Margaret the First Read Online Free PDF Page B

children ran into the lane to watch, I tried to imagine what life would be now: Rotterdam on the Rotte, a port. Beyond that: an empty room. I pulled my cloak around myself. The houses were lit like lanterns. The farmers heading in. I felt a hopeful kind of sadness, driving down that road. I prayed the war would end—in a day, a month, a week—so that we could live at Welbeck Abbey, where I knew he longed to be. I could be a proper wife. Have my sisters to visit. The children in their beds, I thought. Peacocks on the lawn.
    But by the time we reached Rotterdam, Prince Charles had disappeared. With money from his brother-in-law he’d put together a fleet. Sail north! Save the king! There was trouble, though: his ship was late, and troops in Scotland refused to march south without him; the battle at Preston easily went to Cromwell.
    Yet another battle, in Colchester, my home, was not so simply won. The city was surrounded, the struggle protracted, until one night with roaring drums Parliamentarian forces broke through a Royalist blockade. Fighting ensued at St. John’s Green. The house was destroyed, flattened. Our family vaults were again invaded, but this time it was my sister’s and mother’s coffins the mob defiled. Rings from their fingers stolen, their arms flung into gardens, their legs splashed into the pond. One Royalist report swore Parliamentarian soldiers rode off with the dead ladies’ hair in their hats. Still, the siege lasted another two months. My youngest brother, Charlie, commanded the Royalist forces. The townspeople ate cats and horses. A beggar woman tried to flee and was stabbed at the gates. No one could come out as long as the traitors were in. At last, the Royalists surrendered. Rank-and-file were drawn and quartered. The officers placed themselves at Parliament’s mercy. Charlie was shot in the head.
    When word reached Rotterdam, I collapsed on the floor. Since leaving England, I’d lost two brothers, one sister, a niece, and a much-loved mother. My childhood home, the place I’d been happiest—for I was happy then, wandering pastures, picking plums, writing my childish poems, I was happy, I was sure—was gone, my mother’s body strewn across its park. The Lucas clan, once so close-knit, was now completely unraveled, and I had come to believe myself incapable of procreation, of mending those gaping holes with tiny people of my producing. In bed at night I cried out that I was drowning. In that city of water and dams I dreamt of shipwreck every night.
    “A damp sponge,” I mumbled.
    “All rubble,” I said. “All rubble.”
    A doctor came and bled me till I calmed.

HE’D BEEN THERE BEFORE—TO VISIT THE RYKERS, HARPSICHORD makers, renowned for the lifelike insects painted on their soundboards—and liked what he had seen: large houses, country estates, superior art collections. Provincial, yes, but affordable, quiet, and she needs to be somewhere quiet , so leaving his wife in the housekeeper’s care, William rode south to Antwerp—fast through browns, through greens, the horizon and the distant city fading into white. All this he later described: how at sundown he stabled his horse, and that night at the inn, over drumsticks with sage, heard the widow of Peter Paul Rubens was looking to let the late painter’s house.

IN BLACK BENEATH THE POTTED LIME TREES, AN ARBOR HEAVY WITH roses, I listened as the cathedral with its lacy spire chimed at every hour, south to the reedy countryside, north to the sea, over monasteries with stained glass, over Antwerp’s clean broad streets and the leading publishing house in Europe—printing in Syriac, Hebrew, even musical notes—over lindens and canals and savage-looking orchids. It could have easily fit inside one wing of William’s estate at Welbeck, yet all who saw the Rubens House agreed it was a gem: vaulted windows, colorful frescoes, rooms half-paneled and hung with Flemish leather. He gave me a tortoiseshell cabinet bound with gold, an