Free Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton

two gowns.
    “Are you feeling well?” he’d ask.
    “Yes, My Lord,” she’d say.
    She tried to write, but nothing came.
    “My dear,” he said one evening, “I believe we must do more. We were gone so long, you see. We must work to make ourselves known in London’s good society. After sixteen years stalled, we must finally begin to act.”
    His wife looked past him to his shadow on the wall.
    “Margaret?” he asked. He scraped his fork against his plate: gingerbread and apple cream.
    “But I was not stalled,” she said.
    When her sister returned from the country, Margaret was summoned for cake. In rose silk shoes she ventured out, saw that Bow Street teemed with rats and worse: narrow, rutted, splattered by offal and urine, the houses pitched precariously overhead. She saw a painted whore in a gilded chair. A dead dog on the corner. Then Catherine rattled on about people Margaret hardly knew. “How relieved you must be to be home!” her sister cried. “But why are you staying in Bow Street?” And Margaret tried to explain: their debts were large, the estates tied up. They must wait for the king to restore some fraction of what they had lost.
    “You’ve a smudge on your face,” William said when she got back.
    Margaret touched her nose.
    “Other side,” he told her.
    At least when he attended the lectures he’d report on what he’d seen: a demonstration on falling bodies, something pretty with mercury, a piece of white marble dyed a most dramatic red. And though women were not allowed at Gresham College—Cromwell might be dead, but not everything had changed—Margaret waited and listened. For every hour, it seemed, an exiled thinker returned, while others were back in the city after years in university towns. Soon William’s interest was especially piqued—so, in turn, was hers—by a group of experimental philosophers who’d met at Oxford during the war. The Invisible College, they’d called themselves, within the college walls.
    “Invisible?” she asked.
    “A network, you know. Sending letters, sharing ideas.”
    He stopped to pinch some salt.
    “In any case,” he said, “despite the war, whether Royalist or Roundhead, they spent hours together in John Wilkins’s garden, testing ideas. It’s all about proof, you see.”
    “Remind me, who is Wilkins?”
    “You remember. That preacher who wrote the book about a colony on the moon.”
    Together they chewed the goose.
    “In addition to ivies,” William continued, “this garden boasted a transparent beehive from which the men extorted honey without disturbing the bees . . . a rainbow-maker misting exquisite colors across the lawn . . . a Way-wiser and Thermo-meter . . . and a hollow statue with a tube in its throat through which Mr. Wilkins could travel his voice and surprise any guests to his garden!”
    “How merry it sounds.”
    William nodded, spit fat. “Productive, too.”
    Now scores of pamphlets were being printed each day—flicking down London’s streets, catching horses’ legs—and all of it in English—not French, not German, not Latin—so that Margaret could, for the very first time, read the new ideas herself when they were truly new. There was one on fevers, one on flora, one on a frog’s lung, one on fog. At first there were words she did not know and explanations she could not fathom. But as days passed into weeks, she saw a pattern emerge: one man referred to another’s research in explaining his own findings; one article led you down a path of thinking to the next. And there was one pamphlet in particular causing quite a stir: New experiments physico-mechanicall, touching the spring of the air by an Irishman from that Invisible College, a man named Robert Boyle, currently blazing to fame though wholly unknown to her. Margaret sent a servant to fetch it from a shop. In its pages she learned of years of careful labor: the construction, at Oxford, of an air pump, and the subsequent experiments performed on living