Margaret the First (3 page)

AND THOUGH AWKWARD STILL IN THE PRESENCE OF ANY MAN WHO
wasn’t a brother, yet I appear in a painting from around this time—of the queen and her exiled ladies—with my neckline plunging deep, as was the mode: I wear a cherry cap, have good plump breasts, fair skin, precise little curls.

IN 1645 WILLIAM CAVENDISH ARRIVED IN PARIS IN A COACH PULLED BY
nine Holsteiner horses. In truth, the marquess had run out of funds but rightly assumed he’d get better credit if he seemed a less risky investment, so presented himself to the queen and gave her a gift of six of his steeds. Henrietta Maria accepted on the panoramic steps of the Louvre. Ladies-in-waiting in springtime flounces flanked her. William’s seasoned eye lighted on one whose own, this once, looked back. What was that shy girl thinking? That standing in velvet on freshly raked gravel was a version of Shakespeare or Caesar? Here indeed was manly fame and fortune: a playwright and poet, a horseman and soldier, a handsome widower and infamous flirt. But would he ask to meet her, the girl with the quiet stare, sister of one of his captured commanders? There were many unmarried ladies at court: some of them rich, quite a few pretty, each hoping to make a good match. William Cavendish had his pick. He picked me, to wide surprise.

Firstly, he existed in a social sphere far above my own. And I, who rarely spoke, almost never spoke to men. But at thirty years my senior, William knew—unlike noisy young courtiers—how to seduce a strange bright virgin. He watched me in my silence. My reserve? He thought it charming. His attentions made me blush. I could feel his stare as I snuck off with
Cymbeline
to a corner. “You enjoy reading?” he asked. We walked the courtyard under jealous eyes. He spoke of things that mattered—my brother, books, my home—and had a way of standing, feet spread, so that his brown eyes met my green ones at one level. Then, and wisely, he began to frequent the embassy, where we often met on Sundays, he kneeling beside me, watching my lips move as I prayed. I was to him a new-come bud, so slender and pale. I smelled of roses, or so he said. I turned pink and asked about my brother.

But just as I began to soften, Henrietta Maria up and quit Paris, taking herself and her court to St. Germain-en-Laye. Her summer château boasted grand suites with painted windows and formal gardens descending to the Seine, with canals and cascading fountains and a cove of faux-grottoes home to clacking metal birds, a bejeweled caterpillar, a golden duck that shook its head and quacked. We smuggled letters. Like clockwork, William composed one poem every other day. I was a “spotless virgin, full of love and truth.” My breasts so plump and young. “If living cannot meet,” wrote he,

then let us try

If after death we can; oh let us die!

And I: “I look apon this world as on a deths head for mortificashun, for I see all things subject to allteration and change, and our hopes as if they had takin opium.”

And he:

Sweetest of nature, virtue, you are it;

Serenest judgement, fancy for a wit;

So confidently modest, so discreet,

As lust turns into love, love homage at your feet.

Summer scorched. Fires burned in surrounding fields posting towers of smoke between the château and Paris. But poetry toils, even in such heat. By the end of the summer, William and I were secretly engaged. Unaccustomed, I troubled. William, brave in secrecy, pressed me against a wall, hands working to get under all those skirts. I hurried down the corridor, locked myself in my room. Alone on the bed, I wished my mother borne across the sea, in through the open painted window, standing on the cold stone floor in France, as if by magic.
As others lunched in a tent on the grass, I wrote another note, begging he be patient: “If you shod repent sir how unfortunat a woman I shod be; pray consider I have enemyes.”

It was true! A swelling noise arose at court, the ladies in a rage. Some said coy Miss Lucas had played the marquess like a song. Others whispered loudly about his numerous past lovers and a rumored decline in stamina. His closest friends opposed the match. I had no dower, the war having taken my family’s wealth. I was of gentle but unremarkable birth. I was odd, that much was obvious, even to idle courtiers. They made no attempt to hide what they said, and soon a different rumor reached me: that the marquess courted another. Naturally, I panicked. I even began to admire Paris because William was in it: “Shurly, my lord,” I wrote in haste, “I shall be content to be any thing you would have me to be, so I am yours; I rejoyce at nothing mor than your leters.”

I needn’t have despaired.

