Danielle Dutton - Margaret the First

I needn’t have despaired.

One day by the river’s edge he stuck his tongue in my mouth. Unsure, I tugged it with my lips and nearly choked him. An afternoon while others played boules on the grass, he took me for a ride and pinched my nipples. Then it happened: someone leaked our secret to the queen. Her own maid-in-waiting? A nobody in her house? Henrietta Maria swore she’d faint. She called for a glass of wine, declared the chapel hot. And I, immediately struck by another summer fever, kept to my chamber the remainder of the season.

WHEN PRINCESS MARIE OF MANTUA MARRIED THE ANCIENT KING OF Poland (incontinent and crippled by gout), all Paris lined the streets to watch: mounted soldiers in Turkish jackets, their horses’ skin dyed red; footguards in yellow regalia; Polish seigneurs in a wealth of jewels, despite a lack of taste. Madame de Motteville reported that the foreigners slept in animal skins and wore no underclothes, but how she knew was what got everybody talking.

Amid this din, Margaret Lucas became Margaret Cavendish in the ambassador’s private Parisian chapel. It was autumn. I wore gray. My hair in waves around my face and braided up at back. No other Lucas could be present, but Lady Browne fondly shed a sister’s worth of tears, and her daughter Mary carried a myrtle bouquet. Then out to the waiting carriage — horses stamping slick with rain — where William swiftly handed me up and sat down beside me, his wife.

So began our journey, our life. But what does one say? What do? William sat in silence. I watched him warily from the edges of my sight. Had I erred? My thoughts slid over the morning as the embassy raced from view: my arrival, the vows, the giving of rings, the proclamation, the blessings. But no, I’d hardly said three words. And with another glance — his salt-and-pepper beard, his broad-brimmed hat — I clicked through stories I’d read or heard, of husbands, cruel and cold, who changed after the wooing. One who was handsome but mean. One who never listened. One who threatened to boil his lady’s pug in a pot. Then William turned to face me. He took my hands from my lap. “My circumstances in exile,” he began, “my situation, you see, is not what it is back home.” And my fingers relaxed in his. I was far more worried about causing offense than being offended myself.

In England, as I surely knew—“Damned awkward to speak of money, and yet”—in England he could boast two noble estates. There was Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire — with its avenue of fir trees and swans upon the lake — where he was Marquess of Newcastle and I now Marchioness. And not a day’s ride to the west sat the ancient castle of Bolsover, on a gentle slope, turreted and thick with scented vines. “Once,” he said, “I spent £20,000 entertaining the king for a week. What quantities of wine we drank and game we shot!” But now, well. In France, you see. “In short,” William said, “I’m poor.” Poorish .

Too, in certain circles, in certain courtly circles, among certain younger courtiers, “I’m thought of these days as a bit of an also-ran, a nit.” The troops he’d commanded so thoroughly routed at Marston Moor, where my brother had been captured. “Damn Scots!” William spat, and I diverted my gaze to low-hanging wooden signboards swinging over shops. It had not been any error of his. Details would emerge. History would know his worth. “To come to the matter,” he said, “our situation will improve.” There was no point at all on which I should trouble myself. Only steel my ears against gossip. This war would soon be over.

Then a bang of thunder upset the horses and the carriage began to tip — around a corner with two wheels on the ground, water creeping in through seams — a dive! a plunge! a sag! a wreck! — but all was right in seconds, all four wheels on the ground. A current of wet Parisians passed outside the glass. “For now,” he said, replacing his fallen hat, “we will live in the rented wing of a house, yet a graceful château and just beyond the city gate.”

As if on cue, that gate appeared, damp and gray as all Paris, my dress. A regiment of birds strutted blackly at its base. Rain, rain, as far as the eye could see. A drop fell into my lap.

It was: the gate, those crows, some soggy lindens, a fountain, and I was home.

NEXT, A WHIRLWIND OF DETAIL: SERVANTS IN A LINE, EACH WITH A name and position to remember. I curtsied one by one, and William had to wait. Now came faces of his family and friends, to whom I gave shy greeting. He led me by the hand. I saw high-backed chairs with lion’s-paw feet, exposed beams in the hall, then lifted my skirts and mounted the staircase to a long and narrow corridor, where he kissed me with my back against a door. Satisfied, he turned, the tip of his sheathed sword sliding down the wall, off to join the others in a toast.

The room was smaller than the one I’d been used to at the Louvre, yet all my own, and neat and clean, with bright white walls and two tall windows that watched a narrow street. Should I sit? Take off my cap? Margaret Cavendish , I thought, will now take off her cap .

Then, like a ghost, a little maid appeared. A little maid in bright white muslin who didn’t say a word, only stripped away the bridal gown and washed my new-wife’s skin — with rough French hands, French soap — and touched my breasts and thighs with tuberose perfume.

Dripping cold and naked, I thought: William, Willy, Wally, Bill.

It was the century of magnificent beds. Beds like ships from China, or beaded purses, in black and white, or pearled. Beds that disappeared behind a cloud of scented silk. Now an elaborately embroidered brocade curtain exposed my arm, an elbow. I heard their toasts from down below, voices muffled through wood and plaster, just as the world had sounded from my nursery as a girl. I could picture William exactly as I’d first seen him: standing in velvet on freshly raked gravel. It had been only that spring! Then an afternoon, not three months after, when the riverbank was muddy and he’d held me very close. He’d wanted to speak of nothing but me. “A strange enchantment,” I told him. “As if I live in the world but also somehow out.” For he should know I’d always been this way. “But you’re not yet twenty,” he’d said with a smile. “But I’m nearly twenty-two.”

The maid was gone. An Epithalamium played. William opened the door.

His skin was papery. Pleasant, I thought, but papery, loose.

That evening I wrote my mother that he gave me combs and bracelets; William wrote a poem:

To say we’re like one snake, not us disgraces,

That winds, delights itself, with self-embraces,

Lapping, involving, in a thousand rings.

Naturally the talk at dinner was pebbled with first-night jokes. And though seasoned by my time at court, I felt my cheeks go red. I didn’t speak, just sipped and chewed: roasted carp, claret, a shoulder of mutton with thyme, and a fine sugar cake with sprigs of candied rosemary like diamonds. William saw nothing amiss in the banter; his wife was young and very lately a virgin, and his house a household of men.

There was his brother, Sir Charles, with a twisted spine and auburn mustache, considered in certain circles a great philosopher; William’s grown sons from his first marriage, Henry and Charles (called Charlie like my brother); William’s steward; William’s secretary; William’s gentleman of the horse; William’s “man”; William’s ushers, who walked bareheaded before him when he went out. There were female servants, too, and the usual rumors. Over them all, I, Lady Cavendish, now presided. To varying degrees, each ignored me.