The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  He left the gap on the bridge and walked again, up through the narrow streets, the market place, the shambles, towards the Minster. He was alone again, as on the road across the Knavesmire, the emptiness gone from his side. He no longer looked at the people hurrying past. Once he slipped and would have fallen but for his staff. After that he looked only down, at the icy cobbles, and put his staff in the spaces between them as he walked.

  He thought of Arden, as a temptation. It was two days’ walk, that was all, perhaps three now that he was old. He could go back, like an old fox to his earth. But it was not his, had never been. If he went to the mill and asked to stop, they would turn him away, with his torn cloak and his staff, a stranger, too old for useful work.

  He went along Goodramgate and stopped in front of the baker’s shop. He gazed up at the window. A light was burning. Someone else, another life, someone warm in the yeasty warmth that came up from the shop. But the sense of her, her presence, her absence, had altogether left him, and his sorrow was only for himself, out in the cold street, in the fallen night. He remembered suddenly, as clearly as if he were there, the blessed peace of his cell at the Mount-grace on winter nights, the fire, the habit that was his and not his own, the two or three books, his and not his own, the cloister wall at the back of the garden standing high against the weather and against the nettles and brambles of the wood. Many times his world had been taken from him. That peace, that world out of the world: Was that the loss he had never repaired? And the cardinal’s letter, his chance to repair it?

  He set off again, faster now, jabbing his staff into the ground. The crowds of people in the city were like the thoughts crowding his head. He did not know them. He knew nothing. He had not the time. He could taste the bitterness in his throat as he could feel the cold air he breathed in, icy in his lungs.

  He came out of the huddle of little streets into the space in front of the silent vastness of the Minster. His heart was thudding in his chest, and his whole body was hot with a fever of rage and misery. Why was he here? Why had he come two hundred miles to find his spoiled hopes thronging the lanes and alleys, crouching in doorways from the cold, pleading for his attention like the beggar holding out his bowl? He was a fool, stubborn and a fool. He should have turned his back on the north, which had cast him out, from Arden, from the Charterhouse, from York, and gone with the courteous Italians among people whose language he could not speak. He leaned on his staff and cursed himself aloud.

  The words died feebly into the night. A woman passing gave him a frightened look. He heard her quick footsteps vanish among the houses. The great church stood before him in the darkness, its windows lit with a dim glow, like a lake into whose still depths many streams clatter and are quenched. The moon was a milky blur, hidden behind clouds, and against the clouds the three towers and the long roof waited in the sky, massive and black. The streets behind him, the seething passages, what were they? Mud and clay, wattle and daub, wood, thatch, plaster, huts, and cabins to shelter the body, to eat and sleep and couple in. Like the bodies they kept warm, and the rats that ran from one to the other, and the lice in the clothes, they would not last long. Others would come to take their place, others and others again. But the hearthless cathedral, which sheltered no one, in which no one was born or died, was it not here in the stone silences that the crowding people found—the love of the Father? And the crowding thoughts?

  He could no longer hear his heart beating. His anger had left him weak, so that his legs trembled as he crossed the shadowed space. The wicket in the southwest door was unfastened, and he went into the cathedral. Warmer and darker than outside, the air was full of smoke from hundreds of tapers. There were groups of people, men, women, children, babies in arms, gathered in the immense obscurity of the nave. A low mutter rose from them as they thronged forward towards a cluster of lights in the transept. He was taller than most of them, but he could see nothing over their heads except the blaze of light. The mutter ceased as a chant began in the choir, twenty or thirty voices high up in the church beyond the screen from which the carved faces of the kings of England looked down, appearing alive in the candlelight. The heads in front of him were all turned towards the south door. Suddenly the bells of the Minster rang out, overwhelming the chant in their clangour and clash of sound, and a cheer went up from the people, who pressed forward more eagerly than before. Through the craning heads he saw a golden crown move slowly along the transept towards the cluster of tapers, then another, and a third. He understood. It was the feast of the Epiphany. As a chantry-priest, he had stood in the choir, beyond the rood-screen and hidden from the body of the church, and sung the Vespers of the feast with the rest of the Minster clergy. He had heard the peal of the bells and the people cheer. But the ceremony had been stopped at the time the chantries were dissolved. He had never seen the kings come in with their gifts.

  The crowns disappeared one by one behind the crowd as the kings knelt in turn before the massed candles. He could not see the child, picture or painted wood or gilded image, to whom they knelt. Out of his sight they set down the gold, the frankincense, the myrrh, and the hush among the people while the bells still pealed was so deep that he bent his head over his staff and asked forgiveness for his rage and the jostling tumult of his thoughts as if he had indeed been a pilgrim.

  The bells stopped, and as their echoes faded, leaving the solemn line of the chant audible once more, the people broke up into groups and began to murmur again among themselves. In threes and fours they came back down the nave. The great west door was open now, and the freezing night air blew in, laying the flames of all the tapers flat. Before he also turned to go, he looked once more towards the rood-screen. He saw only the dark forms of the crowd moving about in front of the light. Above them the stone kings still looked down, their grave features mild in the smoky haze.

