Margaret the First (11 page)

“That a person might even think up such a thing,” she says at last, as if in answer to a question.

“The dogs?” says Mary. “But surely you see that here is progress. Imagine the possibilities.”

“No, my dear, imagine the risk. Such hubris.”

They pass before the stables, which stink in summer heat.

“Nature,” Margaret advises, “is far too vast for you or I to comprehend her.”

Mary says nothing, still in her traveling hat.

Then Margaret tries again, for truly she once loved Mary’s mother, Lady Browne, now as dead as her own. “Do you remember,” Margaret smiles, “how you carried my bridal bouquet?”

Back in the house: a chilled silver bowl with ripe fruits from the garden. Lunch is lamb from the flock that munches the nearby hill, and stewed chicken with prunes, and boiled leeks, and salmon, though Margaret eats only a clear broth and clarified whey with honey, hoping tonight for success on the stool.

“You and your duchess are absolute farmers,” Mary smiles at William, who credits a recent rain.

“Naturally,” Margaret says, “every part and particle in nature hath an influence on each other, and effects have influence upon effects.” But Mary only eats her lunch, while, over the raisin pie, Evelyn tells how plague deaths are down in nearly every parish. How Hooke established the rotation of Mars. How Hooke discovered tiny rooms called “cells.” Of coming trouble with the Dutch. How a lead actor in Davenant’s company killed a man in a duel in a play. And an invention the size of a pocket watch meant to slice a human foot into many thousands of parts.

“For whatever possible reason?” Margaret finally blurts.

“For mathematical purpose,” says Evelyn.

Back outside they drink their wine. Blue and yellow flowers dot the garden wall. The couples split again: he with him and she with her. In gaps in his own conversation, William hears his wife: “I am sufficiently mistress of,” then, “with the devastating clearness that I do.” The sky is light as servants refill their glasses, yet evening shadows begin to creep cool air across the lawn. The two men soon fall quiet. “It is a great pleasure to me to write,” Margaret is telling Mary, “and were I sure that nobody read my books, yet I would not quit my pastime.”

“Indeed, Duchess,” Evelyn says, turning in his chair, “I’ve heard admiration of your new book.”

“Have you?” Margaret says—but jumps in her chair, for someone shoots in the woods.

“
The Discovery of a New World Called the Blazing World
,” he says.

“There, you see,” William says, taking a bite of fruit.

“From Samuel Pepys,” says John, “who works in the Navy Office.”

“Yes?” she says, straining to seem relaxed, as
pop! pop! pop!
go the woods.

“Indeed, he declares it quite romantic. Also from Robert Boyle, author of
The Sceptical Chymist
, you know, who,” he turns to catch William’s eye, “is lately writing an account of objects that oddly shine. Inspired, I am told, by a piece of rotten meat found glowing in his pantry.”

William and Mary smile.

“Forgive me,” John says, coming back to Margaret, “for I have not had the pleasure of reading your book myself.”

But before she can ask him,
What were Boyle’s words?
John has turned and attends his wife, who is speaking to William of their garden in Deptford, its many species of trees. “Conifers,” Mary tallies, “and laurels, oaks, and elms.” Margaret dabs her upper lip. Robert Boyle, she thinks. Robert Boyle. Samuel Pepys. She dabs her neck, her lip. She has had too much to drink. But would it be rude, she wonders,
not
to acquaint him with my book? On such a pleasant night? For he says he has not read it. Yet Boyle has, she thinks, and a man called Samuel Pepys. She could easily fetch a copy. She could read them the passage about Descartes . . . or the description of the Bird-men . . . or the one about the microscope . . . or the vehicles made of air . . . “Two potted limes!” laughs Mary, and John and William smile. Still someone shoots in the nearby woods, and a flock of rooks rises from the treetops like a cloud.

In bed that night, she won’t be sure what she said next. She’ll remember how the cloud of birds rose up over the trees. It begins as in a dream, she might have said. Then the cloud broke up and found itself again. But thing must follow thing. She must put her thoughts in order. I pray, she might have said, that if any professors of learning and art should humble themselves to read it, or even any part of it, I pray they will consider my sex and breeding, and will fully excuse those faults which must unavoidably be found . . .

