The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  He stopped. The cardinal’s eyes were closed, his face motionless. He half rose from the chair.

  “But now?”

  The lips had moved. The voice was as quiet as before, and no less firm.

  “I am tiring you, my lord.”

  The eyes opened and the cardinal smiled again.

  “No, Master Fletcher, you are not. I have never felt less tired than now, when I am about to sleep for ever. I close my eyes because my eyelids are as weak as my fingers, my arms, my legs. But I am listening. Go on, if you please.”

  He sat back in his chair. He clasped his hands together in his lap, clenching them against each other until they hurt, and then relaxed them. For a moment he was angry that before this man, this dying prince of a Church whose authority he had long ago rejected for ever, he must try to give an account of the darkness that had settled on his soul like the fog outside. Yet he must. He was also glad that he must.

  “Now, my lord, I am alive when I no longer looked for life. I am stronger than I have been for years because I have plenty to eat and sleep in a warm bed. No one questions my presence here or troubles, so far as I can tell, even to find out what I have been. Every day in the chapel on my knees with the rest I pray to God for a quiet mind and a contented spirit and ask forgiveness for my many sins. And yet now that I have life ahead of me, not many years of life because I am already old, but life instead of only death, I am compelled again to choose. What I have been is still what I am. I am alive; therefore I am required to judge, and cannot leave the judgment all to God.

  “I must discover where my sin lay, what was falsehood and what truth, where I have been misled and where I have misled others, what I should hold to and what give over, to whom, if to anyone under God, I owe my duty and my love. And I do not know, my lord. I have had hours, days, months to think on all these things, and it seems to me that I know less, both of myself and of God, than when I first came to Lambeth. The words of Jesus—I have been trying to read the Gospels in Greek, my lord, in your library—the words of Jesus are simple and true. Yet in the world, in the Church, under the authority of these bishops and those, of the queen, the officers of state, of laws and changes in the laws, of books of theology old and new: where, among all these, and among all these things is where we have to live, is there any simplicity, any certain truth to be found? In the past, not once but several times, I thought I knew, and altered my life so that it should be in accord with what I had discovered. But each discovery melted into mist as the last had done, and now I am sure of nothing but my loss, my own loss and the loss of all that I have ever found.”

  He took out his handkerchief to wipe his face. It was of linen, starched, and the slight rustle it made as he crumpled it in his hand seemed to him, in the absolute stillness of the room, a loud noise. He glanced at the cardinal. The eyes were again closed and there was no change in the quiet face on the pillow. There was one thing more to say. He no longer knew whether he cared if the cardinal were listening or not.

  “One day last month I met a man, a Southwark carpenter. He talked to me. I could tell him nothing. I saw his house, his wife, his children, his old father. I wished, then, that I had never known—I mourned one moment, one mischance, one fall in a hayfield fifty years ago that killed a man and sent me from home, for ever.

  “I tell you, my lord, that Southwark carpenter is living out his life in the world, in the very thick of all the warring accounts of God and man, Church and state, that have lately led men into so much confusion and darkness. He is not slow-witted. He understands much of what he sees about him. But it has not defeated him. He lives in simplicity and truth, while I, a learned man, I, who have been a monk, a priest, a teacher of others, I live out of the world, under the protection of your peaceful house—in confusion and darkness. I doubt if he has given his death two serious thoughts together, yet when the Lord comes as a thief in the night, he will be ready for him. While I, passing my days between life and death and considering both with all the powers I have, am fit neither for the one nor for the other.”

  He wiped his face again and put his handkerchief back in his sleeve. The cardinal lay still, giving no sign that he had heard anything he had said.

  The only sounds came from the fire flickering steadily in the hearth behind him. Beyond the leaded panes of the window the opaque grey light of the November afternoon dulled towards blackness. No wisp of the fog, no breath of the cold outside found its way into the room, and a candle-flame reflected in the glass burned straight and clear.

  His words had come, and gone, taking a great heaviness with them. He was emptied. The awe that had weighed on him when he first came into the room had also gone, and he looked round as if he had just sat down to wait in a strange house. The cardinal neither moved nor spoke. The covers over his chest rose and fell very gently, regularly. Perhaps he was after all asleep.

  Perhaps he should get up and go quietly away; but any movement, however careful, might wake the dying man. He sat on without stirring, like a mother beside a sleeping child.

  He watched the daylight fade until the darkness at the window could deepen no further. Then his gaze returned to the room, and it seemed warmer, smaller, quieter than before.