  Outside on the cobbles a pedlar with a tray round his neck was selling sweet pies and roasted nuts to the people leaving the church. He was caught in the press close to him, and among those who pushed past him to buy from the pedlar’s tray was one of the three kings. He was laughing under his pasteboard crown, and as he brushed against him he smelled the tarnished gilt on his robe.

  The crowd thinned. The people went away into the streets, soothing crying children, wishing each other good-night.

  He walked quickly to the house of Alice’s father. He knocked on the door. He waited on the steps in the cold night, fighting down the past. He knocked again. The door was opened by a servant he did not know.

  “Is your mistress at home?”

  “Aye, sir. She’s in her chamber, with the boy. The master’s from home, at the Guildhall. What would you. . .?”

  The man stared at him.

  “Tell your mistress Robert Fletcher is here. She will know the name. Ask her if she would be so good as to come down.”

  The man let him in and shut the door behind him. After another puzzled glance he went away, up the stairs.

  A huge fire was burning in the hall. He crossed the flags and stood with his back to it. He tried to breathe evenly, but the beating of his heart was choking him.

  On the settle by the fire he saw a hornbook lying, just such a hornbook as that with which the prioress at Arden had taught him to read. He picked it up. It too had the alphabet on one side and the Our Father on the other, but was less scratched with age. He bent down to see it more clearly by the light of the fire.

  He saw looking out at him from the smooth horn his father’s face, the face of old Tom Fletcher, haggard and stubborn, laden with grief, lit from below by the flickering flames of the fire. He closed his eyes and his hand, holding the hornbook, dropped to his side.

  He opened his eyes, put the hornbook back on the settle, and stood for a moment, motionless in front of the fire. He heard voices somewhere in the upper part of the house. Fumbling under his cloak in his haste, he took from his bag the cardinal’s letter. He turned it over once in his fingers. Then he laid it down on top of hi
s son’s hornbook and left the house.

  Outside, snow was falling. He walked through the quiet streets. The white flakes floated softly towards him. God be praised, he said to himself over and over again. God be praised.

  16

  May 1559

  “Il Schifanoia”, anonymous agent of the Signory of Venice, in London, to the Ambassador of the Duke of Mantua at the court of King Philip II of Spain, in Brussels; May 1559.

  “. . . Since I last wrote to you, most excellent friend, the affairs of religion in this Kingdom have gone from bad to worse. Already at Christmas the queen would not sit devoutly through the Mass; cobblers and others of the meaner sort usurped the pulpits in the churches of the city and with impunity mocked and abused the blessed memory of the late queen; statues were broken in the churches, especially any remaining of Saint Thomas of Canterbury; and on the feast of Epiphany there was permitted a most scandalous revel at court: wolves representing abbots, asses habited as monks, and a crow clad in the scarlet robes of a cardinal were marched up and down in ribald procession, to the great merriment and delight of all. Now the Mass is altogether forbidden, the parliament has bestowed again upon the queen the title of supreme head of the church, first assumed by her father, King Henry, and there is not one left standing of all the late queen’s acts, those of Cardinal Pole being likewise annulled. All men marvel, however, at the constancy of the old bishops left alive from the late queen’s time, some of whom are now in prison, and I hear that, owing to this great constancy, it is secretly determined, from the fear of some insurrection among the people, to proceed more adroitly than formerly in enforcing the oath to observe the statutes, and that many will be exempted from the obligation to swear to it.

  “As to the matter of the queen’s marriage, speculation is rife at court and will never abate until she choose one or other of her suitors. The earl of Arundel is now generally thought to be out of contention on account of his advanced age; a pretty boy at court whom the queen has favoured with many a smile and glance of her eyes is reckoned too young and green even by his own family; a third contender, judged at this present to lead the field, is a certain nobleman who has not yet returned from France, in which realm he has dwelt these past several years on account of his religion. Although he has not, as yet, made his appearance, it is known—by what means I cannot tell—how greatly the queen has loved and still loves him. He is a very handsome gentleman, whose name I forget. All are agreed in wishing her to take an Englishman. Without doubt, the poor count of Feria failed utterly in his master’s suit, leaving at last for Flanders having spoken only once with the queen, in the little chamber leading out of the privy chamber, where she conversed with him very merrily to no purpose whatsoever. She knows well that even if the people have to wait ten years for her to wed, they will have no more of the king of Spain.

  “Before he went away, the count of Feria did obtain leave from the queen’s council for all the religious, monks, friars, and nuns, who were in the habit at the time of the other schism, to depart this realm for Flanders if that be their wish. They are, however, very few in number, and aged men and women, and their going will scarcely be noticed among the people and still less at court, whence the Catholic lords have for the most part long since withdrawn themselves and their wives to distant shires of the realm.

  “There is so little love now shown to foreigners in England that I shall be glad myself to return again into Italy. My departure hence depends only upon that of Signor Priuli, in whose house and under whose protection I am living. He is much occupied, and weak from a recurring fever, and has not yet executed all the bequests of his beloved cardinal. As soon as he is able, he will, I think, be content to leave these shores, where he has known naught but grief, and I look forward before long to seeing again my dear friends in Brussels, which city we shall without fail pass through on our journey to Venice. . .”

