Danielle Dutton - Margaret the First

No storms, no pirates. Just a dreary trip with many fraudulent fees.

By the time we reached the Thames, Charles was out of cash and had to pawn his clock-watch to proceed to the city upstream. We took a modest house in Covent Garden. From its narrow windows we watched the city stretching out: ticking, constant, grinding, chiming. Charles had early business with the Committee for Compounding. My own hearing would take place in several weeks.

First, however, I had my stepdaughters to meet. I’d carried gifts from Antwerp — black Dutch lace and clove-scented gloves — but Elizabeth and Jane were wary. London tittered. Lady Cavendish went walking with ribbons round her arms! Shy to speak in public, that much was clear, yet I did my utmost, so they wrote to their father, to stand out in a crowd. And no one wore feathers in London, yet their stepmother saw fit to be well-plumed when she went out.

Meanwhile, their father, their hero, whom they longed for, stuck in Flanders — too great a traitor to return. Too great a traitor, or so Parliament determined, to be given back any of the estates that had been taken. “And you were not even married when he fled. So technically,” the judges ruled, “none of it is yours.” I sat rigid before the court — my green, blue, red feathers drafting overhead. Unable to petition further, I whisperingly asked to be taken from the room, through the stately carved doors, out of Goldsmith’s Hall to Gresham Street in December.

AT NIGHT I BECAME INCREASINGLY ANXIOUS, READING AGAIN IN a high-backed chair letters and poems William dispatched from Antwerp. Tales of virgins raped and flung from cliffs, bloody deaths for valiant princes, axes. Without me, he wrote, he was “cold as congealed ice,” his tears “converted to a shower of hail.” Each morning I walked to Drury House to inquire after his seized estates — meadows, coal mines, waterworks, granges — out of my control, sold to Parliamentarian officers. Nothing was as it should have been and London was grown strange. St. Martin’s-in-the-Field was just plain Martin’s. The House of Lords had been abolished. A new flag flew. Divorce was made legal. There was no aristocracy to set a sparkle to the city. The theaters were closed, the palace. Then one Wednesday even the sun went dark, and a burning halo replaced it. A preacher in Friday Street claimed the city’s birds were struck dumb in the unnatural dusk, a mark of evil to come, and placed the blame on Cromwell’s daughter, who refused the Puritan cap, paraded in bright satin dresses. Gone were the jeweled vest and periwig. Men wore short-cropped hair and plain black suits and called each other “brother.” Women in filthy skirts preached from London’s corners. The underground Royalist paper, Mercurius Pragmaticus , declared England had “grown perfectly new, and we in another world.” Time was “running up like parchment on fire.” Change was “running up like parchment on fire.” London was “running up like parchment on fire.” I tried to stitch a pillowcase but found it deadly dull.

AS IF GOSSIP, INSOMNIA, AND PURITANS WEREN’T ENOUGH, DIRE NEWS arrived from Antwerp. William had run out of credit again, and this time there’d be no repayment from the queen. So Sir Charles began the ignoble business of buying back his brother’s inherited estates, the rents from which would allow William a modest but steady income. William’s sons assisted. His daughters pawned jewelry and plate. And this new flurry of business meant another six months in town. After six already? I sunk down fairly low. I reread my husband’s poems, their rivers of blood and wounded beasts, and was troubled at night by dreams. In the mornings I would not dress, since he for whom I dressed myself was miles from where I was kept. I complained of headaches, constipation. Then one afternoon, three weeks on, Mayerne, the royal doctor, who’d often discussed me in letters with William, appeared in Covent Garden to attend me in the flesh.

He tapped and patted, then scribbled in a book: how clear, how pale, how pink. I looked, he assured me, ten years younger than my age, in blossom, in perfect health, and prescribed only a new herb from China called tea. “The decoction of it drunk warm doth marvels,” he told Charles. “Very comforting, abates fumes.” To me he spoke nonsense, as he would to any child, suggesting candy or gossip, or candy with gossip, to lift my mood.

Sir Charles, meanwhile, had never seemed more engaged. Each night the house he’d let was filled with London’s leading minds. There was the furor surrounding Leviathan , as Mr. Hobbes was back in town; some new map of the moon to decipher; and Thomas Browne, whose Pseudodoxia Epidemica was selling out across the land, busy addressing vulgar questions — such as whether the savior laughed — busy explaining time itself, and barrenness in women, and the reason so many aqueducts are adorned with a lion’s head. All this I knew in some detail, for I admit I had grown curious, as days passed into weeks, and had begun to spend my evenings in a yellow parlor downstairs, listening as their voices pressed through the rented walls.

They spoke of Lucretius. They spoke of light.

One evening I took down The Parliament of Bees and, flipping through its pages, hearing the men enter the house, I counted seven years. It was seven years since I first sat listening to their talk. and I was as invisible this evening as I’d ever been in Paris. More so, in fact, for I sat dumbly and alone! Can you hide and yet be angry when no one looks at you? Oh, you can, I knew, but it was pointless, exhausting. The watchman shouted nine o’clock. Still their voices carried on. And despite the frost on the window, my cheeks began to burn — I thought I might be sick — so shrugging off my shawl, I hastened across the parlor and, throwing open the door, ran smack into Hobbes in the hall. “Dear,” he said backing up, “Lady Cavendish.” He bowed as best he could. To which performance I said something dull about cabbage, something vague about a bad fricassee I’d eaten, and hurried with a candle upstairs.

Once in my room, however, I felt foolish rather than ill. I’m , I thought — and turned to the window— I am much too —and up came a roar of laughter from the men. My face shone in the glass, pale and round. A depressing little street: sleety, slippery, with brash market voices, stinking heaps of trash. I could just make out the edge of Bedford Gardens — then the moon broke free of the clouds. London was transformed. London was set alight. The river, the frost. Like something out of a dream. Like something out of Shakespeare: hot ice and wondrous strange snow.

At last, all was silent, as if the house itself had froze. Yet even as the river slowed and the city changed to ice, something in me loosened, my thoughts were taking flight, into and out of questions I’d long held, over London’s rooftops, to the country, to converse with an oak tree, a parrot, a clap of thunder:

Why do men deny fairies, yet burn witches at the stake?

Do fishes have brains?

Are stars made of fiery jelly or are they flecks off the sun?

That night I wrote: “I Language want, to dresse my Fancies in.”

The following day:

Give me the free and noble style,

Which seems uncurb’d, though it be wild.

Hadn’t I thoughts, after all? A mind of my own? It cannot be infamy, I reasoned, to run or seek after glory, to love perfection, desire praise. There were other ladies in London who wrote — I’d met them at the secret Royalist concerts we’d attended. Yet the poems they circulated among themselves were anonymous elegies for dead children or praise for noble husbands. My own quill went marching across the page. I rejected any clocklike vision of the world. I chastised men who hunt for sport. The moon might be a ball of water, I proposed, and the lunar mountains we think we see only reflections of our own.