Danielle Dutton - Margaret the First

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?

Then, of a sudden, William was ready to leave London.

It wasn’t Flecknoe’s recent request for patronage, or the money she’d spent on the gown. He’d simply come to face his fate: he would never find a position in the king’s innermost circle — too old, too stuffy, a reminder of the past.

Margaret said she was ready, if readier months before.

“Wasn’t this what you wanted?” he asked.

“It was,” she said. “It is.”

“What is it you want, my dear?”

But Margaret wanted the whole house to move three feet to the left. It was indescribable what she wanted. She was restless. She wanted to work. She wanted to be thirty people. She wanted to wear a cap of pearls and a coat of bright blue diamonds. To live as nature does, in many ages, in many brains.

“I want my crates” was all she said.

The following morning, before she’d even risen, William was off to Whitehall Palace to seek the king’s permission to leave. If he couldn’t hold sway at court, at least he’d be lord of his county, as he had been before the war, the most powerful man for over half a million acres — from Kegworth to Three Shire Oak and all the way back around.

NOTTINGHAM WAS A NOT INCONSIDERABLE TOWN, WITH WIDE streets and sturdy houses, shops of salt-glazed pots, and Wensleydale and Cheshire cheeses, and stockings and licorice and ale. They stopped at the inn overnight. Morning brought the forest. Sunlight shot from spots between the trees, a dizzying reiteration as the carriage rushed along. It was the farthest north she’d ever been on the planet. The land seemed wilder to Margaret than anything she’d seen. William saw something different. He reminisced. Where once had been the densest of woods, branches entangled like fingers in a grasp, now stood a modern and managed park: timber for building, charcoal, hunting for the rich. Yet to her eyes, Sherwood Forest was vast. It was thick with green and black with moss and lit by starry mountain-laurel clusters puffed up in the dark.

They stopped to stretch.

Margaret heard a heron’s plaintive franck . There were mushrooms on rotted bark, cinnamon ferns in mud. So here was England, yet again — not London, that calamity — England. But it might as well have been the moon, so alien to her memories, to gold soft fields and hills. “What is that?” she asked, head cocked to the side, and he answered it was a river, hidden in the brush. It sounded unlike any she’d ever known. Not the Scheldt, nor the Thames or Seine. “Does every river make a music of its own?” she wondered, tired. Thames, Trent, Tees, Tyne, Tweed, Tay, Dee, Spey: names of rivers, south to north, she’d memorized as a girl. “Margaret,” he called from the carriage, for it was time to go — but something rustled, something whistled, something rattled, remote or close. Thames, Trent, Tees, Tyne, Tweed, Tay, Dee, Spey. Of course, this forest was famously enchanted, enchanting, and heavy with its fame. Her feet began to sink. “Margaret,” he called from the carriage, “we’re almost there.”