Danielle Dutton - Margaret the First

Sick of filling days with treatments and reproaches, William and I were finding a way that suited us. Rather than apply leeches to my hemorrhoids, in the afternoons I sat under the roses, listening as if I had no other thoughts as he talked or joked or lectured on generals or laws or war, spoke of anatomy, trade, architecture, and colonization, famous statesmen, the rise of nations, the tyranny of kings, the righteousness of kings, the pastimes of kings, of religion, famous poets and their merits, the shapes of atoms, the diets of peoples around the world. We spoke of music. He took me to hear a master violist. It seemed I could remember every word he spoke. “It is,” I said, “as if a misty stupor lifts.”

Meanwhile, though pleased by my progress, William grew restless for himself. He wrote two plays in quick succession, then decided to transform the late painter’s studio into a riding school. Indeed, he was a clever horseman. Ben Jonson, seeing him at manège, once said: “I begin to wish myself a horse!” Naturally the school was a sensation, William in high demand. More and more, therefore, I found myself alone. Yet before I could begin to drift into the reeds, William’s brother, Sir Charles, returned from southern travels, and I found I had two dazzling masters instead of one.

Charles was trying to square the circle. He was constructing an equation to determine the outcome of desire plus fear, the evolution from emotion to action — and found me, he said, much improved. He built a lab in the house in Antwerp, where I, silent assistant, saw mercury in little spherical bodies running about, organs pickled in jars, leaves below a microscope. Over dinner the two men met and talked together, about Socrates, Descartes, the zodiac, free will, circulation, the poles. Why had they lost the Civil War? What was the way back to royal rule? Unlike Mr. Hobbes in his Leviathan , then under production in Paris, William thought that common man should be kept illiterate and happy, with sport and common prayer. “Too much reading,” he said, “has made the mob defiant.” I chewed my mutton and considered.

Too, we’d been making friends. There was Constantijn Huygens: statesman, poet, lutenist, and the translator of Donne into Dutch; the Duarte family, once Portuguese Jews, now merchants of coral, pearls, and diamonds (they had a Bruegel, a Titian, two Tintorettos); and Béatrix, Duchess of Lorraine, whose castle at Beersel was home to feminine sports of wit: lotteries, wishes, wonders, oracles. At first I merely listened at the duchess’s gatherings, nibbled a butter cake. Yet in time I found I excelled at their aristocratic games. I wrote “portraits” for the ladies’ amusement, riddles and allegories for them to untangle: the mind is a garden, married life a stew. To my growing delight, I was a hit, my mind, I wrote, a “swarm of bees.” That August I cast off my years of mourning, sent maids scurrying down the halls with stacks of black gowns in their arms. To the final parties of the season I wore a rainbow of new dresses I’d had made — one as bright as a fiery beam, one as green as leaves. “After all,” I told my husband, “dressing is the poetry of women.” He heartily agreed. Had I heard it somewhere? I couldn’t say. I took to wearing feathered hats like ladies in the streets.

One night, the Duarte girl sang poems set to music in a voice so clear I felt my soul rise up inside my ear. In a garden of clematis, with servants dressed like Gypsies placing candles in the trees, we assembled on the grass, between a Belgian wood and Béatrix’s glassy pond. In a pale orange gown I read two pieces I’d prepared: Queen Elizabeth was declared the radiant mistress of the sea, but Penelope should have been stalwart, I said, and never allowed those suitors to gather around her at all. When the ladies clapped their approval in the dark, everything, to me, was suddenly bright and near.

As autumn came, however, I found myself less often at Beersel, less often with William under the roses, more in my chamber alone. I filled sheet after sheet in my straggling hand — no one knew what with. And when he inquired at breakfast one morning: “I’ve long found pleasure in writing,” I explained, “but was only joining letter to letter and word to word. Now,” I said, and took a bite of pear, “I begin to connect idea to idea, as the ancients would form pictures of the stars.” William suggested that a writer requires an acquaintance with the world, some external stimulation. “Might not a brain work of itself,” I countered, “as a silkworm spins out of its own bowels?” I would benefit, he maintained, from engagement outside the house.

And the roses wilted and fell. The yard grew brown, then gray. Christmas came with its myrtle crowns and almond marchpane and candles. The ink in my inkpot was frozen every day. When John Evelyn, Lady Browne’s son-in-law, came on a visit through Antwerp, he brought news that Descartes had died. An era had ended, the men agreed, or another just begun. That night, over supper, they discussed their old friend’s work. The table was heavy with flowers and food, the fire was hot at my back. He was a man who knew much, the gentlemen agreed, and knew what to do with all that he knew. He thought the soul was attached to the human body through a gland, I remembered. He thought the universe was like a machine, the body like a clock. He’d once nailed his wife’s poodle to a board. He believed nothing could think or feel but man. But how could he know a poodle didn’t feel? Or even a magnet? A vase? Now he was gone, and I ate my bread. And yet, I thought, he lived. Unlike my sister and mother, Descartes was here, and always would be, as Shakespeare would, as Ovid. But I did not feel like a clock, I thought. I listened. I chewed my bread.

Then the Scheldt froze and William finally insisted I get out, spin on the ice with incorporeal legs. Much to his astonishment, I refused to do as he bid. Nervous, thrilled, I paced my chamber bit by bit, worried, as I wrote, that “should I Dance or Run, or Walk apace, I should Dance my Thoughts out of Measure, Run my Fancys out of Breath.” I suppose he thought I wrote new riddles for the ladies at Beersel. I pondered in secret the link of death to fame: “Give me a fame that with the world may last.” Yet also: “Fame is but a word, an emptee sound.” I wrote: “And though it seem to be natur’l, that generaly all Women are weaker than Men; yet shurly some are far wiser than some Men.” Still, the river would not thaw. At dinner one night Mr. Evelyn reported seeing a crow’s feet frozen to its prey. I stared at him as if confused by what he’d said. I wrote: “Some Ground, though it be Barren by Nature. ” and fish froze unmoving in the Scheldt. Sitting close to the fire one night, I burned the hem of a dress, white lace curled black upon the tiles. I wrote: “Some Ground, though it be Barren by Nature. ” and stamped the flames with a moldy copy of Dodoens’s Historie of Plants in Antwerp . I wrote: “Some Ground, though it be Barren by Nature, yet, being well muck’d and well manur’d. ” Then Antwerp was flooded by melting ice. I wrote: “Some Ground, though it be Barren by Nature, yet, being well muck’d and well manur’d. ” Peasants filled the city. Cows floated off. Birds sang. Fish swam. I wrote: “Some Ground, though it be Barren by Nature, yet, being well muck’d and well manur’d, may bear plentifull Crops, and sprout forth divers sorts of Flowers.”

I wrote.

SINCE A WOMAN WAS, IN THE EYES OF PARLIAMENT, A MINOR NO matter her age, and since there could be no use in having children swear a loyalty oath, now women swept into the courts as never before — an Olivia for her Endymion, an Alice for her Ralph — and it occurred to William, still in Antwerp, that this might be our chance. He had been banished, yes, but a Royalist’s wife was free to return. So when Sir Charles began to plan a trip to London, William decided that I would go as well, and ask that I be awarded my share of his assets. “That the time is right I have no doubt,” he came to my room and said. Yet for me, for the life of my mind, his timing could not have been worse. Everything excited me — the nature of flattery, food, poetry, the nature of shyness and wit — and I’d been writing every day as in a rush it tumbled out. Now all this I locked away in the tortoiseshell cabinet, fastening its tiny key to a chain around my wrist.