Chapter Two Needle and Thread #2
Anne crouched against the tavern’s wall.
She placed the sewing basket at her feet and put her head between her knees.
She squeezed her legs to hold it there, angled down so she could see the basket.
There were a few spools of thread, a big needle and a small needle, both in cases, a thimble, a case of pins, a swatch of felt, and a set of shears.
Anne uncased the larger needle and stuck it in the felt swatch, so that its eye pointed upward.
She unspooled an arm’s length of a cream-colored thread, cut it with the shears, and poked its end through the needle’s eye.
She had just knotted the thread when a rustling startled her and she jerked, dropping her head in the dirt.
What had that been? Probably just an animal in the trees, a squirrel or shrew.
She felt with her hands and picked her head back up, dusting the dirt off her face and tongue. Luckily, the needle remained threaded.
Anne didn’t want to touch the top of her neck.
She didn’t want to touch the bottom of her head, to acknowledge the separation, the violence.
Nevertheless, she grabbed the threaded needle between her thumb and forefinger, then, holding the needle, raised and gingerly arranged her head atop her neck till it felt aligned and in place.
It felt good to have it there, to see from the correct height the world around her.
She took in a breath through her open mouth, and felt her lungs fill with air.
She pushed out a little cough. Her throat was dry.
She held her head in place with her left hand and, with her right, pierced the needle through the flesh of her lower neck, just below her right ear, under the gap in her skin, into the flesh of her upper neck, and pulled it through, until the knot at the end of the thread caught against her skin, tugged, but did not give.
Doing her best to ignore the pain and pinch of the needle piercing and pulling, she repeated the stitch, working her way to the front of her neck, beneath her chin, before changing hands and continuing with her left, around the side of her neck, below her left ear, around the back of her neck, where she felt the needle for a moment scrape her knobby spine, shuddered, then switched the thread back to her right hand, to finish where she had started, below her right ear.
As she sewed, she felt the skin prickle where it rejoined, as though the wound were healing through some magic.
She felt the bones inside her neck prickle, too, her windpipe, her gullet.
She felt the pulse return to her neck with a flicker; she felt her heart, which she realized now had been still, quicken and strengthen into steady beats.
When she was finished, she looped the thread into a knot, squatted down, careful not to lean too far forward, lest her head break its new stitching and fall off, and grabbed the shears.
She held the blades close to her neck and snipped the loose thread.
Anne hadn’t expected the thread to hold her head in place, but it did, or it did well enough.
Her head felt wobbly, but connected. She turned it to the left, to the right, took a deep breath, felt the air travel down her mended throat, cold for a moment when it passed the healing wound, then warmer, each breath more normal, until she felt no difference, until her breath felt as it had before her execution.
It felt good to breathe. And, she realized, she was hungry.
She hastily arranged and tied the kerchief she’d stolen over her unkempt hair, then dropped the needle back into the sewing basket and kicked it into the shrubs.
What did Anne care if it got returned? The tavern keeper’s wife might find it later, or maybe a beggar would, and sell the thread and needles to some other wife, and pocket the money.
Anne tipped her head from side to side. The bones in her neck popped and cracked, in a pleasureful way.
She ran a hand along the stitching on her neck, beneath which the severed skin puckered and came together, rejoining.
How was that possible? How was any of this possible?
Anne felt secure enough now to move from her hiding place.
She peered around the corner of the tavern, into the alley.
She’d left the side door ajar, and she returned to it.
A great thirst consumed her, and this time she didn’t go up the stairs to the tavern keeper’s dwelling but rather entered the tavern itself, through a back hallway.
The tavern was dingy, its floorboards sticky with spilled ale.
Through the grimy windows, a wan light filtered, catching dust motes in its beams. So there was enough money to pay a glazier; the snoring tavern keeper and his wife must be doing a tidy business, he pouring out mugs of ale to laborers, tradesmen, pilgrims ready to spend any coin on drink, she birthing him heirs in the small bedroom upstairs.
The floorboards above the large trusses framing the tavern ceiling creaked and moaned.
Anne could hear the footsteps of a child racing across the wooden planks, probably fresh out of bed and running for the chamber pot.
The mother’s heavier footsteps followed, plodding and calm.
Anne needed to hurry. She fetched a dirty tankard off a nearby table, uncorked a keg of ale, filled the vessel, and gulped the ale down in a few long swallows.
It tasted sweet, just a hint of bitterness, and weak.
She worried that it would leak out her neck, along the healing stitches, but it traveled swiftly down her throat, filling her empty stomach.