One day by the river’s edge he stuck his tongue in my mouth. Unsure, I tugged it with my lips and nearly choked him. An afternoon while others played
boules
on the grass, he took me for a ride and pinched my nipples. Then it happened: someone leaked our secret to the queen. Her own maid-in-waiting? A
nobody
in her house? Henrietta Maria swore she’d faint. She called for a glass of wine, declared the chapel hot. And I, immediately struck by another summer fever, kept to my chamber the remainder of the season.

WHEN PRINCESS MARIE OF MANTUA MARRIED THE ANCIENT KING OF
Poland (incontinent and crippled by gout), all Paris lined the streets to watch: mounted soldiers in Turkish jackets, their horses’ skin dyed red; footguards in yellow regalia; Polish
seigneurs
in a wealth of jewels, despite a lack of taste. Madame de Motteville reported that the foreigners slept in animal skins and wore no underclothes, but
how
she knew
was what got everybody talking.

Amid this din, Margaret Lucas became Margaret Cavendish in the ambassador’s private Parisian chapel. It was autumn. I wore gray. My hair in waves around my face and braided up at back. No other Lucas could be present, but Lady Browne fondly shed a sister’s worth of tears, and her daughter Mary carried a myrtle bouquet. Then out to the waiting carriage—horses stamping slick with rain—where William swiftly handed me up and sat down beside me, his wife.

So began our journey, our life. But what does one say? What do? William sat in silence. I watched him warily from the edges of my sight. Had I erred? My thoughts slid over the morning as the embassy raced from view: my arrival, the vows, the giving of rings, the proclamation, the blessings. But no, I’d hardly said three words. And with another glance—his salt-and-pepper beard, his broad-brimmed hat—I clicked through stories I’d read or heard, of husbands, cruel and cold, who changed after the wooing. One who was handsome but mean. One who never listened. One who threatened to boil his lady’s pug in a pot. Then William turned to face me. He took my hands from my lap. “My circumstances in exile,” he began, “my situation, you see, is not what it is back home.” And my fingers relaxed in his. I was far more worried about causing offense than being offended myself.

In England, as I surely knew—“Damned awkward to speak of money, and yet”—in England he could boast two noble estates. There was Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire—with its avenue of fir trees and swans upon the lake—where he was Marquess of Newcastle and I now Marchioness. And not a day’s ride to the west sat the ancient castle of Bolsover, on a gentle slope, turreted and thick with scented vines. “Once,” he said, “I spent £20,000 entertaining the king for a week. What quantities of wine we drank and game we shot!” But now, well. In France, you see. “In short,” William said, “I’m poor.”
Poorish
.

Too, in certain circles, in certain courtly circles, among certain younger courtiers, “I’m thought of these days as a bit of an also-ran, a nit.” The troops he’d commanded so thoroughly routed at Marston Moor, where my brother had been captured. “Damn Scots!” William spat, and I diverted my gaze to low-hanging wooden signboards swinging over shops. It had not been any error of his. Details would emerge. History would know his worth. “To come to the matter,” he said, “our situation
will
improve.” There was no point at all on which I should trouble myself. Only steel my ears against gossip. This war would soon be over.

Then a bang of thunder upset the horses and the carriage began to tip—around a corner with two wheels on the ground, water creeping in through seams—a dive! a plunge! a sag! a wreck!—but all was right in seconds, all four wheels on the ground. A current of wet Parisians passed outside the glass. “For now,” he said, replacing his fallen hat, “we will live in the rented wing of a house, yet a graceful château and just beyond the city gate.”

As if on cue, that gate appeared, damp and gray as all Paris, my dress. A regiment of birds strutted blackly at its base. Rain, rain, as far as the eye could see. A drop fell into my lap.

It was: the gate, those crows, some soggy lindens, a fountain, and I was home.

NEXT, A WHIRLWIND OF DETAIL: SERVANTS IN A LINE, EACH WITH A
name and position to remember. I curtsied one by one, and William had to wait. Now came faces of his family and friends, to whom I gave shy greeting. He led me by the hand. I saw high-backed chairs with lion’s-paw feet, exposed beams in the hall, then lifted my skirts and mounted the staircase to a long and narrow corridor, where he kissed me with my back against a door. Satisfied, he turned, the tip of his sheathed sword sliding down the wall, off to join the others in a toast.

The room was smaller than the one I’d been used to at the Louvre, yet all my own, and neat and clean, with bright white walls and two tall windows that watched a narrow street. Should I sit? Take off my cap?
Margaret Cavendish
, I thought,
will now take off her cap
.

