The meeting has begun. She watches as they watch her sit. The air is cold, the windows tall. The walls are blue and hung with portraits. The table is polished and square—she’s always imagined it round—and in benches on three sides sit the famous philosophers and gentlemen members alike. She sees their wigs and eyes, sees an instrument on the table, a piece of raw meat, a glass of something green. And where moments ago, alone in the carriage, it seemed time was rushing ahead, now it seems to Margaret that time is standing still. The moment eddies, pools at her feet. Robert Boyle. Henry More. John Evelyn. Christopher Wren. What will she say? How will it start?
Then the focus shifts. A man steps from the crowd. “Robert Hooke,” the secretary says. Indeed, she sees, he limps. “The air pump,” Hooke announces. He measures the weight of the air. A globe-shaped magnet is pulled through iron filings. A slice of roast mutton is immersed in a liquid and immediately turns to blood. He displays one instrument after another, hardly pausing between. It’s clear he has performed this before. For other aristocratic visitors, other invited guests? Indeed, many of the men look bored as two round marbles are by machinations flattened. He does something with a compass. Something pretty with prisms and light.
London’s bells begin to toll; an hour has passed, though she’s not yet spoken a word. Now Hooke places a microscope on the table. Their brittle art, she’s called it. He asks her to look inside, observe the swimming bodies. All the faces turn to her. Margaret looks inside—she blinks—a horse neighs in the street. She sees the bodies, swimming, like blossoms on a breeze, like actors in a play, she thinks, in and out of view. The image flickers, suspended. Hooke continues his speech. She shifts her gaze to the bodies that fill the room. Like one body, she thinks, with many pairs of eyes. And a feeling comes over her then, the feeling that she’s been walking here across a vast expanse with something in her hands. The image flickers, suspended. Alone, she thinks. I am quite alone. And, thus distracted, she catches only fragments of Hooke’s concluding speech—“light, by which our actions are to be guided . . . be renewed, and all our command over all things”—to the serious philosophers and the gentlemen members assembled in the room.
He almost missed the meeting, for bricklayers came to mend a chimney in his kitchen. Yet keen to see her, he hurried all the way. “The Duchess of Newcastle is all the pageant now discoursed on,” at breakfast tables and dinner parties, over porridge or pike, she was all that anyone spoke about—or so he’d written in his diary several weeks before. For she was everywhere that season. She was at the theater; she was entertaining the king; she was riding down the street. And everyone had seen her, yet he could not manage to spot her. So when it was rumored the Duchess of Newcastle would repay the king’s visit the following Monday, he’d loitered at Whitehall Palace well into the night, the palace packed with eager visitors, as if it were Christina, the Queen of Sweden, at any moment expected. But the duchess did not appear. She awaited an entire new livery for her footmen—or so the papers said—all of silk velvet, with caps that mimicked the caps of the king’s own footmen, a costly and a grand procession, with one coach—the papers said—carrying her gentleman attendants, then the carriage bearing the duchess, then a four-horse coach carrying her ladies-in-waiting, they in gowns of lutestring and she in a fashion of grandeur, heavily embroidered and trimmed in lace, with jewels in her ears, high-heeled shoes on her feet, and a puff of feathers atop her head fit for a masque or a play or a ball, a triumphant show, the court!
It therefore came as a surprise, the following Sunday, to learn that the Duchess of Newcastle’s carriage had rolled into Palace Yard with little ceremony, as he, Samuel Pepys, had been at church in Hackney.
He missed her, too, at the annual celebration for the Order of the Garter—the processions, the feasts—she in a flowered gown, a petaled hat of roses, he in the Navy Office dealing with accounts. Then came May Day and the park was like a circus. The air was thick with hawthorns, cakes, and shit. “Mad Madge,” someone cried from the crowd, at last. “Mad Madge,” someone repeated, as her black-and-silver carriage came roaring down the path. Black stars on white cheeks. “The whole story of this lady is a romance,” he wrote in his diary that night.
And so, when Sir George Berkeley announced at a recent meeting of the Royal Society that the Duchess of Newcastle hoped to visit—that he had dined with her at Newcastle House and that she hoped to be invited—Pepys, a gentleman member, had been pleased, curious and pleased, even as the news caused a collective groan in the room. They were a new organization, after all, still working to make their name. Putting aside all that she had written—her attacks on their work—there was no telling what she would do. They’d all heard the stories: the crowds, her breasts at the theater, the slight she’d given the queen. They could easily imagine the mocking ballads the next day at the pub. Yet she was a duchess, was favored by the king. Debate followed, pro and con. Until, whether out of loyalty or real friendship to the duke, the aristocratic members urged the invitation be sent.