  On the far side of the bed was a reading-desk placed, so that the cardinal could see it, on top of a chest that had been pulled away from the wall. Most of what he had taken for a book open on the desk was hidden from him by the curtains of the bed. He leaned forward a little and saw that it was not a book but a picture in a gilded frame, lit by two candles burning on either side of the desk. He stared at it. He had never before seen anything like it. There was no colour, no definite outline. It was grey and black like the thickening night outside the window. The dead figure of Christ naked on the cross, the head fallen forward between the outstretched arms so that the face could not be seen: this shape was dark and heavy, pressed forward by its own weight as if the lifeless body would crash to the ground, pulling out of the wood the nails hammered into the hands. More lightly drawn, hard to see from a distance against the blank grey space behind them, were two living figures. Shadowy and hesitant, huddled close up against the hanging Christ as if seeking the protection of his dead arms extended far above them, they seemed at the same time to be stumbling forward, bearing the weight of his rigid body like a great battle-standard between them. He thought he had never seen such grief as was drawn into these two human figures, one male, one female, alive under the burden of Jesus dead.

  “What shall you do, Master Fletcher, after I am dead?”

  He moved his head sharply and lost sight of the picture. But he did not lose the sense of its presence there, lit and dark behind the curtain, like a third person in the room.

  The cardinal had spoken in the same level voice as before. He had not slept. Still he did not open his eyes.

  “Do, my lord?”

  He felt the weight of his uncertainty come down upon him again as if he had never hoisted it into speech. He did not remember what he had said. He knew only that behind him, across a darkness that he could not penetrate, lay an unrecoverable good. That was what he had tried to say.

  “If I could make amends. . . ,” he began.

  What he saw as he said this was the starved face of Will propped against a step in the desolate street.

  “My brother—I left my brother to—”

  The cardinal raised one hand an inch or two from the fur, to stop him.

  “You are right to say that it is easier to die than to live. Perhaps I know this even more nearly than you do, not only because there is so little of life left to me now, but because I have so many times been compelled to return to the wretched affairs of the world from the retirement in which I have always preferred to pass my days, and very bitter the coming back has often been to me. But we are all dead men, Master Fletcher, do you remember? I said this to you once before. I say it to you again now, now that I am almost in fact a dead man myself. It is living, not dying, that has never seeme
d easier to me than in these last weeks. Yet I too have on my conscience more than you will ever know. Living and dying are all one. No man is fit for one unless he is fit for the other, as you said of the simple man you found in Southwark. You are not a simple man. You must seek your safety in knowing how far you are. . .”

  Suddenly the cardinal opened his eyes and looked him full in the face.

  “Master Fletcher, you do not believe that in Christ’s death we are forgiven our sins. You do not believe it.”

  “My lord, I—”

  “You have believed it. I do not doubt that you have believed it. Was it not in this very belief that you rejected the mediating authority of the Church and set yourself up to free others from the prison of trusting in their own merit, their own power to earn salvation? But now, Master Fletcher, where now is that faith which once burned so clear in you?”

  He did not shift his eyes from the cardinal’s, but thought of the candle shining in the window-pane, and the night outside.

  “Let me try to tell you what I can only guess. When you read the words of Luther and were convinced of their truth, you turned away from the past, from your own past and that of the whole Church, persuaded that if only men could be helped to see what you had seen a new faith would be born in them as it had been in you. They would lead Christian lives from love rather than from fear, the laws and proscriptions of popes and bishops would cease to be necessary, the darkness keeping men’s souls from the knowledge of God’s grace would be dispelled, the world would become—better. I know this vision. I saw it myself, long ago, and thought then, as you did, that all that was needed was to spread the sight that lit it, the capacity to see it, far and wide.

  “But what came after, when you had left behind so much on account of your vision? You saw the world become no better, worse even for the faction and hatred, cruelty and fear, into which opposing claims to the truth had led men. Though obscurely as yet, you began to understand, because you are a good man—aye, Master Fletcher—an honest man and no fool, that the vision you had been granted, and had watched forming in other souls, was not by itself enough. By itself it seemed to bring, indeed, greater dangers than those which, at its first appearance, you thought it had vanquished for ever. It was so, with the past ruined behind you and the future before you no less ruined, that you faced your death in the bishop’s cellar with a good grace. You were alone with God in the present, and the present is where each of us must seek him, always, for he is nowhere else.

  “You returned to life, to the constraints, as you say, of judgement and choice. You came to my house, to me, and your resistance to the old case for the Church began to weaken. All that you had turned away from, in yourself, in what you had been, and in the long history of the Church, laid a new hold on you. But you could not welcome it. You no longer saw the vision of salvation that once shone before you, but you remembered the sight of it, and you believed that to accept the past again, to bow again to judgements you had resolutely put aside, would be to blot out that vision for ever. So that you are left, now, with nothing. But all is there within you, Master Fletcher, all is there.”

  The cardinal stopped speaking and closed his eyes. The pale forehead contracted into a frown and then became smooth again. Robert Fletcher neither moved nor spoke. The cardinal opened his eyes.

