The Time Before You Die

by Lucy Beckett

  “What is it, my lord?”

  As he spoke he heard the sound of a man shouting, hoarsely and some distance away, perhaps in the hall of the palace, or the courtyard. He went to the window but could see nothing for the fog, pressing dark against the glass. He turned and listened himself. Silence.

  “A drunken soldier in the guardroom.”

  The cardinal’s head shook in a convulsive spasm.

  “No—no—I know that—”

  The shouts came again, much closer now, and again, closer still and mingled with other raised voices. The door burst open, banging against something as it did so, and a servant fell into the room backwards as if pushed by a violent force. The confusion of voices in the doorway suddenly ceased. A man stood there, panting, dishevelled, a crowd of frightened faces behind him. He had a knife in his hand. The blade glinted in the firelight. There was frost on the fur of his cloak.

  Robert Fletcher was on his feet, heavy and resolute, standing so as to shield the cardinal. But the stillness that had fallen on them all came from behind him, from the dying man lying motionless in his bed, and after a few moments he moved aside and stood in the shadows near the head of the bed. He did not turn to look at the cardinal, but he knew that the fear had gone from his eyes.

  The man in the doorway dropped the knife. It clattered as it hit the floor, and he began to laugh, a high-pitched demented laugh that changed to tearful sobbing.

  The knife was not a dagger but a common carving knife. The blade was dirty.

  “They would have kept me out. They bolted the door against me. I heard the bolts go. One. Two. Have I no right to see you? Have I no right? When they’re all dead but you and me? They know me! They tried to stop me, twenty of them! You set them on me! You set twenty men on me, and I wouldn’t hurt a soul. You shouldn’t have left a knife there. I might have killed someone. It would have been your doing if I had killed—killed—”

  He broke off, quiet suddenly as if a new thought had struck him. He bent down and picked up the knife. He felt the blade with his thumb.

  “It’s blunt. Blunt I tell you!” he shouted in the small, warm room. “Why does he give me knives that are blunt? I’ll tell you why!”

  He rounded on the four or five men who had edged into the room behind him, and they shrank back.

  “Because I am not to be trusted. That’s the reason, the good, the excellent reason. I—am—not—to—be—trusted! Have you heard of the house of York? Have you? The blood of kings? The blood of traitors? I killed them all, all, mother, brother, cousins, all. They said they would rack me, and I killed them all.”

  He turned back towards the room and lowered his head. His voice had sunk to a hiss.

  “All but one. He was not there to be killed. He was not there to be racked. He was somewhere else. And yet it was all for him. . . that. . . that. . .”

  He seemed to lose hold of what he was saying. His face sagged, and his eyes became dull, stupid. He looked down and saw the knife in his hand. He turned it over and over in his fingers, staring at it as if he had never seen it before.

  “Put it away.”

  The cardinal’s voice was mild and steady. The slight stir it caused among those at the door did not make the man with the knife look towards them. He walked slowly to the table and put down the knife. He poured out a cup of wine with a shaking hand and drank it all. Then he turned round in a slow circle where he stood, looking at the faces by the door, one by one, at Robert Fletcher’s, peering as though his sight were weak, at last at the cardinal. He came to the foot of the bed.

  “Why are you here? I thought you lived in Rome.” He spoke peevishly, like a fretful child.

  “This is my house. I lie here because I am not well.”

  “Not well? What do you think I am? I am never well. Several times they thought I would die. Why do you not speak to me? And why are all these men here? Can I not be trusted to see you alone?”

  “Sit down, Geoffrey. There is a chair.”

  He backed away from the bed. “Oh, no, I’ll not sit down. I’m a grown man. I can choose for myself. I’ll not sit down again with you to be told. . . to be told. . .”

  Then he stopped. His eyes widened without blinking, stared horribly.