So she’d arrived, twenty minutes late—so she sits there still.
Hooke has finished and the room awaits her reply. But the duchess only sits, looking into the device. That hat is too much, Pepys thinks—still, her shape is fine. At last, she lifts her head. What ingenious remark will she make? “Gentlemen,” she says, “I am all admiration.” She rises from her chair. “I am all admiration,” she says again. She nods, stiffly, as if wishing them well. She looks to Lord Brouncker, who stands, surprised, and leads her to the door.
“A mad, conceited, ridiculous woman,” Pepys writes that night in his diary. She was pretty enough for forty-three, but what a disappointment. She said nothing at all worth hearing. “I do not like her at all.”
William sits in a chair beneath the portrait of his first wife, who is quiet as a pearl, the moon. Margaret is quiet, too. She looks peaceful, though she’d returned in a state. “I said nothing!” she’d cried in the entranceway, unsteady as on a ship. “I don’t understand,” he’d answered, coming to find his wife. She’d wept there on the tiles with her hand against a wall. He’d coaxed her into a chair, persuaded her to take some wine.
She’s calm now, exhausted. There was nothing she could have done. It was only a pretty performance. “It was only more chatter,” she says.
Once, beside a brook, she’d created whole worlds with the tip of her leather boot. She was Margaret, Queen of the Tree-people, and her brothers had built her castles of ropes in the elms. Something had mattered so much—an argument about a bird? She’d watched her own enormous shadow as she’d marched across the fields.
“They will say I failed or that I’m a fool.”
“My dear,” William says, “the honor was theirs.”
Out in the garden, it pours.
Days later, the Dutch fleet enters the Thames. London panics. The papers move on from the duchess to the war. She and William ride north, in haste. The city slides from view, replaced by farms, then hills, then woods. And though she does not know it yet, she will never leave Welbeck again. She’ll continue to read widely, correspond widely, too. She’ll write a well-received biography of William, a second book of plays. And she’ll pay to reissue her Blazing World with its critiques of the Royal Society and its wild fancy intact.
She calls for the carriage. She makes her daily tour. Through the grounds, into the village, past the children, into the woods. The day is nearly done. The sky is a yellowish pink, the snow a mirror, a yellowish pink beneath. Even the village cottages have taken on a glow, sheep like pearls in pinkish snow. Out the carriage window she sees ancient oaks, the wet black earth, and thinks of the orchard in Antwerp—the same black earth, wild and dark, but nothing else is the same. She thinks of the orchard in Antwerp—and she’d been dressed as a bee! “Let’s be off,” William had whispered, but she’d just then spotted the queen dressed as an Amazon. “Let’s get out of this place,” he’d said, guiding her through the busy castle and back into th
e air. There were the stars, still dotting the sky, the lanterns on their hooks. And there was Christina, Queen of Sweden, stepping into a carriage. There was her ankle, her foot. “What a lovely party,” said a pretty girl who’d passed them on the stairs.
Now Lucy arrives to prepare her for bed. She unbraids, untwists her mistress’s hair. “What shall we speak of?” one lady asks the other. “Aren’t they lovely?” says the other of the roses in a vase.
At last she is alone. Another day is done. In her nightgown, in her slippers, Margaret opens the book: “It is a Description of a New World, not such as the French man’s World in the Moone; but a World of my own Creating, which I call the Blazing-World: The first part whereof is Romancical, the second Philosophical, and the third is merely Fancy, or (as I may call it) Fantastical; which if it add any satisfaction to you, I shall account my self a Happy Creatoress; if not, I must be content to live a melancholly Life.”
EPILOGUE
ONE WINTER MORNING, SHE WENT OUT FOR A WALK. THE YARD WAS A blank sheet of snow. The sky was curious—more a sea than a sky—and she walked into the woods in breeches and riding boots. When they found her, hours later, she was sitting alone on a garden chair, leaning to one side.
It was 1673. She was forty-nine. She was survived by her husband and her many Paper Bodies. Through them she would live on, she hoped, in many ages and many brains.
William was unprepared. He never imagined he’d outlive her, his blushing, awkward wife. With her body laid out below and villagers filing through, he sat alone in her chamber amid her gowns and books. They lifted her casket into a carriage, which lumbered up the drive.
After resting in the reception hall at Newcastle House one night, Margaret made her final tour through London’s clamorous streets. Mourners and the curious followed. No one shouted. Church bells tolled. Her husband could not be there, too old to make the trip, but her favorite sister, Catherine, walked beside her all the way. She was laid to rest in the Cavendish family vault.
William died three years later, almost to the day.
