Margaret the First (13 page)

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.

The meeting has begun. She watches as they watch her sit. The air is cold, the windows tall. The walls are blue and hung with portraits. The table is polished and square—she’s always imagined it round—and in benches on three sides sit the famous philosophers and gentlemen members alike. She sees their wigs and eyes, sees an instrument on the table, a piece of raw meat, a glass of something green. And where moments ago, alone in the carriage, it seemed time was rushing ahead, now it seems to Margaret that time is standing still. The moment eddies, pools at her feet. Robert Boyle. Henry More. John Evelyn. Christopher Wren. What will she say? How will it start?

Then the focus shifts. A man steps from the crowd. “Robert Hooke,” the secretary says. Indeed, she sees, he limps. “The air pump,” Hooke announces. He measures the weight of the air. A globe-shaped magnet is pulled through iron filings. A slice of roast mutton is immersed in a liquid and immediately turns to blood. He displays one instrument after another, hardly pausing between. It’s clear he has performed this before. For other aristocratic visitors, other invited guests? Indeed, many of the men look bored as two round marbles are by machinations flattened. He does something with a compass. Something pretty with prisms and light.

London’s bells begin to toll; an hour has passed, though she’s not yet spoken a word. Now Hooke places a microscope on the table. Their brittle art, she’s called it. He asks her to look inside, observe the swimming bodies. All the faces turn to her. Margaret looks inside—she blinks—a horse neighs in the street. She sees the bodies, swimming, like blossoms on a breeze, like actors in a play, she thinks, in and out of view. The image flickers, suspended. Hooke continues his speech. She shifts her gaze to the bodies that fill the room. Like one body, she thinks, with many pairs of eyes. And a feeling comes over her then, the feeling that she’s been walking here across a vast expanse with something in her hands. The image flickers, suspended. Alone, she thinks. I am quite alone. And, thus distracted, she catches only fragments of Hooke’s concluding speech—“light, by which our actions are to be guided . . . be renewed, and all our command over all things”—to the serious philosophers and the gentlemen members assembled in the room.

He almost missed the meeting, for bricklayers came to mend a chimney in his kitchen. Yet keen to see her, he hurried all the way. “The Duchess of Newcastle is all the pageant now discoursed on,” at breakfast tables and dinner parties, over porridge or pike, she was all that anyone spoke about—or so he’d written in his diary several weeks before. For she was
everywhere
that season. She was at the theater; she was entertaining the king; she was riding down the street. And
everyone
had seen her, yet he could not manage to spot her. So when it was rumored the Duchess of Newcastle would repay the king’s visit the following Monday, he’d loitered at Whitehall Palace well into the night, the palace packed with eager visitors, as if it were Christina, the Queen of Sweden, at any moment expected. But the duchess did not appear. She awaited an entire new livery for her footmen—or so the papers said—all of silk velvet, with caps that mimicked the caps of the king’s own footmen, a costly and a grand procession, with one coach—the papers said—carrying her gentleman attendants, then the carriage bearing the duchess, then a four-horse coach carrying her ladies-in-waiting, they in gowns of lutestring and she in a fashion of grandeur, heavily embroidered and trimmed in lace, with jewels in her ears, high-heeled shoes on her feet, and a puff of feathers atop her head fit for a masque or a play or a ball, a triumphant show, the court!