Danielle Dutton - Margaret the First

They turn up Chancery Lane.

“Take Brouncker’s wife,” he offers. “A very amiable girl. One always finds—”

“At dinner tomorrow,” Margaret says, “I will be entirely pleasant, you will see. I will limit my conversation to three topics: rain, Chinese silks, and the stage.”

But the following afternoon, William hears her telling their guests that if the schools do not retire Aristotle and read Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, they do her wrong and deserve to be abolished.

She sits with Flecknoe amid the porcelain figures and sips her cooling tea. It’s true she’s being spoken of. “The general air,” he fears, “is sympathy for the queen. For they say your slight was intended, and you must have seen her pitiful face, and surely you’ve heard. ”

But Margaret’s mind is like a ball of string. It’s just the same, she thinks. Nothing ever changes. And outside, it is spring. The orchard is in blossom. She rises to the window, sees the blooms on trees like constellations, the bees like tiny voyagers between the orchard’s many worlds.

“. her miscarriages,” he whispers.

“But I cannot be sweet Lady Brouncker!” she blurts.

Now Flecknoe is quiet, and Margaret is sorry, for he only means to help.

“I should not have come to London.”

“Nonsense!” he cries. “We must simply present you anew. Give them something else to rattle about. Une petite soirée , perhaps? Here in Newcastle House?” He unfolds into the room. “Surely the duke will agree,” he says. “Is the duke at home?”

But no, the duke is out.

At suppertime, he comes. “Where have you been?” Margaret asks. But William only suggests they take their supper outside. After a plate of beef and two glasses of beer, he finally smiles and speaks. “I have written a play,” he says. She nearly drops her fork. “ The Humorous Lovers ,” he tells her. But they always share their work. “Opening night is in nine days. At Lincoln’s Inn Fields. At eight.” It’s to be staged anonymously, since now he is a duke. “You may order a new gown,” he says. He is eager, she can see. He kisses her on the forehead and tells her, “Everyone will come.”

She is worried there’s something she left behind. She has her mask, her gown. The femme forte , she’d explained to the seamstress. And so the dress, like an Amazon’s, is all simple drapes and folds. Now she crosses Fleet River, her head held very straight. The water flashes in ropes, in shapes. Under the shadow of chestnut trees she stops to adjust her mask. There are others also dressed and moving toward the theater. A black glass bead in the back of her mouth holds the mask in place. She has never worn a mask before. She tries not to gag on the bead.

I am gallant. I am bold. I am right on time , she thinks.

She climbs the wooden staircase, takes her place in the box. And like ripples in a summer pond, lines of faces slowly turn — from the gallery, the pit — she watches the ripple spread. William must be late, for beside her is an empty seat. Still more and more faces turn. Margaret spies his daughters, who sit in a box nearby. Jane and Elizabeth avert their eyes, but they are the only ones.

It’s not simply that Margaret’s reputation has grown — her dress is gold, her breasts bared, her nipples painted red.

The play begins, the lovers center stage. William sits. Everyone roars. The candles sputter and hiss. Yet Margaret is as much observed as anything on the stage. Scene, scene, intermission, scene. The actors take their bows. The audience files out — chattering into coffeehouses, up onto horses, north to Hampstead, west to Oxford, south to the river and on — but before Margaret can say a thing in all the noise, William has her elbow and is guiding her through the crowd.

“Congratulations!” she tells him once their carriage door is shut.

“No, no,” he says, “congratulations to you.”

The horses lurch ahead, crossing the Fleet in the dark.

“Is something amiss?” she asks, placing the mask in her lap.

The river oozes beneath them, a blacker sort of black.

“What could be wrong?”

The driver turns north onto John.

“Only tell me,” he finally says, looking out into the night, “exactly who wears such a gown to an evening at the theater?”

“The femme forte ,” she explains, “a woman dressed in armor.”

“Do you think you are Cleopatra?” he asks.

Margaret bristles. She fingers the mask. “I had rather appear worse in singularity,” she says, “than better in the mode.”

“Do not quote to me from your books,” he snaps.

The driver flicks his whip.

Margaret says nothing. She replaces the mask. The black bead rattles her teeth. Yet despite her continuing silence, she does see what she’s done, sees it clearly, but from way down in, as if there is another mask she wears beneath the mask that she has on. She is a monster, she thinks, and hateful, after everything he’s done.

*

Flecknoe arrives in the morning before she’s finished her broth.

There’s no question at all she wrote the play, everyone agrees.

“You are all that anyone talks about,” he says. He offers the papers as proof. “Everywhere one goes it’s only Margaret Margaret Margaret! ”

She rings the bell for Lucy, but William has gone out.

And though her nipples are likened more to the nipples of London whores than any ancient heroines, that very afternoon the king comes to visit her. The king in her rooms. “A celebrity,” he says, or said. Everything happens so fast!

“What are these daily papers?” Margaret says to William that night. “When did they begin?”

William is silent; he chews his fish; he takes a sip of wine.

“According to them, you wrote my play.”

“I can hardly believe it,” she says. And despite her feelings of regret, she cannot help but smile. Surely he sees the joke. “After all those years they claimed you as the author of what I wrote. ”

“Tomorrow,” William says, “they will be on to something else.”

But tomorrow they are not. Each day for days the papers print details of whatever she did the day before: what floating restaurant she visited, her dinner guests, her gowns.

On April 12 the Duchess of Newcastle went out in a hat like a flame.

On April 18 she was visited by Anne Hyde.

When John and Mary Evelyn arrive, what choice does she have but to pretend that they are friends? Then Walter Charleton, Bishop Morley, many more. Soon her suite is full. William isn’t there: he’s at the palace, or the theater, or resting in his room. She’s alone with the crowd and the porcelain figures. So Margaret recites: whole poems, theories, whatever springs to mind. She stands in the midst of her elegant rooms in the most fantastic dress:

If foure Atomes a World can make, then see,

What severall Worlds might in an Eare-ring bee.

For Millions of these Atomes may bee in

The Head of one small, little, single Pin.

And if thus small, then Ladies well may weare

A World of Worlds, as Pendants in each Eare.

On April 24 the Duchess has her brother, Sir John Lucas, to midday meal.

On April 29 she wears a hat like a little rose.

“You are a marvel,” Flecknoe tells her.

But Margaret isn’t sure. It’s not as if she doesn’t see what happens, doesn’t watch guests turning away, especially some of the ladies, who cover their mouths with their fans. When Lucy comes to prepare her for bed, Margaret does not speak. She tries not to think at all — of the dinner parties, the afternoons, her shallow tinselly speeches — cringing to remember the transparency of her talk. And when she wakes the following morning to small red dots sprung up around her mouth, she sends Lucy to the apothecary’s shop for velvet patches in the shapes of stars and moons.