4. The Head of a Queen

Hnery VIII and Anne Boleyn... we all know the story...

After what Janie Cobweb had been telling Peter about the seemingly ill-balanced power of King Henry over his subjects and particularly the females, he began to feel confused. And now here was one of those mysterious blurry passages appearing from nothing, and this was actually on his own street where there’d been nothing of the sort for the past eighteen years of his life. True, there had been numbers seventeen and nineteen exactly where he could see them in the fading light, but what was that smudge between them? Surely it had never been there before.

“Down here,” insisted Janie, “come on, Peter, you’ll be all right.”

His trouble was, part of him had been hooked, the kissing part of him as well as the inquisitive side of his mind. This woman, young and beautiful, could do things with her lips, with her tongue, with her breath, that nobody else had been able to do in his short life so far, not that he’d a huge backlog of lovers who snogged behind him. But his mind was asking what would she do next and if the only way to find out was to follow her into the mysterious unknown, then he’d better do just that. The alternative didn’t bear thinking about.

So letting her lead him by the hand, he walked with her into the fog of a pathway that shouldn’t be there.

There should have been more houses, a few shops, a school even, all clustered together because those things always had been there. The school was where he’d played with Jane, games that children play, innocent games with any hint of what was to come in their lives left out. But the what was to come part never came because she’d been uprooted and taken to the outback of a continent he knew almost nothing about except that there were kangaroos in it.

The houses, shops, school, everything he was familiar with disappeared and were replaced by an open green space with a sombre background of a castle, stretching behind it. The sun was bright as it fell onto the scene and to the crowd that was gathered, a crowd that as far as he was aware hadn’t been there until the moment Peter saw it. The gathering gloom of late evening vanished with the rising of a sun that should never have been shining at the hour suggested when Peter glanced at his wristwatch.

“What is this?” he asked.

Janie squeezed his arm and in a way it comforted him despite the atmosphere of dread that seemed to pervade the atmosphere, along with an excited hum of different conversations mingled together in one excited rabble

“One of the things I meant when I suggested that what’s right for a king is wrong for a queen,” she replied sadly. “Watch.”

There was nothing else for Peter to do but watch. There was a stage on which helmeted guards with serious and dire expressions on expectant faces stood, weapons in hand. Then a woman was led towards that stage and having climbed onto it she stood for a moment or two, surveying the crowds that were there to watch her.

“This is what I want you to remember, Peter,” whispered Janie, and one or two of the crowd hissed at her to shut up in an accent that was difficult for a man of the twenty-first century to understand even though the general rabble sounded a great deal louder than her whisper.

He gazed at the stage-like affair and watch in horror as the woman was half-encouraged and half-forced to bow down and rest her head on a block of wood.

She looked almost wildly around her as she did so, a look of resignation on her face.

The crowd booed at her as if they knew her well and as one had decided that she must be in league with the devil. A swordsman, gripping the hilt of a shining sword, stood next to her. With one fearful glance she averted her head slightly so that she could catch a momentary glimpse of him, then for a second or two she relaxed.

At a signal from one of the guards the swordsman raised his sword in the air, and then, at a second signal, brought it down.

In that one single stroke the woman’s head was separated from her body and Peter threw up.

Grasping him by one hand Janie Cobweb led him off. The crowd and its noise and the castle behind it faded and all he could see was the familiar estate on which he lived.

“Well done,” smiled Janie, “you must have left what remains of your wedding reception meal in the sixteenth century!”

“That was dreadful,” he replied, “look, Janie, I spend quite a lot of my time playing computer games and guide their characters through many a grotesque territory, and some of them even wield swords not unlike the one that fellow had in his hand, but all they are is just silly echoes of the real thing. They’re no more real than the books I used to love as a little kiddie, with Noddy and Big Ears and Noddy’s quaint little car! But that, what we just saw, that was horrible and I’ll never forget it.”

“Then don’t,” said Janie, “and I’m sorry I’m bringing you on this journey but, well, it all cropped up in our conversation and I needed you to understand something.”

“That they used to chop people’s heads off? I learned that at school!”

“But did you learn the reality?”

He shook his head. “I couldn’t,” he replied, “of course not.”

“Then let me tell you the important bit. Nobody knows the truth of what really happened back then, though they do know that Anne Boleyn’s head was chopped off as you saw moments ago. And she was executed because the king believed she had been unfaithful to him with several other men, who were also executed. One of them was said to have been her own brother! But what she was alleged to have done was exactly the same as the King himself had done. He had mistresses, they all did in those days, and he could enjoy the company of any one of them whenever he liked. And there were liaisons in the hunting woodlands too, like I experienced. It was perfectly alright for him to enjoy the company of members of the opposite sex, but it wasn’t right for her, or any other married women. And that, Peter, was wrong.”

“Wasn’t it because the king wanted to be absolutely sure that any babies that came along were fathered by him and nobody else?” suggested Peter, “what with no DNA testing or paternity stuff?”

“Yes, it was probably at the bottom of the inequality between the sexes, but because some women may want to cheat on their husbands it’s no reason to chop heads off!”

“Look, Janie, we’re just about back at my home,” said Peter, changing the subject. “Do you fancy a cup of tea?”

“Maybe later,” sighed Janie, “but first I’ll pop to my place and change out of this bridesmaid outfit!”

“Of course,” he nodded, “where is your place Janie? Where might I find you if I need another kiss?”

She grinned at him. “That would be telling,” she said with a laugh, “here and there, if you must know, but mostly there!”

© Peter Rogerson 08.05.22

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