The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  At the corner of the Shambles he passed a beggar lying in the gutter, a huge, heavy old man with his head propped against a broken step, an empty dish in his hand. He passed him without attention. There were many such in the city. He walked more quickly. Alice was waiting for him, and he wanted to see her pleasure at the primroses. He needed to see it, to see her, to strengthen his hold on all that was left, Alice, and the child soon to be born.

  A few yards from the baker’s house he stopped suddenly. The beggar at the corner of the Shambles was Will. At the same moment he decided that it was not possible, that he had imagined the likeness to Will; Will, whom he had seen five years before in the rioting mob and then never again, although the city was not so big that in that time, had Will been there, he would not somewhere have come upon him. It could not be Will. Perhaps it had not been Will on the day of the riot.

  He took two steps forward and stopped again. Had there been something familiar in the heaviness of the propped head that lay twisted, almost as if the neck were broken? In a misery of doubt he recalled his brief impression. He must go back to see.

  He stood in the street, holding the primroses and the eggs. Close to him, over the lighted shop, there was Alice, and their fragile peace, and the baby. If it should be Will, how could he bring him in, drag him up the narrow stairs, to her, sewing by the one light? Yet to leave him there, in rags, on a night as cold as the dead of winter? He shuddered, putting the image from him. It was not possible that it was Will, not after so long a time.

  He walked on, into the baker’s shop, up the stairs, home.

  He gave Alice the flowers, and she was pleased. After she had found a jug to put them in and filled it with water, she searched his face.

  “You met someone?”

  “No. Aye. I thought I saw a man I once knew. But it was not he.”

  She touched the primroses again, happily. She was always afraid that he might meet her father in the street.

  She went downstairs, carefully because of the child, to cook their eggs and fetch the bread that they would eat with them. He picked up the sewing she had left lying on the stool, squares of cotton she was piecing together to make a coverlet for the cradle, and looked at her neat stitches. Then he rubbed the window-pane above the taper. A few flakes of snow were flying past in the wind. He knew that the beggar was Will.

  24

  May 1554

  Messer Marc’ Antonio Damula, ambassador of the Republic of Venice at the court of Emperor Charles V in Brussels, to the Signory of Venice; May 1554.

  “. . . Cardinal Pole returned from France three weeks ago and on the twenty-first day of April had audience of the emperor, who spoke to him with much anger of the discussions that the cardinal has conducted with the French king for the furtherance of peace, so that both the cardinal himself and others who were present understood that there is here little of either hope or desire for the accomplishment of the said peace. And even less, as it appeared from the roughness of his words on that occasion, does the emperor intend to allow Monsignor Pole to proceed on his journey to England for the restoration of the Roman obedience in that country, for the emperor concluded the audience with the pronouncement that the cardinal might better have remained in France than come back to the Empire, where there is naught to his purpose. Since this audience with the emperor, whose unwonted harshness surprised many, Cardinal Pole has returned to the house in which he has lived since his first arrival in Brussels in January. He is said to be very low in spirits, on account of the long delays which he has been compelled to suffer (the better part of a year having now passed since Queen Mary ascended the throne), and even, believing it to be himself rather than his cause that displeases the emperor, to have offered the resignation of his legatine commission to the pope, who will doubtless refuse it, there being none other at Rome to replace the cardinal in the affairs of England.

  “It is likely, however, that after the solemnisation of the marriage between the queen and the prince of Spain, who is expected shortly to sail for England, the emperor will at last allow the cardinal to proceed, for it is the emperor’s fear lest the cardinal’s presence in England should endanger the people’s acceptance of the marriage that has led him to detain the cardinal so long from his native land. This fear is in my opinion groundless; I have several times, since the certainty of the marriage became known, heard the cardinal give his approval to the same, saying how greatly the alliance with so powerful a Catholic prince may benefit the unity of the Church, although it is true that formerly for many months he maintained a stubborn silence on the matter and once, I am told, dared to say to the emperor that the queen’s marriage to a foreigner would never be popular in England and that in his opinion the queen had far better remain unmarried. But those days are now past, and if the cardinal be not permitted to leave for England after the marriage has taken place, it will be rather hindrance from England than any obstruction of the emperor’s that will be the cause. For the cardinal lately said to me that in the affairs of England he is as a man walking in a meadow of unmowed grass, who sees the surface waving by the motion of a snake underneath, though he cannot exactly distinguish the spot where he lurks, by which he meant that it is the high passion rife among the nobility there, whose only desire is to retain and keep hold of the abbey lands they had of King Henry, that is the true obstacle to his admittance as legate.

  “If he is forced to remain much longer idle and, as it were, imprisoned at Brussels by the devices of others (for even the pope does not stand firm to the purpose for which he despatched his own legate), I fear greatly for his health, though at present he appears well enough.”

  25

  May 1554

  He stood in the spring evening, in the warm rain, at the foot of Alice’s grave. They had buried her that morning, very early, like a suicide, without a priest because she had married a priest. Her mother had been there, not her father, and he himself had watched from a long way off and walked all day in the fields outside the walls of the city, not wanting to show his face again in the streets.