Then, like a ghost, a little maid appeared. A little maid in bright white muslin who didn’t say a word, only stripped away the bridal gown and washed my new-wife’s skin—with rough French hands, French soap—and touched my breasts and thighs with tuberose perfume.

Dripping cold and naked, I thought:
William, Willy, Wally, Bill.

It was the century of magnificent beds. Beds like ships from China, or beaded purses, in black and white, or pearled. Beds that disappeared behind a cloud of scented silk. Now an elaborately embroidered brocade curtain exposed my arm, an elbow. I heard their toasts from down below, voices muffled through wood and plaster, just as the world had sounded from my nursery as a girl. I could picture William exactly as I’d first seen him: standing in velvet on freshly raked gravel. It had been only that spring! Then an afternoon, not three months after, when the riverbank was muddy and he’d held me very close. He’d wanted to speak of nothing but me. “A strange enchantment,” I told him. “As if I live in the world but also somehow out.” For he should know I’d always been this way. “But you’re not yet twenty,” he’d said with a smile. “But I’m nearly twenty-two.”

The maid was gone. An Epithalamium played. William opened the door.

His skin was papery. Pleasant, I thought, but papery, loose.

That evening I wrote my mother that he gave me combs and bracelets; William wrote a poem:

To say we’re like one snake, not us disgraces,

That winds, delights itself, with self-embraces,

Lapping, involving, in a thousand rings.

Naturally the talk at dinner was pebbled with first-night jokes. And though seasoned by my time at court, I felt my cheeks go red. I didn’t speak, just sipped and chewed: roasted carp, claret, a shoulder of mutton with thyme, and a fine sugar cake with sprigs of candied rosemary like diamonds. William saw nothing amiss in the banter; his wife was young and very lately a virgin, and his house a household of men.

There was his brother, Sir Charles, with a twisted spine and auburn mustache, considered in certain circles a great philosopher; William’s grown sons from his first marriage, Henry and Charles (called Charlie like my brother); William’s steward; William’s secretary; William’s gentleman of the horse; William’s “man”; William’s ushers, who walked bareheaded before him when he went out. There were female servants, too, and the usual rumors. Over them all, I, Lady Cavendish, now presided. To varying degrees, each ignored me.

WHEN LONDON INTELLECTUAL JOHN EVELYN MARRIED LADY
Browne’s now-twelve-year-old Mary, William and I were among the selected guests. My husband, ever lyrical when it came to virgins, wrote a poem for Evelyn comparing his wife to a horse.

Autumn again, and we attended the opera: Rossi’s
Orfeo
at the Palais Royale.

At court: there was a masque that Christmas.

On the Pont Neuf: barges on the Seine (do fishes in the river miss the salt of the sea?).

Before a painting: the
femme forte
, a woman dressed in armor.

In spring, at the ballet: a spectacle of satin.

At the Tuileries: caged tigers lit by torches.

And being fitted: many yards of colored ribbon.

At home: our house was a salon, William a world-class host. He was witty, laughed easily, set everyone at ease. He was, too, I quickly learned, a rather famous patron—of Dryden, Gassendi, Jonson, and more. I greeted with practiced curtsies, grasped a Chinese fan. Here came William Davenant, poet laureate, who’d lost his nose to syphilis and wore a black cloth in its place. Handsome Lord Widdrington, Bishop John Bramhall, Edmund Waller with his fishy eye, Sir Kenelm Digby, and merry Thomas Hobbes. As for the French: René Descartes, Roberval, and the father of acoustics, Marin Mersenne, who stared openly at my breasts.

Of what did they speak as they stood or sat near the fire?

In the beginning they came to eat; William was generous, even when insolvent, and many of the exiles had fled with nothing but their shirts. On the buffet sat wine, cheeses hard and soft, bread, poached apples, berries or asparagus, fish with horseradish, sliced salted ham.

A man from Japan folded paper into frogs.

An Austrian played
rondeaux
upon the harpsichord.

One evening someone asked what modern scheme would replace the collapsed Aristotelian system, the Middle Ages with their air, wind, earth, and fire, their Ptolemaic structure of the heavens. Soon, beside empty glasses and snuffboxes, strange homemade instruments materialized on our tables: telescopes, compasses, captoptics, more. They spoke of new philosophies, in English or French, of bustling worlds in microscopes, the human body and mind, atomic operations and mechanical arrangement. It was all perfectly new to my thinking. I’d never seen a baro-meter, or cupped a lens in my palm. I sat in the corner, pretending to read or sew.