Danielle Dutton - Margaret the First

Monsieur Take-pleasure . Dick, Am I fine to day?

Dick . Yes, Sir, as fine as Feathers, Ribbons, Gold, and Silver can make you.

Takepl . Dost thou think I shall get the Lady Happy ?

Dick . Not if it be her fortune to continue under that name.

Takepl . Why?

Dick . Because if she Marry your Worship she must change her Name; for the Wife takes the Name of her Husband, and quits her own.

Takepl . Faith, Dick , if I had her wealth I should be Happy .

Dick . It would be according as your Worship would use it; but, on my conscience, you would be more happy with the Ladies Wealth, than the Lady would be with your Worship.

Takepl . Why should you think so?

Dick . Because Women never think themselves happy in Marriage.

Takepl . You are mistaken; for Women never think themselves happy until they be married.

Dick . The truth is, Sir, that Women are always unhappy in their thoughts, both before and after Marriage; for, before Marriage they think themselves unhappy for want of a Husband; and after they are Married, they think themselves unhappy for having a Husband.

Takepl . Indeed Womens thoughts are restless.

Then scenes change according to my whim, for I was writing more freely than ever before. In the cloister one moment, we’re next on a field of green, where sheep graze around a maypole, and Lady Happy is a shepherdess, while the Prince-who-woos-her-as-a-Princess is a shepherd. Next, Lady Happy is a Sea-Goddess and the Prince-as-Princess is Neptune astride a rock. They embrace, as friends, and then as friends they kiss. Happy questions her fate. Truth be told, she felt a certain stirring. And “why,” she asks, “may not I love a Woman with the same affection I could a Man?” In the end, the Prince’s true nature is revealed. But would Happy, who fled all men, be happy to be his? I hadn’t yet decided, but hurriedly placed a lid atop the crate, then marched myself and my household to the shore. The goods and lower servants boarded a frigate. I, at last, a Dutch man-of-war.

IT CAME AS A SHOCK. AFTER A BRUTAL CROSSING — IN WHICH SHE HIT her head in a storm and swore she’d seen a bear at the helm of the ship — Margaret expected to find her husband at his London residence, Newcastle House, in fashionable Clerkenwell. Yet there she stood in Bow Street in a rented house, again. “I cannot call it unhandsome,” she said when asked if she liked her new room. Where was she meant to keep her gowns? It hadn’t even a mirror. William’s steward came to tell them that her crates could not be found. Her sister, Margaret learned, would be in Cornwall for three weeks. All this in the first two hours, still stinking of the ship. A doctor came, declared her sound. Margaret washed. She slept. In morning light, she dressed. And over the following week, as William prepared to petition the courts for the return of his elegant townhouse, Margaret prepared for some sign of the notice she’d allowed herself to expect.

A celebrity, the king had said.

She sat by the window day after day, yet no one they knew would be walking in Bow Street, and no one in Bow Street seemed to notice who she was.

This was the Restoration, after all. The very air in London was filled with triumphant returns. When the king arrived on his ship in the Thames, twenty thousand horse-and-foot stood brandishing their swords. Everyone had their version of events. Everyone spoke at once. John Evelyn, from the Strand, beheld it and blessed God: “Praised be forever the Lord of Heaven, who only does wondrous things.” “A pox on all kings!” cried a hag. “Oh look, the king,” gasped a girl held aloft. The diarist Samuel Pepys wrote of bonfires the city over, an infinite shooting of guns, and men drinking to the king’s health upon their knees in the street. London was born anew, again. The theaters reopened in a glow of candles and laughter. There were public lectures at Gresham College — on astronomy, on wind. Throngs of visitors, exotic ambassadors. There was tennis at Hampton Court.

Amid this tumult, Margaret’s crates went undelivered. Her manuscripts were missing. She had only two gowns on hand.

“Did you know,” she said over toast one morning, setting aside a letter from her sister, “it is the fashion in London for a lady to appear in public in a state of near-undress?”

“Ah,” said William, and grabbed his hat.

He had always some appointment or some old friend to see.

“My dear,” he sometimes offered, “if you wish to come, then say.”

But Margaret said nothing, or hesitated, and William left, annoyed. When he returned in the evening, he’d find her seated alone at the table in one of those two gowns.

“Are you feeling well?” he’d ask.

“Yes, My Lord,” she’d say.

She tried to write, but nothing came.

“My dear,” he said one evening, “I believe we must do more. We were gone so long, you see. We must work to make ourselves known in London’s good society. After sixteen years stalled, we must finally begin to act.”

His wife looked past him to his shadow on the wall.

“Margaret?” he asked. He scraped his fork against his plate: gingerbread and apple cream.

“But I was not stalled,” she said.

When her sister returned from the country, Margaret was summoned for cake. In rose silk shoes she ventured out, saw that Bow Street teemed with rats and worse: narrow, rutted, splattered by offal and urine, the houses pitched precariously overhead. She saw a painted whore in a gilded chair. A dead dog on the corner. Then Catherine rattled on about people Margaret hardly knew. “How relieved you must be to be home!” her sister cried. “But why are you staying in Bow Street?” And Margaret tried to explain: their debts were large, the estates tied up. They must wait for the king to restore some fraction of what they had lost.

“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.”