𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐃𝐎𝐕𝐄 𝐀𝐍𝐃 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐑𝐎𝐒𝐄 || 𝑻𝑯𝑬 𝑾𝑯𝑰𝑻𝑬 𝑸𝑼𝑬𝑬𝑵

𝐶𝐻𝐴𝑃𝑇𝐸𝑅 𝐶𝑋

~Snap~

11th of October, Tower Hill....

Dressed in a gown of cloth of gold, a cloak of purple velvet hemmed with ermine wrapped around her, Constance sat upon the royal scaffold high above the braying crowds, the edges draped with silk banners bearing the King's emblem.

She occupied a throne beside Edward - they'd decided Anne was too young to attend and this was her long awaited day after all. Hands folded in her lap, shielded from the bitter, biting air by soft woollen gloves lined with sable fur and embroidered with golden thread. Her hair was bound by a reticulated golden caul, studded with jewels and pearls and the top encircled with a crown.

Tower hill was filled to the brim, all souls in London jostling to claim a view of the gallows that awaited their offering of broken bones. Men and women sat atop walls, children clambered up into tree branches, countless numbers craned their necks and were in danger of tumbling into the nearby fortresses moat. Neither Constance nor Edward payed attention to them, their yells and shoving, their eyes were fixed solely on the noose swaying slightly in the wind, waiting for it to be filled. 

Constance had been in the tower even before dawn, peering through the little window in the door of Elizabeth's cell with a stare colder than ice as she watched her enemy readied for death. She was to walk from the tower to the gallows in nothing but her shift, hair shorn, feet bare against the rough cobbles of the street. Penance for her whoredom.

Constance sent the nuns of Aldergate Abbey to prepare her and had watched with bated breath as she was shoved to her knees, the clothes stripped unceremoniously from her strewn about the floor. Her flaxen locks were shorn from her head, chopped away in a moment, falling to the floor like spun gold and landing in a tangled heap at her knees.

It cut Edward from her in Constance's heart, set him free as well as her. She cut away her evil net and his soul would swim free into the river of heaven.

Without her golden crown, Elizabeth's age showed, she had thought, the wrinkles at the corners of her eyes accentuated, the sag of her breasts no longer hidden. She didn't speak, she didn't move but Constance could feel her pain and she revelled in it. She too would revel in watching her white clad figure paraded through London's jeering crowds and dropped into hell like a pebble to the bottom of a lake, never to be seen again.

A shiver ran down her spine as the crowd began to roar, altering her to the presence of approaching evil. Edward's hand appeared on her sleeve and she placed hers atop it, squeezing his fingers. He'd long waited for this too.

Bit by bit the raging sea of people parted, shoved aside by four guards who led a skinny, white - clad figure in the centre of them. Her shorn head highlighted by the sun, it was nevertheless raised, even as rotting fruit and animal faeces were hurled at her, staining the thin linen of her shift and the ghostly pallor of her skin. Before her she carried a lit taper.