Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton

empty. Flecknoe was kissing her hand.
    He began to visit daily. He knew her work and praised it to her face. Dramatist and poet, and newly returned from Brazil, he was the tallest man she’d seen outside a circus. He wore a black stiletto beard, dressed head-to-toe in black.
    “Your devotee?” asked William.
    “Do you think he’s a rogue?” Margaret asked.
    Yet he seemed so fresh, so young, even if not, in truth, so many years younger than she. And the strangest expressions fell from his mouth: “All my cake will be doe.”
    They began to go on outings; William approved, amused.
    One morning Flecknoe took Margaret to see an amaryllis. It was grown in a pot by a gentleman named Fox. There were many witty young people around, some claiming to have read her books. And what did she think of the flower? “Like two lilies lashed at their feet,” she said. She declared it somewhat mannish. Her audience approved. “Look, you are a star,” Flecknoe whispered into her hat.
    Another afternoon, as he perched like a crow on an Ottoman stool, Margaret asked her new friend to describe the vast Atlantic. “Oh, it was most abundant,” he said, putting down his glass. He told her of the savages. Of garish birds and waterfalls and Brazilian rivers and death. He hoped to visit Greenland next. “I shall take you to see Mercator’s map!” he said, on display in a mansion near Whitehall.
    The following morning they walked the Strand, past cab stands and Roman baths and the stalls at Covent Garden. All was renovation, the king importing new styles from France—the long dark wigs and silverwork doublets, aviaries and fountains and gardens shaped like stars—and Flecknoe bent low to tell her how the previous night the king’s brother had secretly married Anne Hyde. “The court is in a state!” he laughed.
    The map was under glass.
    Annotated in Latin, she could see for herself that the northern tip of Scotland— Scotia —crept onto its bottom edge. At center were four islands: one green, two yellow, one pink, which, he told her, comprised the North Pole, a whole divided by four indrawing rivers to a whirlpool in the middle. “Here,” he said, “lies the very pole of the pole of the Earth, where all the oceans’ waters circle round and fall, just as if you’d poured them down a funnel in your head, only to see them come back out the southern end. And in the middle of the middle sits a large black rock, the very pole of the pole of the pole of the Earth, wholly magnetic, possibly magic, and thirty-three miles across!”
    “Where is the ice?” she wanted to know.
    Walking back up the Strand, he explained about floes. But rather than return to Dorset House, he proposed they venture on—from Fleet Street to Ludgate Hill, up Friday Street to Cheapside—to a coffeehouse called Turk’s Head in Cornhill.
    “Have you never been, Lady Cavendish?” he asked.
    “Please call me Margaret,” she answered.
    It was dim inside, yet most heads lifted when Flecknoe stooped in with a marchioness on his arm. He placed her at a table with several of his friends—a James, a Henry, a Gibson, a Joseph, a Balthy, a Cutch—then returned with coffee, gritty and sweet in a dish. She thanked him and sipped as his friends resumed their conversation about the London stage. A stack of dirty dishes mounted as they spoke: of Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson’s Volpone , of Davenant’s new wings. When the talk turned to a technicality of narration, Margaret abruptly spoke. “Have you noticed,” she said, “how few plays begin or end with a woman’s character speaking?” The one called Gibson readily agreed. But Margaret said no more, and soon it was time to go.
    That night she only poked at her food. Her stomach turned. In bed under a canopy—a dusky swath of red—she was struck just after midnight by the vision of a gown—a dress for the North Pole!—the first she’d dreamt up in ages. And very early, in a kind of violent compulsion, too