by Lucy Beckett
There was some knowledge, some gathering together of the hooked-back shutter, the swallows, the bracken, the sound of water, that lay in wait for him. He would come to it presently. He would give himself time. First he would have to let go his hold, to sink, to sink down under the weight on his chest, the weight of all his life. . .
He was woken by the hard rim of a cup held to his lips. He drank cold water. A woman he had never seen before was leaning over him. He was thirsty. She put her arm behind his head and raised it a little so that he could drink more easily. He finished the water, and she laid his head gently on the bolster. At once a piercing pain seized his stomach. He made as if to clasp his belly with both hands. They did not move. Fresh anguish rose in his throat. He had forgotten, in his sleep, his foolish sleep—forgotten.
The woman stood, looking down at him, one side of her face lit by the daylight from the open square, which now had a golden tinge to it although the sun was not shining directly in. The bottom half of the door was still shut. There must be another door into the stable, from the house. Was that the way they had carried him here?
Then he saw a child, a small girl clutching her mother’s dress and staring at him with terrified eyes. He smiled at her, but the fear in her face did not go away.
The woman bent forward and asked him a question. He thought she asked him his name. He opened his mouth to answer. No sound came. He tried again. Nothing, except a faint croak in the back of his throat. She shook her head and then put her finger to her lips as if it were good that he should not speak. She took the child by the hand and went away into the darkness behind his head.
If he could not speak, he would not be able to tell them where he was going. He would not be able to ask which road to take. It was when he understood that it did not matter, when he understood that if he could not move—if he could not walk—when he saw the simple future that he had built himself vanish like smoke twirling and thinning quickly, quickly into clear air, that he cried out. He cried out, only once, a wordless cry, and he heard the echoes of his cry, a howl like a dog’s howl, fade into the emptiness of the stable. It was not much that he had promised himself. Someone else’s garden. Now he would never reach it. He had not come as far even as the foothills of the mountains.
He bit his lip to stop himself crying out again and was glad to find that his teeth did sink into his flesh. If he could bite, why could he not speak? He forced himself to become calm, breathing slowly so as to quieten the beating of his heart and pleading for the words to shape themselves in his mouth.
Dear God—he tried to whisper—dear God. Nothing. Nothing but the same croak as before. This time he wept. Soundlessly the tears flowed down his cheeks for several minutes, and when they ceased his prayer had changed. He had become acquainted with his muteness, the silence of his body as of his voice, and was thankful, now, for the bed on which he lay, the water he had drunk, the peace of the stable.
This peace, the peace after tears that he would not again let go, was it not like the peace he had felt in the cellar, waiting only to die? There too he had been held fast, in the stocks, able to move hardly more than he could now. There, although he had not lost the power to speak, he had thought that there was no one left for him to speak to, nothing left for him to say. He was wrong. There had been the cardinal. New words. The cardinal’s and his own.
How long ago had it been, the cellar? He had lost count of time before he crossed the sea from England. He had been walking for many months. By the length of the days, the hay, the roses in the hedge, he knew it was June now, almost midsummer. A year ago it had been, a year ago he had lain in the cellar, expecting death. Then his life had been a load he still carried, a burden he almost wanted to unshoulder, to set down before God. Now he was free of it, freed from it, although he had shed no part of it, although he bore it all within him, sealed into his silence, as England was within him as he walked away from it, through France.
What had freed him? Not the cardinal’s death. Not the new reign in England. Not the changes that would come, again, in the Church. None of these. But his journey to York, what he had done there, what he had not done, had freed him at last.
He had left the cardinal’s letter, for Alice’s parents and later, if they chose, for his son, and the leaving of it had absolved him from choice. He would go to the Grande Chartreuse, but not as the cardinal’s penitent. He would ask to see the prior, and without help he would tell him the simplest truth. After that, he would obey. They would not receive him back into the cloister. He hoped only to be given work, and he had allowed himself to build a picture of his days. A garden. Beans to be sown in rows, onions to be hoed, vines he would learn how to prune. Goat’s milk he would set to curdle for cheese, hens he would shut up for the night from foxes, bees. On feast-days he would stand with the lay brothers at the back of the church and listen to the monks singing, and he would speak to no one because no one would understand his foreign tongue.
