The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  Then, one morning early in the winter, the king’s commissioner came to the Mountgrace. He sat at a table in the chapter-house and, without glancing at the monks in their places, read quickly through the legal phrases of a document declaring, on oath, loyalty to the king’s choice of an heir to the realm. Robert Fletcher, watching the prior’s downcast eyes, scarcely listened. What was the king’s heir to him, to any of them there? Had they not left the world to dwell in the desert?

  The commissioner put the document down on the table in front of him, turning it round so that it faced the monks. He pushed the quill and the ink further forward. Then he read, loudly, from another paper, the prior’s name.

  In silence the prior rose, walked to the table, and signed his name. The quill scratched. When he laid down the pen someone coughed. The prior sat down. He looked at no one.

  Other monks, Robert Fletcher among them, followed the prior in the order in which their names were read out.

  “Master Thomas Leighton,” the commissioner called.

  There was no movement. Robert Fletcher looked up sharply. Master Leighton was sitting in his place, his piercing eyes fixed upon the commissioner.

  “Thomas Leighton!” the commissioner repeated, louder, looking round at the cowled figures, not knowing to which of them the name belonged.

  Master Leighton was not deaf. He stood up at last, looked round the chapter-house at each upturned face, and said:

  “I’ll not swear your oath.”

  The commissioner stared at him, laying down the paper in his hand. The prior stood up. Before he could speak Master Leighton went on:

  “The pope has judged the king’s marriage to Queen Catherine good. If the marriage was good, the king has not the right under God’s law to cast the Princess Mary off and put a bastard in her place.”

  The commissioner cleared his throat and said with deliberation:

  “It is not for monks to meddle in these matters, but freely to signify their obedience to the king’s highness.”

  “If it is not for monks to meddle in these matters, why do you come here asking from us oaths we are forbidden to swear?”

  The prior raised his hand. Master Leighton would not be stopped.

  “I will tell you why. You come from London to our cloister and call us from our cells, not because you want an oath for the king, but because you want an oath against the pope, and I for one”—he glared round the chapter-house—“I for one will not swear it. You can go back to London without my oath, and much harm may the lack of it do you!”

  He sat down. The commissioner looked at him coldly for a while longer but at last shook his head and read out the next name. As the rest were called, the prior looked across at each in turn, and the monks came forward one by one and signed. The last, a young man called Geoffrey Hodson, only lately professed, stood when his name was read, bowed to the prior and said:

  “I stick with Master Leighton.”

  The commissioner shrugged his shoulders, gathered his papers together, and left the chapter-house, followed by the prior.

  The monks looked from one to another. They looked at Master Leighton, who sat in his place staring straight ahead, his jaw firm. His defiance crackled in the air. As if to escape its dangerous presence, some of the others went out, too quickly, pushing through the door. Robert Fletcher leaned forward.

  “Master Leighton. . .”

  Slowly the old monk fixed his gaze on him.

  “Well, Robert Fletcher,” he said. “I thought better at least of you. What have you done? Aye, there we have it. You do not know. But I tell you that one day you will be compelled to know what you have done, to see it for what it is. All of you!” He shouted the last three words, and a monk leaving the chapter-house jumped in the doorway and turned back, his mouth gaping.

  “Fools!” Master Leighton roared at them. They flinched where they stood. They had never heard a voice raised in anger in the chapter-house. “Following one the other like sheep through a gap in the wall, and for what cause? Like sheep you have no minds of your own and run where you are led.” He stopped short, halted by the scandal of his own contempt for the prior’s example. The young monk who had refused to sign his name raised a hand to his mouth in fright.

  “Let that be,” old Leighton muttered. But as Robert continued to lean towards him, amazed, seeking an explanation, he spoke again. No one moved.

