If no month’s mind, well then a year’s mind: the world has turned a full circle; it is midsummer again and high time to remember. A whole year gone. Death’s calendar is not simple; or is it the conjugation of the verb that is so difficult: they died yesterday, last week, last month, a year ago? And the permanence of the past tense also; yes, hard to believe, even now, when they have been dead a summer, an autumn, a winter and a spring, a harvest and a great storm, Michaelmas, Advent, Christmas, Lent, snow and sleet and sunshine, new growth and falling leaves. Four deaths, two births; not quite a fair exchange, but when were the scales equal? Four deaths if I count my husband’s, more than a year ago, soon after the feast of Valentine, an unnaturally warm time, I remember. Death should come on cold days, when icicles hang from the trees and nothing stirs, not in the full bloom of June, as it did for Hugh and William Clare.
It was cold here in the parish when Sir Joselin died, and it must have been colder yet where he lay, in London, in a prison cell. Word came to us in November, but the exact day of his death is unknown. Roland had been with him a fortnight or so earlier, and now reproaches himself cruelly for not having stayed, for leaving him to die on his own. But Joselin would not have been alone, I think; not if there is a God. No man was ever more steadfast in his faith than the old priest and consequently less afraid of dying. His death was, as Joan said, a blessed mercy – far better in a bed, albeit in a cell, than upon the scaffold or the bonfire. She is right; even if the angels had swooped straight away to rescue his soul at the moment of his dying, those dreadful means of exit would have been a prospect to confound the very bravest.
Roland should not be full of remorse, for he fought to save Sir Joselin, at grave risk to himself. What we have learned in these last years is that anyone who wants a long life must lie as low as a vole in a hedgerow: sticking out one’s neck is asking for the blade. Nonetheless my nephew Roland wrote letters to clerics and patrons at court protesting Joselin’s innocence, he rode up and down to London with the testimonies of the warden Cadd and other parishioners, he appeared at the trial and swore that the priest was no papist but instead a loyal subject of the king. In the end, though, it was Henry Martyn’s evidence that prevailed, being more to the taste of the times. Although they reject the images that were as books for those who cannot read, these henchmen of the young Josiah, they are very fond of exemplars that serve as warnings. And poor Sir Joselin was one such – strung up like a dead bird as deterrent. It was the girdle of Saint Margaret that undid him finally. Charged with superstitious practices and, contrarily, of stealing valuable possessions of the church, he refused to deny the power of the relic or to reveal where it was hidden. His accusers must have felt deprived when the old man had the effrontery to die a natural death of ague before he could be burned or hanged, but in truth they should be glad that there was one less martyr for the annals.
I have not seen Agnes’s son and will never see him, I suppose, although he is half-brother to my own. Agnes has severed all bonds with me despite my promise that this house would be hers too, for as long as she wanted to live here, alone or married to Henry. She will not forgive me for bearing her father’s lawful heir. However, the liberal sum my lord left her as her portion in his will was enough, it seems, to bind Henry Martyn to his troth, against Joan’s fears. Or was it Roland who held him to it? I hear that Henry prospers and am pleased by that for Agnes’s sake. Does any woman freely choose whom to love? Having lost her mother, her two brothers and her sisters, is it any wonder that Agnes adored her monkey Titus with as fierce a passion as a mother’s for her child? I suppose that she got what she wanted in the end – the creature’s burial in the church – but I have not asked if that was indeed what happened, and I do not care. On that day in June, a year ago today, there was such havoc in the church that the levering up of stones would not have been remarked. Nor do I know if the king’s commissioner ever caused the tomb chest where the Christ had lain to be unsealed: the limestone lid that Simm made is in place still, with nothing written on it.
As drunks are sheepish when they come to their senses, the makers of mayhem are hangdog these days but calm again, their fury spent. When they woke from their madness and saw what they had done, most of the rioters were very sorry for it, but it was too late by then; the dead stay dead, no matter how fervent their murderers’ repentance. A public avowal of culpability, and due legal process, might have been tidier but would not have brought Hugh or William back. As it was, the half-hearted enquiries into the killings came to nothing – Goodge the wheelwright’s brother is the constable of this parish. As it is, the perpetrators will have to square their consciences with God.