Sometimes on his journey people had asked him where he was going. “La Grande Chartreuse,” he had said. In the villages they had looked at him blankly, not knowing the name. In the monasteries one or two had stared at him, taking him for a messenger too old for his task, and shaken their heads at the distance he still had to travel.
If they turned him away. . .
Every so often on his journey he had compelled himself to admit that they might. If they turned him away, he would go on, walk to Rome, to Jerusalem, to the deserts of Egypt. If they turned him away, those to whom he had vowed obedience as a boy of twenty, whatever else had come between, if they sent him from their garden, which he no longer hoped to dwell in but only to tend for them, then indeed his last debt would be discharged. Hundreds of miles he would have walked to find them, but if they ordered him after all to walk past them, he would obey. He had walked through white dust, between hedges, while the sun moved through the sky, and thought that if they shut their garden against him it would be no different from how it was now.
We are strangers before thee, and sojourners, as were all our fathers.
But he had hoped.
A grating sound made him open his eyes, a sound he knew at once for the rusty bolt on the outside of the stable door being pulled back. The door swung open. No one came in. He heard light footsteps retreating. He waited for what he knew would happen next.
Through the doorway he could see the beaten earth on the flat bridge over the stream, a gate into a steep field, daisies in the grass. Only the trees were not the same, a big oak in the field and alders by the water instead of the birches and the rowans. The early morning sun shone down from behind the stable, throwing sharp shadows across the grass, and the leaves of the trees were ruffled by a breeze that seemed to come off the surface of the stream. A fine red cockerel stalked across the bridge. He watched the inquisitive jerks of his head as he looked about him, the delicate placing of his yellow feet on the dried mud. Birds still sang, less noisily than before. A summery breath, the early freshness of a hot day, reached him in the dark corner of the stable where he lay. They would come from the pasture, which was downstream. Now he could hear them, the shutting of a gate, the lazy amble of their walk up the trodden path.
A heavy shape filled the doorway. The cow stopped, because he was there, and then, pushed from behind by a second cow, went to her place and stood quietly in the straw at the far end of the stable. The second cow followed. A girl came in after them, a pail in her hand. She crossed the stable and stood beside him, her head bent. He could not see her face because she had her back to the light, but she did not seem to be afraid. What had happened when they brought him here? Had he spoken to them then? She said a few words to him, or perhaps to herself. This time he did not try to answer. Instead he smiled, as he had to the child. She put out her hand towards him, uncertainly, as if to lay it on his forehead to see if he were feverish, or as if to ward off any danger that might be in him. He could not tell. She withdrew her hand and went back to the cows, pulling a
milking-stool out from the wall as she went. The cows were waiting for her, large and warm in the dusty shadows. He knew that there would be ropes hanging by their heads, from iron rings in the wall, and that she would not bother to fasten them.
He lay with his eyes closed and listened to the old sounds: the scrape of the pail on the flags as she wedged it between her knees, the murmur of her voice as she settled the cow, the same few phrases repeated like the nonsense with which a woman soothes a restless baby, then the rhythmic spurting of the milk into the pail, on and on while the birds sang outside and the swallows flew across the doorway to their nest in the thatch.
Then he had been too young to receive words except as an animal receives them, as tones of voice, sounds of comfort, of command. Now, dying in a foreign land, it was the same.
He heard her push the stool back on the stone. She had finished the first cow. He waited, and it came, the sound of her pouring the milk into a pitcher. She slapped the cow’s rump and told it to move over, using a word he did not know. The cow started, shifting its clumsy feet in the straw. Then all the sounds began again with the second cow, and the spurting of the milk had a new ring because the pail was empty.
