Margaret the First (12 page)

Then, with a clatter of gears, a gate is pulled open in the windowless façade, and they pass through to a courtyard, which leads to a reception hall, which leads to gardens behind. The walls enclose two acres, complete with an orchard ready to blossom and the ivied relics of the ancient cloister that formerly stood on the grounds. Margaret steps outside. She breathes the London air. But William calls to her, eager to lead the tour. Thus Margaret learns “Palladian” means “balance.” There are two symmetrical wings of the house, one built for the husband, one for the husband’s wife. Though when he had it built, of course, his wife was someone else. It’s this lady’s portrait, blue-eyed and yellow-haired, that hangs in Margaret’s rooms.

Yet she is happy—is it happiness she feels?—as she places her things in the cupboards and drawers. Her quills, stockings, shoes. The room is dotted by porcelain figures.
Punctuated
, she thinks. She picks one up, puts it down. The former wife’s collection? Then opens a window to London bells and that green-silk scent of spring. And she sees now, here in this room, how badly she’d needed to leave. Impossible to perceive at Welbeck what one perceives in town. Or to perceive in London what one perceives anywhere else in the world. The rain in Paris, for example. Or the color of the cobblestones that run along the Scheldt. Of course, she thinks, a body cannot be in two places at one time. Might a mind? But no, she thinks. For when a body changes location, it changes its mind as well. She looks to the mirror. Her hair is graying, but her eyes are wide and green. On how many millions of occasions has she observed her own reflection? Tonight she sees that girl in the carriage so many years ago, en route to join the queen. Yet how hard it is to point to a moment. To say: There, in that moment, I changed. That night on the road to Oxford she felt she was plunging into life. The horses ran through the starry dark. And today, too. She closes the window. Everything comes together. The air is wet and sweet, and tiny star-shaped flowers creep across the lawn. She almost laughs as she unpacks a pair of gloves. I will call on dear Catherine in the morning, she thinks, and moves to sit on the canopied bed as Lucy hangs her gowns.

They eat, undress, dress again, drive out into the city. The city is half black from the fire. Still, there is birdsong and laughter. Swine root in fishy water. Towers strain, bells peal. Someone cries for a girl called Doll Lane. The carriage takes a left. Then Charing Cross, then Wallingford House, then Royal Park and the new canal. At last they disembark and enter the Banqueting Hall together, William greeting familiar faces, Margaret in diamond earrings and a hat like a fox that froze. They’ve come to pay their respects to the king and his new queen—new, at least, to Margaret—and pass beneath enormous chandeliers, Margaret in a gown designed to look like the forest floor, like glittering yellow wood moss and starry wood anemone and deep-red Jew’s-ear bloom. It has a train like a river—so long it must be carried by a maid—yet hitches up in front, so she might walk with ease. Gone are the golden shoes with gold shoe-roses, just flat boots laced to her knees. Into the king’s reception chamber—dizzying carpets and glasses of wine half-drunk—where Margaret grandly bows, but there’s little chance to speak. Someone takes her arm. While William is left to speak with the king, Margaret is stewarded to the queen’s reception rooms, where Queen Catherine sits surrounded by her Spanish ladies and several snoring hounds. How unlike Henrietta Maria and the old court this new one is: this queen is pious, unpretty, and has miscarried four times. Margaret’s curtsey is solemn. Solemnly, she offers the queen a copy of her book. The queen is cold. Her ladies cold. “Are those Spanish dogs?” Margaret asks. She is not invited to cards.

“I hate it here,” she says, climbing back into the carriage.

“You’re far too easily flustered,” William says.

In heavy rain they pass Arundel House, where the Royal Society—he’s just learned from Lord Brouncker—has been meeting since the streets near Gresham College were damaged in the fire.

“Are you listening?” he asks.

The city is black and glistens.

A simple rule, which she should have remembered. “The most preposterous sort of ceremony,” she says. For only the woman of highest rank is allowed a female train-bearer, yet Margaret has just presented herself to the queen in a train so long her train-bearer still stood out in the hall.

“An error,” William says. “I’ll apologize to His Majesty myself. You are simply out of practice. It’s been nearly seven years. No need to make a fuss. There’s no need to be always getting so upset.”

They turn up Chancery Lane.

“Take Brouncker’s wife,” he offers. “A very amiable girl. One always finds—”

“At dinner tomorrow,” Margaret says, “I will be entirely pleasant, you will see. I will limit my conversation to three topics: rain, Chinese silks, and the stage.”

But the following afternoon, William hears her telling their guests that if the schools do not retire Aristotle and read Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, they do her wrong and deserve to be abolished.

She sits with Flecknoe amid the porcelain figures and sips her cooling tea. It’s true she’s being spoken of. “The general air,” he fears, “is sympathy for the queen. For they say your slight was intended, and you must have seen her pitiful face, and surely you’ve heard . . .”

But Margaret’s mind is like a ball of string. It’s just the same, she thinks. Nothing ever changes. And outside, it is spring. The orchard is in blossom. She rises to the window, sees the blooms on trees like constellations, the bees like tiny voyagers between the orchard’s many worlds.

“. . . her miscarriages,” he whispers.

“But I cannot be sweet Lady Brouncker!” she blurts.

Now Flecknoe is quiet, and Margaret is sorry, for he only means to help.

“I should not have come to London.”

“Nonsense!” he cries. “We must simply present you anew. Give them something else to rattle about.
Une petite soirée
, perhaps? Here in Newcastle House?” He unfolds into the room. “Surely the duke will agree,” he says. “Is the duke at home?”

But no, the duke is out.

At suppertime, he comes. “Where have you been?” Margaret asks. But William only suggests they take their supper outside. After a plate of beef and two glasses of beer, he finally smiles and speaks. “I have written a play,” he says. She nearly drops her fork. “
The Humorous Lovers
,” he tells her. But they always share their work. “Opening night is in nine days. At Lincoln’s Inn Fields. At eight.” It’s to be staged anonymously, since now he is a duke. “You may order a new gown,” he says. He is eager, she can see. He kisses her on the forehead and tells her, “Everyone will come.”

She is worried there’s something she left behind. She has her mask, her gown. The
femme forte
, she’d explained to the seamstress. And so the dress, like an Amazon’s, is all simple drapes and folds. Now she crosses Fleet River, her head held very straight. The water flashes in ropes, in shapes. Under the shadow of chestnut trees she stops to adjust her mask. There are others also dressed and moving toward the theater. A black glass bead in the back of her mouth holds the mask in place. She has never worn a mask before. She tries not to gag on the bead.

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.