  “Post scriptum: I have heard this day that a married priest who was chaplain to Queen Anne Boleyn is made archbishop of Canterbury.”

  17

  June 1559

  With an effort of will he forced his terror back and tried to piece together his memories of the day before. He had been given a ride on an ox-cart. The oxen plodded through the heat more slowly than he would have walked, but there was no reason for haste, and he had ceased even to ask how many miles there were to the next village. He sat in silence beside the carter, his back against the flowery hay, and watched the rocking of the yoke as the cart jolted over stones in the road. But was the ox-cart the day before, or another day, further north? And the roses. He saw the first dog-roses of the year, blooming in the hedges, whiter than they were in England. When was that? After the ox-cart or before?

  He had no means of telling how long he had been here. Had he been ill for days, without knowing, and eaten nothing? Was it because he had had no food that he could not move? At first he thought that the weight on his chest that prevented him from moving was a sack of flour, a stone, an iron bar, that he could push away with his hands. But when he tried to lift the weight from his chest, his hands had not moved. His head was propped up on a straw bolster. He looked down. His arms lay straight down by his sides, outside the blanket that covered him. He could not move them. There was nothing on his chest but the blanket, a thin, worn blanket. Terror had made him shut his eyes. For a while he had not tried to move. He breathed shallowly, under the weight. Perhaps he had slept. When he opened his eyes he knew that it was morning because there was more light than before. Nothing else had changed.

  Since then he had lain in the slowly increasing light and fought down his fear until he succeeded in busying his mind, for minutes together, with other sensations, other kinds of thought. Then, forgetting that he could not, he would try to move, and fail, and the terror returned, rising up to cover all else, to choke him. There was nothing on his chest but a thin blanket. What was the weight that so pressed him down?

  Looking down, he could see from his arms that he was wearing only his shirt. What had happened to his cloak, his coat? He breathed as deeply as he could, making the weight heavier, to discover whether his belt was still round his waist. As far as he could tell, it was not. Never once on his journey had he taken off his belt. It held what was left of his money. Someone else must have taken off his clothes. Where had they been put?

  From where he lay he could see a big square of light, open to the sky. He looked at it for some time, and at the uneven chink of light beneath it on one side, before he realised that it was the top half of a stable door. Outside, the wooden shutter must be fastened back, hooked to an iron ring in the wall. His picture of this shutter, flat against the wall so that it should not bang, consoled him. The top edge of the square was a jagged line, spiked with ends of straw because the thatch overhung the lintel. He watched the dawn light gaining on the night, and when a swallow flew across the square, and then another, he knew that he had been expecting them.

  Somewhere else, long ago, he used to lie still and watch the day grow light through the open top of a stable door.

  How had he come here? He was certain that he had not shut that door himself, leaning over the hard edge of the planks to shoot the bolt on the outside. He had knocked at no house to ask leave to sleep in the stable. Barns he had slept in several times as the nights had got warmer, but with his coat folded under his head and his cloak wrapped round him. He had not much money left, and, except at the monasteries, he had to pay for his food. It cost nothing to sleep on straw in a barn. Lately, once or twice, there had been new hay. He was lying now on bracken, he knew it by the smell, and someone had put a bolster under his head. Bracken. That, too, reminded him. . .

  They must have carried him here. He did not remember falling. He did not remember the last village, the last night he had lain down to sleep, the last meal. He did not remember the road, the woods, the look of the hills, the weather. . .

  The images of his journey were jumbled together as if it had been during only a long, sing
le day that he had tramped the roads of France, always southwards, always towards the summer and the mountains. He walked all morning with the sun on his left. The shadows shortened as he walked, and the sun moved up the sky ahead of him until it blazed full in his face. At noon he rested under a tree. He ate his bread and cheese and drank from his water-bottle, and slept in the tree’s shade for a while. Afterwards he walked on while the sun descended on his right and pushed the shadows further and further across the fields. He would find a meal and a bed before dark. That was all. Before the early morning mist cleared, some geese had crossed the road, seven of them, one behind the other. They had marched across his path without a sound, as white as the morning, and disappeared over the wet grass into the mist. Later there had been showers, each a few minutes of fine warm rain. He had seen them travelling the hills, the rays of the sun white bars shining through them. In the afternoon he had met men coming from work with unfamiliar tools on their shoulders and seen rows of vines growing in the flinty earth, strings between the stakes that supported them. And always the villages, the whitewashed villages, the plane-trees, the dung-heaps, and the bare churches. He did not know their names. In the morning there were women scrubbing clothes at the pump and children playing barefoot in the white dust. In the evening swallows screamed as they dived above the roofs of the cottages, and swifts skimmed the surface of the village pond for flies.

  Would the power to move come back to him? He shut his eyes. Outside all the birds were singing, the dawn din of early June with the cooing of pigeons thick in the leaves and far off a cuckoo, always far off. Was he going to die here without ever again moving his arms, his hands? Beneath the noise of the birds he thought he could hear the clatter of a stream, the soft roar of falling water. Could he?