  The flowers her mother had laid on the grave were frail and wet in the rain. If he picked them up, all the petals would drop. Now she was free, free of her guilt, free of him—for had they not become one to her, himself and her guilt? Free also of fear. It was her fear, much more than the pain and the fever, that he had hated to watch in the last days, because her fear he should have been able to take from her. He could not. He had tried, again and again, and she had only fled from him, further and further into her terror because he was the cause of it. Now she was free, changed into something else. Remanet nitor unus in illa. That was it. Only the brightness remained in her, and this too Apollo loved. He had pursued her, like Apollo Daphne, into her fear, and she had escaped him. She had changed into something else and left him standing alone on the bank of the river.

  He moaned aloud as he thought of her face on the first morning, nine days ago, happy, young, full of relief. The birth had been an easy one, so the baker’s wife had told him, and Alice had achieved it with a courage that astonished him, sitting up to sew, with quick fingers, between the pains, until the baker’s wife had sent him out to get something to eat, telling him not to come back for an hour. When he returned the baby was there, lying wrapped in linen, filling a space that he did not know there had been in the little room. Alice only smiled at him and then slept till the morning, waking with delight that it was over and that the child was strong and healthy, suckling hungrily.

  For three days she was happy, nursing the baby when he cried, pleased at his earnest frown when he sucked and at the peaceful sleep that followed. Her fear had gone. He had thought that now it might not ever return. On the fourth day, with the start of the fever, it had come back, fiercer than it had ever been, savage and fierce, so that soon he could not tell whether it was sickness or fear that was the faster destroying her.

  “It could not be—I said to you, I knew, I always knew it could not be. I shall die. I am
punished for my sin. I knew it would be so. I shall not see him grow.”

  He was old and full of words, and she turned her face away and would not listen to him.

  “Alice, Alice, listen to me. You will not die. The fever will pass. Alice—”

  But the black dog had got her, had terrified her into a frenzy from which she would not hear him call her name; she refused to hear.

  The bleeding had gone on and on, and the pain, until she was too weak to sit up to suckle the child.

  He knelt down in the wet grass and began to pick the petals off the flowers where they lay on the upturned earth.

  On the last day, the day before yesterday, she had said nothing at all, nor cried, but lay quite still, her eyes open, her eyes moving, following something that he could not see. Several times the baker’s wife came upstairs and put the baby to her breast as she lay, and there was milk for him because he fed and then slept as peacefully as ever. He thought that perhaps she was better, that the fever had passed, but when he said so to the baker’s wife, she only answered: “Poor soul. Poor soul,” and he did not know whether she meant Alice or himself.

  Long after dark, when he was almost asleep himself, sitting at her side, she had said, still without stirring: “Fetch a priest.”

  Now, kneeling in the rain and slowly pulling to bits those flowers of the so late spring, he thought that he had never heard three words more ruinous. Her trust in him had gone, her belief in the words he had given her which had once set her free before God in faith and the assurance of forgiveness. Simul iustus, simul peccator. She had once felt, with him, the deep contrary pull of that tremulous certainty, the despair and the hope, the knowing and the not knowing, the loss and the finding. She had. Or had she? Had it not rather been, all along, only the love between them that had drawn her into accepting what he had told her? Had she ever understood, for herself, in herself? Did not these three whispered words, asking for someone else to come, a stranger who with a few magic phrases would take away her sin, show that she had not?

  He had gone slowly down the stairs and out into the night streets, bowed under the weight he had undertaken to bear on that first night when she had come to him, bringing her clothes with her, knowing he would not send her back.

  A few magic phrases. What more had he offered her himself for the safety of her soul? Different magic phrases?

  He had gone to the far end of the city to find a priest he did not know. He had knocked loudly at a strange door for several minutes until an old man had come grumbling from his bed. More minutes passed while the old man found a light and dressed, complaining that there were clerks enough at the Minster with nothing to do but eat and sleep and him an old man and half a mile from Goodramgate at that.

  As the priest locked the door with two heavy keys, clumsily, still muttering, his impatience changed suddenly to fear.

  “Follow me. I must make haste.”

  He ran back through the darkness, his footsteps echoing from the walls of the houses less loud in his ears than his own panting breath. Once he tripped over something alive on the cobbles and half fell. As he scrambled to his feet, his hand felt the warm, hairy hide of a sleeping pig. He ran on, at last into the baker’s shop and up the stairs, gasping for breath.

  She was dead, the taper still burning at the window, her bare arm hanging down over the side of the bed, her eyes open, afraid. Beside her on the bed the baby lay asleep.

  He closed her eyes. Then he stood for a short time and looked at them both in the flickering light, Alice and her baby, the one, he knew, as utterly gone from him as the other.

  He picked up the child, who startled as he touched him but did not wake, and wrapped him from the cold. He had never held anything so light. He laid him in the cradle and put over him the pieced coverlet. He did not hate him for his mother’s death as his own father had hated him, and never would he. He carried the cradle down the stairs and through the streets to her father’s house because there was nothing else for him to do.

