The lady floats for days across a fish-bright sea. At least it isn’t putrid; the cold contains the smell. In the galley she finds a crate of pears and eats one right after another, on the floor beside a frozen boy, listening to bits of ice bump against the hull. She is strangely unafraid. Hadn’t she always longed for adventure, back at her father’s home?
On the fifth night of this solitude, she falls asleep with a candle burning and dreams herself a mermaid with a thick and golden tail, a crown of shimmering conch shells, then awakens with a start. Whether the ship hit something or something hit the ship, another change has come. The ship is dying; she can feel it slipping away. She waits beneath the blanket for icy water to greet her. But instead of the sea, it’s a bear that opens the door.
A great white bear up on its hind legs steps across the threshold.
“Good morning,” he says, and reaches out a paw.
“Is it morning?” she says, and stands, though this belies her shock. For here is a talking bear! And she clicks through stories she’s read or heard: seizing children in the night, yes, and claws and hunger. But, too, constellations. And in “East of the Sun and West of the Moon” the bear is a prince all along.
“We must hurry,” says the bear.
“Certainly,” she says. “Yes,” she covers herself with her arms, “the ship is sinking,” as though she’s only just realized, the floor of the cabin now swirling with water and small silver fish that bump against her toes. Still, she does not move.
“Miss,” he says, more urgently now. But she only stands and stares. So he takes her in his enormous arms and rushes to the deck. The water rises around them, and from her perch she sees the sun has also risen — or rises, still — and at last breaks through the clouds that have surrounded the ship for days. The ice, too, is breaking up in all directions. The sea is itself again. She sees bodies stiffly bobbing. But the water and sunlight have raised the bear’s fur to a gleam. He is blinding: bright as snow in springtime. She shuts her eyes.
“Where are we going?” she shouts above the waves and another noise — a shrieking. Is it the ship itself that cries?
“There,” he says. He pants.
She opens her eyes again to a rocky spit of beach, just beyond the prow. A dozen bears wave their paws at them and frown as if to say: Hurry, or We don’t think you’re going to make it, or All this trouble for a girl? A hole is opening, a sea-mouth fit to swallow them up. Is it the water, she wonders, that makes the terrible noise?
“Hold on tight,” he shouts, so she holds him.
She rides him to the shore, where he lumbers up on all fours, then sets her down and shakes. Seawater rains over her (the bear is nine feet tall, at least), and several of the silver fish slide out of his fur and gasp. The other bears surround them. They seem impressed, or else amused. One of them helps her to her feet. They sniff her, not impolitely. She can hardly think to stand with all the shrieking. She glances up at the sky and sees massive circling parrots — it is they who make the noise! The beach is sharply pebbled. The lady wears no shoes. The bears give off a musky, fishy smell. One of them offers a blanket made of fur, but not of bear. Sailors’ bodies dot the bay. She smells salt. She smells the musky bears, hears them softly discussing whether to pull the sailors to shore, whether or not to eat them. Yet, she is unafraid. If she shakes, she shakes now from the day, which she feels at last, her skin growing pale and blue in the insupportable cold.
“Come,” says her rescuer, a warm paw on her back.
Behind her, the ship has disappeared.
“Silver, silver, silver!” a maid shouts in the hall, and Margaret can hardly believe it, for when was the last time she went anywhere at all? Now the whole house prepares for departure, and the servants are talking of spoons. One room swirls with feather dusters and motes of dust in light — they must be alive, she thinks, for see how they are nourished by the presence of the sun — and maids are throwing linen over chairs.
It’s off to London now, for Newcastle House in Clerkenwall has finally been regained. Or has it been repurchased? In any case, it’s William’s. He is anxious to see it, be in it again. It was built, he tells her, on the ruins of a nunnery, in the Palladian style, with thirty-five chimneys and views in all directions. He asks her what she hopes to do in the city. It’s been so long since she was there. The carriage bounces south. Toward Robert Hooke and Robert Boyle. Gresham College and public lectures. And that modest house Sir Charles rented in Covent Garden, where — so many years ago — she wrote her first book in a trance. “Shall you sit for a portrait?” William asks, but she hadn’t thought of that.
Outside the carriage, England unrolls in reverse: first forest, then farmland, then softly rising downs. They stop at an inn. They stop beside a brook that’s fast with spring. It all looks the same, she thinks, if a brighter shade of green, since the last time she traveled this road it had been the end of summer. Or was it early fall? The following day, the traffic begins to grow. She sees carts of flowers and cabbages trundle toward the city. The farms turn to villages, the villages to town. There are even crowds along the roadside, trying to get a glimpse — of him? of her? she isn’t sure. William declares it right, pulls her back from the window: “You seem to forget we are now among the highest aristocrats in England. Let them watch the grandees pass.”
At last the carriage stops.
All she can see is a wall.
She hears the horses panting, brushes a fly from her lap. As they sit together in the carriage warmth, her eyes begin to close. Scraps of vision from the past two days pass beneath her lids: the scattered trees and bluebells; the sun upon a hill; a small white house with a thick thatched roof and a dog who appeared above her head atop a garden wall. Her eyes are shut. She smiles. Is it happiness she feels? She is back in London, her Blazing World a triumph. It was just as William said. She had only to give it time. There was first that letter praising the sharpness of her wit. Then one about divine fury, enthusiasm, raptures. And in a single afternoon two letters came from Cambridge. The vice-chancellor called her an oracle. The Master of Fellows of Trinity College called her “Minerva and an Athens to herself.” Yes, there were others who never responded to the gift of a copy she sent. Still, she thinks. The horses shuffle. She sleeps.
Then, with a clatter of gears, a gate is pulled open in the windowless façade, and they pass through to a courtyard, which leads to a reception hall, which leads to gardens behind. The walls enclose two acres, complete with an orchard ready to blossom and the ivied relics of the ancient cloister that formerly stood on the grounds. Margaret steps outside. She breathes the London air. But William calls to her, eager to lead the tour. Thus Margaret learns “Palladian” means “balance.” There are two symmetrical wings of the house, one built for the husband, one for the husband’s wife. Though when he had it built, of course, his wife was someone else. It’s this lady’s portrait, blue-eyed and yellow-haired, that hangs in Margaret’s rooms.
Yet she is happy — is it happiness she feels? — as she places her things in the cupboards and drawers. Her quills, stockings, shoes. The room is dotted by porcelain figures. Punctuated, she thinks. She picks one up, puts it down. The former wife’s collection? Then opens a window to London bells and that green-silk scent of spring. And she sees now, here in this room, how badly she’d needed to leave. Impossible to perceive at Welbeck what one perceives in town. Or to perceive in London what one perceives anywhere else in the world. The rain in Paris, for example. Or the color of the cobblestones that run along the Scheldt. Of course, she thinks, a body cannot be in two places at one time. Might a mind? But no, she thinks. For when a body changes location, it changes its mind as well. She looks to the mirror. Her hair is graying, but her eyes are wide and green. On how many millions of occasions has she observed her own reflection? Tonight she sees that girl in the carriage so many years ago, en route to join the queen. Yet how hard it is to point to a moment. To say: There, in that moment, I changed. That night on the road to Oxford she felt she was plunging into life. The horses ran through the starry dark. And today, too. She closes the window. Everything comes together. The air is wet and sweet, and tiny star-shaped flowers creep across the lawn. She almost laughs as she unpacks a pair of gloves. I will call on dear Catherine in the morning, she thinks, and moves to sit on the canopied bed as Lucy hangs her gowns.