  “You are white,” he whispered. “White. And not moving. That’s it! That’s why they’ve brought me here. You are dying!” At the last word his voice rose to a shriek of terror. A shudder ran through the lookers-on at the door. Robert Fletcher took a menacing step forward. But at once the man began to laugh again, retreating from his fear, the same ghastly laugh as before.

  “You are dying. Even you. Even you cannot live for ever. I expect you think you will join them in paradise.

  “How can you die and leave me, after all I’ve suffered for you? The blood of traitors! My blood. And yours too!”

  He shook with laughter, then quieted suddenly, his eyes narrowing with suspicion.

  “Why have you had me brought here? To watch at your deathbed? For you to ask my forgiveness? And theirs? How can they forgive you from the cold grave? No. You have a reason. A good and Christian reason. Always a good, Christian reason! I have it! Before you die you will forgive me! That’s your reason! That would be like your grace, your holiness! But we’ve played this scene before. That was in Rome. No one to watch. Have we to play it again, in England, before honest English witnesses? Very well! We shall play it. Listen! All of you!”

  He turned, flinging his arms wide.

  “See how the coward, the traitor, grovels before the brave, the virtuous, the blameless cardinal!”

  “Geoffrey, I beseech you. . .”

  But he was on his knees, hands clasped together, eyes raised to heaven.

  He began to recite in a loud, harsh monotone, not pausing between the words: “I confess to almighty God to blessed Mary ever-virgin to blessed Michael the archangel to blessed John the Baptist to the holy apostles Peter and Paul to all the saints and to you brethren that I have. . . that I have. . . that. . .”

  He faltered. His face crumpled suddenly, and his eyes stared wildly round like the eyes of a terrified animal. They came to rest on Robert Fletcher.

  “What have I done?” he cried out with a breaking voice, and then, more quietly, pleading, “What have I done?”

  He still knelt. His hands were still clasped together as he bent forward, straining as if to see through the shadows. His eyes were fixed on him, begging for an answer.

  Robert Fletcher shook his head.

  The kneeling man toppled forward to the floor and wept, this time really wept, his head between his outstretched arms, bowed by a shaking grief.

  It was plain that the fury had gone out of him, and when at last he raised his head from the floor, two men came from where they had been standing near the door and helped him to his feet. He did not shrug them off but stood forlorn between them as they held him gently by the arms.

  “Take me home,” he said.

  They led him from the room. He walked unsteadily, his shoulders twitched by sobs. He did not look at the cardinal again.

  The others followed, murmuring among themselves as they went. Only the servant remained. He came to the foot of the bed, anxious inquiry in his face.

  “Leave us.”

  The cardinal’s voice was just audible.

  The servant left the room, shutting the door behind him. Robert Fletcher returned to the chair and sat down.

  The cardinal’s eyes were closed. Tears escaped from under his eyelids and rolled down his cheeks into his beard.

  The tears stopped. After some time he spoke.

  “Are you there, Master Fletcher?”

  “Aye, my lord.”

  “That was—that is—my brother. You saw and heard—”

  “Aye, my lord.”

  “You will understand, now, how it is that I too am often so far—so far from certitude. Behind me also, and not left behind me but here with me, within me, is that suffering, that pain. I must bear it, not only beca
use, as you see, he cannot, but because it is true that—because, Master Fletcher, I was indeed the cause of it.”

  He waited through a long silence for the cardinal to speak again. He sensed him gathering what was left of his strength for a new effort.

  During this silence the little black cat of the summer, which must have slipped into the room while the door was open, jumped onto the bed and rubbed its head against the cardinal’s motionless fingers. With a faint rasping sound, it began to lick a finger, which responded by straightening slightly. Then it curled up and went to sleep beside the thin hand with the heavy ring.

  The cardinal opened his eyes and smiled.

  “Bring me a little wine, Master Fletcher, and I will tell you a tale that will make you glad you were not born to great estate.”

  The wine brought, after a few moments, a trace of colour to the cardinal’s drawn face and a brightness to his eyes. He did not close them again but looked across at him with an eager intensity, as if he had at last reached a decision long foreseen.

