Danielle Dutton - Margaret the First

“A Sun,” begins a bird with a prominent crest, “is a vast bigness.”

“Ah, yes?” she says.

“It is yellowish and splendid.”

The empress agrees it is all of these things.

“A Moon,” he continues, “is whitish and dimmer. But the great difference between them is that the Sun shines directly, whereas the Moon, as can be perceived on any moon-shiny night, never respects the center of our world.”

“What of sun-motes,” she asks. “I’ve long been curious about those flecks that stir in the air.”

“Nothing but streams of small, rare, transparent particles, through which the Sun is represented as through a glass, thinner than the thinnest vapor, yet not so thin as air.”

“Are they alive?” she asks.

“Yes,” says the bird, shaking his crest. “They must be alive, for they are visibly nourished by the presence of the Sun.”

“And what is the air, exactly? A creature itself?”

Another bird stands, plumed in yellow and gray.

“Empress,” he says, “we have no other knowledge of the air but through our respiration. Nature is so full of variety, our weak senses cannot perceive all the various sorts of her creatures.”

“Quite so,” she tells him, pleased.

But the Bear-men annoy her with their microscopes, their artificial delusions, and she orders them to break the instruments, each and every one.

Walking back to the palace, crossing a canal, the lady thinks about wind. It was wind that brought her to the Blazing World, or else its peculiar lack. How odd it is that one winds up where one does. Was she born to be an empress and not a bird or a girl? She carries on like this for quite some time.

“Are seeds annihilated when a plant grows?”

“Is God full of ideas?”

“Is lightning a fluid?”

“Is thunder a blast of the stars?”

Until, one quiet day, having run out of questions, the empress is ready to share her ideas. She asks the spirits to send her a friend, one chosen from among the greatest modern writers: “Galileo,” she says, “Descartes?” But the spirits assure her these men would scorn to be scribes to a woman, and they suggest instead an author called Margaret Cavendish, who writes, they tell the empress, nothing but sense and reason. Thus, with a bang of air and a puff of wind, the soul of Margaret Cavendish is brought into that world.

The carriage jerks to life.

They’ll make much of what she wears — a gown embroidered with glass Venetian beads, red-heeled shoes, a cavalier’s hat, an eight-foot train, a man’s black juste-au-corps —a completely peculiar hybrid. One member will even mistake her for a man, until he sees her breasts. Yes, much will be made of her appearance, though she doesn’t know it yet. Just now, in the carriage rushing down John Street, she doesn’t know — what they will say, what she will say — and she tries to assemble her thoughts, fixed in one point, like a diamond.

Her thoughts spin out instead.

There is so much she might say: about indeterminacy and contradiction, about multiplicity and shifts and turns, about what if, and what if, and who knows, and fairies supping on ant eggs — who knows! — and amazing desirable shapes, deer made of oak and running through the woods, and men made of sycamore writing poems on papery chests, their arms “may be like spreading Vines, Where Grapes may grow, soe drinke of their own Wine.”

Traffic is thick and a line of boys pursues her in her carriage.

Then, once again, the carriage is off, at two o’clock on a damp gray afternoon. Can a life be said to have a point toward which it moves, like a carriage down a London road, or rainwater in the gutter headed for a drain? At two o’clock on a gray afternoon? But no, she thinks, a life is not like that. They pass a merchant with a long white beard. A pamphleteer with pamphlets. When the carriage stops at the crossroads, she sees a man on a platform claim he can make the time stand still: “And away we go! Away we go, ladies and gentlemen! Clap your hands! Away we go!” But before she can see what happens, the carriage jerks ahead.

Has the time stood still?

The carriage stops; it starts again.

She could take back her request and decline their invitation. She could knock and tell the driver to turn right on Fetter instead. But here are the gates of Arundel House. Here is the Royal Society’s dictum: Nullius in verba . Take no man’s word for it. A crowd in the street pushes and stares. “Mad Madge!” she hears as the gates swing wide. She does not turn her head.