“It starts as in a dream,” she likely said, “with the abduction of a lady, stolen by a merchant seaman, taken to his ship and into a mighty storm. Next comes the death of the merchant and his men. For after that storm, the ship drifts not only to the pole of the world, but even to the pole of another, which joins close to the first, so that this cold, having a double strength at the conjunction of two poles, is insupportable. Too weak to throw their bodies over, the lady lives for days amid blueing flesh, kept alive by the light of her beauty and the heat of her youth as the ship floats across the fish-bright sea. Eventually, she and the vessel pass—mysteriously, unavoidably—into the other world, a world called the Blazing World, where cometlike stars make nights as bright as days. When at last the lady spies land, it glitters with fallen snow, and talking bears, up on two legs, are coming to her rescue. But she is unable to eat what the gentle bears offer, so the bears take her to Fox-men, who take her to Geese-men, who take her to Satyrs, who take her to meet the emperor of the land. They travel for days on a golden ship in a river of liquid crystal.”

Then darkness fell, and John and Mary rose, but Margaret wasn’t tired. John and Mary curtsied, bowed. Margaret stayed and watched the moon wheel across the sky; she climbed the stairs; she lay upon the sheets.

Might it have been more prudent, she thinks, lying there in the room, to have better explained the book’s more serious philosophical contemplation, for without it the other half no doubt sounds pure fancy and could be easily misunderstood? The night is hot and close. An owl calls in the woods. Margaret sleeps. And she dreams of that room without a mirror on Bow Street, and Robert Boyle asleep in the bed with her
Blazing World
on his lap, open to a passage about a golden hollow rock, which produces a medicinal gum, which causes a body to scab, which scab will open along the back and come off like a suit of armor.

“Some believe I act as if drunk,” Margaret reports one night in early autumn, “as I stammer out words, or only pieces of the letters of words.” “You’re not so bad as that,” William replies, dipping bread in soup. A letter has come from London with most distressing news. It seems Mary Evelyn—“Was Deptford near to the fire?” he asks, but how should Margaret know—that Mary Evelyn has reported to her vast London acquaintance how Margaret’s “mien surpasses the imagination of the poets; her gracious bows, seasonable nods, courteous stretching out of her hands, twinkling of her eyes, and various gestures of approbation, show what may be expected from her discourse, which is as airy, empty, whimsical, and rambling as her books!” Evelyn himself, the letter writer maintains, came to Margaret’s defense, arguing that in the duchess’s body are housed together all the learned ladies of the age. “Never did I see a woman so full of herself,” countered Mary, “so amazingly vain and ambitious.” “Not that I should care what Mary Evelyn thinks,” Margaret says, pushing away her plate. I have made a world, she thinks, for which nobody should blame me.

“Yet it’s true I am so often out of countenance,” she says, walking with William in the garden before bed, “as I not only pity myself, but others pity me, which is a condition I would not be in.” Despite her radished curls and pleasant curtsies, Mary Evelyn has called her masculine and vain!

“My tongue runs fast and foolish,” she despairs the next day at tea, “so much, and fast, as none can understand.” In the sweet-smelling room, a pendulum clock:
ping, ping, ping, ping
. And looking across the table, she finds her husband grown old. No, only weary, she thinks, reaching for some toast. There have been so many disputes, and tenants unable to pay, and the draining of the marshes . . . “The truth is,” William suddenly says, “women should never speak more than to ask rational questions, or to give a discreet answer to a question asked of them. They ought,” he wipes his mouth, “to be sparing of speech, especially in company of men.” To which surprising rejoinder Margaret sits in silence, her throat blocked up with bread.

The lady floats for days across a fish-bright sea. At least it isn’t putrid; the cold contains the smell. In the galley she finds a crate of pears and eats one right after another, on the floor beside a frozen boy, listening to bits of ice bump against the hull. She is strangely unafraid. Hadn’t she always longed for adventure, back at her father’s home?

On the fifth night of this solitude, she falls asleep with a candle burning and dreams herself a mermaid with a thick and golden tail, a crown of shimmering conch shells, then awakens with a start. Whether the ship hit something or something hit the ship, another change has come. The ship is dying; she can feel it slipping away. She waits beneath the blanket for icy water to greet her. But instead of the sea, it’s a bear that opens the door.

A great white bear up on its hind legs steps across the threshold.

“Good morning,” he says, and reaches out a paw.

“Is it morning?” she says, and stands, though this belies her shock. For here is a talking bear! And she clicks through stories she’s read or heard: seizing children in the night, yes, and claws and hunger. But, too, constellations. And in “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” the bear is a prince all along.

“We must hurry,” says the bear.