The wandering preacher has moved on. There’s no need to fear, though, that his next stopping place will catch fire, for his is no longer the voice in the wilderness but the voice of the orthodox. What had been a call to arms against the superstitious old ways is doctrine now, imposed, inspected, controlled and regulated, and woe betide the dissenter. The little king has signed an Act that shuts down every chantry in the land and converts all their assets to his use. Well, it is widely known that his father left an empty treasury and a pile of debts. Poor boy, he had to get his money somewhere, and the dead are less likely to complain than the living over the loss of their bequests. If they believed that they could buy songs for their souls in perpetuity, then they were fools, according to the law. Fools anyway to expect that anything could be done for them when they were dead and beyond hope. It’s only their tombs that are safe still, left standing when all else is torn apart. Marmion says the reason for that is the general respect for the dead, but why the stones that house their corpses should be sacrosanct, if their souls are not, remains a puzzle to me.
Joan and I went to mass this morning to pray for William, dead this day last year. Our prayers were of necessity unvoiced; the new priest teaches that salvation comes through faith alone, not through our own deserving, and is anyway predestined; therefore prayers for the dead are prayers in vain. This new priest is temporary, only here until the bishop – likewise newly installed – decides what should become of this parish. To this day the commissioner is seeking to discover where the relic of Saint Margaret and the marble Christ are hidden, but no one will tell him, and because he is ashamed of having fled precipitously when William was killed and Hugh mortally wounded, without even trying to use his powers to enforce order, he dislikes returning to this village and his investigation is as cursory as the one into the murders. It is enough for the Commission that they have confiscated all the silver and the vestments that the church owned, with the money my lord my husband left in trust as provision for his chantry and perpetual prayers for his soul. With my heart I give thanks that the dead Christ lies with Catherine, Hugh and William, the book of their lives written in air and birdsong, not in stone. Let the earth rest lightly on them, requiescant in pace, you who were beloved.
The church is a white space now, clean and white like bone, and empty of almost everything but pews and font and pulpit, and the tomb in its idle chantry. The altars have gone, with the rood screen and the images of Jesus, Mary and Saint John; all the walls are bare, except for one. On the east wall, beneath the window which used to show the risen Christ, a careful hand has lettered the Ten Commandments of Moses in pitch-black paint, for the benefit of the three or four here who can read. Another kind of doom. Eleven imperatives; eight times thou shalt not. Words shall be our coinage now, in place of pictures; one day people shall learn to read them, but will that bring them closer to the Word that was in the beginning, the Word that was with God? Perhaps, if our letters, like the alphabet of the Armenians, were shaped like birds.
Listening, half-listening, to the priest reading from a letter to the Romans – Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers – I remember William telling of those bird-forms, moving his fingers like wings. I remember William singing. My son, William Hugh, sings all day long, from the time he opens his eyes in the morning until he closes them at night; he cannot talk, but he can make the sound of words in music. His eyes are sloe-dark, like his father’s.
Sunlight is dancing through the clear glass of the windows and alighting on the white stone of my tomb. Hands raised in prayer, pearls round my neck, my black-veiled head resting on its book of stone. That tomb can wait, I think. I don’t entirely miss the painted windows, although they were beautiful, for the plainness of the crown glass in their place is pleasing in the way it lets the light in; whiteness and clarity, they have their own truth too. This is a peaceful place, but something has been stolen from it – not solely the candles, the colours and the pictures on the walls. The saints have gone, they who were ambassadors of a power beyond all understanding, stepping stones to God. And it was here where the living and the dead met, where the living had faith that their songs would reach the ones they had lost and give them comfort. A place where the dead, although invisible and speechless, were present in prayer and imagination, a place of covenant between us. Now it is simply where the bones lie, nothing but a tomb, for the bridge of prayer has been condemned and the dead shall only be remembered in graven stone and in the short span of a heart. Safe they may be, in the gentle night, but what of us who mourn them in this silence; how shall we sing for our dead?