Yet it was not the same. The weight. Between then and now lay the weight on his chest, the weight of his whole life, all the words, the long years of the past. . . He had thought that this was what he had left behind, for the wordless present of his journey through France, his single day.
He remembered turning his back, on the past, on the future, on England, walking down steps, and then more steps, and then down the long empty nave of Canterbury cathedral, and out into the morning—turning his back.
In March, it was, in a white windy morning. He woke in Canterbury, at an inn. They had been pleased to give him a good bed, cheap, because there were no pilgrims any more and too many beds in the town for the travellers who passed through. He walked alone to the cathedral, whose walls rose high at the ends of streets as the Minster’s did in York. Inside the church there was a great silence and the cold of winter not yet gone from the stone. He walked up the south aisle, hearing only the sound of his own footsteps and the tap of his staff. There was no one anywhere in the church. He went up the broad steps and into the deserted choir. A second transept, more steps, up and up he walked, and still there was no one. He thought of the crowds of people in the Minster nave, the blaze of tapers, the pasteboard crowns, the cheers. There was nothing here but the level daylight quiet above him and the empty steps leading him up.
After the last steps he walked round a long semi-circle of enormous tombs. Sleeping effigies lay on them, their hands joined in the attitude of prayer. In the centre of the chapel, inside the circle of tombs, was a raw space. Fresh-cut stone slabs had recently been laid; the new mortar between them was rough and clean. He stood by a tomb, his hand on the cold marble of a carved edge, and looked into the space. This was where the shrine had been, the shrine of Saint Thomas of Canterbury, the richest place of pilgrimage in England. He remembered the prior telling them, in the chapter-house of the Mountgrace, that the shrine of Saint Thomas had been pulled down and all the treasure sold. The prior read from a letter that the great ruby of France, the shrine’s most precious jewel, had been made into a thumb-ring for King Henry, and all the monks had winced. And had not he himself come to think such destruction right and good because it took from simple minds the false hope of salvation earned by gifts left at holy places?
He looked at the bare, patched stone, and back, over his shoulder, at the unpeopled stillness of the church below him.
A king had had an archbishop murdered here, because the archbishop defended the Church against the king’s encroachments. He ran his finger back and forth on the corner of the tomb, and the dust made his finger grey. This was Cranmer’s church too, Cranmer who had been Archbishop of Canterbury for twenty years and had seen the ruby every day on the king’s thumb, Cranmer who was himself to be killed.
All had changed. He hit the edge of the tomb with his clenched fist. That was it. When Thomas Becket died, the scandal reached the ends of Christendom and the king had done penance on his knees under the lash of the monks of Canterbury. When Bishop Fisher and Thomas More died, and Becket’s shrine was stripped for spoil, the scandal had been hardly less great, but the king had ground his teeth and gone on his way. When Thomas Cranmer died, what was left of Catholic Christendom had stood by and applauded.
He thought of the ruby, the great glowing jewel that the king of France had given to the shrine. There had been a time when kings themselves feared God as he was made known to them in the Church, the Church, the body of Christ in the hands of men. It was no longer so. And that it was no longer so was less the fault of kings than of the Church, of the men in whose hands. . .
The king who had Becket killed sent for monks from France as a sign of his contrition, the monks who were the first English Carthusians. One of them, Hugh of Avalon from the Grande Chartreuse—he had read the story of his life at the Mountgrace—had afterwards become that king’s dearest friend, Bishop of Lincoln, a saint of the Church.
Now all the English Charterhouses were in ruins and the tomb of Saint Hugh at Lincoln smashed and robbed as the tomb of Saint Thomas at Canterbury had been. Hugh of Avalon, who had come from France as the ruby had come, blessed Saint Hugh, on whose feast-day the cardinal had died, the cardinal who had tried to save the Church Saint Hugh had known and loved, and had set his own murderous King Henry only to rage more furiously against that Church, the cardinal who at last had failed even to. . . the cardinal. . . archbishop. . .