The footsteps on the floor above increased in number and quickened.
She heard a door squeak on its hinges. She poured herself another tankard of ale and drank it.
Then, spying a bowl full of water, she cupped some in her hands and rinsed the dried blood off her neck and décolletage, off her face, so that her skin was clean, before rushing out the side door to the alley.
There, she hiked her skirts, squatted, and let out a strong stream of urine.
It kicked a puff of dust up when it hit the dirt below, then flowed past her feet, toward the river, like everything else.
Anne looked down at her gown. It was covered in dried brown blood.
Beneath it, the skirt of her red kirtle was relatively clean, but beneath the kirtle, her smock was stiff in the front, near her crotch, with what she supposed was her own piss, released moments after decapitation.
Luckily, she hadn’t shat herself, as she knew people sometimes did upon dying.
The gown’s fur hem was caked in mud from the riverbank.
Small bits of straw clung to the fabric at her knees, left there from kneeling on the scaffold.
The mess on Anne’s clothing was conspicuous.
What she wanted was a clean gown appropriate for her station as queen of England, wife of the king, mother to the Princess Elizabeth, true heir to the throne.
She knew that she would fare better, though, would stand out less, dressed as a commoner.
That way, she could make her way back across the bridge, unnoticed; she could sneak into whatever palace Henry and Jane were holed up in, undetected.
Then what? What vengeance might she enact?
Did she even want vengeance? She wasn’t sure yet.
She needed some time to think. But she knew that she must find her way to Henry if she was to have any control, if she was to have any justice.
Anne walked back behind the tavern and carefully removed her sullied gown.
This took some skill and contortion, with no lady’s maids to assist. What remained was her red kirtle, over her plain white smock.
Both had been protected from too much blood by the thick gown, and the kirtle’s red color hid the little bit that had soaked through.
This would do for Southwark, she supposed, where many women lacked gowns.
Even the tavern keeper’s wife had had just a kirtle laid out over her bedroom chair.
Anne needed something to cover the wound on her neck.
She remembered that she’d asked her lady Margaret Lee to bring her one of Elizabeth’s silk swaddling cloths in the Tower, from when the child was an infant, so that she could be buried with it.
She’d hidden the cloth inside the bodice of her kirtle, beneath her smock, close to her skin.
She felt inside her bodice. It was still there.
Carefully, she retrieved it and held it to her nose.
It smelled of Elizabeth as she had as a baby, sweet like bread, and lavender, from the sachet it had been stored with.
Anne wrapped the silk cloth around her neck.
The fabric was just long enough to encircle it.
Digging in the scrubby trees, she retrieved the sewing basket, threaded a needle, and sewed the two ends of the silk cloth together to form a collar, so that the stitches holding her head in place were hidden.
She crumpled the gown and kicked it into the shrubs, along with the sewing basket. There, she thought, done.
It was in this condition that Anne stepped out from the alleyway alongside the tavern and back onto the streets of the unruly borough of Southwark.
What did she know about Southwark? That it was south of London.
That she’d been here a handful of times on official business with Henry.
That to travel south of London one must pass through Southwark, or take a barge down the river, avoiding it, which of course was more dignified.
That portions of Southwark operated under the authority of the bishop of Winchester.
That it had a reputation for lawlessness.
On the street, the people were going about their morning business.
The houses here were spaced farther apart than those in London.
Little gardens were dotted between them, adorned with chickens and geese.
A few buildings down, a wooden sign in the shape of a pig standing over a large knife hung from a pole.
Must be a butcher’s shop. And next to that, a building with a wooden sign in the shape of a workingman’s shirt. Must be a tailor’s.
Farther up the road Anne saw a hostel. She knew people traveling to London from the south stopped in Southwark to rest for a night before crossing London Bridge.
She knew those headed south to Canterbury on a pilgrimage also stopped to rest a night before their long journey.
She knew, as well, that there were prostitutes in Southwark, that men came here to visit the brothels.
Within the city walls of London, prostitution was illegal, but in Southwark there were the stews, brothels that were allowed to operate.
A wink and a nod to the wives of London, who wanted prostitutes out of the city, and to the husbands, who wanted a place to behave like animals.
How could you tell a hostel from a brothel?
How could you tell a working woman from a prostitute?
Anne wondered. Outside this hostel, two women beat at a set of thick drapes with wooden bats, sending up billows of dust, while the hostel keeper sat in a wooden chair, watching them, arms folded across his belly.
It wasn’t even noontime, so, Anne supposed, it would be hard to spot a prostitute.