Margaret the First (8 page)

“You’ve a smudge on your face,” William said when she got back.

Margaret touched her nose.

“Other side,” he told her.

At least when he attended the lectures he’d report on what he’d seen: a demonstration on falling bodies, something pretty with mercury, a piece of white marble dyed a most dramatic red. And though women were not allowed at Gresham College—Cromwell might be dead, but not everything had changed—Margaret waited and listened. For every hour, it seemed, an exiled thinker returned, while others were back in the city after years in university towns. Soon William’s interest was especially piqued—so, in turn, was hers—by a group of experimental philosophers who’d met at Oxford during the war. The Invisible College, they’d called themselves, within the college walls.

“Invisible?” she asked.

“A network, you know. Sending letters, sharing ideas.”

He stopped to pinch some salt.

“In any case,” he said, “despite the war, whether Royalist or Roundhead, they spent hours together in John Wilkins’s garden, testing ideas. It’s all about proof, you see.”

“Remind me, who is Wilkins?”

“You remember. That preacher who wrote the book about a colony on the moon.”

Together they chewed the goose.

“In addition to ivies,” William continued, “this garden boasted a transparent beehive from which the men extorted honey without disturbing the bees . . . a rainbow-maker misting exquisite colors across the lawn . . . a Way-wiser and Thermo-meter . . . and a hollow statue with a tube in its throat through which Mr. Wilkins could travel his voice and surprise any guests to his garden!”

“How merry it sounds.”

William nodded, spit fat. “Productive, too.”

Now scores of pamphlets were being printed each day—flicking down London’s streets, catching horses’ legs—and all of it in English—not French, not German, not Latin—so that Margaret could, for the very first time, read the new ideas herself when they were truly new. There was one on fevers, one on flora, one on a frog’s lung, one on fog. At first there were words she did not know and explanations she could not fathom. But as days passed into weeks, she saw a pattern emerge: one man referred to another’s research in explaining his own findings; one article led you down a path of thinking to the next. And there was one pamphlet in particular causing quite a stir:
New experiments physico-mechanicall, touching the spring of the air
by an Irishman from that Invisible College, a man named Robert Boyle, currently blazing to fame though wholly unknown to her. Margaret sent a servant to fetch it from a shop. In its pages she learned of years of careful labor: the construction, at Oxford, of an air pump, and the subsequent experiments performed on living things.

Prior to the lark, she read, Boyle used a mouse.

The time before, a sparrow.

Before that, a butterfly.

And once he used a bee.

The lark, though now with a hole in her wing, looked lively enough when Boyle put her under glass. Then he turned a stopcock on his rarefying machine and the air was slowly sucked out of the chamber. The bird began “manifestly to droop.” It staggered, collapsing, gasping. It threw itself down, threw itself down, and then the bird was dead.

“All this,” she objected, “to prove a bird needs air?”

“Before devising the pump,” said William, “he’d had to strangle them with his hands.”

Now all London was buzzing with the news: air holds a vital quintessence necessary to life.

“Too late for the lark,” Margaret said.

And as for the air, it was foul. London was loud and it stank. The streets bulged with noisome trade: salt-makers, brewers, soap-boilers, glue-makers, fishmongers, chandlers, slaughterhouses, tanners, and dyers hemorrhaging rainbows into the rivers and lanes. The windows were dimmed with sooty grime. At night she couldn’t sleep. She panicked in the dark. Was it wrong to miss her blue-domed room and the orchard back in Antwerp? It rained, and Margaret slept all day. She dreamt that a porpoise swam up to her window and gulped. Why couldn’t she find a handkerchief? Where was her summer coat? She would send her plays to Martin & Allestyre, but her crates still had not arrived. “Where are my crates?” she asked the maid. Where were her linen-wrapped plays? Her mind was like a river overspilling in the rain. Robert Boyle, Robert Boyle, currently blazing to fame. So William called a doctor, who bled her into bowls. Her cheeks were red, then pink, then gray; the blood in the bowls was black. That night another storm blew in and hit upon the glass. Still the sounds of London’s bells came clanging in her ears: St. Martin-in-the-Field, St. Dunstan-in-the-West. One, two, three, four . . .

By dawn, the sky was clear.

“Where are my crates?” she asked, now calm.

And William proposed a ride, for she’d been so long shut in. But London Bridge was adorned in traitor’s limbs set at startling angles. She saw a leg splash into the river. A rat ran down their hall. The watchman bellowed, “Rain!” No one knocked on their door.

