I am gallant. I am bold. I am right on time, she thinks.
She climbs the wooden staircase, takes her place in the box. And like ripples in a summer pond, lines of faces slowly turn—from the gallery, the pit—she watches the ripple spread. William must be late, for beside her is an empty seat. Still more and more faces turn. Margaret spies his daughters, who sit in a box nearby. Jane and Elizabeth avert their eyes, but they are the only ones.
It’s not simply that Margaret’s reputation has grown—her dress is gold, her breasts bared, her nipples painted red.
The play begins, the lovers center stage. William sits. Everyone roars. The candles sputter and hiss. Yet Margaret is as much observed as anything on the stage. Scene, scene, intermission, scene. The actors take their bows. The audience files out—chattering into coffeehouses, up onto horses, north to Hampstead, west to Oxford, south to the river and on—but before Margaret can say a thing in all the noise, William has her elbow and is guiding her through the crowd.
“Congratulations!” she tells him once their carriage door is shut.
“No, no,” he says, “congratulations to you.”
The horses lurch ahead, crossing the Fleet in the dark.
“Is something amiss?” she asks, placing the mask in her lap.
The river oozes beneath them, a blacker sort of black.
“What could be wrong?”
The driver turns north onto John.
“Only tell me,” he finally says, looking out into the night, “exactly who wears such a gown to an evening at the theater?”
“The femme forte,” she explains, “a woman dressed in armor.”
“Do you think you are Cleopatra?” he asks.
Margaret bristles. She fingers the mask. “I had rather appear worse in singularity,” she says, “than better in the mode.”
“Do not quote to me from your books,” he snaps.
The driver flicks his whip.
Margaret says nothing. She replaces the mask. The black bead rattles her teeth. Yet despite her continuing silence, she does see what she’s done, sees it clearly, but from way down in, as if there is another mask she wears beneath the mask that she has on. She is a monster, she thinks, and hateful, after everything he’s done.
*
Flecknoe arrives in the morning before she’s finished her broth.
There’s no question at all she wrote the play, everyone agrees.
“You are all that anyone talks about,” he says. He offers the papers as proof. “Everywhere one goes it’s only Margaret Margaret Margaret!”
She rings the bell for Lucy, but William has gone out.
And though her nipples are likened more to the nipples of London whores than any ancient heroines, that very afternoon the king comes to visit her. The king in her rooms. “A celebrity,” he says, or said. Everything happens so fast!
“What are these daily papers?” Margaret says to William that night. “When did they begin?”
William is silent; he chews his fish; he takes a sip of wine.
“According to them, you wrote my play.”
“I can hardly believe it,” she says. And despite her feelings of regret, she cannot help but smile. Surely he sees the joke. “After all those years they claimed you as the author of what I wrote . . .”
“Tomorrow,” William says, “they will be on to something else.”
But tomorrow they are not. Each day for days the papers print details of whatever she did the day before: what floating restaurant she visited, her dinner guests, her gowns.
On April 12 the Duchess of Newcastle went out in a hat like a flame.
On April 18 she was visited by Anne Hyde.
When John and Mary Evelyn arrive, what choice does she have but to pretend that they are friends? Then Walter Charleton, Bishop Morley, many more. Soon her suite is full. William isn’t there: he’s at the palace, or the theater, or resting in his room. She’s alone with the crowd and the porcelain figures. So Margaret recites: whole poems, theories, whatever springs to mind. She stands in the midst of her elegant rooms in the most fantastic dress:
If foure Atomes a World can make, then see,
What severall Worlds might in an Eare-ring bee.
For Millions of these Atomes may bee in
The Head of one small, little, single Pin.
And if thus small, then Ladies well may weare
A World of Worlds, as Pendants in each Eare.
On April 24 the Duchess has her brother, Sir John Lucas, to midday meal.
On April 29 she wears a hat like a little rose.
“You are a marvel,” Flecknoe tells her.
