by Lucy Beckett
He watched them working, three of them. Two were thinning and laying the old, overgrown thorn hedge that ran beside the road, the first man chopping out branches with an axe, the second cutting half through the rest, bending them over and lacing them together to make a close fence for the spring to cover with leaves. The third man, the one he had spoken to, looked at each branch as it fell, sliced off the thorny twigs with a few strokes of his billhook, and threw some onto the fire and some onto a pile for faggots. Then he plunged the blade into the top of the stripped branch and split it down to the bottom in one rapid, accurate stroke, twisting his hand as the billhook went down, to avoid the knots in the wood. The two laths he had made fell apart, and he tossed them behind him to a heap of others. The fresh-split surfaces shone white with a little light from the sky as the roses had on midsummer eve, under the cardinal’s window.
Since Christmas, perhaps because it had been so cold, he had lost count of the days. One night, on his straw pallet in some inn, he had woken to hear church bells ringing for the end of the old year and the start of the new. He lay for a while listening to them, praying again for the cardinal, who had known he would not hear another year rung in. He tried to turn his thoughts from the dead to the living, to himself, still bound by years and hours, cold at midnight on a straw bed in spite of his cloak. He tried to look forward, to the new year, the morrow, the north. But he was tired and saw only the dying man, his hand on the cat’s head, and the lights burning again in the quiet room, and slept. That had been four nights ago, or five.
Now he was only a mile or two from the gates of York. He had seen the Minster in the afternoon, distant across the flat, frozen plain, and Clifford’s Tower on its mound. He sat by the fire delaying, as the sky darkened, and wished that he had not come.
Early in the morning of the seventeenth of November, when the fog outside had not yet paled after the night, those who slept in the clerks’ chamber had been summoned to the chapel. There the whole household, expecting to hear that the cardinal had not lived through the night, was told that the queen was dead. The news seemed to reach them from far off, and when, at dinner that day, someone said that the streets of London were full of people come out to greet the Lady Elizabeth, sent for from Hatfield to be queen at last, it was as if he spoke of another country. In the evening they heard that the cardinal had said that it would be fitting if God were to put an end on the same day to the lives of himself and the queen, which had so much resembled each other. These were the last words of his that he had heard reported, and he cherished them for the smile he knew must have accompanied them. Later that night, as they stood in silent groups waiting in the hall with the fire piled high against the dank cold, Signor Priuli came slowly down the stairs and on the last step said: “E morto.”
It was still the seventeenth of November. He knelt the following dawn, during the first of many requiems, and hoped that the cardinal knew that it was the feast of Saint Hugh of Lincoln. In the intervals of the singing, the sound of several men hammering came from different parts of the palace. Later they filed past a lead coffin standing alone among candles in the middle of a room hung with black cloth. Others wept, but he had looked at it without sadness. It was part of the past. The man he had talked to through those hours was of the present, would stay alive in him always. And after he himself was dead, both of them would live in God, who is nowhere else but in the present.
He got stiffly to his feet and sat down again with his back to the way he had come, so as to warm his other side. The northern sky was no longer clear but laden with a heaviness that obscured the fading light. It would snow. If it snowed the air might become less cold. He looked up at the sky, one side of his face hot, the other already cold again, while behind him the chopping and splitting, the rustle of brushwood hitting the frozen grass, went on.
Death. There seemed to be so much difference between life and death, between himself, now, tired, hungry, and cold, and the cardinal, who had been freed from it all, from winter and nightfall, weariness, the hard ruts of the road, and from the body, the closed dead eyes, the skin and bones wrapped in scarlet, that lay in the lead coffin. Yet was there so much difference? Had not the cardinal, lying in his bed, his gaze fixed on the picture, only the picture, of Christ crucified, the first day before the third, been free already? The souls of the just are in the hand of God. Who are the just? The just are those who are in the hand of God, both the living and the dead.
He clasped his cloak tighter round his legs and rested his head on his knees, looking into the fire, which glowed brightly, now, in the deepening dusk. The heat hurt his eyes, and he shut them.
And the way. I am the way. No man comes to the Father but by me. He was sixty years old and never yet had he understood. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Was this what it meant? The will of God done on earth in the life and death of Christ, Christ in the souls of the living and the dead, and no such difference between them as we falsely perceive. Was it not this that the cardinal had seen at last, after all that he had suffered and made others suffer, was it not this? Thy will be done.
Some phrases came to him that he had read long ago. I was in the land where all is different from you, and I heard your voice calling, “I am the food of full-grown men. Grow, and you shall feed on me. But you shall not change me into yourself. Instead you shall be changed into me.” He had not understood. Thy will be done.
It was hot, too hot, and the glare scorched his closed eyelids. The blazing sticks crackled loud beside him. He had not the power to move. Were they burning him after all? There was no pain, then, not the pain he had feared.
Something fell with a thud to the ground beside him, and a hand pushed him roughly away from the fire so that he almost toppled over.
“You’ll be catching alight, old fellow, nodding so near t’ fire.”
