‘I will cover your face and be very quick,’ he’d told me the day before and shown me the ivory comb he would place between my teeth.

He would need dry sponges, he said, and plenty of light; a bucket.

He seemed anxious now.

Anxious and uneasy and reluctant.

I saw him glance at the queen, as if he hoped for some kind of last-minute reprieve, but all she did was nod and point with her muscled finger at his little bag.

He bowed and took out his ink-stone; moistened it. From an invisible pocket in his tunic he produced a cloth and put it over my eyes.

I felt the point of his brush, trembling and wet, describe a circle for his knife to follow and then he made the first cut.

It must be a horrible thing to carve off a piece of a living person who has only the benefit of a beaker of strong wine to steady them.

Five times I counted he went in with his knife, pushing and pulling and sawing and – oh – just when I thought it was over, scraping away at the bone beside my heart to take the last of it.

Half the women fainted, their big broad-shouldered bodies going down like trees and through it all the clatter of their spears and bows falling against each other, arrows dropping like pins from their upturned quivers.

The air stirred and the Chinaman’s cloth slipped from my face. I saw the queen sway beside the couch. She looked ill and green and when the diminutive doctor asked her humbly, would she be next? she seemed embarrassed.

She toyed with the tassel of her golden girdle and coughed a little; mumbled something about second thoughts and changing her mind.

Told him, in a quiet voice, that he could go now – that some of her ideas, perhaps, were better than others.

(The suggestion that the Amazons removed one breast – either by cutting or burning, in order to enhance their prowess on the battlefield – is a persistent one; however there is no indication of such a practice in works of art, in which they are always represented with both breasts, though the right one is often shown covered.)

Bonnet

Bonnet

IT’S EARLY WHEN she boards the London train – dark when she leaves the house and still dark when she arrives at the station in Leeds and enters her compartment and nods to her fellow passengers.

What do they see, her fellow passengers?

They see a small, plain, obscure woman in a black travelling outfit, on her head a large funnel-shaped bonnet, also black, with a dark grey lining – a small, plain, obscure-looking woman who has been to London several times before and has no plan when she gets to her lodgings to do anything differently from the last time or the time before that or the time before that.