  “Nay, and I will not let it be. The king has sent to us and the likes of us, up and down the land, so that he may fetch back to London a great heap of our names, sworn to uphold him in his unlawful marriage, and then say to the world that the conscience of the realm has judged these things well done. For that is what we are, all of us and each one of us, the conscience of the realm, and our voice is not to be overlaid by respect for persons, be they even the person of the king himself.”

  “Master Leighton,” Robert interrupted him, “we are monks. We have left the world, the kingdom of men. It is not our duty to think on these things. Our duty is rather to forget them, to leave them to others whose concern they rightly are. What is it to us if the king should choose to alter his inheritance?”

  “We are here to cast off our sins, Master Fletcher, not to cast off our wits. Listen to me, all of you. We are monks, aye; we are churchmen therefore. We are Englishmen also and dwell under the king’s law. But as churchmen we dwell under the pope’s authority, which is God’s authority upon earth. While the king’s law is consonant with the pope’s authority, well and good. If the king proposes a law flat against a judgement the pope has made, then it is for us to follow the pope’s judgement and do nothing that might ease the king’s path. We should refuse our oath of loyalty to this one law, not because we mean to do aught in disobedience to it, but because it is fashioned of the king’s lawlessness. We owe this to the pope and the Church; we owe it to England too. A monk—do you recall, Master Fletcher?—may not conceal himself anywhere from God. No more than in all those hiding places that he has renounced may he seek refuge in mere obedience to the king. To seek refuge is to betray—”

  The prior reappeared in the doorway of the chapterhouse. Master Leighton fell silent and got to his feet. Robert Fletcher saw, with a pang that pierced his own anger, the old man’s stiff and painful movements as he rose. All the monks who remained in the room also rose. The prior looked from face to face.

  “I am to tell you,” the prior said quietly, “that every monk in the eight other Charterhouses of the English province has given his oath of loyalty to the king’s grace. Master Leighton, Geoffrey Hodson, do you persist in your refusal, or will you now sign your names?”

  “I will not,” Thomas Leighton said, looking still at Robert Fletcher.

  Geoffrey Hodson looked from the prior to Leighton and back.

  “I will sign,” he said at last.

  Leighton raised a hand in the young monk’s direction and let it fall.

  “Master Leighton, you are confined to your cell until such time as I send you word that you may come to choir and chapter.”

  The old man’s head dropped forward in assent.

  Robert Fletcher went back to his cell out of temper, though not with himself. A Carthusian monk belonged to no realm, no kingdom, no temporal state. He knew that this was so. It was his fresh, his shining knowledge. “Look that nothing live in thy working mind but a naked intent stretching into God.” What had a king’s marriage to do with that intent? Master Leighton was wrong. Robert Fletcher was glad that the boy, Hodson, had obeyed the prior. He wished only for familiar peace to settle again upon the monastery. He picked up his book and shook his head violently, to clear it of the resentment he felt at the disturbance Master Leighton had caused.

  When the monks went to the church for Vespers the commissioner and his servants had left. Thomas Leighton’s place in choir was empty.

  In the months that followed, the visit of the commissioner was not spoken of. After six weeks Master Leighton was seen again in choir and chapter-house, his fa
ce stubborn, closed. He did not meet Robert Fletcher’s glance. But the monks were not left alone in their desert.

  During the spring and summer more messengers came from London and York, more guests, unknown to the monks, whom the prior, sometimes in the middle of the night, was summoned to receive. As if from a remote height, Robert Fletcher watched anxiety increase in the house. The hours that were not filled with ordered prayer and the work of his garden he spent reading over and over again, until he knew them by heart, the words of his book. Or simply emptying his mind of all words whatsoever.

  In the tattered pages he found the old prior’s phrase. Mean by sin a lump. Many times he stared at the ill-written words, overcome by an understanding that he had been far from when he had heard them spoken. Led by the book to leave behind him, as he had once left behind Easterside and before that Arden, not only the walls of his cell, the oak-wood and the flowers in his garden, and the many words he was required to pray, but also his very self, his past, his future, the insistence of his body, in wordless silence, he knew that he reached more nearly to God than he had ever done. More and more often he withdrew to an empty place filled only with attention. There he was alone and not alone.

