Margaret the First (7 page)

A week passed with hardly a word in the house.

I worked at poems, he on his book about
manège
.

At last, one night, he asked me to sit up with him, and I agreed to a small glass of wine. We settled on a sofa near the fire. A quiet rain was falling. A dog in the corner scratched. My husband began to cry. “Now my best hope is that his widow will be pregnant.” He choked back a sob. “A link to poor Charlie,” he sighed. He took out a handkerchief, blew his nose: “Of course, I do not blame you.” I put down the glass of wine. “Blame me for what?” I asked. He fiddled with a ring. “I will never hold our disappointment against you,” he finally said. His words, though softly spoken, meant, I saw, he did.

So, a carrying on of patterns: in and out of rooms, watching windows, imperceptibly closing doors. When the night of Béatrix’s party arrived, William was dressed as a captain. I emerged from the marble staircase in layers of gauze and yellow silk. “A beehive?” he asked, and offered me his arm.

Birds still chirped in branches. The night was warm, bright with moonlight and the lanterns off carriages that lined the gravel drive. Once inside the castle, William wandered left, I right, glancing through rooms, over tables lit by tulips, and out the windows to stars. In elaborate gilded bird-beak masks, partygoers passed me. Even the music was like a dream, a foreign, pulsing air. And there, in the bustling courtyard, I spotted her at last—Christina, Queen of Sweden. She was dressed as an Amazon. Her entire breasts were bared, her knees. O excellent scandal! O clever ladies’ chatter! But privately I admired the queen’s gold helmet and cape, and her hand that rested lightly on the hilt of her handsome sword.

The following morning, a messenger rang the bell. William was out atop a horse, so I received the note. The widow was not pregnant. I asked the cook to fix his favorite meal. Over a pie of eels and oysters, I gently broke the news. “It will all be for the best,” I said. I didn’t say it might be best for the widow as well. I didn’t say: There’s no telling a child will be any comfort to its mother at all.

WHEN THE SCHELDT FROZE THIS TIME, I STOOD AT THE WINDOW
, watching Antwerp’s well-to-do slide by. Their sleighs, gliding, were lit by footmen with torches. William easily persuaded me to go out. Bundled in blankets, we rode to the shore, to revelers skating, vendors selling cakes and fried potatoes under lamps. The frozen expanse glistened in the dark, icicles licking the pier like devil’s tongues. William stepped down and waited for me to follow. And—oh!—how I longed to go, to dance with him on incorporeal legs. But I couldn’t. Or I wouldn’t. He climbed back up. We turned around. William looked strangely heartbroken, and we rode through the streets in silence. Then alone at my desk, I imagined a frozen river in me: “a smooth glassy ice, whereupon my thoughts are sliding.”

WHEN YOUNG KING CHARLES II CAME FROM PARIS TO VISIT HIS
brothers (the dukes) and sister (now Princess of Orange), William proposed a ball: “Opulent, of course, yet fittingly refined.” We stuffed Delft bowls with winter roses—their petals tissue-thin—and draped the painter’s studio in silk. Dancing was of the English country style, with arched arms and curtsies, embroidered twists and knots. “Lavish,” it was whispered. And sixteen hired servants carried dinner on eight enormous silver chargers—half through the eastern door, half through the west, meeting at a table in the center of the room. I managed the evening from a confluence of my own, a merging of myself, my present and my past, as if half of myself were here, myself, while the other half was still in Oxford clutching the queen’s fox train. Back then I’d been but a maid—and awkward and shy—whereas tonight I was a marchioness and seated beside the king. “Did you know,” he leaned in close, “you are something of a celebrity in London?” In truth, I’d heard as much. Still, I blushed as pink as the ham. “And it seems your husband’s credit,” he winked, “can procure better meat than my own.” At two in the morning, we toasted the Commonwealth’s downfall. And seven months later, by God’s blessing, Cromwell was dead.

WILLIAM WAS HUNTING IN THE HOOGSTRATEN WHEN THE NEWS
hit. In Paris, Rotterdam, Calais, Antwerp, exiles danced in the street.

Cromwell was dead.

I was at my desk.

