Margaret the First (5 page)

Charles was trying to square the circle. He was constructing an equation to determine the outcome of desire plus fear, the evolution from emotion to action—and found me, he said, much improved. He built a lab in the house in Antwerp, where I, silent assistant, saw mercury in little spherical bodies running about, organs pickled in jars, leaves below a microscope. Over dinner the two men met and talked together, about Socrates, Descartes, the zodiac, free will, circulation, the poles. Why had they lost the Civil War? What was the way back to royal rule? Unlike Mr. Hobbes in his
Leviathan
, then under production in Paris, William thought that common man should be kept illiterate and happy, with sport and common prayer. “Too much reading,” he said, “has made the mob defiant.” I chewed my mutton and considered.

Too, we’d been making friends. There was Constantijn Huygens: statesman, poet, lutenist, and the translator of Donne into Dutch; the Duarte family, once Portuguese Jews, now merchants of coral, pearls, and diamonds (they had a Bruegel, a Titian, two Tintorettos); and Béatrix, Duchess of Lorraine, whose castle at Beersel was home to feminine sports of wit: lotteries, wishes, wonders, oracles. At first I merely listened at the duchess’s gatherings, nibbled a butter cake. Yet in time I found I excelled at their aristocratic games. I wrote “portraits” for the ladies’ amusement, riddles and allegories for them to untangle: the mind is a garden, married life a stew. To my growing delight, I was a hit, my mind, I wrote, a “swarm of bees.” That August I cast off my years of mourning, sent maids scurrying down the halls with stacks of black gowns in their arms. To the final parties of the season I wore a rainbow of new dresses I’d had made—one as bright as a fiery beam, one as green as leaves. “After all,” I told my husband, “dressing is the poetry of women.” He heartily agreed. Had I heard it somewhere? I couldn’t say. I took to wearing feathered hats like ladies in the streets.

One night, the Duarte girl sang poems set to music in a voice so clear I felt my soul rise up inside my ear. In a garden of clematis, with servants dressed like Gypsies placing candles in the trees, we assembled on the grass, between a Belgian wood and Béatrix’s glassy pond. In a pale orange gown I read two pieces I’d prepared: Queen Elizabeth was declared the radiant mistress of the sea, but Penelope should have been stalwart, I said, and never allowed those suitors to gather around her at all. When the ladies clapped their approval in the dark, everything, to me, was suddenly bright and near.

As autumn came, however, I found myself less often at Beersel, less often with William under the roses, more in my chamber alone. I filled sheet after sheet in my straggling hand—no one knew what with. And when he inquired at breakfast one morning: “I’ve long found pleasure in writing,” I explained, “but was only joining letter to letter and word to word. Now,” I said, and took a bite of pear, “I begin to connect idea to idea, as the ancients would form pictures of the stars.” William suggested that a writer requires an acquaintance with the world, some external stimulation. “Might not a brain work of itself,” I countered, “as a silkworm spins out of its own bowels?” I would benefit, he maintained, from engagement outside the house.

And the roses wilted and fell. The yard grew brown, then gray. Christmas came with its myrtle crowns and almond marchpane and candles. The ink in my inkpot was frozen every day. When John Evelyn, Lady Browne’s son-in-law, came on a visit through Antwerp, he brought news that Descartes had died. An era had ended, the men agreed, or another just begun. That night, over supper, they discussed their old friend’s work. The table was heavy with flowers and food, the fire was hot at my back. He was a man who knew much, the gentlemen agreed, and knew what to do with all that he knew. He thought the soul was attached to the human body through a gland, I remembered. He thought the universe was like a machine, the body like a clock. He’d once nailed his wife’s poodle to a board. He believed nothing could think or feel but man. But how could he know a poodle didn’t feel? Or even a magnet? A vase? Now he was gone, and I ate my bread. And yet, I thought, he lived. Unlike my sister and mother, Descartes was here, and always would be, as Shakespeare would, as Ovid. But I did not feel like a clock, I thought. I listened. I chewed my bread.

