ALONE IN MY ROOM, I WAS WRITING PLAYS. THEY WERE ALL-FEMALE plays for an all-female troupe. Of course, it was absurd. Women so rarely acted in public. Of course, I never meant them to be staged. “They will be acted,” I said to no one, “only on the page, only in the mind. My modest closet plays.” I smiled. I dipped my quill in ink.
The housekeeper knocked and held out a note. I took up William’s instructions from the ornate pewter tray.
No more to be done, yet everything to do.
Flemish tapestries, drawing tables, lenses, the telescopes from Paris, books, of course, and perfumes, platters, ewers, ruffs, tinctures, copperplates, saddles, wax. There were little green-patterned moths dashing around the attic, bumping at the glass. I thought I felt like that. I dreamed the moths crept upside down on the surface of my mind. In the mornings I met with a magistrate or bid a neighbor farewell. I myself packed linen-wrapped manuscripts into crates. The plays had a box to share, each handwritten folio tied with purple ribbon: in Bell in Campo, the Kingdom of Restoration and the Kingdom of Faction prepare to go to war, and the wives, with Lady Victoria at their helm, insist on joining the battle; in The Matrimonial Trouble, a housemaid who has married the master proceeds to put on airs; in The Convent of Pleasure—the only not quite finished—Lady Happy, besieged by men who wish to marry her fortune, escapes to a cloister. But the pesky men sneak in, dressed like women, to join the ladies’ play within the walls. Enter Monsieur Take-pleasure and his Man Dick.
Monsieur Take-pleasure. Dick, Am I fine to day?
Dick. Yes, Sir, as fine as Feathers, Ribbons, Gold, and Silver can make you.
Takepl. Dost thou think I shall get the Lady Happy?
Dick. Not if it be her fortune to continue under that name.
Takepl. Why?
Dick. Because if she Marry your Worship she must change her Name; for the Wife takes the Name of her Husband, and quits her own.
Takepl. Faith, Dick, if I had her wealth I should be Happy.
Dick. It would be according as your Worship would use it; but, on my conscience, you would be more happy with the Ladies Wealth, than the Lady would be with your Worship.
Takepl. Why should you think so?
Dick. Because Women never think themselves happy in Marriage.
Takepl. You are mistaken; for Women never think themselves happy until they be married.
Dick. The truth is, Sir, that Women are always unhappy in their thoughts, both before and after Marriage; for, before Marriage they think themselves unhappy for want of a Husband; and after they are Married, they think themselves unhappy for having a Husband.
Takepl. Indeed Womens thoughts are restless.
Then scenes change according to my whim, for I was writing more freely than ever before. In the cloister one moment, we’re next on a field of green, where sheep graze around a maypole, and Lady Happy is a shepherdess, while the Prince-who-woos-her-as-a-Princess is a shepherd. Next, Lady Happy is a Sea-Goddess and the Prince-as-Princess is Neptune astride a rock. They embrace, as friends, and then as friends they kiss. Happy questions her fate. Truth be told, she felt a certain stirring. And “why,” she asks, “may not I love a Woman with the same affection I could a Man?” In the end, the Prince’s true nature is revealed. But would Happy, who fled all men, be happy to be his? I hadn’t yet decided, but hurriedly placed a lid atop the crate, then marched myself and my household to the shore. The goods and lower servants boarded a frigate. I, at last, a Dutch man-of-war.
THE RESTORATION
IT CAME AS A SHOCK. AFTER A BRUTAL CROSSING—IN WHICH SHE HIT her head in a storm and swore she’d seen a bear at the helm of the ship—Margaret expected to find her husband at his London residence, Newcastle House, in fashionable Clerkenwell. Yet there she stood in Bow Street in a rented house, again. “I cannot call it unhandsome,” she said when asked if she liked her new room. Where was she meant to keep her gowns? It hadn’t even a mirror. William’s steward came to tell them that her crates could not be found. Her sister, Margaret learned, would be in Cornwall for three weeks. All this in the first two hours, still stinking of the ship. A doctor came, declared her sound. Margaret washed. She slept. In morning light, she dressed. And over the following week, as William prepared to petition the courts for the return of his elegant townhouse, Margaret prepared for some sign of the notice she’d allowed herself to expect.
