there; often they do not see what is. That day they saw what was there indeed, and I say they drew from it conclusions that were right.”