At last, one night, Margaret insisted that they go—retreat to the countryside, where she could write and be at peace. She had never been happy in London, not once. “And to be surrounded by such a constant crush, all of them speaking English!”

“But you never learned a word of Dutch.”

“Exactly,” Margaret countered. “I cannot distinguish my thoughts!”

“My dear,” William finally said, “Welbeck is uninhabitable. Bolsover is half pulled down—six rooms in the eastern wing stand open to the sky. For that matter,” he dug in, “your St. John’s Green is nothing but rubble and hip-high grass.”

She told him of her sister’s disdain for their lodgings, of that rat she had spied in their hall. It was an insult, she half whispered, to live so far below their rank. Was this what they’d suffered for? Her childhood home flattened; one brother crushed by his horse; another shot in the head. So that they might return, unnoticed, to live in Bow Street in filth? She trembled as she said it: “Unfit, it appears, to be acknowledged by the king?”

William only chewed his meat. He wiped his lips. Then he pushed back from the table, loyal to the crown. “To my final breath!” he cried.

Days of silence settled with London’s soot on the house.

But the following week, when a grocer’s boy was trampled to death just beyond their doorstep, William acquiesced, moved them over to Dorset House just up from the Whitefriars Stairs. It was only one elegant wing rented from the earl, and though he could ill afford it, William had to admit: the move brought quiet, and river views, and an ample parlor with an Italianate ceiling in which to entertain.

SIR KENELM DIGBY, SIR GEORGE BERKELEY, THE BISHOP OF LONDON
himself: Margaret greeted them in the Dorset House parlor in a dress of sparkling violet, a hat like petals falling through empty space. To William, so pleased with it all—the guests and wine, her sparkling gown—his wife was more a marchioness than she’d ever been before. He remembered her in Paris, pretending to read or sew. Now as he took her round the room—introducing her to poets, ambassadors, dukes—she hardly blushed, and even spoke. Yet meanwhile, across the parlor, his daughters looked on distraught. Their father had grown only more besotted and their stepmother more astonishing than when they’d first laid eyes on her in ribbons years before. She bowed. She nodded. She nearly bobbled. Yet if she noticed their scrutiny, Margaret gave no outward sign. She admired Elizabeth’s sapphire stockings with the metal thread. Elizabeth smiled sweetly. Everyone played a part.

Finally, one quiet morning, word arrived at Dorset House that the king would come to dine. It was exactly what William had been angling for these weeks. He hurried to write a spoof—the evening’s entertainment, involving an incomprehensible Welshman who babbles when meeting the king—while Margaret was taken down to see the Earl of Dorset’s cook. Quince cream and orange pudding, the harried cook advised. Quince cream and orange pudding, singers and a band. The morning passed in a fuss. A hasty dinner, and rain began to fall. Margaret, exhausted, alone in her chamber, sat and watched the barges on the Thames: onions going down to sea, timber coming up. She had not written in many weeks. The river raced along. A fishmonger dropped a basket and several fish slid out.

William hoped for a place at court, his London house returned, and Margaret had hopes of her own that night. “A celebrity,” the king had said.

As guests began to arrive downstairs, she was thinking her thoughts, half dressed.

“What is it?” William asked as they descended the marble stairs.

She only shook her head.

The parlor was overfull: ladies grooming, musicians tuning, powder on the air. Here came her one living brother, John, whom Margaret hardly knew. William’s son Henry. Sir Kenelm Digby, again. Guests danced, drank punch. They threw open windows for air. But when the king’s carriage was seen in the street, everything grew still. Margaret stood beside her husband, the blood loud in her ears.

His Majesty entered to fanfare—and all was movement again.

William was first to step forth and bow. The king turned to Margaret, who smiled and curtsied low. It was their first meeting in over a year, their first since that dinner in Antwerp, yet when she opened her mouth to speak, she saw the king’s eyes riffle over her and off. Over her shoulder he scanned the crowd. On instinct, she moved aside.

He was lost all night to a sea of girls and courtiers and fuss. Quince cream and orange pudding, singers and a band. At least William was named a Gentleman of the Bedchamber, at last.

