The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  “I scarcely saw any part of it. I lived—not much in the world then.”

  The carpenter laughed.

  “That was all I ever heard of the north, that rebellion, never stirring, as I say, further from Southwark than I could help. I was no more than a lad in those days, still making rakes and rolling-pins all day I was, but I remember my father saying: ‘They’re risking their necks up there in the north, rising against the king, and for what? For a few old abbeys—and the monks won’t lift a finger to help themselves, you mark my words.’ And he was in the right of it, sure enough. We’ve never missed the monks since they’ve gone, have we? Never missed them a day or an hour. Yet there were all those then, your countrymen, ready to lay down their lives to keep them in their abbeys. I don’t understand it. Never shall. It’s like nowadays, the burnings. Plain men, the likes of me, some of my neighbours among them, and their wives, with children to care for, ready and willing to roast, they are, and to leave their children and their old fathers to starve, and for what? For this Mass or that Mass, for up with the pope or down with the pope, for whether we have a wooden table in the church or an altar-stone, for whether we go to the priest to be shriven or stay at home and trust to God to forgive us our sins—come to that, for Our Father or Paternoster, as if God couldn’t hear the different tongues he’s given us!”

  The carpenter broke off to greet a little old woman with bright eyes who sat in a doorway beside a barrel of salted herring, shouting her wares in a high voice. They were walking now in a narrow, busy street through a thickening crowd of people. The tall bulk of the church of Saint Mary Overy rose above the rooftops on their right.

  “Old Mother Starkey,” the carpenter explained as they walked on. “She’s a good soul. Her son’s my sister’s husband.”

  But the old woman had looked at Robert Fletcher sharply as she returned the carpenter’s greeting, and he had dropped his eyes.

  “No,” the carpenter went on, in the same tone as before, waving his free hand as he talked. “It’s against all reason, that’s what it is. There’s this one goes to burn, forces them to take him, almost with his bragging, and that one tears all up by the roots and is off to Germany—Germany!—when he might rest his bones in England that bred him, and the other fellow falls out with his father over it, or his wife, and ends up hating half the folk he’s known from a lad—hating them! Foolish days we live in, sir!”

  “They’re all the days we have,” Robert Fletcher said, but the carpenter swept on.

  “Foolish and light. To be so pulled about as we are from one side and the other. The great ones that do the pulling, the king, the parliament, and now the queen and the bishops—they chop and change, to be sure—this in, that out, pulling down here, setting up there. But we’re to blame as much, the common people, losing our wits, running here, there, and everywhere after our betters, losing our lives along with our wits often enough. Don’t folk know, haven’t they always known, that if a man loves God and honours the king he can’t go badly wrong? If he says his prayers at night, goes to church with his neighbours on Sundays, loves his wife, follows his trade honestly, brings up his children to do the same, owns his sins and trusts to God for a quiet death, what need he fear? There’s plenty to do between him and God if he sticks to what he knows, what every Christian man knows, and doesn’t go chasing about and about after every new-fangled preacher putting all that’s good in the melting-pot. I don’t like the preachers for muddling folk, telling us it don’t matter what we do if we believe right—what sort of Christian would they have us be?—and turning sound men into silly sheep that dash up and down bleating what they don’t understand any more than I do, that confessing sins is wicked and the Mass is blasphemy and the bishops ministers of Satan and I don’t know what all. Mind you, I don’t like the Spaniards any better that came in with the queen and hide in doorways to catch these same silly sheep—but English sheep, mark you—and carry them off to burn in front of their neighbours. Here, sir.”

  The carpenter turned into a gap between two houses wide enough to let a horse and cart through. As they crossed the muddy yard towards an open door, on the step of which two children sat playing cat’s-cradle, the carpenter added: “But I daresay the worst of it’s over when all’s said. They say the queen’s not likely to see the year out. The Lady Elizabeth’s as English as I am and from what I hear not over-fond of either Spaniards or preachers. So much the better for simple folk. There’s my wife.”

  A young woman, smiling, with a nine-month-old baby on her arm, had appeared in the doorway.

