Chapter Two Needle and Thread
Chapter Two
Needle and Thread
When Anne woke—for she must have fallen asleep drifting in the little boat—she was curled around her head.
The boat was still. The first light of dawn dappled its hull.
She rolled onto her back, turning her head to face upward.
Above her, the new spring leaves of a stand of saplings.
She must have run ashore in the night. She sat up and held her head to her chest so she could see.
Before her, the pebbly bank of the river, sloping up to a low stone wall.
She turned. To the north, on the other side of the river, the Tower, from which she’d escaped.
She hadn’t made it far. To the west, London Bridge with its big stone legs, with its collection of shops and houses, all quiet, the people who lived there asleep.
In the bridge’s center, the Chapel of St. Thomas, too, stood quiet, its bells unrung.
In late spring, the sun rose early. Anne knew it must scarcely be five in the morning.
She knew, too, that the pikes on the bridge’s southern gate would be adorned with five heads, each belonging to one of her accused lovers.
Lovers? She laughed. Her laugh was a wheeze.
She knew her brother’s head would be there. She didn’t know why hers wasn’t.
She must be in Southwark, then. What she needed to do, since she had apparently survived her execution, since she was apparently still sentient, still capable of movement, not extinguished yet, was get her head back on.
It was heavy and awkward to hold and carry, and she was lucky she hadn’t dropped it in the Thames last night.
She turned back to the riverbank. If she could get out of the boat and up the bank, into Southwark, surely she could find a needle and thread at a tailor’s shop, a cobbler’s, even in some middling wife’s sewing basket.
Warblers had begun to trill in the scraggly trees along the river.
Terns darted in and out of the mudflats searching for insects.
It was low tide. This would work in Anne’s favor.
Cautiously, clutching her head under one arm, she stood and stepped out of the boat.
Her fine velvet slippers squelched into the mud, and when she raised her feet to step, the sucking sound the mud made was like a last breath leaving the body.
Squelch, suck. Squelch, suck. She curled her toes inside her slippers to keep them on her feet.
When Anne reached the weedy slope leading up from the riverbank, she held her free hand out to brace herself against the low stone wall separating Southwark from the Thames.
In the distance stood houses and taverns, businesses and hostels.
What whoring and revelry had happened here last night?
Anne wondered. What whoring and revelry happened every night in Southwark?
Anne hoisted herself over the wall and walked toward the town, her gait lurching at first, then evening out as the mud fell from her slippers in clods.
Where was Henry now? she wondered as she walked, hesitantly, into the streets of Southwark.
Harry, she had sometimes called him. “Harry, oh, Harry!” whispered in his ear at that crucial moment, her voice breathy, to make him shudder and groan and come inside her.
“Harry! Oh! Harry!” again and again. And when he had finished and gone back to his own chambers, her ladies would come clean her up, even sniveling Jane Seymour.
Jane, Jane, Jane. Jane, with her moony eyes, her pious religiosity, her Englishness.
Jane, who looked away when regarded. Jane, who never spoke a word out of turn, who held her tongue.
Jane, the twenty-eight-year-old flat-footed virgin who had somehow seduced her husband.
She supposed Henry was with Jane now; perhaps they were sleeping chastely on two sides of a shared wall, two chambers separated by a meager partition, so that they could preserve her virginity for their wedding night—for Anne was sure that he would marry her—so that any children born would be legitimate, so that he could convince himself that he was holy, he was pure, he was the hand of God.
How odd to be a man, Anne thought, to father children but to carry none of them in your body; to be able to convince yourself that you could begin again, start fresh, new wife, new life; to have no ghosts of lost babies haunting your womb; to have no womb at all.
To have, instead, rooms. A whole host of rooms to fill with men and women, furniture and servants and portraits and fresh-cut flowers and lumpy English puddings and spiced meats, a whole feast, a morality play where all the actors speak with one voice to say that you are right.
You are right, my king, my lord. Right. You are right.