“Certainly,” she says. “Yes,” she covers herself with her arms, “the ship is sinking,” as though she’s only just realized, the floor of the cabin now swirling with water and small silver fish that bump against her toes. Still, she does not move.

“Miss,” he says, more urgently now. But she only stands and stares. So he takes her in his enormous arms and rushes to the deck. The water rises around them, and from her perch she sees the sun has also risen—or rises, still—and at last breaks through the clouds that have surrounded the ship for days. The ice, too, is breaking up in all directions. The sea is itself again. She sees bodies stiffly bobbing. But the water and sunlight have raised the bear’s fur to a gleam. He is blinding: bright as snow in springtime. She shuts her eyes.

“Where are we going?” she shouts above the waves and another noise—a shrieking. Is it the ship itself that cries?

“There,” he says. He pants.

She opens her eyes again to a rocky spit of beach, just beyond the prow. A dozen bears wave their paws at them and frown as if to say:
Hurry
, or
We don’t think you’re going to make it
, or
All this trouble for a girl
? A hole is opening, a sea-mouth fit to swallow them up. Is it the water, she wonders, that makes the terrible noise?

“Hold on tight,” he shouts, so she holds him.

She rides him to the shore, where he lumbers up on all fours, then sets her down and shakes. Seawater rains over her (the bear is nine feet tall, at least), and several of the silver fish slide out of his fur and gasp. The other bears surround them. They seem impressed, or else amused. One of them helps her to her feet. They sniff her, not impolitely. She can hardly think to stand with all the shrieking. She glances up at the sky and sees massive circling parrots—it is they who make the noise! The beach is sharply pebbled. The lady wears no shoes. The bears give off a musky, fishy smell. One of them offers a blanket made of fur, but not of bear. Sailors’ bodies dot the bay. She smells salt. She smells the musky bears, hears them softly discussing whether to pull the sailors to shore, whether or not to eat them. Yet, she is unafraid. If she shakes, she shakes now from the day, which she feels at last, her skin growing pale and blue in the insupportable cold.

“Come,” says her rescuer, a warm paw on her back.

Behind her, the ship has disappeared.

“Silver, silver, silver!” a maid shouts in the hall, and Margaret can hardly believe it, for when was the last time she went anywhere at all? Now the whole house prepares for departure, and the servants are talking of spoons. One room swirls with feather dusters and motes of dust in light—they must be alive, she thinks, for see how they are nourished by the presence of the sun—and maids are throwing linen over chairs.

It’s off to London now, for Newcastle House in Clerkenwall has finally been regained. Or has it been repurchased? In any case, it’s William’s. He is anxious to see it, be in it again. It was built, he tells her, on the ruins of a nunnery, in the Palladian style, with thirty-five chimneys and views in all directions. He asks her what she hopes to do in the city. It’s been so long since she was there. The carriage bounces south. Toward Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle. Gresham College and public lectures. And that modest house Sir Charles rented in Covent Garden, where—so many years ago—she wrote her first book in a trance. “Shall you sit for a portrait?” William asks, but she hadn’t thought of that.

Outside the carriage, England unrolls in reverse: first forest, then farmland, then softly rising downs. They stop at an inn. They stop beside a brook that’s fast with spring. It all looks the same, she thinks, if a brighter shade of green, since the last time she traveled this road it had been the end of summer. Or was it early fall? The following day, the traffic begins to grow. She sees carts of flowers and cabbages trundle toward the city. The farms turn to villages, the villages to town. There are even crowds along the roadside, trying to get a glimpse—of him? of her? she isn’t sure. William declares it right, pulls her back from the window: “You seem to forget we are now among the highest aristocrats in England. Let them watch the grandees pass.”

At last the carriage stops.

All she can see is a wall.

She hears the horses panting, brushes a fly from her lap. As they sit together in the carriage warmth, her eyes begin to close. Scraps of vision from the past two days pass beneath her lids: the scattered trees and bluebells; the sun upon a hill; a small white house with a thick thatched roof and a dog who appeared above her head atop a garden wall. Her eyes are shut. She smiles. Is it happiness she feels? She is back in London, her
Blazing World
a triumph. It was just as William said. She had only to give it time. There was first that letter praising the sharpness of her wit. Then one about divine fury, enthusiasm, raptures. And in a single afternoon two letters came from Cambridge. The vice-chancellor called her an oracle. The Master of Fellows of Trinity College called her “Minerva and an Athens to herself.” Yes, there were others who never responded to the gift of a copy she sent. Still, she thinks. The horses shuffle. She sleeps.