Then, a creeping kind of peace. For some months nothing happened. There were skirmishes, flare-ups, but nothing of any substance. Not until December of the following year was William confident of a speedy restoration. He began, in delight, to compile a book of counsel, to be handed to the young king at some sympathetic moment. “Monopolies must be abolished,” he wrote. “Acorns should be planted throughout the land.” But above all else—and here he was firm—the king must circulate, must be as a god in splendor, and make the people love him “in fear and trembling love,” as they once loved Queen Elizabeth, for “of a Sunday when she opened the window the people would cry, ‘Oh Lord, I saw her hand, I saw her hand.’ ”

He could not wait to be home.

But what could home mean now? To what did we return? Through my open bedroom window came the sounds of morning: the clip-clop of a horse’s hooves, the steady hum of bees. I’d lived in exile half my life, in marriage nearly as long. There was the familiar wooden gate, the leafy garden path. Once, it’s true, I’d wished the war would end, so we could live at Welbeck, where I knew William longed to be. The children in their beds, I’d thought, peacocks on the lawn. But the war had never ended, or it had not ended for us. I’d long ago stopped waiting for home to come.

Still, the king’s words were never far from my mind. A celebrity, he’d said.

Now William finished his book of counsel and had it bound in silk.

I ordered two new gowns: one white and triumphant like a lighthouse, one bruised like autumn fruit.

FIREWORKS, SPEECHES, GUN SALUTES, A BALL. IN APRIL OF 1660, THE
Hague celebrated with King Charles II. William rushed to his side. He hoped to be named Master of the Horse, but his reception was cool, the little book went unmentioned, and that post of honor was granted to a handsome new courtier named Monck. Snubbed—even as Marmaduke was made a baron, Lord Jermyn an earl—William refused an invitation to join the king’s brother on the crossing, hired an old rotten frigate, and left alone the following day. He never returned to Antwerp. He sent a letter instructing me to remain where I was, a pawn for all his debts. His trip took an endless week—they were becalmed in the middle of the passage—but when finally he saw the smoke and spires of London, his anger passed to joy. He said: “Surely, I have been sixteen years asleep.”

ALONE IN MY ROOM, I WAS WRITING PLAYS. THEY WERE ALL-FEMALE
plays for an all-female troupe. Of course, it was absurd. Women so rarely acted in public. Of course, I never meant them to be staged. “They will be acted,” I said to no one, “only on the page, only in the mind. My modest closet plays.” I smiled. I dipped my quill in ink.

The housekeeper knocked and held out a note. I took up William’s instructions from the ornate pewter tray.

No more to be done, yet everything to do.

Flemish tapestries, drawing tables, lenses, the telescopes from Paris, books, of course, and perfumes, platters, ewers, ruffs, tinctures, copperplates, saddles, wax. There were little green-patterned moths dashing around the attic, bumping at the glass. I thought I felt like that. I dreamed the moths crept upside down on the surface of my mind. In the mornings I met with a magistrate or bid a neighbor farewell. I myself packed linen-wrapped manuscripts into crates. The plays had a box to share, each handwritten folio tied with purple ribbon: in
Bell in Campo
, the Kingdom of Restoration and the Kingdom of Faction prepare to go to war, and the wives, with Lady Victoria at their helm, insist on joining the battle; in
The
Matrimonial Trouble
, a housemaid who has married the master proceeds to put on airs; in
The Convent of Pleasure
—the only not quite finished—Lady Happy, besieged by men who wish to marry her fortune, escapes to a cloister. But the pesky men sneak in, dressed like women, to join the ladies’ play within the walls. Enter Monsieur Take-pleasure and his Man Dick.

Monsieur Take-pleasure
. Dick, Am I fine to day?

Dick
. Yes, Sir, as fine as Feathers, Ribbons, Gold, and Silver can make you.

Takepl
. Dost thou think I shall get the Lady
Happy
?

Dick
. Not if it be her fortune to continue under that name.

Takepl
. Why?

Dick
. Because if she Marry your Worship she must change her Name; for the Wife takes the Name of her Husband, and quits her own.

Takepl
. Faith,
Dick
, if I had her wealth I should be
Happy
.

Dick
. It would be according as your Worship would use it; but, on my conscience, you would be more happy with the Ladies Wealth, than the Lady would be with your Worship.

Takepl
. Why should you think so?

Dick
. Because Women never think themselves happy in Marriage.

Takepl
. You are mistaken; for Women never think themselves happy until they be married.

