Margaret the First by Danielle Dutton Page A

eager to wait for her husband’s consent, she sent off an order for three bolts of bright blue silk, and gilt lace, and green and yellow taffeta . . . but how would she manage a magnetic hat?
    Then, of a sudden, William was ready to leave London.
    It wasn’t Flecknoe’s recent request for patronage, or the money she’d spent on the gown. He’d simply come to face his fate: he would never find a position in the king’s innermost circle—too old, too stuffy, a reminder of the past.
    Margaret said she was ready, if readier months before.
    “Wasn’t this what you wanted?” he asked.
    “It was,” she said. “It is.”
    “What is it you want, my dear?”
    But Margaret wanted the whole house to move three feet to the left. It was indescribable what she wanted. She was restless. She wanted to work. She wanted to be thirty people. She wanted to wear a cap of pearls and a coat of bright blue diamonds. To live as nature does, in many ages, in many brains.
    “I want my crates” was all she said.
    The following morning, before she’d even risen, William was off to Whitehall Palace to seek the king’s permission to leave. If he couldn’t hold sway at court, at least he’d be lord of his county, as he had been before the war, the most powerful man for over half a million acres—from Kegworth to Three Shire Oak and all the way back around.

NOTTINGHAM WAS A NOT INCONSIDERABLE TOWN, WITH WIDE streets and sturdy houses, shops of salt-glazed pots, and Wensleydale and Cheshire cheeses, and stockings and licorice and ale. They stopped at the inn overnight. Morning brought the forest. Sunlight shot from spots between the trees, a dizzying reiteration as the carriage rushed along. It was the farthest north she’d ever been on the planet. The land seemed wilder to Margaret than anything she’d seen. William saw something different. He reminisced. Where once had been the densest of woods, branches entangled like fingers in a grasp, now stood a modern and managed park: timber for building, charcoal, hunting for the rich. Yet to her eyes, Sherwood Forest was vast. It was thick with green and black with moss and lit by starry mountain-laurel clusters puffed up in the dark.
    They stopped to stretch.
    Margaret heard a heron’s plaintive franck . There were mushrooms on rotted bark, cinnamon ferns in mud. So here was England, yet again—not London, that calamity—England. But it might as well have been the moon, so alien to her memories, to gold soft fields and hills. “What is that?” she asked, head cocked to the side, and he answered it was a river, hidden in the brush. It sounded unlike any she’d ever known. Not the Scheldt, nor the Thames or Seine. “Does every river make a music of its own?”she wondered, tired. Thames, Trent, Tees, Tyne, Tweed, Tay, Dee, Spey: names of rivers, south to north, she’d memorized as a girl. “Margaret,” he called from the carriage, for it was time to go—but something rustled, something whistled, something rattled, remote or close. Thames, Trent, Tees, Tyne, Tweed, Tay, Dee, Spey. Of course, this forest was famously enchanted, enchanting, and heavy with its fame. Her feet began to sink. “Margaret,” he called from the carriage, “we’re almost there.”

WELBECK SPANNED CENTURIES: GOTHIC AT ONE END, ELIZABETHAN in the middle, and at the other end a classic Jacobean front. Inside, the house had been denuded in the war. Fortunately, Henry’s wife—who’d lived there with her family until William and Margaret’s return—left several beds, and pots and pans, and candlesticks and stools, and two imposing suits of armor erect on a red leather floor.
    “Still, it’s nice,” William murmured, “to be at home at last.”
    For days he seemed ceaseless, sleepless: there were his nearly horseless stables and the crumbling castle of Bolsover not a day’s ride to the west. His holdings spilled over borders, into Derbyshire and Yorkshire, and, riding through, he discovered many fewer