In the formal yard: Lord Brouncker, Sir George, the Earl of Carlisle. They bow as she descends. Beyond the lords, the gates. Beyond the gates, the crowd: “Mad Madge! Mad Madge!”

Brouncker leads her in and down a darkened hall. It smells of powdered wigs and snuff, much like the house in Paris where she used to sit and listen. But a person cannot be in two places at one time, and she is here, not in Paris. She sees a skeleton in a corner. A jar alive with bees. Then Brouncker stops, so Margaret stops. They stand before a door. “It is the first time the Royal Society has beheld a lady in its congress. The room is full,” he says. “Everyone has come.” Margaret nods, adjusts her hat. She follows him through the door.

The meeting has begun. She watches as they watch her sit. The air is cold, the windows tall. The walls are blue and hung with portraits. The table is polished and square — she’s always imagined it round — and in benches on three sides sit the famous philosophers and gentlemen members alike. She sees their wigs and eyes, sees an instrument on the table, a piece of raw meat, a glass of something green. And where moments ago, alone in the carriage, it seemed time was rushing ahead, now it seems to Margaret that time is standing still. The moment eddies, pools at her feet. Robert Boyle. Henry More. John Evelyn. Christopher Wren. What will she say? How will it start?

Then the focus shifts. A man steps from the crowd. “Robert Hooke,” the secretary says. Indeed, she sees, he limps. “The air pump,” Hooke announces. He measures the weight of the air. A globe-shaped magnet is pulled through iron filings. A slice of roast mutton is immersed in a liquid and immediately turns to blood. He displays one instrument after another, hardly pausing between. It’s clear he has performed this before. For other aristocratic visitors, other invited guests? Indeed, many of the men look bored as two round marbles are by machinations flattened. He does something with a compass. Something pretty with prisms and light.

London’s bells begin to toll; an hour has passed, though she’s not yet spoken a word. Now Hooke places a microscope on the table. Their brittle art, she’s called it. He asks her to look inside, observe the swimming bodies. All the faces turn to her. Margaret looks inside — she blinks — a horse neighs in the street. She sees the bodies, swimming, like blossoms on a breeze, like actors in a play, she thinks, in and out of view. The image flickers, suspended. Hooke continues his speech. She shifts her gaze to the bodies that fill the room. Like one body, she thinks, with many pairs of eyes. And a feeling comes over her then, the feeling that she’s been walking here across a vast expanse with something in her hands. The image flickers, suspended. Alone, she thinks. I am quite alone. And, thus distracted, she catches only fragments of Hooke’s concluding speech—“light, by which our actions are to be guided. be renewed, and all our command over all things”—to the serious philosophers and the gentlemen members assembled in the room.

He almost missed the meeting, for bricklayers came to mend a chimney in his kitchen. Yet keen to see her, he hurried all the way. “The Duchess of Newcastle is all the pageant now discoursed on,” at breakfast tables and dinner parties, over porridge or pike, she was all that anyone spoke about — or so he’d written in his diary several weeks before. For she was everywhere that season. She was at the theater; she was entertaining the king; she was riding down the street. And everyone had seen her, yet he could not manage to spot her. So when it was rumored the Duchess of Newcastle would repay the king’s visit the following Monday, he’d loitered at Whitehall Palace well into the night, the palace packed with eager visitors, as if it were Christina, the Queen of Sweden, at any moment expected. But the duchess did not appear. She awaited an entire new livery for her footmen — or so the papers said — all of silk velvet, with caps that mimicked the caps of the king’s own footmen, a costly and a grand procession, with one coach — the papers said — carrying her gentleman attendants, then the carriage bearing the duchess, then a four-horse coach carrying her ladies-in-waiting, they in gowns of lutestring and she in a fashion of grandeur, heavily embroidered and trimmed in lace, with jewels in her ears, high-heeled shoes on her feet, and a puff of feathers atop her head fit for a masque or a play or a ball, a triumphant show, the court!