Excerpt from The Beheading Game by Rebecca Lehmann, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

How had he moved so quietly on the scaffold? He must have cushioned his shoes, or slipped out of them. So there had been care there. But then what? The good blue of the sky and the dancing swordsman, and now she was here. She understood she was in a box. She understood, then, that the flesh at the back of her head was her own knees. She under-stood that the round, hard object at her knees was her own head. She felt the back of her head with her free hand as well as she could, because her body was wrapped in one shroud of the linen, and her head in another. How carefully her ladies must have wrapped her body. "Let no man touch me," she'd instructed them. Noli me tangere, she thought, touch me not, recalling the love poem Thomas Wyatt had written for her. For wasn't Thomas Wyatt in some other chamber of the Tower, accused, like the others, of lying with her? Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind, he'd written, like so many men who'd wanted to conquer her, or any woman, who'd viewed her as a trinket, a trophy, a deer to master and slay, a mount.

So she was awake. Was she alive? Was she a ghost? Was this perdition? She understood her first task was to undo the linen, to untangle herself from the tidy work of her ladies. She shifted her body's weight off her left side so that she could shimmy her left arm out from under herself. She shimmied and wiggled until her arm was free, until she could press her left hand over her right hand, against her stomach, above her head. Good Christian people, I am come hither to die. She felt for a gap in the linen. There must be a place where the fabric ended, where it had been gathered and tucked in, a loose end. She felt in front of her. Smooth. She did not want to feel above, at her neck. She did not want to know the loss there. She moved her right hand behind herself. There, at her back, a small bulge of tucked fabric, running the length of her body. With her right hand she grabbed a fistful of linen and pulled. It loosened. She pulled again. She wiggled. The linen came loose from around her back. She pulled the sheet of it over and, with small kicks, uncovered her legs, then wiggled her arms and torso free from the shroud.

There was the matter, then, of her head. First, next, then, last. She remembered the lesson in sequencing from her childhood. Next, make the crust. Then, cook the filling. Last, bake the pie. (Though she'd never baked a pie. She had servants for that.) To grow a garden, first, till the earth. Next, plant seeds. Then, tend the plants. Last, harvest the crop. (She'd never tended plants either.) To become and stay queen, first, go to court. Next, catch the king's eye. Then, marry him (this step took a while). Last, bear a son. She had been so determined, so confident that she'd bear a son. Henry was a virile man in his early forties when they finally consummated their long courtship. How could the child he fathered not have been a boy? But there instead was wee Elizabeth, squalling in her arms. She knew the names people called Elizabeth. The bastard. The brat. The little pig. Her Elizabeth, though she hadn't gotten to keep her long before she was taken, sent off to her own household, to be raised by noble ladies and maids. That was the way of things. Ma chère. Mon coeur. Elizabeth.

First, next, then, last. First, learn you are in your own grave. Next, unwrap your headless body from its shroud. Then, unwrap your head. Easy enough. She had two hands free now. She felt the back of her head. She could feel her cap, which had come askew, through the linen. She could feel the place, under the left side of her head, where the linen fabric was tucked. She pulled gently. She could feel the fabric sliding out beneath her cheek, beneath her ear, ruffling her loose strands of hair, knocking her cap off entirely. She could feel the fabric sticking at the nape of her neck, congealed there by her own blood. Panicking, she yanked. The fabric came loose, peeling with it the scabbed blood, a bit of the skin beneath. She winced. She understood then that she could still feel pain. "Why the delay?" she'd said to Kingston, the Tower constable, when her execution had been forestalled a day. "He is a good swordsman and I have but little neck." She certainly had but little neck now. She pushed the linen down so that her face was uncovered. She felt the features of her face. All there, all intact. It must have been one blow, then. Swift. Clean.

Excerpted from The Beheading Game by Rebecca Lehmann. Copyright © 2026 by Rebecca Lehmann. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.