  “If you will bear with me.”

  “My lord. . .” He spread his hands, to receive whatever it might be that he should be given.

  The cardinal looked down for an instant, and then back at him.

  “Very well.” He paused.

  “My brother Geoffrey was of all my family the least strong, the least able to stand firm against the blandishments and the menace of the world. We learned at our mother’s knee of blood most unjustly spilled by royal command, of her father Clarence secretly murdered in the Tower, of her brother Warwick executed by King Henry Tudor on no charge worthy of the name. Her courage in the telling of these stories hardened the rest of us to face the dangers of our inheritance with a like courage. Geoffrey would wake night after night screaming, terrified by dreams of blood and drowning. As a man he found only in spendthrift, reckless living some refuge from his fears.

  “When we were young, King Harry, perhaps in reparation for his father’s killing of my uncle, treated us with very great kindness and liberality, myself most of all. He kept me in state at Oxford, in the university at Padua, at Venice. He offered me the see of York at Wolsey’s death when I was barely thirty. I refused it because he already demanded as condition that I should think him right in the matter of his divorce. I could not think him right then; later, as you know, after his destruction of the unity of the Church, I could still less think him right, for all the love I bore him.

  “I loved the king when I was a boy, Master Fletcher. To me he was everything a great prince should be. I loved him.

  “I returned to Italy and lived as an exile. I wrote a book against the king’s proceedings. I did not publish it but sent it to the king, hoping that he might thereby come to see the peril he was in. His rage against me was terrible. Because I had called him wrong, misled, he branded me a rebel, a traitor, a viper he had nursed, and all my family with me, though none of them had raised a finger against him. He was a man whose fury, once roused, must find a vent. Master Cromwell knew how to break a weak link where he saw one. Geoffrey was taken, imprisoned in the Tower, a place of horror to him since he was a child, examined seven times, threatened with the rack. In the end he laid false evidence against my elder brother, my cousin Exeter, and some others, that they had spoken treasonably, intending harm to the king. They were executed. My mother was kept in the Tower several years, several years, Master Fletcher, an old woman of great goodness and fidelity, in cold and want, and at last executed also, on no charge at all.

  “Twice in the Tower Geoffrey tried to take his own life, once with a knife. Aye. Since he was freed he has been at intervals as you see him now, driven quite from his wits by the terror of the past. At other times he is quiet, spiritless, without the will to put on his clothes or eat or talk. I have seen him sit all day on the same stool, not even coming to the window for light or to the fire for warmth. Remorse has wasted him these twenty years, remorse that he has not the power to turn to penitence. Yet whose is the guilt for the sin that so torments him? Who put him to the test that he could not but fail? Not he himself, not Master Cromwell and his obedient lords, but I—I, with my clarity of mind, my stubbornness, my learned assurance that I was in the right, I, far away in Italy among my friends, left him, who had none of these things, to be brought to this wretchedness, this despair. He was no more than the miserable agent of my family’s destruction. I was the cause.”

  Except of his mother the cardinal had spoken levelly, as if he had many times been through these events in his mind and long ago become accustomed to his account of them. He was silent for a moment.

  Then he said in a different voice: “You said that you had a brother, Master Fletcher.”

  “I had two, my lord. The elder hated me because my father loved my mother and not his. He would not let me into my father’s house when I came back from the Mountgrace. Perhaps he feared that I would be a charge on him, though I wished only to know whether my father still lived. My father was dead.

  “My second brother was also the son of my father’s first wife. They reckoned him an idiot. He was mute and solitary. He did strange things. But he was not an idiot, and he was not deaf. He did not speak because—because, over what I could not tell, his heart was broken.

