That night she only poked at her food. Her stomach turned. In bed under a canopy — a dusky swath of red — she was struck just after midnight by the vision of a gown — a dress for the North Pole! — the first she’d dreamt up in ages. And very early, in a kind of violent compulsion, too eager to wait for her husband’s consent, she sent off an order for three bolts of bright blue silk, and gilt lace, and green and yellow taffeta. but how would she manage a magnetic hat?
Then, of a sudden, William was ready to leave London.
It wasn’t Flecknoe’s recent request for patronage, or the money she’d spent on the gown. He’d simply come to face his fate: he would never find a position in the king’s innermost circle — too old, too stuffy, a reminder of the past.
Margaret said she was ready, if readier months before.
“Wasn’t this what you wanted?” he asked.
“It was,” she said. “It is.”
“What is it you want, my dear?”
But Margaret wanted the whole house to move three feet to the left. It was indescribable what she wanted. She was restless. She wanted to work. She wanted to be thirty people. She wanted to wear a cap of pearls and a coat of bright blue diamonds. To live as nature does, in many ages, in many brains.
“I want my crates” was all she said.
The following morning, before she’d even risen, William was off to Whitehall Palace to seek the king’s permission to leave. If he couldn’t hold sway at court, at least he’d be lord of his county, as he had been before the war, the most powerful man for over half a million acres — from Kegworth to Three Shire Oak and all the way back around.
~ ~ ~
NOTTINGHAM WAS A NOT INCONSIDERABLE TOWN, WITH WIDE streets and sturdy houses, shops of salt-glazed pots, and Wensleydale and Cheshire cheeses, and stockings and licorice and ale. They stopped at the inn overnight. Morning brought the forest. Sunlight shot from spots between the trees, a dizzying reiteration as the carriage rushed along. It was the farthest north she’d ever been on the planet. The land seemed wilder to Margaret than anything she’d seen. William saw something different. He reminisced. Where once had been the densest of woods, branches entangled like fingers in a grasp, now stood a modern and managed park: timber for building, charcoal, hunting for the rich. Yet to her eyes, Sherwood Forest was vast. It was thick with green and black with moss and lit by starry mountain-laurel clusters puffed up in the dark.
They stopped to stretch.
Margaret heard a heron’s plaintive franck. There were mushrooms on rotted bark, cinnamon ferns in mud. So here was England, yet again — not London, that calamity — England. But it might as well have been the moon, so alien to her memories, to gold soft fields and hills. “What is that?” she asked, head cocked to the side, and he answered it was a river, hidden in the brush. It sounded unlike any she’d ever known. Not the Scheldt, nor the Thames or Seine. “Does every river make a music of its own?” she wondered, tired. Thames, Trent, Tees, Tyne, Tweed, Tay, Dee, Spey: names of rivers, south to north, she’d memorized as a girl. “Margaret,” he called from the carriage, for it was time to go — but something rustled, something whistled, something rattled, remote or close. Thames, Trent, Tees, Tyne, Tweed, Tay, Dee, Spey. Of course, this forest was famously enchanted, enchanting, and heavy with its fame. Her feet began to sink. “Margaret,” he called from the carriage, “we’re almost there.”
~ ~ ~
WELBECK SPANNED CENTURIES: GOTHIC AT ONE END, ELIZABETHAN in the middle, and at the other end a classic Jacobean front. Inside, the house had been denuded in the war. Fortunately, Henry’s wife — who’d lived there with her family until William and Margaret’s return — left several beds, and pots and pans, and candlesticks and stools, and two imposing suits of armor erect on a red leather floor.
“Still, it’s nice,” William murmured, “to be at home at last.”
For days he seemed ceaseless, sleepless: there were his nearly horseless stables and the crumbling castle of Bolsover not a day’s ride to the west. His holdings spilled over borders, into Derbyshire and Yorkshire, and, riding through, he discovered many fewer deer, missing fences, and missing woods, yet was happier each night at supper than his wife had ever seen. He arranged with merchants for iron grates for their fires, glasses for tables, linens for beds, then met with tenants until midnight to settle disputes at The Swan. Margaret watched him come and go, Lord Lieutenant of Nottinghamshire. He could arrest a man, raise a tax, argue for hours about bullocks or plows. He appeared to her a stranger wearing her husband’s skin.
She wandered from empty room to empty room, mapping the house with her feet, in gold shoes that echoed off the walls. It was a little, she decided, like living at the Louvre, so frigid and bewildering, though she’d never tell him that. From its formal entrance and polished stairs, the house pushed back from the London road, turned right and south to water gardens, left to the ancient monastery out of which the whole building had sprung. Her own vast chamber was on the second floor, puckered by a wall of oriel windows, each pane divided into sixteen squares that glittered in the dawn. A yellow writing table faced the southern wall. Hung with heavy tapestries, the bed looked like a ship. Against her will, it seemed, she fell asleep by day, the bed as dark as night, and when she woke, her dreaming filled the chamber. But Margaret detested a nap, the day flapping loose all around. She scribbled: “Idleness is the burden of my sex,” but nothing else. She had nothing to do and no one to see — William off working, no rats in the hall, no Flecknoe to entertain her. She had nothing but time, and no reason not to write. Each hour that passed with no ink from her quill was a quiet affliction, a void. She stared at that sunny table, ill fitted to the room, and watched as a violent downpour passed over their lake and woods.
Soon Margaret took to sitting in a room a floor below her own, a medieval wood-paneled gallery painted like a rainbow the century before. It was here she came to read in the afternoons.
And there that William found her, one day, and invited her on a walk. It was a filmy winter afternoon, and he’d show her the path to Clipstone Park, his chosen boyhood province, just beyond their woods — past the ornamental canals, the fishpond, swans upon the lake. He took her hand as they rounded the water, a scene he had often described. But when they cleared the trees, he met instead with a shock: stump after stump after stump after stump after stump and dried-out shoots. He sat on the ground. The sky was white. The day was everywhere quiet. “I left it,” he finally said, “so full of trees. And a river of fish and otter. And rabbits and partridge and poots.” Now he grieved. Now everything hit him at once. All he’d lost was lost in that grove. “Sixteen years,” he said. And Margaret helped him up. She took him home and sat him before the fire, placed a blanket over his knees — he was almost seventy, after all — then settled down beside him to watch the falling sleet. The clock chimed ten o’clock. “Damned Roundheads!” he cried at last. “Damned charcoal! Damned war!” That night they shared a bed, as once had been their custom.
Yet in the morning, out the window, in addition to the frost there was the grange farm that needed tending: cattle, oxen, horses, rye. He pulled on his boots in the icy hall. The winter was hard, and a new kind of normal settled with the snow. No one came to visit. No neighbors for miles around.
“For my pleasure and delight,” she wrote in a letter to Flecknoe, “my ease and peace, I live a retir’d life, which is so pleasing to me as I would not change it for all the pleasures of the publick world, nay, not to be mistress of the world.”