“An utter success,” her stepdaughters confided to Margaret as they prepared to take their leave. “The handsome king! That spoof!” Still the rain persisted, and the bishop had lost his hat. Maids danced in and out. Where was the bishop’s hat? Alone at the window, Margaret didn’t hear. The reflection of the parlor was yellow and warm. She watched it empty out. Then, an interruption. A voice came at her side: “What do you look at with such interest, Lady Cavendish?” What did she see in the glass? She saw the Marchioness of Newcastle. She saw the aging wife of an aged marquess, without even any children to dignify her life.

THE VOICE WAS RICHARD FLECKNOE’S AND HE SAVED HER FROM HERSELF.
“We’ve met before,” he said, “at the Duchess of Lorraine’s . . . at Béatrix’s castle.” By now the parlor was empty and he stooped to kiss her hand. The king was gone. The parlor was empty. Flecknoe was kissing her hand.

He began to visit daily. He knew her work and praised it to her face. Dramatist and poet, and newly returned from Brazil, he was the tallest man she’d seen outside a circus. He wore a black stiletto beard, dressed head-to-toe in black.

“Your devotee?” asked William.

“Do you think he’s a rogue?” Margaret asked.

Yet he seemed so fresh, so young, even if not, in truth, so many years younger than she. And the strangest expressions fell from his mouth: “All my cake will be doe.”

They began to go on outings; William approved, amused.

One morning Flecknoe took Margaret to see an amaryllis. It was grown in a pot by a gentleman named Fox. There were many witty young people around, some claiming to have read her books. And what did she think of the flower? “Like two lilies lashed at their feet,” she said. She declared it somewhat mannish. Her audience approved. “Look, you are a star,” Flecknoe whispered into her hat.

Another afternoon, as he perched like a crow on an Ottoman stool, Margaret asked her new friend to describe the vast Atlantic. “Oh, it was most abundant,” he said, putting down his glass. He told her of the savages. Of garish birds and waterfalls and Brazilian rivers and death. He hoped to visit Greenland next. “I shall take you to see Mercator’s map!” he said, on display in a mansion near Whitehall.

The following morning they walked the Strand, past cab stands and Roman baths and the stalls at Covent Garden. All was renovation, the king importing new styles from France—the long dark wigs and silverwork doublets, aviaries and fountains and gardens shaped like stars—and Flecknoe bent low to tell her how the previous night the king’s brother had secretly married Anne Hyde. “The court is in a state!” he laughed.

The map was under glass.

Annotated in Latin, she could see for herself that the northern tip of Scotland—
Scotia
—crept onto its bottom edge. At center were four islands: one green, two yellow, one pink, which, he told her, comprised the North Pole, a whole divided by four indrawing rivers to a whirlpool in the middle. “Here,” he said, “lies the very pole of the pole of the Earth, where all the oceans’ waters circle round and fall, just as if you’d poured them down a funnel in your head, only to see them come back out the southern end. And in the middle of the middle sits a large black rock, the very pole of the pole of the pole of the Earth, wholly magnetic, possibly magic, and thirty-three miles across!”

“Where is the ice?” she wanted to know.

Walking back up the Strand, he explained about floes. But rather than return to Dorset House, he proposed they venture on—from Fleet Street to Ludgate Hill, up Friday Street to Cheapside—to a coffeehouse called Turk’s Head in Cornhill.

“Have you never been, Lady Cavendish?” he asked.

“Please call me Margaret,” she answered.

It was dim inside, yet most heads lifted when Flecknoe stooped in with a marchioness on his arm. He placed her at a table with several of his friends—a James, a Henry, a Gibson, a Joseph, a Balthy, a Cutch—then returned with coffee, gritty and sweet in a dish. She thanked him and sipped as his friends resumed their conversation about the London stage. A stack of dirty dishes mounted as they spoke: of Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson’s
Volpone
, of Davenant’s new wings. When the talk turned to a technicality of narration, Margaret abruptly spoke. “Have you noticed,” she said, “how few plays begin or end with a woman’s character speaking?” The one called Gibson readily agreed. But Margaret said no more, and soon it was time to go.

That night she only poked at her food. Her stomach turned. In bed under a canopy—a dusky swath of red—she was struck just after midnight by the vision of a gown—a dress for the North Pole!—the first she’d dreamt up in ages. And very early, in a kind of violent compulsion, too eager to wait for her husband’s consent, she sent off an order for three bolts of bright blue silk, and gilt lace, and green and yellow taffeta . . . but how would she manage a magnetic hat?