  “I met this gentleman coming out from Lambeth in the sunshine,” said the carpenter, “and he walked down with me for a jug of ale.”

  She looked from one to the other.

  “You talk too much, Kit Tye,” she said, still smiling. “Will you come in, sir? Out of the way, Meg and Jenny. There’s sawdust everywhere, sir, but a carpenter’s house is his shop.”

  He felt as if he had been walking with a strong wind blowing full in his face so that he could scarcely breathe. Not only what the carpenter had said but the noisy street, the crowd of people buying and selling, crying their wares, pushing past each other; the pretty girls leaning from the windows of the stews; the mounds of apples, cabbages, whelks on stalls; the rabbits and hares hanging head downwards; the smells of bread coming from bakers’ shops, blood from butchers’, fish, vegetables, beer, plums, roasting chestnuts: it had come at him with violence, all at once like a gale, and he was stunned. He had lived for weeks without impressions, his present an empty space crossed only by the shadows of the past. Suddenly teeming life and words of raw wholesomeness whose flavour he had quite forgotten had rushed into the emptiness, and he stood in the sun, nameless and alive, the past for the moment stilled behind him.

  “Thank you,” he said as the children got up from the step, one of them carefully holding the string pattern taut on her hands. “You are very kind.”

  They went in.

  He saw the carpenter take the baby from his wife while she went out through another open door into a further yard at the back of the house. The sound of someone sawing came from the yard, and beyond a low wall the river glinted between the branches of an overhanging tree. Along the rays of sunlight streaming in at the door sawdust floated gently. There was no wind. Something stirred far within him. The dry sweetish tickling smell of fresh oak-dust and shavings, mixed with another. His eyes travelled round the room. There—over the fire a black pot of hide glue hung from an iron hook, a curl of acrid vapour twisting from it. Beside the fire an old man sitting on a stool held a half-made bowl between his knees and shaved slivers of wood from it, tapping the end of his chisel very softly with a hammer. The woman came back with a jug in one hand and two pewter cups in the other. She put them on the table and poured out the ale. She gave him a cup.

  “It’s my own brewing, sir. Kit likes it well enough.”

  The ale was strong and cold. As he drank she said to her husband: “A man came from Master Phillips about the chest. I said to come back before dark and you’d be sure to be here.”

  “It’s done, all but the last waxing. I’d best be on with it now.”

  The carpenter downed his ale and made as if to give the baby back to his wife.

  “Put him in the cradle if he’ll go down. I’ve things to see to—if you’ll pardon me, sir,” she said.

  The carpenter began to cross the room towards the cradle in the far corner, but as they passed him, the baby suddenly smiled and held out his arms to the stranger standing by the table. Disbelieving, he put his cup down.

  “I’ll take him for you, if you—”

  The carpenter laughed. “You’d better sit down a minute then. He’s a fair weight to hold.”

  He sat on the end of a bench beside the table, and the baby, contented on his lap, his small back firm against his chest and his downy head bent forward, played with the empty cup.

  The carpenter took a big lump of beeswax from a shelf. He cut
a piece off it with a knife, warmed it in a ladle over the fire, and then stood with his back to the fire rolling it round and round between his palms.

  He was watching the wax with such attention that he was startled when the carpenter, paying no heed himself to what he was doing and grinning at the baby, said: “He’s a fine little lad.”

  When the wax was soft enough, the carpenter wrapped it in a linen rag and began to rub with it the panelled surface of a new oak chest that stood against the wall. He rubbed with an even pressure, in a gentle circular action, rubbed and rubbed, until the wax through the linen started to stick a little to the wood, and then he rubbed still more gently, with the same motion, and a shine began to come.

  He watched, with the baby heavy on his lap, and a drowsy pleasure gathered in him, a slow warmth spreading through his body. The carpenter talked as he worked: “Master Phillips is a goldsmith, this side of London Bridge. He will have a good shine to his wood if it’s only to keep servants’ linen in.” But he scarcely heard the words. He was back in the mill at Arden, a small boy by the fire on a winter evening, watching Robin as he waxed—what? A new chest for the prioress’s chamber, a dish for her table, a butter-tub, a plough-handle, a coffin, a haft for a sickle, a salt-spoon. There was no wooden thing those great hands could not make, and at the end the waxing, the gentle, even rubbing, in soft circles, with a catch now and then as the wax stuck.