He turned suddenly and looked from tomb to tomb as if he had not all along seen them standing there in the silence. In Becket’s crown, he had heard them say at Lambeth. In Becket’s crown. From the heaviest and most decorated tomb he caught the calm stare of a gold knight gazing up to heaven. He crossed the space to him, hearing his own footsteps again. The knight lay open-eyed in his shining armour, his hands in their spiked gauntlets just touching at the finger-tips in prayer, the arms of England on his surcoat and a crowned lion under his head. Edward Plantagenet, Prince of Wales. He looked up. There they were above him, hanging in his bronze gaze, his helmet, gloves and coat, and his shield, not gleaming and graven as on the effigy, but old, battered, the very ones he had worn at Crécy, at Poitiers.
He laughed aloud. This tomb would not be destroyed. This shrine to the butcher of ten thousand Frenchmen would stand for ever, because the knight, the king’s son, held no meaning but his own, his own glory and England’s, as the victor of so many bloody battles. The ruby of France and Hugh of Avalon were already forgotten, what they had signified returned into God for whom they had come. The Black Prince would not be forgotten.
He traced with his finger the line of the long, brazen nose. Put not your trust in princes. . .
He looked about him, slowly now, tomb by tomb. He would not be here, the cardinal, not here among these monuments to worldly glory. There, at the very top, the very end of the whole church, was a round apse lit with a white light and empty of effigies and carvings. Becket’s crown. He walked through the arch into the apse and saw a new stone, bare in the light, and three words on it. Depositum Cardinalis Poli. He stood in front of it for a long time and thought of the warm room at Lambeth, the mad brother, the tapers burning each side of the picture of Christ, the fog outside.
Put not your trust in princes, nor in any child of man; for when the breath of man goeth forth he shall turn again to his earth.
At last he shook his head and went away, walking away down the great church, an old man in a ragged cloak leaning on his staff as he walked, his heart light, light. He waved as he passed the Black Prince. Keep your shield safe, lad, and your spiked gloves.
He had gone away to France, where the ruby had come from, and Saint Hugh, where he knew nothing and no one and would not understand what people said.
And now he lay, unable to speak, unable to move, on a bed of bracken in a stable and smi
led once more as he remembered that morning in Canterbury and listened to a girl milking a cow.
It was done. She poured the second pailful of milk into the pitcher and picked it up. She needed both hands to carry it, so that she had to put it down on the ground in order to unlatch the door behind his head, into the house. He heard a little milk slop over onto the floor as she picked it up again, heard her pull the door open with her foot as she went through. The sound of women’s voices, the high voice of a child, reached him from behind the door. Then she came back, shutting the door behind her. She stopped beside him, but he did not open his eyes. He did not want to see her face. He wanted to pretend for a little longer that he was back, after all, at the beginning, in the narrow dale, and that the girl, the miller’s daughter, was she who had nursed him because her own baby had died. . . He knew, certainly he knew, that it was not true. It was only a game he was playing with himself. All the same, beneath what he knew not to be true there was a truth, a truth, if there would be time to find it, that had to do with time and with what was not lost, not ever, and with God. . .
His shoulders had begun to ache under the weight on his chest. If he could have moved on his bed, if he could have hoisted himself up on the bolster, if he could. . . He felt himself slipping down further and further under the weight.
She went away from his side, and he opened his eyes to keep himself from falling asleep. He must not waste what was left of the day. The dazzle and glint of the morning outside the door he had forgotten while his eyes were shut. He heard the unfamiliar sound he made in his throat, but she did not turn towards him as she sent the cows out in front of her down to the pasture. She left the picture empty, quiet except for the birds and the rattle of the stream over pebbles. The cockerel did not pass by. After a while she came back. She came into the stable, fetched the pail, and took it to the stream. She knelt on the bridge and tipped up the pail to drink the last of the milk. He saw her throat move as she drank. Then she rinsed the pail in the stream, swilling it out twice, three times, in the clean water.