But Margaret isn’t sure. It’s not as if she doesn’t see what happens, doesn’t watch guests turning away, especially some of the ladies, who cover their mouths with their fans. When Lucy comes to prepare her for bed, Margaret does not speak. She tries not to think at all—of the dinner parties, the afternoons, her shallow tinselly speeches—cringing to remember the transparency of her talk. And when she wakes the following morning to small red dots sprung up around her mouth, she sends Lucy to the apothecary’s shop for velvet patches in the shapes of stars and moons.
“These black stars serve,” she says to William, “like well-placed commas, to punctuate my face.”
“They look obscene,” he says.
On May 1 the duchess goes out in her silver carriage.
On May 2 she walks the lawn in a moiré gown.
And Flecknoe tells her—as they walk that lawn—how the previous night he heard someone telling someone else that after visiting at Newcastle House Mary Evelyn told Roger Bohun that women were not meant to be authors or censure the learned—he lifts a low-hanging branch—but to tend the children’s education, observe the husband’s commands, assist the sick, relieve the poor. Everything is white, for the blossoms have come down. The path is white. The grass. Even Margaret’s shawl is white and wrapped around her arms. Eventually, she says: “A woman cannot strive to make known her wit without losing her reputation.” “But you are making yours,” he says. Indeed, people wait to see her pass. They wait at night at the palace, hoping she’ll visit the king. But the papers begin to report on things she never did or said. Is it another Margaret Cavendish parading down London’s streets? On another peculiar outing? In another ridiculous dress? That night she dreams she’s eating little silver fish; each time one fish goes in, ten more come sliding out.
In the morning she tells Lucy she will only sit and read. But she’s promised to visit her sister—so another gown, the carriage, another ride to read about in the papers the following day.
Catherine in middle age looks remarkably like their mother, her hair pulled back as their mother’s always was. Margaret’s own hair is freshly reddened, curled. She might see herself in her sister, yes, but her sister seems so real. How pleasant is the glow of Catherine’s little room. “How nice this is,” Margaret says, and takes a bite of cake. Then all at once her sister’s grandchildren arrive. How simple. How sweet it is. “This is the Duchess of Newcastle,” Catherine says. The children stare with their bright, round eyes. Margaret shifts in the chair. My hat is too tall, she thinks.
Outside, the day is hot.
“It’ll be out of the way,” her driver says.
But Margaret doesn’t care.
So rather than east on Holborn, they sweep down Drury Lane, all the way to Fleet Street, around the remains of what was once St. Paul’s—it’s here she brought her Poems & Fancies in 1652, to Martin & Allestyre at the Sign of the Bell, now burnt to the ground—up Old Change to Cheapside to Threadneedle to Broad. At last she sees the gates. Here is Gresham College. She raps and the driver stops. But as she steps from the carriage, she sees the street is burned. It’s black beneath her boots. At once she remembers William’s words, as if she heard them only now: The Royal Society of London no longer meets at Gresham, damaged in the fire. Then what is she doing here?
> As she stands, a crowd begins to form.
On the corner, a sign: a unicorn means an apothecary’s shop. Margaret begins to cross the street. But a hackney coach’s iron wheels come screeching across the stones. She presses herself against a wall. A woman stands beside her, a screaming child slung across her back. When was the last time Margaret walked such streets alone? She opens the door—the shop is dim—but she cannot simply stand there as the apothecary stares. So back into the street, quickly to the carriage. The driver helps her up. The crowd has grown. They point and call, “Mad Madge! Mad Madge!” and mud hits her window as the driver takes a left.
So, it comes. And there’s nothing she can do, even as she feels it come and wishes that it wouldn’t. Mad Madge! Mad Madge! she hears in her head all night.
At dawn, Lucy fetches William and tells him about the crowd. William sends for the doctor. She is only half asleep, half dreaming of that coach, screaming, the screaming baby pressed against the wall. She wakes to the awful shadows of the bed curtains on her arm. “Well,” the doctor says, “no harm was done.” And William—good William—kisses her cheek. Has she been forgiven? He holds her hand as she lies there, bleeding into bowls. When visitors come to the house, the butler tells them the duchess is indisposed. William stays until the doctor’s real cure arrives, a stinking ointment that Lucy has been instructed to spread on her mistress’s legs. “It will open sores,” William explains, “so that the harmful humors might be expelled.” Her hands in waxed gloves, Lucy spreads the salve. Margaret faints from pain. She oozes onto sheets.
