The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  A chaffinch flew from the wood outside to the high coping of the wall beyond the rose. He stooped slowly, keeping his eyes on the bird, and put the whetstone back on the ground. He straightened, as slowly, so as not to frighten the chaffinch, and as he did so he forgot the intricate problem of the bush, the pruning that he meant to make perfect. He breathed in deeply. The air was mild with the first mildness of the year. His hands were not cold, although he had been working outside for—he glanced up at the sun—more than two hours. Birds were singing in the oak trees the other side of the wall, trees that he could not see from where he stood. He sniffed. A raw, clean smell rose from the earth, dark and soft at last after the winter, a smell as of the very sap rising in the old trees and in the uncurling primrose leaves close to the ground. The chaffinch flew away, out of the garden, back into the wood. He felt the spring stir in himself also, warming him through. It was the Wednesday of Holy Week, and he felt the lightness of the coming Easter as if he already breathed the air of that new world.

  He saw some blades of grass that had sprung up through the earth near to the rosebush. He went over to them, put down the knife, and sank his fingers in the earth, which was still cold. He pulled gently, to snap nothing off, and out of the earth came eighteen inches of villainous white root, here and there along its length clusters of smaller roots clutching at the soil as he pulled, and young shoots that would become matted tufts of grass: creeping quitch grass: quick, Robin the miller at Arden had called it, quick because it would not die. The smallest piece of root left in the ground would send out a tangle of growth creeping into the roots of innocent plants, choking them of life. Seven years ago, when he first came, his garden had been overgrown and wild because the monk whose place he had taken had been infirm for years before his death. He had had to dig up all the plants, what was left of them, lavender and catmint, pinks, rosemary and rue, and sort out with his fingers the frail black roots from the fat white ones. He had pulled out yards of quitch, ground-elder and bindweed, too, and yellow nettle-roots that stung as much as the leaves, and burned them in grisly, spitting bonfires with the ivy he had torn from the wall. But he had never dared to dig up the old rose, and the quicks still lurked among its roots, waiting for every spring.

  He stood in the March sunshine holding the length of root in both his hands. In the wood outside the garden quitch grass and nettles killed nothing. The forget-me-nots and the wild garlic, the bluebells and the willow-herb held on as strongly as they to their own patches of ground, and the branches of the oaks shaded them all with an equal shade. There all and none were weeds. He looked at the rose-prunings lying in a heap where he had thrown them and wished that he had not cut out so much. There were buds there that would have become leaves and flowers, that had the scent of summer already folded in them. Now they would only burn.

  It was Martin who had told him to prune the bush, Martin the lay brother, who sometimes brought him plants, seedlings, cuttings, scraps divided from clumps of herbs. The plants had begun to appear not long after he had cleared his garden of the worst of the weeds. They had been left beside his dish in the hole in the cell wall where every day a lay brother left his food. The hole was right-angled so that the monk inside the cell could not catch even a glimpse of the man who brought his food. He would never have known who had left him the plants if Martin had not said one day as he dumped a load of firewood in the corner of his cell:

  “How does the winter savory do for you then? You should put a bit to your dish of beans, my lad.”

  Much later, this last autumn, he had brought his firewood again, and this time he had said:

  “Needs cutting back hard, does the old rose, hard as you like, every odd year or so. Do it nowt but good.”

  These were the two things Martin had said to him.

  So he had cut back the rose.

  He frowned as he stood with the quitch root in his hands. He loved his garden, his bushes reduced to orderly shapes, with the bare earth beneath them. Why did it trouble him that in the wood beyond the wall, which he could see from the window of his loft but had never walked in, not once, there was no bare earth, and in autumn the traveller’s joy hung in grey swathes over the unpruned briars?

  From across the cloister the bell began to ring. He tossed the root, with unnecessary force, over the wall into the wood and turned towards his cell. It was the hour for Sext. The office-book lay open at the right page on the reading-desk in his cell. He went to the tap by the door, to rinse the earth from his hands. But the bell did not stop after six strokes. He paused to listen, water dripping from his hands and the scratches smarting that the rose-thorns had made. The strokes of the bell went on, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, more, and it seemed to him that it was being rung faster and louder than usual. It meant, in any case, that the office was to be said in church. He looked down at his habit, muddy from where he had knelt to prune the rose. He dried his hands and dabbed at the marks with the cloth, making them worse because they were still damp. The bell stopped. He threw down the cloth, picked up the heavy office-book as he went through his cell, and opened the door into the cloister.

  He almost knocked over Master Leighton, coming slowly down the cloister with no book and his hands folded under his habit. The old man, lately much aged, gave him a sharp look as he passed, signifying disapproval both of his haste and of the mud on his habit. Robert stepped back, to give him a lead of a few paces, and looked out over the great cloister-garth.

  There was the sheen of new growth on the grass. Finches flew about among the twigs of the apple trees and the hazels, the soft gold of the catkins hazy over a drift of yellow crocuses. He sighed. All this shining and breaking open of the spring, the breaking open of bud, seed, shell, sheath, winter sleep. . . He turned to follow Master Leighton to the church.