  “My father paid no more heed to him than to a dog. My elder brother kicked him, cursed him, beat him. He never resisted. Sometimes he would break things. He broke a great stone trough to pieces with a pick and all the water ran out over the yard. The day I left to go to the Charterhouse I could not find him, though he was always afraid to go far. I looked for him all day. Afterwards I feared that grief at my going had made him run away. As a boy I was smaller, weaker than he was. He would follow me to places where he would not go alone. I think he loved me then, so far as he was able, though as I grew up he came with me less and less. All the years at the Charterhouse I never knew whether or not he had run away that day. If he had, they would not have gone after him.

  “When I came back I could discover no news of him. He was altogether forgotten in the village, even among the old people, as if he had never been. Later, in York, years later, I saw him one day. After the chantries were dissolved. There was a mob running wild in the streets, breaking, plundering the churches. I saw him among them, older than all the rest, and taller, strong still, with a great iron bar in his hands. Soldiers took them from the church, and afterwards I could not find him, not in the prison, not anywhere in the city.

  “But he was there. I think he was in York, God knows in what wretchedness, what filthy hovel, all the time that I was living there. For it was in York that I saw him the last time, the time I could not—did not. . . It was cold, a bitter wind blowing. I had gone out for eggs. I had money at home, meat, bread, warm clothes, firewood. I saw him in the street, lying in the gutter. I pretended to myself that I was not certain it was he. It was he. I saw him lying where he had fallen. People hurried past, going home, as I was. It was almost dark. I stood still outside my door. I had to choose. It was so cold, though it was April, that there was ice over the running ditch. I went in. My wife was there, great with child. I said to myself that it was for her I had left him there. She was much afraid, had many dreams. But it was not because of her. It was I that was afraid. I had peace, warmth, safety. I was afraid that he would take them from me. I begrudged him them. I looked on him and passed by on the other side. Soon after, it began to snow. He died, very likely, that same night. Very likely the watch found him dead before morning. My lord—”

  “Calm yourself, Master Fletcher.”

  “My lord, I read, this morning, Jesus’ words. I have read them many times before. ‘If thou bring thy gift to the altar and there rememberest that thy brother hath aught against thee, leave there thy gift before the altar and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift.’ He is dead. My brother is dead. What is there that I can do?”

  “Or I, Master Fletcher, though my brother be alive?”


  There was silence in the room, among the burning candles.

  He got out his handkerchief, mopped his face, blew his nose, put back the handkerchief. He looked up at the cardinal. The large eyes, patient and thoughtful, returned his look.

  “I am a coward, my lord. I have always been a coward. Once when I was a lad I met a beggar, a horrible old man, hungry, frightened, full of hatred. I was afraid. I ran away. I was afraid of my father, of my brothers, both of them, of the bitterness and hatred that was in the house. I ran away to the cloister, to my quiet cell, my garden, and stopped my ears to the misery of those I left behind. Much later when my old schoolmaster was dying I cared for him, fed him, read to him because he was blind, but I never spoke to him of the despair I knew was in him. I was afraid of his grief. And Alice—my wife—poor child. She died alone because I had gone out to find someone else to help her die. And my brother, that last day. And my own son.

  “I have been a coward, my lord, I know it now. I have been afraid, always afraid, to love.”

  “But not to bear the blame.”

  The cardinal’s gaze was steady; the few words had been spoken very softly, as if to himself. Then he said: “Put some wood on the fire, Master Fletcher, and lift me up a little higher. If I am ever to try, it must be now.”

  There were great logs stacked beside the hearth. He picked up two, one after the other, and laid them across the iron bars. Those that were there already, consumed almost to ash, crumbled beneath them and dropped into the burning embers. He returned to the bed, took the dying man gently by the shoulders and, as he braced his back, raised him a little on the pillows. He was lighter to hold than the fresh logs.

  He sat down.

  “Soon they will bring my supper.” The cardinal smiled. “Which I shall not be able to eat. And before I sleep the fever will be back upon me. What I have told you already, many people know. There is more. I tell you this tale for you. I begin with myself, but I shall end with you. In a few days, a week or two at the most, I shall be dead. But you, you will be alive, you will have the time, perhaps, to—to think.