He had put out a hand to save himself from falling, and his palm was full of thorns. He pulled off his mittens and brushed stupidly at the thorns. Some went deeper into his flesh. He sat staring at his hand in the firelight which gleamed back dully from the blade of the axe the man had thrown down beside him. He felt tears rising in his throat.
“You’ll not fetch those out while daylight,” the man said.
He shook his head.
“If you’ve a bed to find in t’ city you’d best be on your way. Been freezing fast since dinner-time, it has, and likely an hour or two’ll see it colder yet.”
The sounds of work had ceased, and the three of them stood in the dusk looking down at him as if at a sick animal. The fire burned on. He did not want to leave it.
Again he shook his head.
Without a word two of them bent down, took him by the arms and helped him to his feet. It was painful to stand, and he swayed, light-headed for a moment, between them. They held him upright until the third man gave him his staff and he leaned on it, steadying himself.
“He’d be dead by sunrise an he slept out here,” one of them said. “Frozen stiff.”
“Can he walk that far, d’you reckon? A mile and a half? Reckon you can walk a mile and a half, old man?”
“I’ve walked from London.”
One laughed, but the others still looked at him uncertainly. “I can walk,” he said again, to take the burden from them. They let him take it, stooped and picked up their tools. One of them kicked the unburned ends of stick into the fire.
“Good-night, then,” they said. “Good-night.”
He watched them go down the road together, the way he had come. When he had almost lost sight of them, one of them turned his head. He saw his face, pale in the darkness. He waved, to show that they had done right to leave him. For a few moments after he could no longer see them, he heard their footsteps fading into silence.
He looked down at the fire. If he had passed by a little later, now, after they had gone, he would have sat down here for the warmth, and slept perhaps, and. . . He raised his staff with both hands and brought it down hard on top of the f
ire. The brushwood fell together lightly, easily. There was almost nothing left to burn. The fire would soon be out and the cold might not have woken him. They would have come back in the morning to finish the hedge. He glanced again towards the northern sky, from which small gusts of icy wind were beginning to blow. There would have been snow, no doubt, lying unmelted on his frozen face. The sun would have risen, red over the snow; other eyes would have seen it, not his. He poked with his staff at the place where he had sat.
He moved away from the fire, crossed the uneven ground to the road, and began to walk towards the city, the cold wind from the north making his eyes smart.
Was that why he had set out, stubborn, for York instead of travelling across the sea with the Italians, to France, with his letter in his pocket? He put his hand to the belt that he wore under his cloak. It was there, folded small in a leather bag with the money they had given him. There would have been enough to pay for his burial, and the letter would have told them his name.
He smiled, under his hat in the darkness.
The moon, two or three days from the full, shone down on the cold fields and lit the road ahead of him so that he could see the ruts clearly, the shadows they cast, and here and there ice gleaming. A dog was barking, far off. He gripped his staff tighter as he walked and felt the thorns in his hand. He was hungry. The meat was already sizzling on some spit that he should eat before he slept.
The cardinal, whose kindness had put the money in his purse to pay for his supper, who had himself loved gardens, loved trees as he had loved his friends, had learned to hold life cheap. Why could he not do the same? There was a resignation, a knowledge, that he had caught sight of many times, as just now when he had almost fallen asleep beside the fire. Yet always he lost it, again and again. The moonlight, the hard road, the barking dog, for example, drew him back, and gladly he came. The earth. It was only the earth, not life, that the cardinal had learned to hold cheap. Did he not believe, as the cardinal believed, that life, which is in God, does not cease when the eyes no longer see the sun rising, when the ears no longer hear and thorns no longer sting the hand? Then why could he not let go?
After the Tower and the bishop of London’s cellar, Lambeth had been no prison. He was held there, nevertheless, from the earth, as he had been, for years before they took him, in the alleys and garrets of London. These last weeks, walking the length of England in fair weather and foul, he had rejoiced in his freedom as he had that day, long ago, when he walked from Hawnby in the spring after Master Husthwaite’s death. After another man’s death. Another man had died, and he had not. And his freedom, what was that? Money in his purse from the dead.
For nearly three weeks after the cardinal’s death he had done nothing. Of course he had to leave. They had given him the letter. He hesitated. Was what it said of him the truth? In the months of warmth and safety he had thought too much. Now he could not think. And his child?
One afternoon he was standing at the window where he had waited on midsummer eve. Behind him servants were moving chests and tables and packing the cardinal’s candlesticks in straw. There was no fire in the hearth, only ash that no one had swept. The casement was shut. Outside in the fog the leafless branches of the trees were faint, the river beyond them altogether hidden in whiteness. Damp leaves lay rotting on the ground where they had fallen, here and there among them the stalks of long-spent flowers, which would not bend if they were trodden on, but snap. A wren flew into the grey branches of an apple tree and perched on the single apple that still hung there, an apple as grey, in the fog, as the leafless branches. He watched the little bird peck at the apple over and over again, and its hardness and sweetness pierced him as he stood at the closed window. The apple did not fall under the wren’s weight. Some thin flow of sap, some life, still joined it to the twig that had blossomed in the spring. The wren flew away.