Near dawn each day the roosters shout.
At night she hears the bells.
A pattern of days and nights.
Of birds, then bells.
Finally, one afternoon, William leads her to the yard. Her legs are mostly healed. “I think we should have a party,” he says, reaching around to steady his wife. She holds a green umbrella. “To refresh you,” he goes on. The cool air stirs the sores beneath her skirts. “It will be only those friends we’ve known for years,” he says. “Your sister, and Richard Flecknoe, and Sir George Berkeley and his wife.”
The ladies wear satin dresses, the men thick black wigs. Margaret is prepared: she has Latin for one guest, translation for the bishop, sea nymphs for Sir George’s wife. They drink out on the lawn. But the bishop is ill and does not come, and she is seated next to Sir George and not Sir George’s wife. Margaret passes a platter of eels, a calf’s head eaten cold, as Sir George offers a chilled silver bowl with a salad of burdock root. His hands are faintly shaking. “Had you heard,” he loudly says, “I am now an official gentleman member of London’s Royal Society?” “No,” she says, straightening in her chair, “I had not heard.” “Well, well,” he goes on, “you made quite a stir, my dear.” Her Blazing World was passed from man to man. “Quite ruffled,” he laughs, “quite ruffled.” Who was ruffled, she wants to know. But William is asking the old man for news, so Margaret repeats her husband’s question in Sir George’s ruddy ear. And with another laugh, he begins to tell of a recent meeting in which Sir Robert Moray gave an account of an astonishing grove—in Scotland? was it Wales?—its trees encrusted with barnacle shells. “Inside the shells,” he says and chews, “when Moray pried them with his knife, what do you think he found?” He looks the length of the table, for everyone listens now: “Miniature seabirds!” he says. “Curled up and still alive!” The party is delighted. The table shines with light. Margaret watches the salad go, its shining bowl and tongs. But who was ruffled, she wants to know. “Tell us of Robert Boyle,” Catherine’s husband says. “Is it true he walks with a limp?” “You think of his colleague Robert Hooke. A sickly man, though gifted.” “A great man,” someone says. “Then who is Moray?” “Sir Robert Moray,” someone says. “Pardon me,” says Margaret, and everyone turns. “Forgive me,” she says, “but we had been speaking—that is, Sir George had been speaking of my recent book, of comments made at the Royal Society, and not of Sir Robert Moray or Robert Hooke and his limp. You see,” she says, as everyone watches, “I have lately felt a great desire—that is—I would very much like to present my ideas. I would like to speak to the Royal Society. I would like to be invited.”
In Margaret’s Blazing World—with its river of liquid crystal, its caves of moss, and bears—the young lady, inevitably, marries the emperor and, as empress, eventually, begins to feel alone. After the wedding night, she scarcely sees the emperor. Months pass. She has a son. She rarely sees him either. Lonely and bored, she appoints herself the Blazing World’s Patron of Art and Science, names the Bear-men Experimental Philosophers, the Ape-men Chemists, the Lice-men Mathematicians, and calls a convocation of the Bird-men, her Astronomers, instructing them to instruct her in the nature of celestial life.
“A Sun,” begins a bird with a prominent crest, “is a vast bigness.”
“Ah, yes?” she says.
“It is yellowish and splendid.”
The empress agrees it is all of these things.
“A Moon,” he continues, “is whitish and dimmer. But the great difference between them is that the Sun shines directly, whereas the Moon, as can be perceived on any moon-shiny night, never respects the center of our world.”
“What of sun-motes,” she asks. “I’ve long been curious about those flecks that stir in the air.”
“Nothing but streams of small, rare, transparent particles, through which the Sun is represented as through a glass, thinner than the thinnest vapor, yet not so thin as air.”
