Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton

the gravel. Two boxes from Martin & Allestyre were set down on the drive. “My modest closet plays,” she said. She nearly ran to the stairs—for the recovery of her wayward crates that spring and the preparation of her plays for publication had rekindled inside Margaret a flame she’d feared gone out. Indeed, she’d said to William: “a flame I’d feared gone out!” But now, in turning the pages, she grew concerned and then incensed: “reins” where she had written “veins,” “exterior” when she had clearly meant “interior.” The sun went down. The room grew dim. She tipped a wick into the fireplace and nearly lit herself— ting ting ting went the kitchen bell—then hurried with a candle down the long and flickering hall.
    William was already seated before a small beer and lamb. Margaret placed a napkin in her lap.
    “Before the printer ruined it,” she cried, “my book was good!”
    “Could it be,” he asked, soaking his bread in blood, “that you were yourself the cause of this misfortune?”
    “It could not,” she said, and took a bite of pie.
    “Perhaps,” he said, “you had not yet come, at that time, to so fully understand the words which you were using. You’ve been on such a course of reading that I’m sure you will be happier with the next.”
    Cyrano de Bergerac, Francis Bacon, Robert Hooke. And pamphlets from that Invisible College now chartered and renamed: the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge, with rooms at Gresham College and a silver mace from the king.
    “I suspect they gave it very little attention,” she finally said. “A little book by a little woman, they thought.”
    That night she wrote to Flecknoe: “My wit at last run dry!” Since leaving Antwerp, since returning to England, she’d written nothing new, only tidied up those plays. “And yet,” she pressed on, “perhaps these plays will find some profitable use?” She snuffed the candle, closed her eyes.
    But weeks passed with no word from Flecknoe, no word about her book. The summer grew heavy with rain.
    “Margaret,” William asked one day, “what is it you are doing?”
    “Revising my books,” she said.
    “I’ve long admired your books as they are.”
    “And that is a huge consolation to me,” she told him, “in this censorious age,” but went on fixing sour rhymes, replacing omissions, undoing misplacements—and not only words but entire passages, theories. “Now,” she said, and dipped her quill in ink, “it will be for all history as if my errors never were.”
    “And you’re happy in our new life?” he asked.
    “Very happy, My Lord.”
    Again, he worked to get her out. They watched a licorice harvest near Worksop one day, where millions of capricious insects glittered in the fields. They shared a radish salad, spotted a white-tailed deer. And when they returned to Welbeck that night, a letter was waiting from William’s daughter Jane.
    Now Margaret learned that readers thought her plays lacked all direction: no catastrophes, no drama, just a jumble of speeches and scenes. They tire the brain. Only flit from place to place.
    “But I’d have my plays,” she said, still standing in her jacket, “be like the natural course of all things in the world. As some are newly born, when some are newly dead, so some of my scenes have no acquaintance to the others.”
    “Surely you cannot hope to please every reader, my dear.”
    “It seems I cannot hope to please a single one!”
    And as the leaves yellowed, Margaret withdrew. The evenings grew darker faster. She sank into herself. William had seen it more than once, yet he couldn’t always be there. He spent some nights each week at Bolsover Castle, attending to the rebuilding: an entire new roof for the western wing, where rooks had nested and frogs in puddles croaked. Ensconced in her rainbow gallery, Margaret sat late with pamphlets by Hooke, Boyle, and Wren: on optic lenses, windy holes, or ways of