Margaret the First Read Online Free PDF

prescribed, everything from more rest to the excrement of a virile ram rubbed across my belly. The king’s own doctor, Sir Theodore Mayerne, wrote to William from London: Was the marquess aware that a woman could not conceive without an excited swelling, a heat? Of what frequency and duration was my ardor? A French doctor insisted that William need only lift my spirits, for a woman cannot get pregnant if she is always sad. I had taken to regular vomits, refused to come out of mourning, refused the doctor’s tinctures, which gave me terrible gas. Yes, I was often quiet, as the doctor had observed. But my husband chose not to worry. That summer I turned twenty-four.
    Then William’s son Henry died. Or, he nearly died. He lay near death in England. Letters rushed to Paris, each contradicting the others. His doctors flushed him with gold and mercury. They dusted powdered frog on his meat at every meal. Still, he worsened.
    William troubled in the garden. He troubled atop his horse.
    And though Henry was only a second son, I was under an ever-increasing pressure to produce. Each night we tried again. Each morning I asked for the carriage and made the daily tour: down the expansive Cour de la Reine, seeing all of fashionable Paris without, myself, being seen.
    Bien sûr , they knew I was in there. I was Margaret Cavendish, marchioness, hiding in her carriage.
    Yet as Paris whispered of my failure, my husband, over fifty, was buying tonic on the sly: one for elevating , made of the backbones of vipers, to be taken half-a-dram each day dissolved in broth. That same French doctor urged mutton dressed with new-laid eggs and a little nutmeg or amber. He advised my husband to anoint his big toes in Spanish oil each night.
    On top of all this, our money was gone. Parisian creditors were anxious and would not provide: no meat, no wine, no wax. I was tormented by worries William would be thrown in debtor’s jail. Fortunately, the queen, conscious of an obligation, finally repaid a sizable loan that William had made her in Yorkshire. He promptly bought two Barbary horses, one telescope from Torricelli, and four from Divini’s shop. “More important than baguette,” he said, “is to maintain the appearance of means.” In the mornings I stood in a nearby grove, thinking of my dead mother, transfixed by the peeling bark. Each night we tried again. Each day I called for the carriage. The crowds. The doctor came. Then a letter arrived from London with news that Henry had recovered, was up out of his bed. Still, I felt more suited to sitting on graves than dancing at Christmas balls. Invitations came, but I turned them down. At New Year’s William’s telescopes reached us in boxes packed with straw. There was even one for me, in fine marbled paper, a gift. “My Lady’s Multiplying Glass,” he said, and taught me how to hold it up a breath away from my eye.
    Thus as a family—frustrated, gassy, impotent, poor—we wondered together at the turning of the stars.

PALE YELLOW SPIDERS SPECKED OUR TINY PARISIAN GARDEN — LIKE Cassiopeia on a leaf , I thought, and there is the Harp, the Crab —when one mild afternoon the ambassador came to call. The Scots, he explained, had raised a regiment for the king. Now Prince Charles was off to Rotterdam, to better prepare to return, and the queen wanted William to follow, to help keep her boy secure.
    Packing, packing, servants, horses.
    I swear, I nearly floated out of town.
    Four long years, now free. Free of Paris’s piss-stink alleys and constant doctor visits, its mindless idle gossip and endless gray construction. True, it wasn’t a return to the grassy fields of home, yet travel through the Low Countries afforded golden views: huge sky meeting flattest land, windmills in sunbeams, cows! Each time we approached a town I’d marvel again at the streets—so wide and clean—and masts of boats peeking above a rainbow of Dutch houses.
    As our carriages trundled north, and barking dogs and