  He remembered seeing the prioress, on the night of Robin’s death, burst into tears at last when she had to send away for a coffin for him.

  In York he himself had tried to wax the cradle he had made, without skill, for Alice’s baby. He had not the knack, and the wood had been too rough to shine much, but he had rubbed away, kneeling beside the cradle in the room above the baker’s shop, and Alice had laughed with pleasure, watching him.

  He put his hand on the baby’s head. The bones of the skull were not yet joined together and through the skin he felt the pulse beating softly and quickly. He prayed with all the force of the love stored up in him.

  God send your father health and a long life so that he may see you grow and flourish here, in the sawdust and the sunshine, and become a man and marry and beget children in your turn.

  He got up, carried the child to the cradle, and laid him down. The baby smiled up at him, put two fingers in his mouth and shut his eyes. The carpenter was still waxing the front of the chest, squatting on his haunches and whistling through his teeth. He stood up as Robert Fletcher came towards him.

  “I must be on my way, Master Tye. The ale was very good. I thank you for it, and for. . .” He waved a hand at the room.

  “You’re most welcome, sir. We had a fine talk, coming down, and broke no bones. And the sun’s still shining for your going home.” He laughed again. “Good-day to you, sir.”

  They shook hands. As he passed by the fire on his way out the old man lifted his head, with his hammer and chisel still in place, and said very quietly: “God be with you, master.”

  He walked back to Lambeth through the brilliant autumn noon, hungry, as if he were indeed walking home. The level of the river seemed already to have dropped a little. In the orchards opposite the cottages along the wharf, women and children were looking for windfalls in the wet grass and shaking more apples down from the branches. He wondered without anxiety if he would live to see the spring and, if he did, where he would be when it came. He wondered what sort of man was miller at Arden now, and whether his children were set in turn to watch the sacks of flour fill and shout out when they were ready to be tied and rolled away. If Robin had lived, that man would most likely have been himself. The mill no doubt still stood, still needed a miller, though the nuns were long gone and some stranger would have taken the priory, its woods, and its few fields in the narrow dale, from the king.

  Then he would never have gone to Easterside, never known his father or Will, never learned Latin, never have been a monk. He would only have worked. And married.

  When he reached the palace it was at once as if he had not been out. On his table in the library the Greek Testament was open at the page he had been reading when the old monk came in. At supper he nodded as usual to the priests and clerks of the cardinal’s household and heard them say that the cardinal was no better and no worse. When he went to bed he wished a goodnight, as he always did, to those with whom he shared the big clerks’ chamber. He blew out his candle and for a moment pressed his face to the casement. The panes were cold, the glass running with moisture from the warmth inside the room. Outside the mist had risen again from the river, and the torches over the gate burned in the dampness with a thick, dim glare. He opened the casement a crack. The mist smelled of salt, of smoke, of winter.

  That night he dreamed of Alice as he had not once dreamed since her death. She was there in his bed with him, warm, asleep, her legs entwined with his, her head heavy on his shoulder, her hair close to his mouth. Snow was falling on them as they lay, and was not cold.

  13

  12 November 1558

  “You see how it is with me, Master Fletcher. Every morning they bring me a boiled egg, and when I eat it, with sippets of bread like a weaned child, they tell me I am better today, to be taking meat so well. But the truth is that I lose a little strength, leave this poor corpse at a greater distance from me, each day that passes. To hold a pen so tires my arm that I can scarce write my name, short as it is, before my fingers drop the pen. I can no longer hold a book. And every time the fever returns, it leaves me a little weaker.”

  The cardinal was lying in his bed supported by a pile of pillows. The great eyes seemed all that was left alive in his worn face; the end of his beard could scarcely be distinguished, in the candlelight, from the fur of the rug drawn up over his chest. His hands rested palms downwards on the fur, thin and wasted, no less white than the sleeves of his shirt, the bishop’s ring huge on one of them. He spoke almost merrily, as if it were a jest to be shared, his knowing how much closer to death he was than anyone had told him.