  When he tried in confession to describe to the prior this nearness and farness, this blinded sight, the prior did not understand and took him to mean that he had seen visions. He saw nothing that was not there, but what he saw he saw from a great distance. He climbed a long way.

  From the height he attained, he looked down and watched them in the cloister, the chapter-house, the church, becoming afraid. He knew, himself, that the intrusions of the world into the defenceless monastery, the king’s demands as to laws and oaths, were part of the lump of sin that must be pushed down under the cloud of forgetting. He watched the monks move through the days at their measured pace, no less quietly than before. But it was as if he stood on the high moor in the last of the sunlight and watched them scurrying in the shadowed dale below. He saw clearly. What he saw troubled him scarcely at all. His soul was not there but somewhere else. He would obey the prior. Was it not in obedience that freedom was to be found, the freedom Master Husthwaite had spoken of long ago and which he now recognised as the freedom releasing his soul to beat upon the cloud of unknowing?

  That spring, Thomas Leighton was dying. Very old, gaunt and wasted, he persisted in carrying out every obligation imposed on him by the habit of fifty years. Monks rising in the small hours at the bell for the night office would find him already almost at the church door, gasping for breath on his two sticks, as if he had not slept at all but lain awake counting the hours through until it was time to begin the slow walk from his cell. In chapter he lowered himself into his place, his knuckles white on the sticks, and sat, his eyes shut, motionless as a stone. Robert Fletcher, always aware of his presence and of his relation to himself, with mixed feelings watched him little by little fail.

  Deep within him he kept the memory of his first encounter with Master Leighton. Then, the old man’s strength had supplied his own weakness, implanting in him an understanding which had afterwards grown to occupy all the room there was in his soul. Now, that understanding had become his own, himself, and Master Leighton had been left behind, outside, like a dying oak beside a tree in its prime with the sap ringing to the tips of its branches. In the matter of the oath-taking Robert had seen how the old man was still caught in the concerns of the world, while he had grown free of them. When he saw Master Leighton hobble from church or chapter-house into the cloister, he would follow him, slowly so as not to overtake him, but with a proud spring to his step, conscious of the strength of his body, of a health, a contained and dedicated vigour, that he would retain for many years yet.

  Robert Fletcher was thirty-seven years old that spring, tall and heavy, with a brown spade of a beard and broad, thick hands.

  From time to time he remembered the visit of Master Pole to the Charterhouse. When he did, he no longer thought of him as noble metal but, with some scorn, as a fine, slight youth, pale in his black clothes, too soft for the monks’ diet of beans and black bread. In his backwards glance, the high-born gentleman from the king’s court grew younger and younger. The green boy he had been himself, bent over the Georgics at Master Husthwaite’s parlour table, thin and strong and sunburned, he did not remember at all.

  One day in May the prior read to his monks a letter that had come from the Charterhouse in London. It said that the London prior and two other Carthusian priors had been hanged, drawn, and quartered as traitors before a great crowd at Tyburn for refusing to acknowledge the king as head of the Church in England. It also said that the London monks had been threatened with the dissolution of their house if they continued to follow the example of their prior’s refusal.

  The sun streamed in through the windows of the chapter-house. The only movement was the tremble of the letter shaking in the prior’s hands.

  Geoffrey Hodson suddenly rose to his feet and said with violence:

  “It was a martyr’s death, and if they come to take us we should not be afraid to go.”

  There was a murmur of assent. The prior bent his head, covering his eyes with his hand.

