“Do you think you are Cleopatra?” he asks.
Margaret bristles. She fingers the mask. “I had rather appear worse in singularity,” she says, “than better in the mode.”
“Do not quote to me from your books,” he snaps.
The driver flicks his whip.
Margaret says nothing. She replaces the mask. The black bead rattles her teeth. Yet despite her continuing silence, she does see what she’s done, sees it clearly, but from way down in, as if there is another mask she wears beneath the mask that she has on. She is a monster, she thinks, and hateful, after everything he’s done.
*
Flecknoe arrives in the morning before she’s finished her broth.
There’s no question at all she wrote the play, everyone agrees.
“You are all that anyone talks about,” he says. He offers the papers as proof. “Everywhere one goes it’s only Margaret Margaret Margaret!”
She rings the bell for Lucy, but William has gone out.
And though her nipples are likened more to the nipples of London whores than any ancient heroines, that very afternoon the king comes to visit her. The king in her rooms. “A celebrity,” he says, or said. Everything happens so fast!
“What are these daily papers?” Margaret says to William that night. “When did they begin?”
William is silent; he chews his fish; he takes a sip of wine.
“According to them, you wrote my play.”
“I can hardly believe it,” she says. And despite her feelings of regret, she cannot help but smile. Surely he sees the joke. “After all those years they claimed you as the author of what I wrote. ”
“Tomorrow,” William says, “they will be on to something else.”
But tomorrow they are not. Each day for days the papers print details of whatever she did the day before: what floating restaurant she visited, her dinner guests, her gowns.
On April 12 the Duchess of Newcastle went out in a hat like a flame.
On April 18 she was visited by Anne Hyde.
When John and Mary Evelyn arrive, what choice does she have but to pretend that they are friends? Then Walter Charleton, Bishop Morley, many more. Soon her suite is full. William isn’t there: he’s at the palace, or the theater, or resting in his room. She’s alone with the crowd and the porcelain figures. So Margaret recites: whole poems, theories, whatever springs to mind. She stands in the midst of her elegant rooms in the most fantastic dress:
If foure Atomes a World can make, then see,
What severall Worlds might in an Eare-ring bee.
For Millions of these Atomes may bee in
The Head of one small, little, single Pin.
And if thus small, then Ladies well may weare
A World of Worlds, as Pendants in each Eare.
On April 24 the Duchess has her brother, Sir John Lucas, to midday meal.
On April 29 she wears a hat like a little rose.
“You are a marvel,” Flecknoe tells her.
But Margaret isn’t sure. It’s not as if she doesn’t see what happens, doesn’t watch guests turning away, especially some of the ladies, who cover their mouths with their fans. When Lucy comes to prepare her for bed, Margaret does not speak. She tries not to think at all — of the dinner parties, the afternoons, her shallow tinselly speeches — cringing to remember the transparency of her talk. And when she wakes the following morning to small red dots sprung up around her mouth, she sends Lucy to the apothecary’s shop for velvet patches in the shapes of stars and moons.
“These black stars serve,” she says to William, “like well-placed commas, to punctuate my face.”
“They look obscene,” he says.
On May 1 the duchess goes out in her silver carriage.
On May 2 she walks the lawn in a moiré gown.
And Flecknoe tells her — as they walk that lawn — how the previous night he heard someone telling someone else that after visiting at Newcastle House Mary Evelyn told Roger Bohun that women were not meant to be authors or censure the learned — he lifts a low-hanging branch — but to tend the children’s education, observe the husband’s commands, assist the sick, relieve the poor. Everything is white, for the blossoms have come down. The path is white. The grass. Even Margaret’s shawl is white and wrapped around her arms. Eventually, she says: “A woman cannot strive to make known her wit without losing her reputation.” “But you are making yours,” he says. Indeed, people wait to see her pass. They wait at night at the palace, hoping she’ll visit the king. But the papers begin to report on things she never did or said. Is it another Margaret Cavendish parading down London’s streets? On another peculiar outing? In another ridiculous dress? That night she dreams she’s eating little silver fish; each time one fish goes in, ten more come sliding out.
In the morning she tells Lucy she will only sit and read. But she’s promised to visit her sister — so another gown, the carriage, another ride to read about in the papers the following day.
Catherine in middle age looks remarkably like their mother, her hair pulled back as their mother’s always was. Margaret’s own hair is freshly reddened, curled. She might see herself in her sister, yes, but her sister seems so real. How pleasant is the glow of Catherine’s little room. “How nice this is,” Margaret says, and takes a bite of cake. Then all at once her sister’s grandchildren arrive. How simple. How sweet it is. “This is the Duchess of Newcastle,” Catherine says. The children stare with their bright, round eyes. Margaret shifts in the chair. My hat is too tall, she thinks.
Outside, the day is hot.
“It’ll be out of the way,” her driver says.
But Margaret doesn’t care.
So rather than east on Holborn, they sweep down Drury Lane, all the way to Fleet Street, around the remains of what was once St. Paul’s — it’s here she brought her Poems & Fancies in 1652, to Martin & Allestyre at the Sign of the Bell, now burnt to the ground — up Old Change to Cheapside to Threadneedle to Broad. At last she sees the gates. Here is Gresham College. She raps and the driver stops. But as she steps from the carriage, she sees the street is burned. It’s black beneath her boots. At once she remembers William’s words, as if she heard them only now: The Royal Society of London no longer meets at Gresham, damaged in the fire. Then what is she doing here?
As she stands, a crowd begins to form.
On the corner, a sign: a unicorn means an apothecary’s shop. Margaret begins to cross the street. But a hackney coach’s iron wheels come screeching across the stones. She presses herself against a wall. A woman stands beside her, a screaming child slung across her back. When was the last time Margaret walked such streets alone? She opens the door — the shop is dim — but she cannot simply stand there as the apothecary stares. So back into the street, quickly to the carriage. The driver helps her up. The crowd has grown. They point and call, “Mad Madge! Mad Madge!” and mud hits her window as the driver takes a left.
So, it comes. And there’s nothing she can do, even as she feels it come and wishes that it wouldn’t. Mad Madge! Mad Madge! she hears in her head all night.
At dawn, Lucy fetches William and tells him about the crowd. William sends for the doctor. She is only half asleep, half dreaming of that coach, screaming, the screaming baby pressed against the wall. She wakes to the awful shadows of the bed curtains on her arm. “Well,” the doctor says, “no harm was done.” And William — good William — kisses her cheek. Has she been forgiven? He holds her hand as she lies there, bleeding into bowls. When visitors come to the house, the butler tells them the duchess is indisposed. William stays until the doctor’s real cure arrives, a stinking ointment that Lucy has been instructed to spread on her mistress’s legs. “It will open sores,” William explains, “so that the harmful humors might be expelled.” Her hands in waxed gloves, Lucy spreads the salve. Margaret faints from pain. She oozes onto sheets.