Reading it back, I realized I believed it.
I was busy with two new pieces when a letter arrived in the maiclass="underline" in the rented house in London, Sir Charles was stricken by ague. A week later, dear Charles was dead. William, just returned from the hunt, fell suddenly ill at the shock.
I split my days, so split myself: it was mornings with my husband, afternoons at my desk. My thoughts spun round, like fireworks, or rather stars, set thick upon the brain. Truly I mourned Charles, yet every afternoon I lit up like a torch. In one essay I called the Parliamentarians demons. Gold mines, I argued, could not be formed by the sun. My fingernails went black from the scraping of my quill. Few friends came to the house. Had I lost what friends we’d made? It was one thing to write riddles for ladies, another to do what I’d done.
Still, the summer invitations would arrive.
And so: at a soiree at the Duartes’ I sat in black between Mr. Duarte and a visitor from Rome. I’d come alone — William too ill to attend — and grew sleepy on French wine as the two men spoke Italian across my chest all night. Finally, over boiled berry pudding, the Duartes announced a surprise: their eldest girl was pregnant, the pretty one who’d sung like a bird, now resting with her hands across her belly in a chair. Everyone raised a glass. I raised a glass. I looked around me, sipped the wine. To many healthy babies, I agreed. Yet I sank down into a private wordless rage, the fury of which I could not explain. I ordered the carriage, returned to the house. When William asked how the evening had gone, I snapped. Surely I had no time for such silly affectation. Only my work and my sick husband mattered. Nor was it easy labor. How many pages a day? How many days? Until, in the first fine week of autumn, as the branches in the orchard bent and wasps went mad with fruit, I set aside my quill. I’d finished my second book.
It was Michaelmas and William was recovered.
Now I myself fell ill.
William wrote to Mayerne that I was bilious, passed a great amount of urine with specks of white crystals in it. The doctor wrote back: “Her ladyship’s occupation in writing of books is absolutely bad for health!” And what if it truly was? But if anything, I insisted, I’d only just begun, was off, at last, and thirty- one. I might be praised, I might be censured, but my desire was such, I explained, it was such. but I could not find the words. Judiciously, steadily, William worked to get me out — from my bed, my room, the house — and for his sake, I rallied. I promised him I’d lead a more sensible life.
Of course, by this time my manuscript was already off to London.
So one night, returning from a circus — monsters, camels, baboons, a man with sticks for fingers, a woman with soft brown fur — we opened the door to The World’s Olio arrived in the publisher’s crates.
~ ~ ~
WHILE ONE BOOK IN THE WORLD MIGHT BE CONSIDERED AN anomaly, two books, it seemed, sounded an alarm. The lady is a fraud! Even if the books were ridiculous, how could a woman speak the language of philosophy at all? I hadn’t attended university. They knew I didn’t read Latin. It fell to reason a man was behind my work — writing it, dictating it, or even perhaps unknowingly the victim of my theft.
But hadn’t Shakespeare written with natural ability?
Every tree a teacher, every bird?
Alone in my room, I fought with the air: “If any thinks my book so well wrote as that I had not the wit to do it, truly I am glad for my wit’s sake!”
~ ~ ~
DEFENDING A SECOND BOOK QUICKLY LED TO A THIRD. Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 1655. In it I argued all matter can think: a woman, a river, a bird. There is no creature or part of nature without innate sense and reason, I wrote, for observe the way a crystal spreads, or how a flower makes way for its seed. I shared each page with William, often before the ink had dried. It put me at odds, he explained, with the prevailing thought of the day. But how could the world be wound up like a clock? It was pulsing, contracting, attracting, and generating infinite forms of knowledge. Nor could man’s be supreme. For how could there be any supreme knowledge in such an animate system? One critic called the book a “vile performance.” But another said my writing proved the mind is without a sex!
At dinner parties now, I was sometimes asked to account for myself, to speak of my ideas. I very rarely could. Bold on the page, in life I was only Margaret.
Still, Antwerp, the parties, my husband’s talks — all of it fed my mind. I’d hardly set down my quill before I took it up again, writing stories unconnected — of a pimp, a virgin, a rogue — strung up like pearls on a thread. This one, my fourth, called Natures Pictures, was something of a hit. It opens with a scene of family life — men blowing noses, humble women in rustling skirts — and closes somewhat less humbly, I admit, with “A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life”—in which, for the sake of history, I describe in my own words my childhood in Essex, my experiences of war, my marriage and disposition — in short, my life — and ultimately declare: “I am very ambitious, yet ’tis neither for Beauty, Wit, Titles, Wealth or Power, but as they are steps to raise me to Fames Tower.” O minor victory! O small delight! My star began to rise.
ANTWERP, 1657
~ ~ ~
I PAUSED IN THE HALL BEFORE GOING IN TO EAT. “I’VE HAD IT,” William spat, “with this damned unending war.” I took a spoonful of chestnut soup. “Yes,” I said, and watched him as he chewed. He finished his dinner in silence, hulked off to his room. Alone with the duck and a vase of roses, was I to blame for his mood? The latest round of gossip had rattled him, I knew. “Here’s the crime,” he’d said in a fit, “a lady writes it, and to entrench so much upon the male prerogative is not to be forgiven!” He’d defended me at every turn. Yet lately he’d been riled. And for my part — riled, too — I decided simply to busy myself with the summer as best I could.
There was a housekeeper to hire.
A neighbor starting an archery school on the opposite side of our fence.
A portrait to sit for — or rather, I stood.
And Christina, Queen of Sweden, was on a European tour.
Of course I’d heard the stories, impossible to avoid: how the queen drew crowds in Frankfurt and Paris, where one lady, shocked, wrote that her “voice and actions are altogether masculine,” noted her “masculine haughty mien,” and bemoaned a lack of “that modesty which is so becoming, and indeed necessary, in our sex.” She wore breeches, doublets, even men’s shoes. She smoked. She’d sacked Prague. She wore a short periwig over her own flaxen braids, and a black cap, which she swept off her head whenever a lady approached. Most importantly, she’d be traveling to Antwerp next, and Béatrix in her castle would host a masquerade.
A Gypsy, a flame, a sea nymph? I wondered what to be.