Dick
. The truth is, Sir, that Women are always unhappy in their thoughts, both before and after Marriage; for, before Marriage they think themselves unhappy for want of a Husband; and after they are Married, they think themselves unhappy for having a Husband.

Takepl
. Indeed Womens thoughts are restless.

Then scenes change according to my whim, for I was writing more freely than ever before. In the cloister one moment, we’re next on a field of green, where sheep graze around a maypole, and Lady Happy is a shepherdess, while the Prince-who-woos-her-as-a-Princess is a shepherd. Next, Lady Happy is a Sea-Goddess and the Prince-as-Princess is Neptune astride a rock. They embrace, as friends, and then as friends they kiss. Happy questions her fate. Truth be told, she felt a certain stirring. And “why,” she asks, “may not I love a Woman with the same affection I could a Man?” In the end, the Prince’s true nature is revealed. But would Happy, who fled all men, be happy to be his? I hadn’t yet decided, but hurriedly placed a lid atop the crate, then marched myself and my household to the shore. The goods and lower servants boarded a frigate. I, at last, a Dutch man-of-war.

IT CAME AS A SHOCK. AFTER A BRUTAL CROSSING—IN WHICH SHE HIT
her head in a storm and swore she’d seen a bear at the helm of the ship—Margaret expected to find her husband at his London residence, Newcastle House, in fashionable Clerkenwell. Yet there she stood in Bow Street in a rented house, again. “I cannot call it unhandsome,” she said when asked if she liked her new room. Where was she meant to keep her gowns? It hadn’t even a mirror. William’s steward came to tell them that her crates could not be found. Her sister, Margaret learned, would be in Cornwall for three weeks. All this in the first two hours, still stinking of the ship. A doctor came, declared her sound. Margaret washed. She slept. In morning light, she dressed. And over the following week, as William prepared to petition the courts for the return of his elegant townhouse, Margaret prepared for some sign of the notice she’d allowed herself to expect.

A celebrity, the king had said.

She sat by the window day after day, yet no one they knew would be walking in Bow Street, and no one in Bow Street seemed to notice who she was.

This was the Restoration, after all. The very air in London was filled with triumphant returns. When the king arrived on his ship in the Thames, twenty thousand horse-and-foot stood brandishing their swords. Everyone had their version of events. Everyone spoke at once. John Evelyn, from the Strand, beheld it and blessed God: “Praised be forever the Lord of Heaven, who only does wondrous things.” “A pox on all kings!” cried a hag. “Oh look, the king,” gasped a girl held aloft. The diarist Samuel Pepys wrote of bonfires the city over, an infinite shooting of guns, and men drinking to the king’s health upon their knees in the street. London was born anew, again. The theaters reopened in a glow of candles and laughter. There were public lectures at Gresham College—on astronomy, on wind. Throngs of visitors, exotic ambassadors. There was tennis at Hampton Court.

Amid this tumult, Margaret’s crates went undelivered. Her manuscripts were missing. She had only two gowns on hand.

“Did you know,” she said over toast one morning, setting aside a letter from her sister, “it is the fashion in London for a lady to appear in public in a state of near-undress?”

“Ah,” said William, and grabbed his hat.

He had always some appointment or some old friend to see.

“My dear,” he sometimes offered, “if you wish to come, then say.”

But Margaret said nothing, or hesitated, and William left, annoyed. When he returned in the evening, he’d find her seated alone at the table in one of those two gowns.

“Are you feeling well?” he’d ask.

“Yes, My Lord,” she’d say.

She tried to write, but nothing came.

“My dear,” he said one evening, “I believe we must do more. We were gone so long, you see. We must work to make ourselves known in London’s good society. After sixteen years stalled, we must finally begin to act.”

His wife looked past him to his shadow on the wall.

“Margaret?” he asked. He scraped his fork against his plate: gingerbread and apple cream.

“But I was not stalled,” she said.

When her sister returned from the country, Margaret was summoned for cake. In rose silk shoes she ventured out, saw that Bow Street teemed with rats and worse: narrow, rutted, splattered by offal and urine, the houses pitched precariously overhead. She saw a painted whore in a gilded chair. A dead dog on the corner. Then Catherine rattled on about people Margaret hardly knew. “How relieved you must be to be home!” her sister cried. “But why are you staying in Bow Street?” And Margaret tried to explain: their debts were large, the estates tied up. They must wait for the king to restore some fraction of what they had lost.