They are buried together in Westminster Abbey. The inscription above their bodies reads: “Here lies the loyal Duke of Newcastle and his Duchess, his second wife, by whom he had no issue: her name was Margaret Lucas, youngest sister to the Lord Lucas of Colchester, a noble family: for all the brothers were valiant, and all the sisters virtuous. This Duchess was a wise, witty and learned lady, which her many books do well testify; she was a most virtuous and a loving and careful wife, and was with her Lord all the time of his banishment and miseries, and when he came home never parted from him in his solitary retirement.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. To readers interested in historical biography, I recommend Katie Whitaker’s Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by Her Pen and Kathleen Jones’s A Glorious Fame: The Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623–1673.
I am also indebted to the writing of Virginia Woolf, which is where—in “The Duchess of Newcastle” and A Room of One’s Own—I first met Margaret Cavendish, and in whose life and work I unexpectedly found much inspiration for the woman who took shape inside this book. Furthermore, my book incorporates, here and there, lines and images from Woolf’s own writing (as well as material from Cavendish’s work, of course).
*
Finally, I’d be remiss not to mention the following, which were used to varying degrees in my writing and research:
Ashley, Maurice. Life in Stuart England. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967.
Barker, Felix and Peter Jackson. London: 2,000 Years of a City and Its People. New York: Macmillan, 1974.
Battigelli, Anna. Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1998.
Bowerbank, Sylvia and Sara Mendelson, eds. Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2000.
Bryson, Bill, ed. Seeing Further: The Story of Science & the Royal Society. London: HarperPress, 2010.
Campbell, Mary Baine. Wonder & Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Clucas, Stephen, ed. A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003.
Danielson, Dennis Richard, ed. The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclites to Hawking. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2000.
Daston, Lorraine and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature. New York: Zone Books, 2001.
Hartley, Sir Harold, F.R.S. The Royal Society: Its Origins and Founders. London: The Royal Society, 1960.
Hazlehurst, F. Hamilton. Gardens of Illusion: The Genius of André Le Nostre. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1980.
Hunt, John Dixon. Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination: 1600–1750. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Inwood, Stephen. The Man Who Knew Too Much: The Strange and Inventive Life of Robert Hooke, 1635–1703. London: Pan Books, 2003.
Keen, Mary. The Glory of the English Garden. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1989
Leasor, James. The Plague and the Fire. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, Inc., 1961.
Orsenna, Érik. André Le Nôtre: Gardener to the Sun King. Trans. by Moishe Black. New York: George Braziller, 2001.
Pearson, Thesketh. Merry Monarch: The Life and Likeness of Charles II. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960.
Peck, Lynda Levy. Consuming Splendor: Society and culture in seventeenth-century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Volume VII, 1666. Edited by Robert Latham & William Matthews. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.
Plumptre, George. Royal Gardens. London: Collins, 1981.
Sarasohn, Lisa T. The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy During the Scientific Revolution. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010.
Scott, A. F. Every One a Witness: The Stuart Age. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co., 1975.
Stafford, Barbara Marie and Frances Terpak, eds. Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2001.
Tinniswood, Adrian. By Permission of Heaven: The True Story of the Great Fire of London. New York: Riverhead Books, 2004.
Turner, John Grantham. Libertines and Radicals in Early Modern London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Weld, Charles Richard. A History of the Royal Society: With memoirs of the presidents, Volume I. London: John W. Parker, 1848.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Short excerpts from this book appeared previously in Vanitas, Western Humanities Reviews, and Birkensnake. Thank you to their editors. Thank you to my lovely agent, Cynthia Cannell, and my incredible editor, Pat Strachan. To Andy Hunter, Julie Buntin, Jennifer Abel Kovitz, and everyone at Catapult. To my earliest readers and advisors, J’Lyn Chapman, Kathryn Davis, Gregory Howard, John McElwee, Miranda Popkey, Suzanne Scanlon, and Kate Zambreno. To W. Scott Howard for Paper Bodies. To Washington University in St. Louis, and my colleagues in the English Department, for time and support. And above all, to my forever reader, the wise and patient Martin Riker, for Elijah and everything else.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Danielle Dutton is the author of a collection of prose pieces, Attempts at a Life, and a novel, SPRAWL, which was a finalist for the Believer Book Award. She also wrote the text for Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera, an artist book of collages by Richard Kraft. Her fiction has appeared in Harper’s, BOMB, Fence, Noon, and other periodicals. Dutton, who grew up in Central California, holds a Ph.D. from the University of Denver and a M.F.A. from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the founder of the publishing house Dorothy, and teaches at Washington University in St. Louis, where she lives with her husband and son.
Danielle Dutton, Margaret the First
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