Margaret the First Read Online Free Page B

SERVANTS IN A LINE, EACH WITH A name and position to remember. I curtsied one by one, and William had to wait. Now came faces of his family and friends, to whom I gave shy greeting. He led me by the hand. I saw high-backed chairs with lion’s-paw feet, exposed beams in the hall, then lifted my skirts and mounted the staircase to a long and narrow corridor, where he kissed me with my back against a door. Satisfied, he turned, the tip of his sheathed sword sliding down the wall, off to join the others in a toast.
    The room was smaller than the one I’d been used to at the Louvre, yet all my own, and neat and clean, with bright white walls and two tall windows that watched a narrow street. Should I sit? Take off my cap? Margaret Cavendish , I thought, will now take off her cap .
    Then, like a ghost, a little maid appeared. A little maid in bright white muslin who didn’t say a word, only stripped away the bridal gown and washed my new-wife’s skin—with rough French hands, French soap—and touched my breasts and thighs with tuberose perfume.
    Dripping cold and naked, I thought: William, Willy, Wally, Bill.
    It was the century of magnificent beds. Beds like ships from China, or beaded purses, in black and white, or pearled. Beds that disappeared behind a cloud of scented silk. Now an elaborately embroidered brocade curtain exposed my arm, an elbow. I heard their toasts from down below, voices muffled through wood and plaster, just as the world had sounded from my nursery as a girl. I could picture William exactly as I’d first seen him: standing in velvet on freshly raked gravel. It had been only that spring! Then an afternoon, not three months after, when the riverbank was muddy and he’d held me very close. He’d wanted to speak of nothing but me. “A strange enchantment,” I told him. “As if I live in the world but also somehow out.” For he should know I’d always been this way. “But you’re not yet twenty,” he’d said with a smile. “But I’m nearly twenty-two.”
    The maid was gone. An Epithalamium played. William opened the door.
    His skin was papery. Pleasant, I thought, but papery, loose.
    That evening I wrote my mother that he gave me combs and bracelets; William wrote a poem:
    To say we’re like one snake, not us disgraces,
    That winds, delights itself, with self-embraces,
    Lapping, involving, in a thousand rings.
    Naturally the talk at dinner was pebbled with first-night jokes. And though seasoned by my time at court, I felt my cheeks go red. I didn’t speak, just sipped and chewed: roasted carp, claret, a shoulder of mutton with thyme, and a fine sugar cake with sprigs of candied rosemary like diamonds. William saw nothing amiss in the banter; his wife was young and very lately a virgin, and his house a household of men.
    There was his brother, Sir Charles, with a twisted spine and auburn mustache, considered in certain circles a great philosopher; William’s grown sons from his first marriage, Henry and Charles (called Charlie like my brother); William’s steward; William’s secretary; William’s gentleman of the horse; William’s “man”; William’s ushers, who walked bareheaded before him when he went out. There were female servants, too, and the usual rumors. Over them all, I, Lady Cavendish, now presided. To varying degrees, each ignored me.

PARIS TO ANTWERP
1646–1649
    WHEN LONDON INTELLECTUAL JOHN EVELYN MARRIED LADY Browne’s now-twelve-year-old Mary, William and I were among the selected guests. My husband, ever lyrical when it came to virgins, wrote a poem for Evelyn comparing his wife to a horse.
    Autumn again, and we attended the opera: Rossi’s Orfeo at the Palais Royale.
    At court: there was a masque that Christmas.
    On the Pont Neuf: barges on the Seine (do fishes in the river miss the salt of the sea?).
    Before a painting: the femme forte , a woman dressed in armor.
    In spring, at the ballet: a spectacle of satin.
    At the Tuileries: caged tigers lit by torches.
    And