Then the Scheldt froze and William finally insisted I get out, spin on the ice with incorporeal legs. Much to his astonishment, I refused to do as he bid. Nervous, thrilled, I paced my chamber bit by bit, worried, as I wrote, that “should I Dance or Run, or Walk apace, I should Dance my Thoughts out of Measure, Run my Fancys out of Breath.” I suppose he thought I wrote new riddles for the ladies at Beersel. I pondered in secret the link of death to fame: “Give me a fame that with the world may last.” Yet also: “Fame is but a word, an emptee sound.” I wrote: “And though it seem to be natur’l, that generaly all Women are weaker than Men; yet shurly some are far wiser than some Men.” Still, the river would not thaw. At dinner one night Mr. Evelyn reported seeing a crow’s feet frozen to its prey. I stared at him as if confused by what he’d said. I wrote: “Some Ground, though it be Barren by Nature . . .” and fish froze unmoving in the Scheldt. Sitting close to the fire one night, I burned the hem of a dress, white lace curled black upon the tiles. I wrote: “Some Ground, though it be Barren by Nature . . .” and stamped the flames with a moldy copy of Dodoens’s
Historie of Plants in Antwerp
. I wrote: “Some Ground, though it be Barren by Nature, yet, being well muck’d and well manur’d . . .” Then Antwerp was flooded by melting ice. I wrote: “Some Ground, though it be Barren by Nature, yet, being well muck’d and well manur’d . . .” Peasants filled the city. Cows floated off. Birds sang. Fish swam. I wrote: “Some Ground, though it be Barren by Nature, yet, being well muck’d and well manur’d, may bear plentifull Crops, and sprout forth divers sorts of Flowers.”

I wrote.

SINCE A WOMAN WAS, IN THE EYES OF PARLIAMENT, A MINOR NO
matter her age, and since there could be no use in having children swear a loyalty oath, now women swept into the courts as never before—an Olivia for her Endymion, an Alice for her Ralph—and it occurred to William, still in Antwerp, that this might be our chance. He had been banished, yes, but a Royalist’s wife was free to return. So when Sir Charles began to plan a trip to London, William decided that I would go as well, and ask that I be awarded my share of his assets. “That the time is right I have no doubt,” he came to my room and said. Yet for me, for the life of my mind, his timing could not have been worse. Everything excited me—the nature of flattery, food, poetry, the nature of shyness and wit—and I’d been writing every day as in a rush it tumbled out. Now all this I locked away in the tortoiseshell cabinet, fastening its tiny key to a chain around my wrist.

No storms, no pirates. Just a dreary trip with many fraudulent fees.

By the time we reached the Thames, Charles was out of cash and had to pawn his clock-watch to proceed to the city upstream. We took a modest house in Covent Garden. From its narrow windows we watched the city stretching out: ticking, constant, grinding, chiming. Charles had early business with the Committee for Compounding. My own hearing would take place in several weeks.

First, however, I had my stepdaughters to meet. I’d carried gifts from Antwerp—black Dutch lace and clove-scented gloves—but Elizabeth and Jane were wary. London tittered.
Lady Cavendish went walking with ribbons round her arms!
Shy to speak in public, that much was clear, yet I did my utmost, so they wrote to their father, to stand out in a crowd. And
no one
wore feathers in London, yet their stepmother saw fit to be well-plumed when she went out.

Meanwhile, their father, their hero, whom they longed for, stuck in Flanders—too great a traitor to return. Too great a traitor, or so Parliament determined, to be given back any of the estates that had been taken. “And you were not even married when he fled. So technically,” the judges ruled, “none of it is yours.” I sat rigid before the court—my green, blue, red feathers drafting overhead. Unable to petition further, I whisperingly asked to be taken from the room, through the stately carved doors, out of Goldsmith’s Hall to Gresham Street in December.

AT NIGHT I BECAME INCREASINGLY ANXIOUS, READING AGAIN IN
a high-backed chair letters and poems William dispatched from Antwerp. Tales of virgins raped and flung from cliffs, bloody deaths for valiant princes, axes. Without me, he wrote, he was “cold as congealed ice,” his tears “converted to a shower of hail.” Each morning I walked to Drury House to inquire after his seized estates—meadows, coal mines, waterworks, granges—out of my control, sold to Parliamentarian officers. Nothing was as it should have been and London was grown strange. St. Martin’s-in-the-Field was just plain Martin’s. The House of Lords had been abolished. A new flag flew. Divorce was made legal. There was no aristocracy to set a sparkle to the city. The theaters were closed, the palace. Then one Wednesday even the sun went dark, and a burning halo replaced it. A preacher in Friday Street claimed the city’s birds were struck dumb in the unnatural dusk, a mark of evil to come, and placed the blame on Cromwell’s daughter, who refused the Puritan cap, paraded in bright satin dresses. Gone were the jeweled vest and periwig. Men wore short-cropped hair and plain black suits and called each other “brother.” Women in filthy skirts preached from London’s corners. The underground Royalist paper,
Mercurius Pragmaticus
, declared England had “grown perfectly new, and we in another world.” Time was “running up like parchment on fire.” Change was “running up like parchment on fire.” London was “running up like parchment on fire.” I tried to stitch a pillowcase but found it deadly dull.