  “The vision does not cancel the past; nor does the past cancel the vision. We live, perhaps, moving always between the two. We know for a moment our salvation in the love of God. The moment fades into the past, and the shadows close about us. Faith in the power of Christ’s death to free us from our sins shines within us, none the less, invisible to others, invisible to ourselves, but visible to God, who works in us in ways beyond our understanding. Each of us must turn again and again, not once only but always, to God, believing in his salvation given to us in Christ. This belief, this faith, will make us whole, will find us in the eye of God, but first we must know that we are lost, broken; and all, both faith and knowledge, must be held, together, in the present. Simul iustus simul peccator. Luther’s words, Master Fletcher. Do not desert them because the past presses hard upon you. Do not desert them. They tell the truth. They tell of what is in what has been, of the light shining in the darkness, of the love of God—in us and for us.”

  The cardinal closed his eyes. His forehead was damp with sweat.

  “Master Fletcher—the cup of water.”

  On a table beyond the fire were more lit candles, a gilt cup and two silver jugs, a pile of folded linen cloths. He crossed the floor softly, bent down and sniffed the jugs. One contained wine. He poured some water from the other into the cup.

  “A few drops of wine—in the water.”

  He brought the cup back to the bed. The thin hands lay still on the fur rug, so he held the cup to the cardinal’s lips. As the sick man drank, in small sips, he thought that he would gladly lift him from his bed and carry him somewhere, anywhere, away from the danger of death.

  The cardinal choked and water dribbled from his mouth into his beard. Robert Fletcher went back to the table to fetch one of the white cloths. He wiped the cardinal’s mouth and wiped away the drops from his beard.

  He remembered Master Husthwaite blind and helpless in his chair through the long winter of his death. He had fed him with a spoon, washed him, changed his clothes. He had talked to him and read to him day after day, yet nothing he could do had reached the spring of his despair and dried it for him.

  And now a dying man had spent some of his last, most precious strength to comfort him. He was ashamed.

  After a while the cardinal opened his eyes and smiled.

  “Thank you, my friend. I can do nothing, now, for myself. . . But when is it not so, Master Fletcher? When do we not need the help of other men? We think we stand alone. A dream, Master Fletcher, a dream. We wake and find that we are no more than a part—and the Church, what after all is the Church but the common bond of all Christian men, Christ himself within us, for each other, the bread broken and broken to feed us all?”

  His eyes were fixed on Robert Fletcher, looking at him, and beyond him. Then his face changed. He laughed.

  “But I have not said what I sent for you to tell you. There is so little time. Another night of fever, and I may not remember, may not know you.”

  He had spoken lightly. But for a few moments he studied him keenly, as if making up his mind whether or not to trust him.

  “When I am dead, Master Fletcher, all those of my household who are here only on account of me must go their ways. I fear the queen will not long outlive me, and after her death the Church in England will again sound to a babel of contentious voices. I shall not hear them. Nor shall I live to find myself again in exile, followed through all the courts of Christendom by murderers and spies, last and most hated of the house of York, most detestable and traitorous Pole. I shall be lying in an English grave. But you, Master Fletcher, who shall you be? A monk forgotten of his cloister, a heretic forgotten of his fellows, a servant of Pole left homeless by his master, a man without a name.

  “There is almost nothing, now, that I can set right. But you, you may have left a few years of life.

  “When I am dead, they will give you some money, not much, but enough to keep you from hunger for a while. Also they will give you a letter, a letter to the prior of the Grande Chartreuse. In it I have asked that you, as a monk turned out of his cell through no fault of his or of his monastery, as a penitent and friend of mine who has lived under my roof a life of patient obedience, as a heretic who has—not persisted in his heresy, may be absolved of the breach of your vows into which you were partly led by false laws passed in this land, and that you may be received again into the order that bore you blameless within it for half your life.

  “All this I have written, Master Fletcher. What you choose to do with this letter I can but leave to you. I know that now, today, you are no penitent of mine. But should you, after my death and somewhere else but in my house, be given absolution through
another mouth but this, I think that you will nevertheless be a penitent of mine. The letter will be—no more than what you have left of me when I am no longer here, my hope for you, for the true end of all that, so far as I can tell, you have been and are still.”

  Robert Fletcher could no longer bear the weight of the cardinal’s gaze. He buried his face in his hands and saw instead the dark figure of the dead Christ in the picture on the other side of the bed, and the two beneath it grieving under their load as they faltered forward.

  The cardinal said, more softly than ever, as if nursing the little power he had left with which to speak: “One thing more. When you have the letter in your hands and do not know, as you will not, whether to cast it in the fire or to allow what it says of you. . . to be the truth, ask yourself what they were, those vows you made as a lad of twenty, and who it was that made them. If it was you, yourself, for all that you are old now and have seen much change, that which does not change—”

  The cardinal stopped speaking suddenly, as if interrupted by pain or alarm. Robert Fletcher raised his head from his hands and looked round the room. Nothing had stirred. The candles still burned straight and clear. The fire still flickered in the hearth.

  The cardinal had lifted his head a little from the pillows and was listening, his mouth open and his face rigid with attention. Both his hands clutched the fur of the rug.