Free Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton Page A

things.
    Prior to the lark, she read, Boyle used a mouse.
    The time before, a sparrow.
    Before that, a butterfly.
    And once he used a bee.
    The lark, though now with a hole in her wing, looked lively enough when Boyle put her under glass. Then he turned a stopcock on his rarefying machine and the air was slowly sucked out of the chamber. The bird began “manifestly to droop.” It staggered, collapsing, gasping. It threw itself down, threw itself down, and then the bird was dead.
    “All this,” she objected, “to prove a bird needs air?”
    “Before devising the pump,” said William, “he’d had to strangle them with his hands.”
    Now all London was buzzing with the news: air holds a vital quintessence necessary to life.
    “Too late for the lark,” Margaret said.
    And as for the air, it was foul. London was loud and it stank. The streets bulged with noisome trade: salt-makers, brewers, soap-boilers, glue-makers, fishmongers, chandlers, slaughterhouses, tanners, and dyers hemorrhaging rainbows into the rivers and lanes. The windows were dimmed with sooty grime. At night she couldn’t sleep. She panicked in the dark. Was it wrong to miss her blue-domed room and the orchard back in Antwerp? It rained, and Margaret slept all day. She dreamt that a porpoise swam up to her window and gulped. Why couldn’t she find a handkerchief? Where was her summer coat? She would send her plays to Martin & Allestyre, but her crates still had not arrived. “Where are my crates?” she asked the maid. Where were her linen-wrapped plays? Her mind was like a river overspilling in the rain. Robert Boyle, Robert Boyle, currently blazing to fame. So William called a doctor, who bled her into bowls. Her cheeks were red, then pink, then gray; the blood in the bowls was black. That night another storm blew in and hit upon the glass. Still the sounds of London’s bells came clanging in her ears: St. Martin-in-the-Field, St. Dunstan-in-the-West. One, two, three, four . . .
    By dawn, the sky was clear.
    “Where are my crates?” she asked, now calm.
    And William proposed a ride, for she’d been so long shut in. But London Bridge was adorned in traitor’s limbs set at startling angles. She saw a leg splash into the river. A rat ran down their hall. The watchman bellowed, “Rain!” No one knocked on their door.
    At last, one night, Margaret insisted that they go—retreat to the countryside, where she could write and be at peace. She had never been happy in London, not once. “And to be surrounded by such a constant crush, all of them speaking English!”
    “But you never learned a word of Dutch.”
    “Exactly,” Margaret countered. “I cannot distinguish my thoughts!”
    “My dear,” William finally said, “Welbeck is uninhabitable. Bolsover is half pulled down—six rooms in the eastern wing stand open to the sky. For that matter,” he dug in, “your St. John’s Green is nothing but rubble and hip-high grass.”
    She told him of her sister’s disdain for their lodgings, of that rat she had spied in their hall. It was an insult, she half whispered, to live so far below their rank. Was this what they’d suffered for? Her childhood home flattened; one brother crushed by his horse; another shot in the head. So that they might return, unnoticed, to live in Bow Street in filth? She trembled as she said it: “Unfit, it appears, to be acknowledged by the king?”
    William only chewed his meat. He wiped his lips. Then he pushed back from the table, loyal to the crown. “To my final breath!” he cried.
    Days of silence settled with London’s soot on the house.
    But the following week, when a grocer’s boy was trampled to death just beyond their doorstep, William acquiesced, moved them over to Dorset House just up from the Whitefriars Stairs. It was only one elegant wing rented from the earl, and though he could ill afford it, William had to admit: the move brought quiet, and river views, and an ample parlor with an Italianate