  Again he had to hammer on the door. The baby, in the cradle on the step, still did not wake.

  He put the cradle into the arms of the sleepy servant who opened the door.

  “Tell the master and the mistress that their daughter is dead this night of childbed fever. Tell them now.”

  Since then a day and a night and a second day had passed. He had not yet grieved. He had pushed grief ahead of him like an unwelcome guest, knowing that sooner or later grief would turn to face him. He had come here, to her grave, in order to stop walking, in order to let grief turn and meet him, and now he was only alone. Nothing was before him. No tears came, no prayers. Nothing.

  He looked with surprise at what he had done to the flowers. They lay on the earth with their stalks twisted and bent, every petal and every leaf torn off, a handful of trash thrown down for birds to peck among.

  She had sent him for a priest because to her he was no longer a priest. And if he were a priest neither to her nor to the queen’s court in the Minster, what was he?

  A little limping rhythm beat softly in his head and after a while fetched up the words that belonged to it.

  Who’ll be the clerk?

  I, said the lark,

  If ‘tis not in the dark,

  I’ll be the clerk.

  It did not matter what he was. The truth that he had known had lately been hidden from him, but it was there yet, in him and if in him then somewhere between him and God. It had freed him once from the past, and it must free him again. The charge he bore, Alice, her fear, her death without the magic phrases she had sent him to fetch, he could neither escape nor lay down. He would bear it always, because it was what she had now become for him, in him. But she, she herself, who had been changed into something else, was free. Her he resigned to God. The sin he would bear. Simul iustus, simul peccator. Believe, believe. Surely, even now, as he accepted it for ever, God forgave the sin.

  And the words of absolution Alice had longed for as she was dying? The priest through whom God speaks forgiveness? The priest in whose hands the bread and wine become Christ?

  Who caught his blood? I, said the fish, With my little dish, I caught his blood.

  He shook his head violently. One day these questions—one day, but not today. He was worn out with running, chasing through thickets a quarry he had lost.

  He started to sweep together with his hands the remains of the spoiled flowers. The wet petals stuck to the earth, so he had to leave them where they had fallen.

  He would go away from York. He had twice visited merchants who in the past had brought their families week after week to hear him preach in his church. He had offered to say the English service of Holy Communion for them in their houses. They had shaken their heads and asked him to go at once, afraid of the new laws. None of those he had cared for in his parish, not one, had sought him out after his disgrace in the Minster. At Archbishop Holgate’s school they had not dared to hire him. But he had heard that in London there were many faithful to the prayerbook and the new ways, many who were keeping their preachers in hiding from the bishops and were glad to do it. They would have a use for him. He would make of the time he had left, at last, a simple good. He would take to the Protestants who were standing firm what he knew of the truth and leave the past where it lay.

  He got slowly to his feet. He was stiff and old, and his clothes were damp on his back.

  The next day he packed up in a blanket his three books, his spare shirt, his winter shoes, and a little square he cut from Alice’s velvet cloak, and he set out for London.

  26

  October 1554

  Messire Simon Renard, Lieutenant of Amont, ambassador of Emperor Charles V at the court of Queen Mary and King Philip of England, for the time in Brussels, to King Philip in London; October 1554.

  “. . . I have but this hour left the house of the cardinallegate, to whom I communicated all that your Majesty empowered me to say to him and from whom I received, upon the whole, replies that sho
uld satisfy both your Majesty and the parliament of England when it shall meet. I allowed the said cardinal (as your Majesty instructed me) to suppose that it was the ardour of his last letter to your Majesty imploring permission to enter England that had brought me to Brussels; thus he began by setting forth yet again his reasons against the further delay of his arrival in England, but expressed himself happy to recognise your Majesty’s wish that he should now be given leave to depart from here and to resume his journey as soon as may be possible. He consented to enter England as an Englishman by birth, and as the ambassador of a great prince (the pope), but without the emblems and ceremonies of a legate, should such an entry be deemed expedient, and he further agreed that he would not attempt to use in England his legatine powers without the will and consent of your Majesty and the queen. As to the third matter, the enlargement of his powers so that he might, without reference to Rome, be able to remit the obligation of those who have obtained lands of the Church to return the same, he appears to be willing to seek such enlargement from the pope, but still somewhat evaded the question, saying that he would by no means have it appear that obedience to the Church should be, as it were, purchased by the offer of the Church’s property. So that I shall return to this matter tomorrow, in order to have made your Majesty’s conditions for his coming into England entirely clear to him.

  “In conclusion I must add that I found in Monsignor Pole, who received me with the utmost dignity and courtesy, none of that silent obstinacy of which the emperor your father and the bishop of Arras have of late had cause to complain, but rather a noble simplicity which in my opinion cannot fail to call forth admiration in his countrymen (from whom he has these twenty years and more been separated) and must work greatly to your Majesty’s advantage when at last he comes to England, as your Majesty’s friend and servant, which he now warmly professes himself to be.”