AS IF GOSSIP, INSOMNIA, AND PURITANS WEREN’T ENOUGH, DIRE NEWS
arrived from Antwerp. William had run out of credit again, and this time there’d be no repayment from the queen. So Sir Charles began the ignoble business of buying back his brother’s inherited estates, the rents from which would allow William a modest but steady income. William’s sons assisted. His daughters pawned jewelry and plate. And this new flurry of business meant another six months in town. After six already? I sunk down fairly low. I reread my husband’s poems, their rivers of blood and wounded beasts, and was troubled at night by dreams. In the mornings I would not dress, since he for whom I dressed myself was miles from where I was kept. I complained of headaches, constipation. Then one afternoon, three weeks on, Mayerne, the royal doctor, who’d often discussed me in letters with William, appeared in Covent Garden to attend me in the flesh.

He tapped and patted, then scribbled in a book: how clear, how pale, how pink. I looked, he assured me, ten years younger than my age, in blossom, in perfect health, and prescribed only a new herb from China called tea. “The decoction of it drunk warm doth marvels,” he told Charles. “Very comforting, abates fumes.” To me he spoke nonsense, as he would to any child, suggesting candy or gossip, or candy with gossip, to lift my mood.

Sir Charles, meanwhile, had never seemed more engaged. Each night the house he’d let was filled with London’s leading minds. There was the furor surrounding
Leviathan
, as Mr. Hobbes was back in town; some new map of the moon to decipher; and Thomas Browne, whose
Pseudodoxia Epidemica
was selling out across the land, busy addressing vulgar questions—such as whether the savior laughed—busy explaining time itself, and barrenness in women, and the reason so many aqueducts are adorned with a lion’s head. All this I knew in some detail, for I admit I had grown curious, as days passed into weeks, and had begun to spend my evenings in a yellow parlor downstairs, listening as their voices pressed through the rented walls
.

They spoke of Lucretius. They spoke of light.

One evening I took down
The Parliament of Bees
and, flipping through its pages, hearing the men enter the house, I counted seven years. It was seven years since I first sat listening to their talk . . . and I was as invisible this evening as I’d ever been in Paris. More so, in fact, for I sat dumbly and alone! Can you hide and yet be angry when no one looks at you? Oh, you can, I knew, but it was pointless, exhausting. The watchman shouted nine o’clock. Still their voices carried on. And despite the frost on the window, my cheeks began to burn—I thought I might be sick—so shrugging off my shawl, I hastened across the parlor and, throwing open the door, ran smack into Hobbes in the hall. “Dear,” he said backing up, “Lady Cavendish.” He bowed as best he could. To which performance I said something dull about cabbage, something vague about a bad fricassee I’d eaten, and hurried with a candle upstairs.

Once in my room, however, I felt foolish rather than ill.
I’m
, I thought—and turned to the window—
I am much too
—and up came a roar of laughter from the men. My face shone in the glass, pale and round. A depressing little street: sleety, slippery, with brash market voices, stinking heaps of trash. I could just make out the edge of Bedford Gardens—then the moon broke free of the clouds. London was transformed. London was set alight. The river, the frost. Like something out of a dream. Like something out of Shakespeare: hot ice and wondrous strange snow . . .

At last, all was silent, as if the house itself had froze. Yet even as the river slowed and the city changed to ice, something in me loosened, my thoughts were taking flight, into and out of questions I’d long held, over London’s rooftops, to the country, to converse with an oak tree, a parrot, a clap of thunder:

Why do men deny fairies, yet burn witches at the stake?

Do fishes have brains?

Are stars made of fiery jelly or are they flecks off the sun?

That night I wrote: “I
Language
want, to dresse my
Fancies
in.”

The following day:

Give me the free and noble style,

Which seems uncurb’d, though it be wild.

Hadn’t I thoughts, after all? A mind of my own? It cannot be infamy, I reasoned, to run or seek after glory, to love perfection, desire praise. There were other ladies in London who wrote—I’d met them at the secret Royalist concerts we’d attended. Yet the poems they circulated among themselves were anonymous elegies for dead children or praise for noble husbands. My own quill went marching across the page. I rejected any clocklike vision of the world. I chastised men who hunt for sport. The moon might be a ball of water, I proposed, and the lunar mountains we
think
we see only reflections of our own.