Once, beside a brook, she’d created whole worlds with the tip of her leather boot. She was Margaret, Queen of the Tree-people, and her brothers had built her castles of ropes in the elms. Something had mattered so much — an argument about a bird? She’d watched her own enormous shadow as she’d marched across the fields.
“They will say I failed or that I’m a fool.”
“My dear,” William says, “the honor was theirs.”
Out in the garden, it pours.
Days later, the Dutch fleet enters the Thames. London panics. The papers move on from the duchess to the war. She and William ride north, in haste. The city slides from view, replaced by farms, then hills, then woods. And though she does not know it yet, she will never leave Welbeck again. She’ll continue to read widely, correspond widely, too. She’ll write a well-received biography of William, a second book of plays. And she’ll pay to reissue her Blazing World with its critiques of the Royal Society and its wild fancy intact.
She calls for the carriage. She makes her daily tour. Through the grounds, into the village, past the children, into the woods. The day is nearly done. The sky is a yellowish pink, the snow a mirror, a yellowish pink beneath. Even the village cottages have taken on a glow, sheep like pearls in pinkish snow. Out the carriage window she sees ancient oaks, the wet black earth, and thinks of the orchard in Antwerp — the same black earth, wild and dark, but nothing else is the same. She thinks of the orchard in Antwerp — and she’d been dressed as a bee! “Let’s be off,” William had whispered, but she’d just then spotted the queen dressed as an Amazon. “Let’s get out of this place,” he’d said, guiding her through the busy castle and back into the air. There were the stars, still dotting the sky, the lanterns on their hooks. And there was Christina, Queen of Sweden, stepping into a carriage. There was her ankle, her foot. “What a lovely party,” said a pretty girl who’d passed them on the stairs.
Now Lucy arrives to prepare her for bed. She unbraids, untwists her mistress’s hair. “What shall we speak of?” one lady asks the other. “Aren’t they lovely?” says the other of the roses in a vase.
At last she is alone. Another day is done. In her nightgown, in her slippers, Margaret opens the book: “It is a Description of a New World, not such as the French man’s World in the Moone; but a World of my own Creating, which I call the Blazing-World: The first part whereof is Romancical, the second Philosophical, and the third is merely Fancy, or (as I may call it) Fantastical; which if it add any satisfaction to you, I shall account my self a Happy Creatoress; if not, I must be content to live a melancholly Life.”
EPILOGUE
ONE WINTER MORNING, SHE WENT OUT FOR A WALK. THE YARD WAS A blank sheet of snow. The sky was curious — more a sea than a sky — and she walked into the woods in breeches and riding boots. When they found her, hours later, she was sitting alone on a garden chair, leaning to one side.
It was 1673. She was forty-nine. She was survived by her husband and her many Paper Bodies. Through them she would live on, she hoped, in many ages and many brains.
William was unprepared. He never imagined he’d outlive her, his blushing, awkward wife. With her body laid out below and villagers filing through, he sat alone in her chamber amid her gowns and books. They lifted her casket into a carriage, which lumbered up the drive.
After resting in the reception hall at Newcastle House one night, Margaret made her final tour through London’s clamorous streets. Mourners and the curious followed. No one shouted. Church bells tolled. Her husband could not be there, too old to make the trip, but her favorite sister, Catherine, walked beside her all the way. She was laid to rest in the Cavendish family vault.
William died three years later, almost to the day.
They are buried together in Westminster Abbey. The inscription above their bodies reads: “Here lies the loyal Duke of Newcastle and his Duchess, his second wife, by whom he had no issue: her name was Margaret Lucas, youngest sister to the Lord Lucas of Colchester, a noble family: for all the brothers were valiant, and all the sisters virtuous. This Duchess was a wise, witty and learned lady, which her many books do well testify; she was a most virtuous and a loving and careful wife, and was with her Lord all the time of his banishment and miseries, and when he came home never parted from him in his solitary retirement.”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. To readers interested in historical biography, I recommend Katie Whitaker’s Mad Madge: The Extraordinary Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, the First Woman to Live by Her Pen and Kathleen Jones’s A Glorious Fame: The Life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, 1623–1673.
I am also indebted to the writing of Virginia Woolf, which is where — in “The Duchess of Newcastle” and A Room of One’s Own—I first met Margaret Cavendish, and in whose life and work I unexpectedly found much inspiration for the woman who took shape inside this book. Furthermore, my book incorporates, here and there, lines and images from Woolf’s own writing (as well as material from Cavendish’s work, of course).
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Finally, I’d be remiss not to mention the following, which were used to varying degrees in my writing and research:
Ashley, Maurice. Life in Stuart England. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1967.
Barker, Felix and Peter Jackson. London: 2,000 Years of a City and Its People. New York: Macmillan, 1974.
Battigelli, Anna. Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind. Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, 1998.
Bowerbank, Sylvia and Sara Mendelson, eds. Paper Bodies: A Margaret Cavendish Reader. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2000.
Bryson, Bill, ed. Seeing Further: The Story of Science & the Royal Society. London: HarperPress, 2010.
Campbell, Mary Baine. Wonder & Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Clucas, Stephen, ed. A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2003.
Danielson, Dennis Richard, ed. The Book of the Cosmos: Imagining the Universe from Heraclites to Hawking. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2000.
Daston, Lorraine and Katharine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature. New York: Zone Books, 2001.
Hartley, Sir Harold, F.R.S. The Royal Society: Its Origins and Founders. London: The Royal Society, 1960.
Hazlehurst, F. Hamilton. Gardens of Illusion: The Genius of André Le Nostre. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1980.
Hunt, John Dixon. Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination: 1600–1750. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.
Inwood, Stephen. The Man Who Knew Too Much: The Strange and Inventive Life of Robert Hooke, 1635–1703. London: Pan Books, 2003.
Keen, Mary. The Glory of the English Garden. Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1989
Leasor, James. The Plague and the Fire. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, Inc., 1961.
Orsenna, Érik. André Le Nôtre: Gardener to the Sun King. Trans. by Moishe Black. New York: George Braziller, 2001.