The Time Before You Die by Lucy Beckett

Author:Lucy Beckett [Beckett, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Novels
ISBN: 9781681497143
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2016-06-16T16:00:00+00:00

7

23 June 1558

He didn’t know what to do with the flowers. He looked at them again, a red rose and a white, cranesbill, marjoram, bright green pennyroyal, and silvery fronds of ladslove, tied together in a bunch with a piece of ribbon. They were limp now and three or four petals dropped from the white rose. The sweetness of the moment, the gift, was fading with their scent.

The air in the room was still, and although one of the casements was open to the summer twilight, the tapers in the tall candlesticks burned with straight clear flames. The table was covered with a heavy velvet cloth, and in its centre was a gilt dish piled high with grapes and plums too early to have been grown in England. He could see trees, motionless, black, outside the window, in full leaf, and beyond them lights on the river. Sounds reached him faintly from the streets, music, laughter, the cries of pedlars selling cockles, sweetmeats, flowers, now and then a cheer from a crowd surrounding a juggler or a group of girls dancing, sometimes a burst of drunken singing.

Midsummer Eve. In the cellar he had kept count only of the days of the week, not of the date. Coming off the boat at Lambeth onto the thronging wharf, he thought he had never seen so many people, so many happy, careless faces, young men sweating as they danced, children eating strawberries, their mouths red with juice, babies crying because of the noise. He had been rowed downstream in the sunshine, past ducks and moorhens busy on the water, swans, the flowery grass high on the bank and the leaves of the willow trees brushing the surface of the river. But it was when the soldier took his arm on the wharf and they began to push through the hot, jostling crowd that he felt he had returned from the dead.

They came to an open space at a street corner where thirty or forty men and girls were dancing in four lines. The crowd watching were clapping the rhythm of the dance, and old women were gathered in the doorways looking on, some of them with tears in their eyes. They could not pass and stood with the rest as the lines of dancers moved towards each other and back. Suddenly, at a shout from one of the men, the rhythm changed. The clapping became faster, more insistent. The dance changed shape, the lines dissolving, the men coming out to the edge of the space and standing in a big untidy ring, clapping too, stamping their feet on the cobbles, while the girls in the middle whirled round and round. They were at the front of the crowd. The soldier began to clap and stamp. They were part of the ring. He clapped with the others, laughing, his heart beating fast, his body warm with new life. Another shout. The clapping and stamping suddenly stopped. The girls in the middle, breathless, dizzy, all

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