Near dawn each day the roosters shout.
At night she hears the bells.
A pattern of days and nights.
Of birds, then bells.
Finally, one afternoon, William leads her to the yard. Her legs are mostly healed. “I think we should have a party,” he says, reaching around to steady his wife. She holds a green umbrella. “To refresh you,” he goes on. The cool air stirs the sores beneath her skirts. “It will be only those friends we’ve known for years,” he says. “Your sister, and Richard Flecknoe, and Sir George Berkeley and his wife.”
The ladies wear satin dresses, the men thick black wigs. Margaret is prepared: she has Latin for one guest, translation for the bishop, sea nymphs for Sir George’s wife. They drink out on the lawn. But the bishop is ill and does not come, and she is seated next to Sir George and not Sir George’s wife. Margaret passes a platter of eels, a calf’s head eaten cold, as Sir George offers a chilled silver bowl with a salad of burdock root. His hands are faintly shaking. “Had you heard,” he loudly says, “I am now an official gentleman member of London’s Royal Society?” “No,” she says, straightening in her chair, “I had not heard.” “Well, well,” he goes on, “you made quite a stir, my dear.” Her Blazing World was passed from man to man. “Quite ruffled,” he laughs, “quite ruffled.” Who was ruffled, she wants to know. But William is asking the old man for news, so Margaret repeats her husband’s question in Sir George’s ruddy ear. And with another laugh, he begins to tell of a recent meeting in which Sir Robert Moray gave an account of an astonishing grove — in Scotland? was it Wales? — its trees encrusted with barnacle shells. “Inside the shells,” he says and chews, “when Moray pried them with his knife, what do you think he found?” He looks the length of the table, for everyone listens now: “Miniature seabirds!” he says. “Curled up and still alive!” The party is delighted. The table shines with light. Margaret watches the salad go, its shining bowl and tongs. But who was ruffled, she wants to know. “Tell us of Robert Boyle,” Catherine’s husband says. “Is it true he walks with a limp?” “You think of his colleague Robert Hooke. A sickly man, though gifted.” “A great man,” someone says. “Then who is Moray?” “Sir Robert Moray,” someone says. “Pardon me,” says Margaret, and everyone turns. “Forgive me,” she says, “but we had been speaking — that is, Sir George had been speaking of my recent book, of comments made at the Royal Society, and not of Sir Robert Moray or Robert Hooke and his limp. You see,” she says, as everyone watches, “I have lately felt a great desire — that is — I would very much like to present my ideas. I would like to speak to the Royal Society. I would like to be invited.”
In Margaret’s Blazing World—with its river of liquid crystal, its caves of moss, and bears — the young lady, inevitably, marries the emperor and, as empress, eventually, begins to feel alone. After the wedding night, she scarcely sees the emperor. Months pass. She has a son. She rarely sees him either. Lonely and bored, she appoints herself the Blazing World’s Patron of Art and Science, names the Bear-men Experimental Philosophers, the Ape-men Chemists, the Lice-men Mathematicians, and calls a convocation of the Bird-men, her Astronomers, instructing them to instruct her in the nature of celestial life.
“A Sun,” begins a bird with a prominent crest, “is a vast bigness.”
“Ah, yes?” she says.
“It is yellowish and splendid.”
The empress agrees it is all of these things.
“A Moon,” he continues, “is whitish and dimmer. But the great difference between them is that the Sun shines directly, whereas the Moon, as can be perceived on any moon-shiny night, never respects the center of our world.”
“What of sun-motes,” she asks. “I’ve long been curious about those flecks that stir in the air.”
“Nothing but streams of small, rare, transparent particles, through which the Sun is represented as through a glass, thinner than the thinnest vapor, yet not so thin as air.”
“Are they alive?” she asks.
“Yes,” says the bird, shaking his crest. “They must be alive, for they are visibly nourished by the presence of the Sun.”
“And what is the air, exactly? A creature itself?”
Another bird stands, plumed in yellow and gray.
“Empress,” he says, “we have no other knowledge of the air but through our respiration. Nature is so full of variety, our weak senses cannot perceive all the various sorts of her creatures.”
“Quite so,” she tells him, pleased.
But the Bear-men annoy her with their microscopes, their artificial delusions, and she orders them to break the instruments, each and every one.
Walking back to the palace, crossing a canal, the lady thinks about wind. It was wind that brought her to the Blazing World, or else its peculiar lack. How odd it is that one winds up where one does. Was she born to be an empress and not a bird or a girl? She carries on like this for quite some time.
“Are seeds annihilated when a plant grows?”
“Is God full of ideas?”
“Is lightning a fluid?”
“Is thunder a blast of the stars?”
Until, one quiet day, having run out of questions, the empress is ready to share her ideas. She asks the spirits to send her a friend, one chosen from among the greatest modern writers: “Galileo,” she says, “Descartes?” But the spirits assure her these men would scorn to be scribes to a woman, and they suggest instead an author called Margaret Cavendish, who writes, they tell the empress, nothing but sense and reason. Thus, with a bang of air and a puff of wind, the soul of Margaret Cavendish is brought into that world.
The carriage jerks to life.
They’ll make much of what she wears — a gown embroidered with glass Venetian beads, red-heeled shoes, a cavalier’s hat, an eight-foot train, a man’s black juste-au-corps—a completely peculiar hybrid. One member will even mistake her for a man, until he sees her breasts. Yes, much will be made of her appearance, though she doesn’t know it yet. Just now, in the carriage rushing down John Street, she doesn’t know — what they will say, what she will say — and she tries to assemble her thoughts, fixed in one point, like a diamond.
Her thoughts spin out instead.
There is so much she might say: about indeterminacy and contradiction, about multiplicity and shifts and turns, about what if, and what if, and who knows, and fairies supping on ant eggs — who knows! — and amazing desirable shapes, deer made of oak and running through the woods, and men made of sycamore writing poems on papery chests, their arms “may be like spreading Vines, Where Grapes may grow, soe drinke of their own Wine.”
Traffic is thick and a line of boys pursues her in her carriage.
Then, once again, the carriage is off, at two o’clock on a damp gray afternoon. Can a life be said to have a point toward which it moves, like a carriage down a London road, or rainwater in the gutter headed for a drain? At two o’clock on a gray afternoon? But no, she thinks, a life is not like that. They pass a merchant with a long white beard. A pamphleteer with pamphlets. When the carriage stops at the crossroads, she sees a man on a platform claim he can make the time stand stilclass="underline" “And away we go! Away we go, ladies and gentlemen! Clap your hands! Away we go!” But before she can see what happens, the carriage jerks ahead.