  “I am very sorry to hear it, my lord,” Robert Fletcher said, nevertheless.

  “Sorry? No, Master Fletcher. The fever is not Satan, coming back each time fiercer than the last. It is not bad in itself, not evil, not good. It is—a storm, that is all, which when it comes will blow down only the tree that is ready to fall. It is not to be feared because it is not to be fought.”

  A smile lit the great eyes.

  “But sit down, Master Fletcher. I think there is a chair.”

  He moved his eyes without turning his head. Robert Fletcher saw the chair near the side of the bed, placed to face the cardinal. He crossed the room slowly and quietly, as if not to frighten a deer or a bird, and sat down. In the last weeks he had accustomed himself to the certainty that he would never see the cardinal again. The drift of feeling at Lambeth reminded him of the last few months at the Mountgrace. Though no more than usual was said, and each day passed in the same orderly manner as ever, the whole household was disquieted, unable to live contented in a present that had no purpose because it had no future. Two or three of the Italians had already left for home, fearing the hardships of a journey in the worst months of winter. As at the Charterhouse, he observed the common uneasiness and found himself almost untouched by it. He had thought scarcely at all of what he should do after the cardinal’s death.

  For a few days after his meeting with the Southwark carpenter, he had wanted to talk once more to the cardinal, to explain to him the discovery he felt he had made that morning. But during the weeks that followed he heard how weak the cardinal had become, that he no longer left his bed, that he could not eat without help, that he saw no one but his chaplain and Signor Priuli and one or two of his most devoted servants. Already at the end of October it was said that his thoughts were now entirely fixed on death and that he asked for nothing but the same few passages from the Gospels to be read to him each day. He would not see him again.

  So today’s summons had moved and shaken him as if it had
come from beyond the grave.

  “Has all been well with you, these past months, Master Fletcher?”

  “With me, my lord? If it were not for. . . Aye, very well, my lord, thanks to your great kindness.”

  “If it were not for what, Master Fletcher?”

  The round eyes were fixed on him with complete attention, as they had been in August in the garden, in June in the study next door.

  “I began to say, my lord, that if it were not for your kindness, I should have been dead before July was out.”

  The cardinal smiled.

  “But you thought that no fit speech to make to a dying man—if that, in truth, was what you had begun to say.”

  He could not meet the cardinal’s look, and dropped his eyes. In the silence the fingers of one of the thin hands moved slightly, backwards and forwards in the fur.

  “Have you wished, would you have wished, that I had left you to die, in the summer, in the bishop’s cellar?”

  “No, my lord. That is to say, perhaps if. . . It is hard for me to find words, and it is not that I am ungrateful, unmindful of all that you have done for me. But it would have been. . . No, my lord.” He looked up. “No man should wish to have died before it is the will of God to take him from the world. In any case, now is by no means the time for me to speak of such things.”

  “Aye, Master Fletcher. Now is the time. Yesterday, if I am not mistaken, was Martinmas. The winter is drawing on. It is very cold outside, they tell me, and the air full of fog, which has ever caused me harm. I shall not see Advent come again. After a few days, a knock or two more from the fever, I doubt that I shall be able to speak to you, even so feebly as today. That is why I sent for you when I did. I wished to ask you—to tell you—while it is yet in my power. . . But tell me first. . .”

  There was a pause. The cardinal waited.

  “It would have been easier, my lord, to die in the stocks as the bishop left me to do. Even then I had begun to be uncertain, not of the rightness of my cause perhaps, but of the rightness of how it was being upheld, the deaths, the hatred, the pride, the simple statements that seemed to have reduced to law and letter once more what had been spirit and life. But at least, then, I knew that I had in some ways tried for the best, the best that had been open to me, as I saw it in those days, and, once they had fixed me to the ground and bolted the door and ceased to bring me food and water, there would have been nothing left for me to do, nothing that I had to choose, but only to die as well as I was able. I had forsaken the world for God, though I had been forced to it, as entirely as if I had again been a monk in a cell at the Charterhouse. But now. . .”