The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  “And I am glad to see you look so well, sir, in your new clothes and all.”

  He looked down at the black clothes Signor Bernardi had given him, for the first time ill at ease in them.

  “I am well, aye, very well.”

  There was a silence between them. Then the soldier held out his hand. “Good-day to you, sir. I must be off if I’m to be back up river tonight.”

  He shook hands with the soldier and waved to him when he looked back from the gate.

  He took the letter up to his table in the library and opened it.

  “We do daily remember and earnestly pray for you in your sore distress and suffering at the hands of our oppressors who shall not, please God, for ever persecute and punish us, faithful children of the Lord, for that we will not betray the truth we have received and know ourselves to be safe in the mercy of Christ for all that some among us may be bound and fastened in the prisons of men. Keep high your courage and despair not a whit, to whatever pass you are brought, even to death itself, for the Lord shall deliver us out of the hand of our enemies and scatter them by his power. When the count is taken of those who have stood fast to the truth, your name shall not be forgotten among them, to the greater glory of the Lord our God. And so we take leave of you, asking you also to remember us in your heart that are yet in the midst of such manifold and great dangers and having no learned men remaining to give us counsel, yet hold to the path of righteousness.”

  He turned the paper over on the table and spread his hand flat on its blank side, as if to put out the fire that burned in the words.

  When the bell in the courtyard began to ring for dinner, he got up, tore the letter into tiny fragments, and mixed them with the ashes in the hearth.

  12

  October 1558

  The air was damp and windless, rank with the smells of smoke, sodden earth, battered and dying grass. A sour chill came off the river that flowed in swift dirty spate, the full tide swollen by weeks of rain. He stood still on the muddy path that skirted Lambeth marsh and looked across to where the square tower of Saint Paul’s, the spire of Saint Dunstan’s-in-the-East, and the white battlements of the Tower rose above the mist, catching the sun.

  It had been the change in the weather that had enticed him out. The silence he had woken to after so much wind, the mist lying on the river early in the morning with the sky lucid blue above it, the sounds, audible again, of someone sweeping the dung from the courtyard, of people’s footsteps in the street outside the gate: all this had lured him. For the first time he had walked out of the palace, and the soldier at the gate had nodded to him as he passed. You are a guest in my house.

  He watched a big branch, snapped off somewhere upstream by a storm now blown out. It went by quickly, rolled and tossed on the surface of the water like a twig thrown in by a child.

  And yet he was not free. He had no money and nothing to sell. He must go back to the palace to eat, or starve, or beg. There was no one he had known in the city to whom he could go: those he had once known would regard him as a coward and a traitor. Was he?

  He did not know. Chance and the whim of a man more powerful than his captor had saved him from a slow and painful death, alone in the dark and altogether without the glory he had seen on the faces of those burned at the stake. Yet several times in the last month he had thought almost with envy of himself fastened by the feet on the cellar floor with only the shadow of the dandelion to tell him of the passage of the sun.

  He sighed deeply as he stood there. A laden barge pulled heavily upstream against the tide, the ten oars rising and falling together in the mist, a few gulls wheeling round it.

  It seemed to him that he had outlived his death, like the green leaves still clinging to the branch he had seen tumbled along on the rushing water. He had been severed from all his past, and an encounter of the day before had made him understand how strict were the bonds of his confinement to the present.

  He had been working, or rather sitting at his place, in the library as usual. Since the end of August, when the summer weather had broken for good and the cardinal had again taken to his rooms, more gravely ill, it was said, than before, he had scarcely looked at his decrees. He kept the huge volumes open on a table, as if to remind himself that a task did exist that he had been given to perform. But he passed the time with the Greek Testament in front of him and the Latin beside it, laboriously puzzling out the sense of the language he had never properly learned. He was reading his way slowly through the Gospels, and the new words gave the history of Jesus, what he had done and said, a freshness that, during the hours he spent there, made him forget everything else. He was quite drawn away from the sad, expectant household, the closed faces of men he saw daily but hardly spoke to, the fires lit in every hearth against the buffeting rain. Sometimes the words of Jesus seemed addressed to him, to everyone, with such simple force that he wanted to pick up the book and take it through the silent, guarded rooms to where the cardinal lay dying and read to him, only a sentence or two, to undo the harnessed weight he was dragging to the grave. But the distance between him and the cardinal was much greater than the length of a few rooms, and he would shut the book and fall back into the listlessness that made of every day an indistinguishable lapse of time.

  So he had been sitting, idle, the day before, his finger on the Greek word he had reached but his gaze out of the window on the rainy sky, when the door opened and a man dressed in the habit of a Carthusian monk came into the library. He had known for three years that the queen had restored to the priory at Sheen a group of monks from the old Charterhouses, among them even one or two from the Mountgrace. But it had seemed a fact remote from him, and he had never troubled to find out which of his former brethren had chosen to go back to the cell. The monk who walked towards him through the shadows, as he stood dismayed by the window, was a stranger. He might have been a ghost.

  He had never thought to see again the habit he had worn for twenty years, and he would not have imagined that the sight of it could so move him. He got to his feet and stepped forward.

