Has the time stood still?
The carriage stops; it starts again.
She could take back her request and decline their invitation. She could knock and tell the driver to turn right on Fetter instead. But here are the gates of Arundel House. Here is the Royal Society’s dictum: Nullius in verba. Take no man’s word for it. A crowd in the street pushes and stares. “Mad Madge!” she hears as the gates swing wide. She does not turn her head.
In the formal yard: Lord Brouncker, Sir George, the Earl of Carlisle. They bow as she descends. Beyond the lords, the gates. Beyond the gates, the crowd: “Mad Madge! Mad Madge!”
Brouncker leads her in and down a darkened hall. It smells of powdered wigs and snuff, much like the house in Paris where she used to sit and listen. But a person cannot be in two places at one time, and she is here, not in Paris. She sees a skeleton in a corner. A jar alive with bees. Then Brouncker stops, so Margaret stops. They stand before a door. “It is the first time the Royal Society has beheld a lady in its congress. The room is full,” he says. “Everyone has come.” Margaret nods, adjusts her hat. She follows him through the door.
The meeting has begun. She watches as they watch her sit. The air is cold, the windows tall. The walls are blue and hung with portraits. The table is polished and square — she’s always imagined it round — and in benches on three sides sit the famous philosophers and gentlemen members alike. She sees their wigs and eyes, sees an instrument on the table, a piece of raw meat, a glass of something green. And where moments ago, alone in the carriage, it seemed time was rushing ahead, now it seems to Margaret that time is standing still. The moment eddies, pools at her feet. Robert Boyle. Henry More. John Evelyn. Christopher Wren. What will she say? How will it start?
Then the focus shifts. A man steps from the crowd. “Robert Hooke,” the secretary says. Indeed, she sees, he limps. “The air pump,” Hooke announces. He measures the weight of the air. A globe-shaped magnet is pulled through iron filings. A slice of roast mutton is immersed in a liquid and immediately turns to blood. He displays one instrument after another, hardly pausing between. It’s clear he has performed this before. For other aristocratic visitors, other invited guests? Indeed, many of the men look bored as two round marbles are by machinations flattened. He does something with a compass. Something pretty with prisms and light.
London’s bells begin to toll; an hour has passed, though she’s not yet spoken a word. Now Hooke places a microscope on the table. Their brittle art, she’s called it. He asks her to look inside, observe the swimming bodies. All the faces turn to her. Margaret looks inside — she blinks — a horse neighs in the street. She sees the bodies, swimming, like blossoms on a breeze, like actors in a play, she thinks, in and out of view. The image flickers, suspended. Hooke continues his speech. She shifts her gaze to the bodies that fill the room. Like one body, she thinks, with many pairs of eyes. And a feeling comes over her then, the feeling that she’s been walking here across a vast expanse with something in her hands. The image flickers, suspended. Alone, she thinks. I am quite alone. And, thus distracted, she catches only fragments of Hooke’s concluding speech—“light, by which our actions are to be guided. be renewed, and all our command over all things”—to the serious philosophers and the gentlemen members assembled in the room.
He almost missed the meeting, for bricklayers came to mend a chimney in his kitchen. Yet keen to see her, he hurried all the way. “The Duchess of Newcastle is all the pageant now discoursed on,” at breakfast tables and dinner parties, over porridge or pike, she was all that anyone spoke about — or so he’d written in his diary several weeks before. For she was everywhere that season. She was at the theater; she was entertaining the king; she was riding down the street. And everyone had seen her, yet he could not manage to spot her. So when it was rumored the Duchess of Newcastle would repay the king’s visit the following Monday, he’d loitered at Whitehall Palace well into the night, the palace packed with eager visitors, as if it were Christina, the Queen of Sweden, at any moment expected. But the duchess did not appear. She awaited an entire new livery for her footmen — or so the papers said — all of silk velvet, with caps that mimicked the caps of the king’s own footmen, a costly and a grand procession, with one coach — the papers said — carrying her gentleman attendants, then the carriage bearing the duchess, then a four-horse coach carrying her ladies-in-waiting, they in gowns of lutestring and she in a fashion of grandeur, heavily embroidered and trimmed in lace, with jewels in her ears, high-heeled shoes on her feet, and a puff of feathers atop her head fit for a masque or a play or a ball, a triumphant show, the court!
It therefore came as a surprise, the following Sunday, to learn that the Duchess of Newcastle’s carriage had rolled into Palace Yard with little ceremony, as he, Samuel Pepys, had been at church in Hackney.
He missed her, too, at the annual celebration for the Order of the Garter — the processions, the feasts — she in a flowered gown, a petaled hat of roses, he in the Navy Office dealing with accounts. Then came May Day and the park was like a circus. The air was thick with hawthorns, cakes, and shit. “Mad Madge,” someone cried from the crowd, at last. “Mad Madge,” someone repeated, as her black-and-silver carriage came roaring down the path. Black stars on white cheeks. “The whole story of this lady is a romance,” he wrote in his diary that night.
And so, when Sir George Berkeley announced at a recent meeting of the Royal Society that the Duchess of Newcastle hoped to visit — that he had dined with her at Newcastle House and that she hoped to be invited—Pepys, a gentleman member, had been pleased, curious and pleased, even as the news caused a collective groan in the room. They were a new organization, after all, still working to make their name. Putting aside all that she had written — her attacks on their work — there was no telling what she would do. They’d all heard the stories: the crowds, her breasts at the theater, the slight she’d given the queen. They could easily imagine the mocking ballads the next day at the pub. Yet she was a duchess, was favored by the king. Debate followed, pro and con. Until, whether out of loyalty or real friendship to the duke, the aristocratic members urged the invitation be sent.
So she’d arrived, twenty minutes late — so she sits there still.
Hooke has finished and the room awaits her reply. But the duchess only sits, looking into the device. That hat is too much, Pepys thinks — still, her shape is fine. At last, she lifts her head. What ingenious remark will she make? “Gentlemen,” she says, “I am all admiration.” She rises from her chair. “I am all admiration,” she says again. She nods, stiffly, as if wishing them well. She looks to Lord Brouncker, who stands, surprised, and leads her to the door.
“A mad, conceited, ridiculous woman,” Pepys writes that night in his diary. She was pretty enough for forty-three, but what a disappointment. She said nothing at all worth hearing. “I do not like her at all.”
William sits in a chair beneath the portrait of his first wife, who is quiet as a pearl, the moon. Margaret is quiet, too. She looks peaceful, though she’d returned in a state. “I said nothing!” she’d cried in the entranceway, unsteady as on a ship. “I don’t understand,” he’d answered, coming to find his wife. She’d wept there on the tiles with her hand against a wall. He’d coaxed her into a chair, persuaded her to take some wine.
She’s calm now, exhausted. There was nothing she could have done. It was only a pretty performance. “It was only more chatter,” she says.