There was a man, let’s call him Henry VIII. There was his wife, let’s call her Anne B. Let’s give them a castle and make it nice. Let’s give her many boy babies but make them dead. Let’s give him a fussy way of being. Let’s make her smart and sneaky, because it’s such a mean thing to do.
Let’s make it so she can’t escape.
*
It takes two swings to cut off her head. Everyone does their best to pretend that the first one didn’t happen. In the awkward silence afterward, the swordsman says something about mercy or justice, a strangely fervent soliloquy in French that might have made Anne herself emotional, but it’s a touch long-winded, and no one’s paying him any attention. And she’s dead, so it’s especially beside the point.The ministers dither in the courtyard, chancing last looks, murmuring, Exquisite mouth, just exquisite. She is so beautiful, they agree, even beheaded.
Henry will return to the body later, when everyone is gone and what’s left of her has been moved to the chapel. He will stand on the threshold, halfway between one momentous decision and the next. He will kneel on the dais beside her severed head and lay one ornately rubied hand along her frigid cheekbone. Maybe he will stay five minutes. Maybe he will stay 35. Maybe he will cry softly, but it doesn’t matter, because there isn’t a nosy patron around to commission an oil painting for the textbooks, and it doesn’t matter because she’s dead, she’s still very, very dead.
He will leave as furtively as he came, wiping his hand on his smock. Anne’s headless body and bodiless head will be left to their own devices, her blood blackening, thickening on the ground, the gristle of her neck tougher with every minute. The clock ticks. Night falls.
It is her head that speaks first. It says, “Is he gone?”
Her body spasms, maybe a shrug, or maybe just a reflex.
Her head opens its eyes and looks this way, that way. It says, “It’s over? It really worked?”
*
We don’t need to stick around while her body crawls its way to her head and fits itself back together. Every excruciating inch of the stone floor is a personal coup, and every inch lasts the whole span of human history. It is slow. It is clumsy. The head falls off a couple of times. The body is floppy with atrophy. There is a lot of blood. She probably, definitely cries. It does not befit a queen.*
He is reading the Saturday paper, still in his shirtsleeves, when she breezes in the next morning. The horizon of the paper lowers to the bridge of his nose. He is a man who wears his tension in the way of a beautifully tuned piano, and in this moment he vibrates at a bewildered middle octave.“Anne,” he says, at an absolute loss.
“Henry,” she says, the picture of politeness.
She sits at the table. Not a hair out of place, not a leaky vein in sight. She butters her toast in four deft strokes. A servant steps out from the shadows to fill her teacup to the brim. It’s all very serene, domestic. If it takes her a few tries to put her toast back on the plate, or if he dabs his napkin with a little extra violence, well, who can say. She slurps her tea, which they both know he hates. He hoists his newspaper back up. Like this, they go on.
*
Of course she knows what comes next. Let’s not fib.She is seized from her bed some weeks later, in a state of drowsy dishabille, the wardens bristling with royal braid. This night will have the consistency of a dream. The palace swims in sound and darkness. The youngest one, the boy or man who grips her arm with one rubbery fist and studiously avoids her gaze, reminds her of the sons she has lost in the womb. She wants to tell him, Don’t worry, the thing you’re afraid of, the girl, the job, the rising cost of real estate in London, it will all work out someday—you’ll see, it all comes to pass, but he is leading her to her death, so it seems a bit impolite.
The cooks are baking down in the kitchen. The yeasty comfort of this aroma, which reminds her of the seam of volcanic heat that escapes when she cracks a fresh loaf, of a day opening beneath her, is too much. She shuts her nostrils. Her silk nightgown flaps at her ankles. When she can, she reaches out and touches the walls, the radiators, the edges of doorframes. Reminding herself that she is here, now, she is alive, that this dream is all too real. She can’t falter yet. There’s work to do.
A gibbet stands in the courtyard beneath a lonesome moon. They thread the noose around her neck with genteel care, snugly, even though the youngest one quakes every time his skin makes contact with hers. Up in the turret window, she sees Henry watching at a distance, as he does best. A coward in his big-boy breeches.
It is a quick death. The noose is tight. The drop is long. No one’s trying to be cruel here. One person cries out but is quickly silenced. The wardens double-check, triple-check to make sure she’s properly dead this time. From the courtyard to the turret, they flash a thumbs-up to Henry. He lets the curtain fall. This time, he does not visit her tenderly. It is done.
The wardens will return to their card games, all except the youngest one, who will mourn her without meaning to. He will simmer with sorrow for hours until, without warning to himself or others, he punches a wall so hard he fractures most of the knuckles in his right hand, leaving a fist-size whorl of buckled plaster as a signature.
And when she wakes up, hours later, on a slab of wintry marble in the royal morgue, it’s with a broken neck and very little air in her lungs. She adjusts her neck the way she might correct a crooked hat—difficult without a proper mirror, but she manages. She tightens the belt on her flimsy nightgown and slips through the haunted halls, pausing only when she reaches the king’s chambers. She doesn’t knock. She doesn’t crow or look for consolation, although the pang is there, and it feels unstoppable. Instead, with great effort, she continues on to her apartments, where she goes right back to bed. She is wiped and the throb in her neck is telling her to conserve strength. But most of all, it is such a trivial insult to him, so small, so vicious, to fall asleep as soundly as she does this night.