  “Good day to you, sir,” the monk said. “I have leave of Signor Bernardi to borrow for the Charterhouse an old book, Master Hilton’s Ladder of Perfection. I daresay you know of it. It is a printed book, finely bound. Archbishop Cranmer had it from the library of the London Charterhouse when they took our books away. In those unhappy days we did not dare to hope the time might come when we would be able. . .”

  He knew where it was, took it down from its place, and put it into the old monk’s hands.

  “Thank you, sir. Thank you.”

  The monk did not turn to go but looked down, weighing the book in his hands.

  “You know, sir, this was the book, the very book, the prior told me to read when I was a novice. Fifty years ago, that was, all but three years. He gave it to me because my Latin was not good in those days, only schoolboy Latin I had when I was first a monk, and it was a pleasure to me to read an English book that treated of the things of God. The very same book!

  “Little did I think all those years ago that before I saw this book a second time the ladder would be broken under us, the very rungs on which we stood taken out to make us fall. . . But there, young men are full of trust in themselves, which is as it should be, no doubt, or they would never set forth on these perilous climbs. . . Perhaps if I had paid more heed then to what Master Hilton had to say, I would not be here now, telling the tale. In this wicked world yet, in my grey hairs, when others I knew, clearer-sighted than I, though some were young and some were unlettered men, went to their deaths bravely in God’s cause.”

  The old monk raised his watery eyes to look at Robert Fletcher. “Alas, sir, God gives courage only to some. The rest of us he means to learn patience as best we may, and we have the longer road. Aye, we have the longer road.”

  The frail voice fell silent. Robert Fletcher was unable to reply. After a few moments the old man peered up at him, wrinkling his eyes against the light.
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  “We have the longer road, but at the last we may reach, with God’s grace, the top of the same mountain, may we not?”

  When he still said nothing, the old monk shook his head, perhaps taking him for an Italian who did not understand English. He tucked the book under his arm.

  “Forgive me, sir. . .” He patted the book. “An old man’s memories. An old man’s memories.”

  He held out his hand. It was light and dry.

  “God be with you, sir, and thank you.”

  Then he had gone, closing the door quietly behind him.

  The gentle words had stayed in his mind all day, and when he had woken in the morning, this morning, he had wondered for a moment whether the old monk’s appearance in the library had not been a dream, so much did what he had said seem to come from inside himself. He had lain still, listening to the new silence of the weather, and slowly his own perplexity had gathered about him like darkness until the monk’s innocent hope shone as a taper shines in an alien window on a foggy night, intermittently and far away. Yesterday he had thought that he might have delayed the monk with answers, have revealed to him a little of himself, that he too had once been a novice reading Walter Hilton, and then a monk for whose safety in the cloister others had gone blithely to a horrible death. He might have gone back with him to the Charterhouse at Sheen and disappeared behind its doors for ever, as into the grave. But the thought had been no more than weakness, a wish to escape into the certainty of the past from the bewilderments of the present.

  The monastery door was locked to him. It was locked not only because the Charterhouse would never receive into its painfully preserved fidelity a married monk, a contumacious priest, an unrecanted heretic. It was locked also because he himself had rejected for good what lay behind that door.

  Had he not?

  He picked up a stone from beside the path and threw it furiously into the river. He wished that he had never met the cardinal.

  He walked on through the mud towards London Bridge, looking only at the path in front of his feet. What, after all, after sixty years, was he? A monk without a monastery, a priest without a people, a father without a child, a brother who had left his brother lying in the street when he might have taken him home, washed him, fed him, as he himself had been washed and fed when he was lying in the stocks by a young man, a stranger, who, at risk to himself, had tended him as kindly as a son his father. A son his father.

  He stopped and looked again, out over the wide, rushing water. The mist was thinning, and the city on the far bank, the houses, the palaces, the many churches, were becoming clearer in the sunshine. At his feet the river swirled on, dark and dangerous, with the litter of autumn carried tumbling on its surface. The thought of his father, and of his father’s wretched death, made him angry as he stood on the path by the river and kicked at the stones with his worn shoe like a moody boy.

  If he himself had stayed at home and never gone into the Charterhouse to lead that sweet, that free and ordered life, would he have been able, one day, to shift his father from his defiance, his sullen crouch over the smouldering fire?

  He kicked another stone into the water. Very likely not. If a man will not forgive himself, other men, death, fate, even God, he cannot himself be forgiven. It had been the same with Master Husthwaite. For all his goodness he had died embittered and without joy, because something had happened to him that he would not forgive.

  He shivered, from standing still in the clammy October morning, and began to walk again, more slowly than before. Requiescant in pace. The three words of prayer, of farewell, soothed him a little. Had not their souls, the unhappy souls of his father and Master Husthwaite, been gathered long ago into the mercy of God? All souls, however broken, however wordless and maimed, could they not be entrusted to God in the prayers of the living till the end of time, when every man would have vanished from the earth into God’s eternity?