“Are they alive?” she asks.
“Yes,” says the bird, shaking his crest. “They must be alive, for they are visibly nourished by the presence of the Sun.”
“And what is the air, exactly? A creature itself?”
Another bird stands, plumed in yellow and gray.
“Empress,” he says, “we have no other knowledge of the air but through our respiration. Nature is so full of variety, our weak senses cannot perceive all the various sorts of her creatures.”
“Quite so,” she tells him, pleased.
But the Bear-men annoy her with their microscopes, their artificial delusions, and she orders them to break the instruments, each and every one.
Walking back to the palace, crossing a canal, the lady thinks about wind. It was wind that brought her to the Blazing World, or else its peculiar lack. How odd it is that one winds up where one does. Was she born to be an empress and not a bird or a girl? She carries on like this for quite some time.
“Are seeds annihilated when a plant grows?”
“Is God full of ideas?”
“Is lightning a fluid?”
“Is thunder a blast of the stars?”
Until, one quiet day, having run out of questions, the empress is ready to share her ideas. She asks the spirits to send her a friend, one chosen from among the greatest modern writers: “Galileo,” she says, “Descartes?” But the spirits assure her these men would scorn to be scribes to a woman, and they suggest instead an author called Margaret Cavendish, who writes, they tell the empress, nothing but sense and reason. Thus, with a bang of air and a puff of wind, the soul of Margaret Cavendish is brought into that world.
The carriage jerks to life.
They’ll make much of what she wears—a gown embroidered with glass Venetian beads, red-heeled shoes, a cavalier’s hat, an eight-foot train, a man’s black juste-au-corps—a completely peculiar hybrid. One member will even mistake her for a man, until he sees her breasts. Yes, much will be made of her appearance, though she doesn’t know it yet. Just now, in the carriage rushing down John Street, she doesn’t know—what they will say, what she will say—and she tries to assemble her thoughts, fixed in one point, like a diamond.
Her thoughts spin out instead.
There is so much she might say: about indeterminacy and contradiction, about multiplicity and shifts and turns, about what if, and what if, and who knows, and fairies supping on ant eggs—who knows!—and
amazing desirable shapes, deer made of oak and running through the woods, and men made of sycamore writing poems on papery chests, their arms “may be like spreading Vines, Where Grapes may grow, soe drinke of their own Wine.”
Traffic is thick and a line of boys pursues her in her carriage.
Then, once again, the carriage is off, at two o’clock on a damp gray afternoon. Can a life be said to have a point toward which it moves, like a carriage down a London road, or rainwater in the gutter headed for a drain? At two o’clock on a gray afternoon? But no, she thinks, a life is not like that. They pass a merchant with a long white beard. A pamphleteer with pamphlets. When the carriage stops at the crossroads, she sees a man on a platform claim he can make the time stand still: “And away we go! Away we go, ladies and gentlemen! Clap your hands! Away we go!” But before she can see what happens, the carriage jerks ahead.
Has the time stood still?
The carriage stops; it starts again.
She could take back her request and decline their invitation. She could knock and tell the driver to turn right on Fetter instead. But here are the gates of Arundel House. Here is the Royal Society’s dictum: Nullius in verba. Take no man’s word for it. A crowd in the street pushes and stares. “Mad Madge!” she hears as the gates swing wide. She does not turn her head.
In the formal yard: Lord Brouncker, Sir George, the Earl of Carlisle. They bow as she descends. Beyond the lords, the gates. Beyond the gates, the crowd: “Mad Madge! Mad Madge!”
Brouncker leads her in and down a darkened hall. It smells of powdered wigs and snuff, much like the house in Paris where she used to sit and listen. But a person cannot be in two places at one time, and she is here, not in Paris. She sees a skeleton in a corner. A jar alive with bees. Then Brouncker stops, so Margaret stops. They stand before a door. “It is the first time the Royal Society has beheld a lady in its congress. The room is full,” he says. “Everyone has come.” Margaret nods, adjusts her hat. She follows him through the door.
Margaret the First Page 10