  He saw the prior emerge from his cell on the far side of the cloister. He quickened his pace so as to reach the church before the prior, then slowed it in surprise. The prior had stayed at his door, holding it open behind him with a gesture of courtesy. A stranger came out, a layman dressed in black, a gentleman, and walked with the prior towards the church.

  The monks sang the office in choir as if it were Sunday, with the sunlight falling in bars on the north wall. Today, a weekday, they should not have met in the church until Vespers. He sang with the rest, paying no heed to the words he sang. The stranger was out of sight, in the nave beyond the narrow door under the tower. He wondered as he sang who he was, this young man whom the prior had accompanied with a deference beyond his usual gravity, and why he had come.

  At the end of the office the monks filed into the chapterhouse, and the prior, with a raised hand, signed to them to stay there. They waited in their habitual silence. The prior went back into the church and returned a moment later with the stranger. Then the prior said:

  “The midday office has been sung in choir so that you might know that Master Reginald Pole, cousin to the king’s grace, is here as our guest for the days of Easter. Master Pole has been a scholar in the universities of Oxford and Padua and is much at the court. He comes to us, so far in the north, so far out of the world, from the very centre of the world. But he has lately been living among our brethren in the Charterhouse at Sheen, where he also was for some years as a boy, so that he is no stranger to our quiet days nor to the tenor of our lives in the cloister. We are glad, we are very glad, to see him here, and his coming does us great honour.”

  While the prior was speaking the young man’s eyes travelled round the faces of the listening monks. There was in his glance a warmth, a gentleness, that touched Robert Fletcher as the spring weather had already done. When the large eyes met his own, he put up a hand to his cheek as if to hide behind it. Master Pole’s black clothes and clear gaze made him suddenly aware of his tangled beard, his big scratched hands, his coarse bleached habit, which smelled of sweat and earth.

  After the prior had finished, the young man bowed to the monks with a brief smile that seemed to lighten the
quality of the silence from which they watched him and left the chapter-house. The monks went back to their cells.

  Robert Fletcher crossed the grass of the cloister-garth instead of following the rest down the shadowed walk. He stopped among the crocuses and looked down at them as they bent, together, in the light wind. There were daisies in the grass too—many more daisies than crocuses—that had also opened in the morning’s sunshine. He picked a daisy and, with some anguish, twisted the stalk in his fingers until the head broke off.

  “Noble metal to our base,” he muttered as he walked on, to his cell. At his door he paused with his hand on the latch and straightened his shoulders as if there were someone inside whom he needed new courage to face.

  On Sundays the monks dined together in the refectory. That Sunday, because it was Easter day, there was wine to drink, watered according to Carthusian custom, and flowers in little jugs down the middle of the table. The reading was one of Saint Bernard’s sermons, on the Resurrection of Christ. A novice read it, nervously and too fast, so that the mighty Latin rattled forward like a river shallow over pebbles. Robert Fletcher was not listening to the sense of the words. He ate the meal without pleasure, although there was white bread instead of black and cream cheese with the baked apples, and watched, from the far end of the table, Master Pole eating and listening in a remote stillness, stiller than that of any of the monks. He had the impression that their far-come guest had in spirit already left the monastery and was somewhere else, in the midst of trouble.

  At the end of the meal the prior called Robert Fletcher over. “Master Pole has asked to see one of the gardens of the great cloister. Will you show him yours, since I know that it has been your particular care?”

  He bowed and, without a word, led the young man in his black clothes out into the air and across the grass to his cell. He opened the door for him, and Master Pole passed through in silence, accustomed not to open doors for himself. But when they came out into the garden he smiled with pleasure and said:

  “Ah—you have a good, big garden. And sunshine.” He turned round where he stood, looking at the sky. “Both a south and a west wall. You should plant a peach on that wall, or at least a plum. I have seen them in Italy grown against a south wall, forced into the shape of a fan and cut back every year. They bear a heavy crop. You are fortunate to have these warm walls. Aye. . .”

  He put the flat of his hand on the stone of the wall and looked Robert full in the face. His voice altered.

  “You are very fortunate. I could wish that I had been allotted such a garden.” He hesitated, dropping his glance, and said softly, “And indeed, such a life, far out of the world, as your prior said, under these hills. Nothing can touch you here, your books, your peaceful days.” He looked up. “What manner of life did you quit, to enter the Charterhouse?”

  “My father is a tenant of the abbot of Rievaulx, sir, holding a deal of land, sheep-grazing most of it, that my brother will hold after him. I laboured for them and learned Latin from the priest at Hawnby, twelve mile from here.”

  “Peaceful days also. You are a happy man.”

  Robert said nothing.

  Master Pole smiled and turned to the rose. He bent down beside it, took hold of its gnarled main stem, and rocked it a little in the ground.

  “A fine rose, and full of vigour still, though it must be thirty years old. About my age. And yours. Does it carry white flowers?”

  “Aye, sir, it does, a pure, clear white.”