A celebrity, the king had said.
She sat by the window day after day, yet no one they knew would be walking in Bow Street, and no one in Bow Street seemed to notice who she was.
This was the Restoration, after all. The very air in London was filled with triumphant returns. When the king arrived on his ship in the Thames, twenty thousand horse-and-foot stood brandishing their swords. Everyone had their version of events. Everyone spoke at once. John Evelyn, from the Strand, beheld it and blessed God: “Praised be forever the Lord of Heaven, who only does wondrous things.” “A pox on all kings!” cried a hag. “Oh look, the king,” gasped a girl held aloft. The diarist Samuel Pepys wrote of bonfires the city over, an infinite shooting of guns, and men drinking to the king’s health upon their knees in the street. London was born anew, again. The theaters reopened in a glow of candles and laughter. There were public lectures at Gresham College—on astronomy, on wind. Throngs of visitors, exotic ambassadors. There was tennis at Hampton Court.
Amid this tumult, Margaret’s crates went undelivered. Her manuscripts were missing. She had only two gowns on hand.
“Did you know,” she said over toast one morning, setting aside a letter from her sister, “it is the fashion in London for a lady to appear in public in a state of near-undress?”
“Ah,” said William, and grabbed his hat.
He had always some appointment or some old friend to see.
“My dear,” he sometimes offered, “if you wish to come, then say.”
But Margaret said nothing, or hesitated, and William left, annoyed. When he returned in the evening, he’d find her seated alone at the table in one of those two gowns.
“Are you feeling well?” he’d ask.
“Yes, My Lord,” she’d say.
She tried to write, but nothing came.
“My dear,” he said one evening, “I believe we must do more. We were gone so long, you see. We must work to make ourselves known in London’s good society. After sixteen years stalled, we must finally begin to act.”
His wife looked past him to his shadow on the wall.
“Margaret?” he asked. He scraped his fork against his plate: gingerbread and apple cream.
“But I was not stalled,” she said.
When her sister returned from the country, Margaret was summoned for cake. In rose silk shoes she ventured out, saw that Bow Street teemed with rats and worse: narrow, rutted, splattered by offal and urine, the houses pitched precariously overhead. She saw a painted whore in a gilded chair. A dead dog on the corner. Then Catherine rattled on about people Margaret hardly knew. “How relieved you must be to be home!” her sister cried. “But why are you staying in Bow Street?” And Margaret tried to explain: their debts were large, the estates tied up. They must wait for the king to restore some fraction of what they had lost.
“You’ve a smudge on your face,” William said when she got back.
Margaret touched her nose.
“Other side,” he told her.
At least when he attended the lectures he’d report on what he’d seen: a demonstration on falling bodies, something pretty with mercury, a piece of white marble dyed a most dramatic red. And though women were not allowed at Gresham College—Cromwell might be dead, but not everything had changed—Margaret waited and listened. For every hour, it seemed, an exiled thinker returned, while others were back in the city after years in university towns. Soon William’s interest was especially piqued—so, in turn, was hers—by a group of experimental philosophers who’d met at Oxford during the war. The Invisible College, they’d called
themselves, within the college walls.
“Invisible?” she asked.
“A network, you know. Sending letters, sharing ideas.”
He stopped to pinch some salt.
“In any case,” he said, “despite the war, whether Royalist or Roundhead, they spent hours together in John Wilkins’s garden, testing ideas. It’s all about proof, you see.”
“Remind me, who is Wilkins?”
“You remember. That preacher who wrote the book about a colony on the moon.”
Together they chewed the goose.
“In addition to ivies,” William continued, “this garden boasted a transparent beehive from which the men extorted honey without disturbing the bees . . . a rainbow-maker misting exquisite colors across the lawn . . . a Way-wiser and Thermo-meter . . . and a hollow statue with a tube in its throat through which Mr. Wilkins could travel his voice and surprise any guests to his garden!”
“How merry it sounds.”
William nodded, spit fat. “Productive, too.”