  As he walked he remembered that not long ago he had told simple men and women that there was no need to pray for the dead, that the idea of purgatory was maintained by the pope and his obedient bishops and priests only to frighten people into thinking that they could buy the safety of their souls, of other souls, with money or good works or a certain number of Masses. The words rose in his mind like a cloud of chaff. Had he not prayed, just now, for the dead, that their souls might be brought clear of misery and sin? What was his prayer but a prayer for the souls in purgatory? And was his prayer not real and shining beside those dusty arguments of the recent past—as Luther’s description of faith had shone for him in York among the dusty Masses he had been paid to say for souls he knew nothing of, alone in his Minster chantry?

  He shook his head as he walked, and smiled. Surely it was only the truth that shone so. But he had known for years that both could not be true. If a soul were saved only by the faith that was in it, then to pray for the dead was empty folly. If there were a reason to pray for the dead, then the justification of the soul by faith alone must be a false account of salvation. Was this knowledge or was it not? Men had died, men, therefore, had killed, for one of these truths or the other. But suppose that both indeed shone with the light of truth? Suppose it were only the reasoning of men, the dry, excluding words, that set them over against each other? Suppose it were in one mystery that both these things so shone, and men had killed, and died, only for the dust of their own words?

  He was walking more briskly again, enjoying the unfamiliar exercise. Perhaps there was something to be said for being old, something to be thankful for in having been cut off from so much. He thought with exhilaration now of the leafy branch tossed over and over on the out-going tide. He hoped, recognising the neatness of the thought with an appreciative nod, that it had not lodged itself against a pier of the bridge. He had never seen the sea.

  All at once the last layers of mist rolled away from the surface of the river. The bright sun struck him suddenly in the eyes, and the wide expanse of water to his left sparkled and gleamed in its light. He looked about him. The muddy path had become a muddier lane. He was approaching a row of cottages built along a narrow wharf at the river’s edge. The water slapped against the stone wall, only a foot or two from its top. On his right were gardens and orchards glistening in the sun, the leaves on the trees just beginning to turn. On the grass beneath them lay green leaves, twigs, and unripe apples blown down in the gales. In a cobbled yard in front of one of the houses a man was scraping the bottom of an upturned wherry, whistling as he worked. He stopped to watch. There was something consoling in the noise and rhythm of the scraping, in the rhythm of the man’s body bending and drawing back, something from long, long ago, and he himself standing and watching.

  The man stood upright over his boat, stretching to straighten his back. He sensed his attention, turned towards him, and grinned.

  “’Tis a bonny day.”

  He smiled back. He realised for how long he had been cooped up among books and discreet Italians walking close to the wall with downcast eyes. He opened his mouth to answer, but the man went on: “Mind you, we want a bit of sunshine after all the wet we’ve had. And wind. I’ve not seen the river like it’s been, not ever. More than once I’ve thought we’d have it over the top, and a fine pickle we’d be in here if it did that. But there you are, what will be will be, I say. The water’s stayed in its proper place, and if we have a few fine days it’ll go down soon enough. No use in meeting trouble halfway. You on your way to London, sir?”

  “No. Aye. That is, no. I’ve walked out from Lambeth, because the sun was shining.”

  “A right mucky road that’ll have been in this weather, and you not so young as you were, sir, if you’ll pardon me saying so. Now. . .”

  He turned back to the boat and ran his hand down the keel. Then he stood away from it and looked it over carefully. He went round to the other side and did the same. Finally he gave it a cheerful kick and said: “She’ll do for a few months, I reckon.”

  He gathered up his tools from
the ground, put them in a small sack, and slung it over his shoulder.

  “I’ve to go back home to Southwark for a plank. There’s a bit of gunwale rotten that won’t see out the winter. Will you walk down with me for a jug of ale—on account of the sun’s shining yet?”

  Robert Fletcher was almost frightened, and for a moment wished he were back in the safe obscurity of his library. But the man’s laugh was friendly, his look open and uncurious, so that he said: “I will. Aye, I’ll just walk down to Southwark. Thank you.”

  He wanted to say that he had no money for his share of the ale, but he looked at the man’s face again, passed his hand across his own, and remained silent.

  “My name’s Kit Tye,” his companion said after a few minutes. “I’m a carpenter by trade, as you see, like my father was before me, and a Southwark man born and bred. If you searched the wide world over, you’d never find a better town than Southwark, nor better neighbours than mine. I wouldn’t cross the river if you paid me to, not to live. I’ve a son myself now, God be praised, after three girls, pretty as they be, and it’s my only wish he’ll be content enough in the house and trade of his father.”

  The carpenter went on talking, but Robert Fletcher thought of the rabbits in the field at Easterside, the pigeons in the wood at the Mountgrace, now and for ever, the deer, the monks living and dying and being buried in their nameless graves.

  “I’m very sorry.”

  The carpenter had asked him a question.

  “You, sir, you’ll not be a London man?”

  “No. I’m from the north, from York and thereabouts, though I’ve been in London three or four years now.”

  He saw the carpenter glance sideways at him as they walked, uncertain, from the evidence of his clothes and manner, what his occupation might be. He saw him almost ask, and then, with a shyness that touched him, decide not to.

  “From York?” the carpenter said instead. “Then you’ll have seen something of the great rebellion they had there against King Harry twenty years gone and more?”