He turned from the window and went down to the great hall where Signor Priuli sat at the table with a pen in his hand, an inventory in front of him and a pile of rolled-up tapestries on the floor beside him.
“I shall leave in the morning, my lord.”
“For France?”
“For the north, my lord. For York, where I once lived.”
Signor Priuli looked up at him for a moment, bringing back all his attention from the dismantling of the household. But he only said: “Bene, Signor Fletcher. Dominus tecum.”
He bowed and went away. In the morning someone else gave him money and new clothes. Signor Priuli’s look, and the five words he had spoken, were the last breath of Italy upon him.
Italy: he smiled again as he tramped along the frozen road. Padua and Venice Master Husthwaite had described to him long ago as they sat, priest and listening boy, under some tree in the high dale in summer. Impressions of weight and richness, great stone palaces, marble steps leading down into water, long black boats rowed from the back by an oarsman standing—Master Husthwaite had sketched one for him later with his scratchy quill—had formed in his mind to be forgotten for fifty years. Afterwards, in York, Luther. Italy had become only Rome, the glittering edifice of power and law lying heavy over the truths of God so as to bury them from simple men, bloated princes defending their treasure from every just attack.
But in the last months, in the cardinal’s household, he had caught sight many times of an ancient gravity, a wealth not of jewels and gold but of books and manners, that had reminded him of a particular wistful love in Master Husthwaite’s voice: “In Italy we had all to learn. The light that strikes us in the north only from the words we read, Virgil, Tully, in Italy has never ceased to shine. And the gardens. The gardens among the stone.” Italy—where the silver cup had been made, and the cardinal’s picture drawn, where Master Husthwaite had carefully copied thousands of verses, and the cardinal and his friends had designed the reform of the whole Church in the garden of San Giorgio. Venice. Venice above all he wished he had seen. The great market of the world, the crowds of people speaking in a score of tongues, the wharves piled high with carpets, bales of silk, silver, and beaten copper, the galleys coming and going on the water, Africa, Arabia.
He stopped on the road. To either side there lay under the moon the flat marshes of the Knavesmire, the common outside the walls of the city where the poor grazed their beasts. They had come out here in their hundreds to see the Dutch heretics burn. Near him some sheep munched at turnip-ends. His breath, and the sheep’s, were forming little clouds of vapour in the icy air. The walls were not far now, dark under the sky, and within them the long shape of the Minster. Torches flamed on either side of Micklegate Bar. The wicket would still be open in the gate. He listened to the scrabblings of the sheep and the low murmur, with now and then a faint shout, that reached him from the city. An owl flew across the road, a heavy shadow, and disappeared without a sound into the darkness. Beyond the sheep in a hollow of the ground among clumps of coarse grass stiff in the cold was a pond, frozen over, its surface giving off a dull, even shine.
Italy! He laughed, half-aloud so that the sheep raised their heads. He had not even seen the sea.
He began to walk again, with firm steps, towards the city.
And in any case, what odds were there? Italy, England, Venice, York, France. What odds before God, whose freedom was not that of the traveller over the beloved earth, the man with money in his purse and new clothes on his back, but that of the prisoner in his chains, the oppressed man whom his oppressors cannot overcome? See that ye love not the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him.
He reached the gate, out of breath because he had quickened his pace up the last slope from the quiet common. No one challenged him as he passed through the wicket, and the air, as he stood still for a moment on the cobbles to get his breath, seemed at once warmer, thick with the life of the whole city huddled against the winter. He walked slowly down the steep familiar street towards the river. People brushed against him as he walked, overtaking him or coming the other way, their
eyes bright in their muffled faces. Lights burned inside steamy windows, and fires lit in iron baskets smoked at the corners of streets. Smells hung in the air with the smoke, horse-dung, roasting meat, dirty clothes on warm dirty bodies, ale from the taverns, singed hoof from the open door of a smithy. A boy pushed past him leading a goat, and he felt the rough, thin, stinking flank of the goat against his leg. A beggar sat in the entrance to an alley, a filthy bandage over his eyes and a hand holding a bowl stuck out of his rags. A donkey with an old woman at its head pulled a sledge loaded with sawn logs up the hill. Dogs nosed about in the rubbish. A baker stood in his doorway clapping his hands together because of the cold, a smell of loaves and currants coming past him into the street. The great bell of the Minster tolled the hour from across the river.
He walked slowly, not stopping, down the middle of the street. Alice. All his carefully assembled resolution, his weeks and months of calm, had dissolved into the anguish of her name. He had not looked for this. When he reached the river there were tears freezing on his cheeks at the emptiness at his side, the emptiness of his hand. He stopped on the bridge, at his old gap between the houses. Mist, silvery in the moonlight, curled off the black, fast-flowing water. Here she turned away, from the knowledge of him he offered her, and therefore from him.
He shivered at the chill of the stone under his mittened hand. The water that flowed there, black and quiet, came down from the moors, from the icicle-hung pools and the rattling becks. They were the river: they made the river. He hit the coping of the wall hard, with the flat of his hand. The stone hurt him, and the thorns in his palm.