Now scores of pamphlets were being printed each day—flicking down London’s streets, catching horses’ legs—and all of it in English—not French, not German, not Latin—so that Margaret could, for the very first time, read the new ideas herself when they were truly new. There was one on fevers, one on flora, one on a frog’s lung, one on fog. At first there were words she did not know and explanations she could not fathom. But as days passed into weeks, she saw a pattern emerge: one man referred to another’s research in explaining his own findings; one article led you down a path of thinking to the next. And there was one pamphlet in particular causing quite a stir: New experiments physico-mechanicall, touching the spring of the air by an Irishman from that Invisible College, a man named Robert Boyle, currently blazing to fame though wholly unknown to her. Margaret sent a servant to fetch it from a shop. In its pages she learned of years of careful labor: the construction, at Oxford, of an air pump, and the subsequent experiments performed on living things.
Prior to the lark, she read, Boyle used a mouse.
The time before, a sparrow.
Before that, a butterfly.
And once he used a bee.
The lark, though now with a hole in her wing, looked lively enough when Boyle put her under glass. Then he turned a stopcock on his rarefying machine and the air was slowly sucked out of the chamber. The bird began “manifestly to droop.” It staggered, collapsing, gasping. It threw itself down, threw itself down, and then the bird was dead.
“All this,” she objected, “to prove a bird needs air?”
“Before devising the pump,” said William, “he’d had to strangle them with his hands.”
Now all London was buzzing with the news: air holds a vital quintessence necessary to life.
“Too late for the lark,” Margaret said.
And as for the air, it was foul. London was loud and it stank. The streets bulged with noisome trade: salt-makers, brewers, soap-boilers, glue-makers, fishmongers, chandlers, slaughterhouses, tanners, and dyers hemorrhaging rainbows into the rivers and lanes. The windows were dimmed with sooty grime. At night she couldn’t sleep. She panicked in the dark. Was it wrong to miss her blue-domed room and the orchard back in Antwerp? It rained, and Margaret slept all day. She dreamt that a porpoise swam up to her window and gulped. Why couldn’t she find a handkerchief? Where was her summer coat? She would send her plays to Martin & Allestyre, but her crates still had not arrived. “Where are my crates?” she asked the maid. Where were her linen-wrapped plays? Her mind was like a river overspilling in the rain. Robert Boyle, Robert Boyle, currently blazing to fame. So William called a doctor, who bled her into bowls. Her cheeks were red, then pink, then gray; the blood in the bowls was black. That night another storm blew in and hit upon the glass. Still the sounds of London’s bells came clanging in her ears: St. Martin-in-the-Field, St. Dunstan-in-the-West. One, two, three, four . . .
By dawn, the sky was clear.
“Where are my crates?” she asked, now calm.
And William proposed a ride, for she’d been so long shut in. But London Bridge was adorned in traitor’s limbs set at startling angles. She saw a leg splash into the river. A rat ran down their hall. The watchman bellowed, “Rain!” No one knocked on their door.
At last, one night, Margaret insisted that they go—retreat to the countryside, where she could write and be at peace. She had never been happy in London, not once. “And to be surrounded by such a constant crush, all of them speaking English!”
“But you never learned a word of Dutch.”
“Exactly,” Margaret countered. “I cannot distinguish my thoughts!”
“My dear,” William finally said, “Welbeck is uninhabitable. Bolsover is half pulled down—six rooms in the eastern wing stand open to the sky. For that matter,” he dug in, “your St. John’s Green is nothing but rubble and hip-high grass.”
She told him of her sister’s disdain for their lodgings, of that rat she had spied in their hall. It was an insult, she half whispered, to live so far below their rank. Was this what they’d suffered for? Her childhood home flattened; one brother crushed by his horse; another shot in the head. So that they might return, unnoticed, to live in Bow Street in filth? She trembled as she said it: “Unfit, it appears, to be acknowledged by the king?”
William only chewed his meat. He wiped his lips. Then he pushed back from the table, loyal to the crown. “To my final breath!” he cried.
Days of silence settled with London’s soot on the house.