*
For a time, it is quiet. Henry waits. He consults his advisers, who are just as baffled. He tries to get his head around the situation, but at least he has the good grace to do it far from her.You will want to hear that Anne takes solace in these precarious days, so let’s say that’s true: She takes that trip she always meant to, an ethereal island resort where every day the indigo waters whisper Get out, get out while you still can and the jacarandas whistle a jaunty tune of existential dread. She cashes in her many retirement portfolios, she doesn’t so much throw parties as fling them, handfuls of bacchanalia into those feverishly starlit nights.
Or: She digs her heels deep into the Turkish carpets of her palatial apartments and doesn’t budge. In the bruised hours between dusk and midnight, she feels a joy so grandiose that it fills the empty canals and sidewalks within her. She takes to promenades around the gardens, drinking in the virtuous geraniums in their neat rows and the slightly ferocious hedge maze with its blooming thistles and uncertain corners. She grows sentimental about centipedes and spiders and wasps and belladonna and ragwort and nettles and every other hardscrabble weed, every pernicious pest. I’m still here, she says to the wasps, the centipedes, the belladonna, the ragwort. I’m still here.
The joy of the narrow escape is that it unfurls into hours, hidden doors that lead to secret passages of days, even if those days are numbered, even if she knows it. None of it is hers and it’s all she’s got. She loses herself, like a woman in a myth, unstuck in borrowed time, unraveling with possibility.
And yes, maybe she feels a few inches of gratitude for the armistice he has granted her. And yes, of course, the waiting days smother her, the twinned knowing and not-knowing what happens after, imagining Henry at every turn, cartoony with rage or puzzlement, but what is she to do?
*
After that, he drowns her himself. And who could blame him? If you want a job done right, you’d better know the end of this sentence. He comes upon her in the bath. He wraps his hands around her bare shoulders and thrusts her beneath the bathwater. Soap bubbles and air bubbles bloom in multitude. An artery in his skull skitters wildly. The water fights. The walls steam with tension.She tries to thrash away from him, of course. She tries to defend herself, of course. But he’s six foot two, built like a linebacker, and she is not. There is nothing more complicated here. He is not the first man to do this, or the wealthiest, or the angriest. He certainly isn’t the last. As they say, it’s a tale as old as time.
Eventually the water stills. Her body floats. He sits on the brim of the tub, head bowed, the cuffs of his doublet dripping, his fingers pruning a gentle shade of violet. Up close, murder is a messy business, decidedly unroyal, too much flesh and screaming. He sits in wait—for how long, who knows. When the surface moves again and she sits up, feral-eyed and vomiting bathwater, he sighs.
“What do we do with you?” he says, not so much a question as a regret. And she has no answer, of course she has no answer.
*
It is he who helps her out of the tub, although she resists. He hands her the bathrobe, courteously studying the mosaic of the floor while she covers up. He helps her back to her rooms. (...)*
Henry is learning.He gets crafty. He invents the portable long-barreled firearm.
Then he invents the firing squad. Then he invents acute ballistic trauma. Then he sends his wardens to find her.
But while he’s busy doing all that, she’s been busy, too, inventing: cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The telephone. The 911 call. First-response teams. Modern-day surgery. Organ transplants. Crash carts. Gurneys. Subsidized medicine. She improvises like it’s the only thing she knows how to do.
It is ugly, obviously. There is quite a lot of blood and gore and spattered internal organs. But she lives. Still, she lives.
*
Lest you think it’s all maudlin garden strolls and gallows touched by moonlight, let’s admit that Anne and Henry still have their moments. Like the time a scullery maid starts a stovetop fire and trips the palace-wide alarm. All around the castle, the sprinkler systems kick in, first in the kitchens, then in the great hall, and then everywhere, misting porous manuscripts, Brylcreemed foreign dignitaries, the throne room, everyone on their toilets, Henry’s collection of vintage cameras, and Anne in her finest silk pajamas, snoring over her watercolors. Still very much not dead.She escapes to the nearest balcony. And as she wrings her ruined shirt and her hair in futility, a window creaks open and who should climb through but Henry, his arms filled with soaking scrolls almost as tall as himself. He sees her sodden in her night-clothes and begins to guffaw.
She says, “That’s not very kingly,” feeling hurt, and more vulnerable than she wants to be, and probably a little foolish.
He says, “Well, you don’t look especially queenly,” and drops the scrolls in a heap. She despairs at her reflection in the window.
“The gossip magazines are going to love this look,” she says.
“Easy fix,” he says. “Here.” He sweeps up to the balcony’s edge, blotting her from view of the courtyard. So close that she’s immediately on high alert. She steps back. Every muscle clamped.
“You need more width,” she says, with all the calm she can summon.
He begins to windmill his arms like a complete fool. He doesn’t say a word, just churns his arms up and down with intense concentration. And to her own surprise, she starts to laugh. She can’t help it. He does his best deadpan, smile uncracked, but it’s there in the twitch of his eyebrows, the twinkle in his eye.
“What’s your plan here?” she says.
“Trickery,” he says, not missing a step. “Misdirection. Excellent upper-arm strength.”
You may be thinking that this would be an opportune time to push him off the balcony, make it look like an accident, and maybe you wouldn’t be wrong. But he’s still the size of a world-class heavy-weight boxer, and she is still most decidedly not. And yes, she’s eager to please, and yes, even now, he can find ways to disarm her utterly. And yes, this moment, precious as it is, has a kind of power on its own, a force, and the ache of laughter in her abdomen will sustain her a few days longer. Do you really want to take that away from her?
by Senaa Ahmad, LitHub | Read more:
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