  The gentleman in his neat black clothes stood looking at the pruned branches to which a few withered leaves were still attached. The new year’s shoots were about to break. Robert suddenly saw fear in his guest’s face and took one step towards him. But Master Pole looked down at the earth for a moment and smiled, after all, once more, as he raised his eyes.

  “Perhaps it is a good omen,” he said. And, as he held out his hand, “God be with you, sir.”

  Then he went away quickly, opening the door for himself.

  8

  January 1532

  Messire Eustace Chapuys, ambassador to the court of King Henry VIII in London, to Emperor Charles V, King of Castile and Aragon, Count of Burgundy, hereditary lord of the Netherlands, Austria, etc., etc., in Italy; January 1532.

  “. . . The king rode out early, from Hampton Court, for the chase, as he is used to do. The Princess Mary, now much disregarded on account of her mother’s marriage being cast into question, watched him go, humbly kneeling as is her wont, from the platform above and greeted of none. Until the king, turning by chance in the saddle, of a sudden took off his cap and bowed to her, at which they all followed. I saw this with my own eyes and did rejoice at it; but she, I have heard, retired to weep in her chamber as she does continually.

  “The son of the princess’s governess, Reginald Pole, he that these two years past went into France to further the king’s cause, though much unwillingly as I am told, could not until yesterday obtain licence to go again abroad for the pursuit of his studies. It is said that he refused the archbishopric of York after the death of the cardinal because he would not adopt the king’s opinion concerning the divorce and that he greatly angered the king by the intemperate manner in which he then spoke, although they were alone. He has lived this past year in retirement at the Carthusian house at Sheen, in the very rooms occupied by the cardinal after his fall from power, and has long desired to return to Italy, where, Sir Thomas More the Lord Chancellor has informed me, he is esteemed for his learning and virtue more even than for his noble birth (for he is of the blood royal and in any realm but England would bear a prince’s title). It is said that yesterday he told the king that if he remained in England he must attend the Convocation, he being dean of Exeter though yet a layman, and that if the divorce were there discussed he must speak according to his conscience. On this, the king immediately gave him leave to go and promised to continue his pension of four hundred ducats. They say that, to make up his quarrel with the king, he secretly wrote him a letter during this last summer that set forth with such goodly wit and eloquence his reasons against the divorce that the letter was instantly destroyed by Master Cranmer for fear of the hurt it might do the king’s cause should it become known among the learned of the Kingdom.

  “The queen your aunt has said to me that the king’s seeking of a divorce is a judgement of God for that her former marriage with Prince Arthur was made in blood, meaning that of the earl of Warwick, the White Rose, who was executed thirty years since on the orders of her father-in-law King Henry VII to clear the succession of the House of Tudor but at the instance, she swears, of the ambassador of Spain. I begged her to believe all not yet lost and reminded her that the said earl of Warwick’s sister, the Lady Margaret Pole, and her sons are now, so far from being her grace’s enemies, among her most faithful friends. But she was not to be comforted.”

  9

  1534—1535

  During the autumn strangers arrived at the monastery more often than before, and Robert Fletcher watched a change come over the prior as marked as that of the leaves of the oak trees turning from green to purple and gold. Master Wilson had ruled for twelve years in peace a peaceful house. Now his shoulders, as he walked, were hunched under a weight of care. In chapter, while the ordinary business of the monastery was discussed, he sat in silence looking from face to face, as if he would have liked to ask for help but dared not. His monks, by long use accustomed to resigning decisions to their prior, lived through the days not knowing what news each letter from London brought or who had clattered out through the Charterhouse gate carrying his noise away into the world.

  Robert Fletcher, meanwhile, was in love with a book. A bundle of books had lately reached the Mountgrace from the London Charterhouse in exchange for a bundle that he himself had packed up and sent away. Among those that had come was a small volume, old and badly transcribed so that many words were difficult to read, which seemed to him to have been written for him alone. It had made of every day a wonder and
a joy too short for all that the wakeful silence between himself and God might hold. He went into chapter, into the cloister, into choir for the night offices, and found himself with surprise there among his fellow monks. He did what they did, said or sang the same words; but he was all the time busy with a new work, the work set him by the book. The book was in English. It was called The Cloud of Unknowing. No author’s name appeared in its clumsily sewn pages.

  “Look that nothing live in thy working mind,” the book said, “but a naked intent stretching into God. Cease never in thine intent; but beat ever more on this cloud of unknowing that is betwixt thee and thy God with a sharp dart of longing love, and loathe for to think on aught under God, and go not thence for anything that befalleth. If thee list have this intent lapped and folden in one word, take thee but a little word of one syllable. Such a word is this word Love. Fasten this word to thine heart. With this word thou shalt beat on this cloud and this darkness above thee. With this word thou shalt sink down all manner of thought under the cloud of forgetting.”

  Love, he said to himself over and over, love, love, as he woke in the dark, happy, to the bell ringing over the cloister, and walked across the wet grass to the church.

  During this time the warning the old prior had given him on the day before his profession never once came back to him. Love, he repeated. Faith was a word he no longer needed.