But the following week, when a grocer’s boy was trampled to death just beyond their doorstep, William acquiesced, moved them over to Dorset House just up from the Whitefriars Stairs. It was only one elegant wing rented from the earl, and though he could ill afford it, William had to admit: the move brought quiet, and river views, and an ample parlor with an Italianate ceiling in which to entertain.
SIR KENELM DIGBY, SIR GEORGE BERKELEY, THE BISHOP OF LONDON himself: Margaret greeted them in the Dorset House parlor in a dress of sparkling violet, a hat like petals falling through empty space. To William, so pleased with it all—the guests and wine, her sparkling gown—his wife was more a marchioness than she’d ever been before. He remembered her in Paris, pretending to read or sew. Now as he took her round the room—introducing her to poets, ambassadors, dukes—she hardly blushed, and even spoke. Yet meanwhile, across the parlor, his daughters looked on distraught. Their father had grown only more besotted and their stepmother more astonishing than when they’d first laid eyes on her in ribbons years before. She bowed. She nodded. She nearly bobbled. Yet if she noticed their scrutiny, Margaret gave no outward sign. She admired Elizabeth’s sapphire stockings with the metal thread. Elizabeth smiled sweetly. Everyone played a part.
Finally, one quiet morning, word arrived at Dorset House that the king would come to dine. It was exactly what William had been angling for these weeks. He hurried to write a spoof—the evening’s entertainment, involving an incomprehensible Welshman who babbles when meeting the king—while Margaret was taken down to see the Earl of Dorset’s cook. Quince cream and orange pudding, the harried cook advised. Quince cream and orange pudding, singers and a band. The morning passed in a fuss. A hasty dinner, and rain began to fall. Margaret, exhausted, alone in her chamber, sat and watched the barges on the Thames: onions going down to sea, timber coming up. She had not written in many weeks. The river raced along. A fishmonger dropped a basket and several fish slid out.
William hoped for a place at court, his London house returned, and Margaret had hopes of her own that night. “A celebrity,” the king had said.
As guests began to arrive downstairs, she was thinking her thoughts, half dressed.
“What is it?” William asked as they descended the marble stairs.
She only shook her head.
The parlor was overfull: ladies grooming, musicians tuning, powder on the air. Here came her one living brother, John,
whom Margaret hardly knew. William’s son Henry. Sir Kenelm Digby, again. Guests danced, drank punch. They threw open windows for air. But when the king’s carriage was seen in the street, everything grew still. Margaret stood beside her husband, the blood loud in her ears.
His Majesty entered to fanfare—and all was movement again.
William was first to step forth and bow. The king turned to Margaret, who smiled and curtsied low. It was their first meeting in over a year, their first since that dinner in Antwerp, yet when she opened her mouth to speak, she saw the king’s eyes riffle over her and off. Over her shoulder he scanned the crowd. On instinct, she moved aside.
He was lost all night to a sea of girls and courtiers and fuss. Quince cream and orange pudding, singers and a band. At least William was named a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, at last.
“An utter success,” her stepdaughters confided to Margaret as they prepared to take their leave. “The handsome king! That spoof!” Still the rain persisted, and the bishop had lost his hat. Maids danced in and out. Where was the bishop’s hat? Alone at the window, Margaret didn’t hear. The reflection of the parlor was yellow and warm. She watched it empty out. Then, an interruption. A voice came at her side: “What do you look at with such interest, Lady Cavendish?” What did she see in the glass? She saw the Marchioness of Newcastle. She saw the aging wife of an aged marquess, without even any children to dignify her life.
THE VOICE WAS RICHARD FLECKNOE’S AND HE SAVED HER FROM HERSELF. “We’ve met before,” he said, “at the Duchess of Lorraine’s . . . at Béatrix’s castle.” By now the parlor was empty and he stooped to kiss her hand. The king was gone. The parlor was empty. Flecknoe was kissing her hand.
He began to visit daily. He knew her work and praised it to her face. Dramatist and poet, and newly returned from Brazil, he was the tallest man she’d seen outside a circus. He wore a black stiletto beard, dressed head-to-toe in black.
Margaret the First Page 6