  Robert Fletcher stood up in his place and said:

  “We are here in this cloister to dwell with God on his holy mountain and to pray for the souls of the faithful dead and that the sins of the living may be forgiven. Our peace is not of this world, and we have no worldly power to defend it. Our everlasting trust is in God; our mortal trust must be in mortal power. If the pope’s power does not protect our cloister from the king, we must look to the king. If the king’s men take our priors and hang them, if the king’s men dissolve our houses, our cells and our choirs will stand empty, there will be none out of the world to ask forgiveness for the sins of the world, the souls of the dead will go unprayed for, and on his mountain God will dwell alone. But if we yield to the king, in this matter of the pope as in the matter of the succession, then the king, as head of the Church, must surely in all justice and reason defend our house.”

  Thomas Leighton opened his eyes and said in a hoarse voice, without moving his head:

  “Nolite confidere inprincipibus.”

  “The pope also is a prince, Master Leighton.”

  The prior motioned him to sit down, and he obeyed.

  “If the king’s men come here again, Master Leighton,” said the prior, “what would you have us do?”

  Thomas Leighton, still seated in his place, bowed ceremoniously to the prior. Robert Fletcher winced at the irony of the bow. The prior’s face, anxious and open, did not alter. After a pause Thomas Leighton spoke:

  “The honour of this house was laid low when the oath to the succession was sworn. They will come again. God grant I shall be dead before they come. When they come, to seek your assent to the king’s usurpation of rule over the Church, I beg you, Master Prior, to recall that the safety of this house and the lives of the monks in your care are not your first charge. This house is wood and stone; these monks are flesh and blood; mortal, both house and monks. Our souls are bound for heaven, I trust, however we meet death upon the way thither. But to choose good against evil, to sort the truth of God from the deceits of men and to cleave to the truth, there is our first charge. There is any man’s.”

  They waited for him to say more, but he clenched his jaw and stared over their heads.

  Robert Fletcher cleared his throat.

  “Master Fletcher?” the prior said.

  “Master Prior, brethren,” he stood up, looking round at the bent heads of the monks in the sunshine. He loved them all. He thought of the butchery in London, the blood horribly spilled for a foolish, human cause. He knew that he was right.

  “I say that these brave priors have died for affairs of state and that God’s truth, which, indeed, Master Leighton, we must use all our strength to discern and to cleave to, is not, in the king’s new law, anywhere in question. The king is no heretic; has he not fought in every way the ev
il teachings of Luther? Has he not had heretics burned and even himself written a book defending the holiness of the seven sacraments? Surely this matter of temporal power over the Church may safely be left to parliament and the king to settle. Monks of the Charterhouse are innocent of all power and removed from the world’s changes to live with God in his eternity. For them to take upon themselves this disobedience to the king is to return into those very toils of time and chance which they have been called by God to leave behind for ever. I see no wickedness in civil obedience to the civil power. The king, in asking us to acknowledge him head of the Church in his own realm, is asking us to give up nothing that is ours to give.

  “What do we have that is our own, that we must never give up however hard we are pressed? We have our rule, the order of our days, which encircles our peace, guards us from all worldly dangers and distraction, and frees us to approach God in the silence of our souls. Let us protect that peace, at any cost save that of God’s truth, for our peace is a part of God’s truth, our own peculiar part as hermits in the desert.”

  He sat down, his heart beating fast, pleased with what he had said.

  Thomas Leighton looked straight at him, his old eyes icy, and said: “Credo in unam, sanctam, catholicam et apostolicam Ecclesiam. An article of faith, Master Fletcher.”

  Robert Fletcher jumped up again.

  “But the king is a faithful son of the Church.”

  “Then why does he care so much for oaths to his new law that he will kill blameless men to get them?”

  “For the peace of the Church! Have not all the bishops and abbots sworn the oath? Should we not copy them, greater and more learned men than we are, rather than our own brethren who had far better have held their peace, obeyed the king, and stayed in their cloisters where they could do only good?”

  Master Leighton appeared to have abandoned the argument. He sat, his eyes again closed, without stirring, his hands grasping his sticks.