Late one night, with the ball still weeks away, a messenger banged on our door. Voices from the courtyard, footsteps down the hall — I found William in the parlor and a letter on the floor. The Viscount of Mansfield, Charles Cavendish, Charlie, his eldest, was dead. A “palsy” was how the letter writer put it: raised a glass to his lips and choked on the lamb. “Inconceivable,” William choked. He muttered to himself. Only thirty-three and alive last week. I reached out for his hand. Was there anything he needed? But he didn’t see that the fire smoked. He didn’t hear me leave. I stepped into the courtyard, where out under the whirling stars I prayed for a grandson, many grandsons, legions of grandsons for William, who sat in front of the fire with the blankest of looks on his face. I watched him through the windowpane as through a room of glass. Later, too — tossing, restless — I watched as if from another world as he sweated through his sheets. He took a glass of brandy. He drifted off at last.
Next came a flurry of letters, back and forth. William grew suspicious, suspected the widow — of what? And Henry, so long a second son, was quick to claim his dead brother’s title, even as his sisters begged him to delay, ensure that Charlie’s widow wasn’t pregnant with an heir. William shouted at servants. He fired the cook, rang the bell. Meanwhile, feeling so far from my husband’s grieving, I felt strangely aware of myself. My face in the mirror was only one year older than Charlie’s had been last week. How odd that I could still feel like a girl, be made to feel it, feel the cold floors of St. John’s Green beneath my feet—“Picky Peg,” my brothers called me — yet my neck was beginning to sag, the skin grown soft and loose. I was all discontent. Angry, in fact. At Charlie for dying so suddenly, at Henry for causing William to suffer, at William for letting his children upset him as much as they did.
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.”
ANTWERP TO THE CHANNEL, 1658–1660
~ ~ ~
WHEN YOUNG KING CHARLES II CAME FROM PARIS TO VISIT HIS brothers (the dukes) and sister (now Princess of Orange), William proposed a balclass="underline" “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.