Danielle Dutton - Margaret the First

WELBECK SPANNED CENTURIES: GOTHIC AT ONE END, ELIZABETHAN in the middle, and at the other end a classic Jacobean front. Inside, the house had been denuded in the war. Fortunately, Henry’s wife — who’d lived there with her family until William and Margaret’s return — left several beds, and pots and pans, and candlesticks and stools, and two imposing suits of armor erect on a red leather floor.

“Still, it’s nice,” William murmured, “to be at home at last.”

For days he seemed ceaseless, sleepless: there were his nearly horseless stables and the crumbling castle of Bolsover not a day’s ride to the west. His holdings spilled over borders, into Derbyshire and Yorkshire, and, riding through, he discovered many fewer deer, missing fences, and missing woods, yet was happier each night at supper than his wife had ever seen. He arranged with merchants for iron grates for their fires, glasses for tables, linens for beds, then met with tenants until midnight to settle disputes at The Swan. Margaret watched him come and go, Lord Lieutenant of Nottinghamshire. He could arrest a man, raise a tax, argue for hours about bullocks or plows. He appeared to her a stranger wearing her husband’s skin.

She wandered from empty room to empty room, mapping the house with her feet, in gold shoes that echoed off the walls. It was a little, she decided, like living at the Louvre, so frigid and bewildering, though she’d never tell him that. From its formal entrance and polished stairs, the house pushed back from the London road, turned right and south to water gardens, left to the ancient monastery out of which the whole building had sprung. Her own vast chamber was on the second floor, puckered by a wall of oriel windows, each pane divided into sixteen squares that glittered in the dawn. A yellow writing table faced the southern wall. Hung with heavy tapestries, the bed looked like a ship. Against her will, it seemed, she fell asleep by day, the bed as dark as night, and when she woke, her dreaming filled the chamber. But Margaret detested a nap, the day flapping loose all around. She scribbled: “Idleness is the burden of my sex,” but nothing else. She had nothing to do and no one to see — William off working, no rats in the hall, no Flecknoe to entertain her. She had nothing but time, and no reason not to write. Each hour that passed with no ink from her quill was a quiet affliction, a void. She stared at that sunny table, ill fitted to the room, and watched as a violent downpour passed over their lake and woods.

Soon Margaret took to sitting in a room a floor below her own, a medieval wood-paneled gallery painted like a rainbow the century before. It was here she came to read in the afternoons.

And there that William found her, one day, and invited her on a walk. It was a filmy winter afternoon, and he’d show her the path to Clipstone Park, his chosen boyhood province, just beyond their woods — past the ornamental canals, the fishpond, swans upon the lake. He took her hand as they rounded the water, a scene he had often described. But when they cleared the trees, he met instead with a shock: stump after stump after stump after stump after stump and dried-out shoots. He sat on the ground. The sky was white. The day was everywhere quiet. “I left it,” he finally said, “so full of trees. And a river of fish and otter. And rabbits and partridge and poots.” Now he grieved. Now everything hit him at once. All he’d lost was lost in that grove. “Sixteen years,” he said. And Margaret helped him up. She took him home and sat him before the fire, placed a blanket over his knees — he was almost seventy, after all — then settled down beside him to watch the falling sleet. The clock chimed ten o’clock. “Damned Roundheads!” he cried at last. “Damned charcoal! Damned war!” That night they shared a bed, as once had been their custom.

Yet in the morning, out the window, in addition to the frost there was the grange farm that needed tending: cattle, oxen, horses, rye. He pulled on his boots in the icy hall. The winter was hard, and a new kind of normal settled with the snow. No one came to visit. No neighbors for miles around.

“For my pleasure and delight,” she wrote in a letter to Flecknoe, “my ease and peace, I live a retir’d life, which is so pleasing to me as I would not change it for all the pleasures of the publick world, nay, not to be mistress of the world.”

So passed several months.

She even tried to help with the sheep.

Then, one spring day, her missing crates arrived.

SHE WAS READING FRANCIS GODWIN’S MAN IN THE MOONE —ITS MAN borne into space in a carriage drawn by swans — when she heard the sound of wheels upon the gravel. Two boxes from Martin & Allestyre were set down on the drive. “My modest closet plays,” she said. She nearly ran to the stairs — for the recovery of her wayward crates that spring and the preparation of her plays for publication had rekindled inside Margaret a flame she’d feared gone out. Indeed, she’d said to William: “a flame I’d feared gone out!” But now, in turning the pages, she grew concerned and then incensed: “reins” where she had written “veins,” “exterior” when she had clearly meant “interior.” The sun went down. The room grew dim. She tipped a wick into the fireplace and nearly lit herself— ting ting ting went the kitchen bell — then hurried with a candle down the long and flickering hall.

William was already seated before a small beer and lamb. Margaret placed a napkin in her lap.

“Before the printer ruined it,” she cried, “my book was good!”

“Could it be,” he asked, soaking his bread in blood, “that you were yourself the cause of this misfortune?”

“It could not,” she said, and took a bite of pie.

“Perhaps,” he said, “you had not yet come, at that time, to so fully understand the words which you were using. You’ve been on such a course of reading that I’m sure you will be happier with the next.”

Cyrano de Bergerac, Francis Bacon, Robert Hooke. And pamphlets from that Invisible College now chartered and renamed: the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, with rooms at Gresham College and a silver mace from the king.

“I suspect they gave it very little attention,” she finally said. “A little book by a little woman, they thought.”

That night she wrote to Flecknoe: “My wit at last run dry!” Since leaving Antwerp, since returning to England, she’d written nothing new, only tidied up those plays. “And yet,” she pressed on, “perhaps these plays will find some profitable use?” She snuffed the candle, closed her eyes.

But weeks passed with no word from Flecknoe, no word about her book. The summer grew heavy with rain.

“Margaret,” William asked one day, “what is it you are doing?”

“Revising my books,” she said.

“I’ve long admired your books as they are.”

“And that is a huge consolation to me,” she told him, “in this censorious age,” but went on fixing sour rhymes, replacing omissions, undoing misplacements — and not only words but entire passages, theories. “Now,” she said, and dipped her quill in ink, “it will be for all history as if my errors never were.”

“And you’re happy in our new life?” he asked.

“Very happy, My Lord.”

Again, he worked to get her out. They watched a licorice harvest near Worksop one day, where millions of capricious insects glittered in the fields. They shared a radish salad, spotted a white-tailed deer. And when they returned to Welbeck that night, a letter was waiting from William’s daughter Jane.

Now Margaret learned that readers thought her plays lacked all direction: no catastrophes, no drama, just a jumble of speeches and scenes. They tire the brain. Only flit from place to place.