The smell of Southwark overwhelmed Anne.
It stank of piss and shit, to be sure, though many places outside the palace walls did.
What street corner or alleyway wasn’t a latrine?
What window wouldn’t a woman stick her head out in the morning to dump a pot of waste into the dirty street?
There was the smell of ale, as well. And vomit.
Outside a tavern she walked past, three men lay passed out, sleeping off last night’s celebrations.
“The great whore has been beheaded!” Anne imagined them jeering.
“The concubine is dead!” Some of the revelers would have gone off with actual whores to celebrate.
Though not these men, curled up together like cold children.
She stopped and stood over them, nudged one of them with her foot.
He moaned. So she could touch others, she understood, so she could be felt.
She hurried along. The early morning was getting brighter, and she needed to fix herself, for if she could be felt, it was likely she could be seen, and though the streets were empty now, they would soon be filled with Southwarkers.
On the side of the tavern, Anne found a narrow alley.
She ducked into it. She had to hold her head in front of her to fit through.
She was looking for a side door, a back door, living quarters.
At the end of the alley, she found a door and pushed it open, taking care to do so slowly, quietly.
There, a set of steep stairs. Anne used one hand to hold the wall as she ascended them.
At the top, she found a corridor off which opened two doors.
Behind the first door, half-closed, the tavern keeper snored in his bed.
Behind the second, in a single bed in a smaller room, slept his wife and children.
A little girl and boy. The girl, probably Elizabeth’s age, two or three, the boy a few years older.
Their mother, young and pale between them.
She couldn’t be more than twenty-five. In the corner, a baby mewled in a cradle, making its morning noises, kicking its small feet in the air.
Anne caught her breath, which is to say she gasped and the air shot through her hollow neck, like wind through a reed.
At the foot of the bed, she spied the fair woman’s sewing basket. Cautiously, she crept into the room.
How many times had she crept stealthily around Hampton Court Palace?
How many times before she married Henry, creeping into or out of his chambers?
How many times after? Anne of the green sleeves.
Anne with the sixth finger. Anne with the wen on her neck that she hid with a wide collar.
Anne the Lutheran. Anne the prick-tease.
Anne who wore a dress covered in human tongues to her coronation, to show the people what happened to those who spoke ill of her.
Of course, none of that was true, though she’d loved the absurdity of the tongue dress, when one of her ladies had told her of the wild rumor.
In reality, she’d worn a white gown to her coronation; she’d been heavy with child, and the gown was tailored to show off her round belly.
She’d spent the eve in the queen’s chambers at the Tower, feeling the babe’s elbows and feet scrape across her belly.
Little Elizabeth: even in the womb she’d been active, agitated, a fire sparked inside her.
Imagine having no womb, Anne thought. Imagine having no ghosts.
At the bedside, a board creaked under Anne’s foot and she stopped, tense, turning her eyes to the little ones in the bed, to the mother’s placid face.
All slept on. Only the baby in the cradle stirred, and it was busy making happy coos, entertained by the shadows, by the headless woman tiptoeing through the room, now hooking her fingers in her own mouth to better grasp her head as she leaned down and nabbed the sewing basket with her other hand.
There, Anne had it. She crept back out of the room, pausing for just a moment to steal the woman’s headkerchief, which was set on a small table beside the bed, and put it in the basket, for she’d lost her cap and would be conspicuous without a head covering.
Then she moved silently down the stairs. She needed a quiet place, and private.
—
In the alley the sun had brightened. A few people wandered up and down the street, preparing the neighborhood for another day.
Anne followed the alley to the back of the tavern, which faced the weedy riverbank.
She could hear the calls of dockworkers in the distance, loading the ships that left London with wool, that returned with spices and silk, maybe a fine fabric from Calais, maybe a proper dressmaker.
And whatever else could be smuggled in the crates and barrels, between other objects.
A flask of port. A stone phallus. A few pages of scripture, written in English, the people’s tongue.