letters today?” Margaret asks, still waiting for word from William.
“Not today, Duchess. Though Mr. Tapp says the London road is down with snow. You’ll likelier hear tomorrow.”
Lucy curtsies, closes the door.
Alone again in semidarkness, Margaret stands in the corner and fancies herself a statue, with silken robes and a crown of topaz, erected in a garden, atop a pedestal, at the center of a circle divided into four parts, with lines drawn, and points laid, in the service of some abstruse mathematical thought, and covers her eyes with her palms. She can see her Blazing World before her: the emperor’s bed is made of diamonds. The walls of his room are jet. His penis is made of silver. She opens her eyes. No, it’s just a penis. But there are his horse stables of gold, cornelian, amber, and turquoise. There are his horses. This is his golden city, his flickering canal, his woodsy archipelago stretching all the way to the granite cave where Bear-men sleep on the cool dirt floor. She imagines the salty musk. She imagines the cave steaming, drenched, covered in moss and crystals.
The binding cracks. She sniffs it. Her book smells like a shoe.
Then, as if she’s been struck by alien star-stone, she’s suddenly struck by doubt. Is it ridiculous? Is she a joke? Not that these doubts are new, only here, again, and racing in the dark. And where moments ago she saw a golden city, now there is only this. The fallen snow. This dread. She places the book in a shallow drawer, scans the room to fill her eyes and so to fill her mind: the bed, the mirrors, the tapestries, a portrait of herself. But even with the curtains drawn she finds her eyes are burning, a headache coming fast, and she calls again to Lucy to assist her in retiring to a sofa of pillows embroidered with garden scenes. Off come her skirts and petticoats, her lace cuffs and collar, her shoes and whalebone stay, until she lies on her side in nothing but a cotton shift and endless strands of pearls. Dust hangs in a crack of light between red velvet drapes, like stars.
Her dreams are glimpses, bewildered—celestial charts, oceanic swells, massive, moving bodies of water, the heavens as heavenly liquid, familiar whirlpools, the universe as a ship lost at sea—but the ship she imagines arrived safely, years ago, loaded with their possessions. It’s true her crates took long to find her—something mismarked or misnamed—and she wept for her missing manuscripts as she would have wept for an absent child. Long reconciled to childlessness, she worries instead about barrenness of the brain: “I should have been much Afflicted and accounted the Loss of my Twenty Plays, as the Loss of Twenty Lives,” she’s written, “but howsoever their Paper Bodies are Consumed, like as the RomanEmperours, in Funeral Flames, I cannot say, an Eagle Flies out of them, or that they Turn into a Blazing Star, although they make a great Blazing Light when they Burn”—and as she wakes, her mind alights on something she read last night, Copernicus’s dying words: “It moves!”
*
When he returns, the snow is melted, the almond trees in bloom. “I nearly forgot what you looked like,” Margaret says. It was only those two weeks he’d planned for, plus another six or seven he could never have foreseen.
William has brought her a gift: Experimental History of Cold , the latest from Robert Boyle, which includes an account of experiments touching the force of freezing water, experiments touching the weight of bodies frozen and unfrozen, bodies capable of freezing other bodies, and bubbles formed in ice. “It is,” he says, “the latest talk of learned men.”
She turns it in her hand.
Like throwing an apple into the pond without causing a single ripple—has no one read her Blazing World ?
“Give it time,” says William. The plague has only just passed, if it has; the theaters are still black; the birdmen with their leather masks still step between the corpses. Yet when he
“Not today, Duchess. Though Mr. Tapp says the London road is down with snow. You’ll likelier hear tomorrow.”
Lucy curtsies, closes the door.
Alone again in semidarkness, Margaret stands in the corner and fancies herself a statue, with silken robes and a crown of topaz, erected in a garden, atop a pedestal, at the center of a circle divided into four parts, with lines drawn, and points laid, in the service of some abstruse mathematical thought, and covers her eyes with her palms. She can see her Blazing World before her: the emperor’s bed is made of diamonds. The walls of his room are jet. His penis is made of silver. She opens her eyes. No, it’s just a penis. But there are his horse stables of gold, cornelian, amber, and turquoise. There are his horses. This is his golden city, his flickering canal, his woodsy archipelago stretching all the way to the granite cave where Bear-men sleep on the cool dirt floor. She imagines the salty musk. She imagines the cave steaming, drenched, covered in moss and crystals.
The binding cracks. She sniffs it. Her book smells like a shoe.
Then, as if she’s been struck by alien star-stone, she’s suddenly struck by doubt. Is it ridiculous? Is she a joke? Not that these doubts are new, only here, again, and racing in the dark. And where moments ago she saw a golden city, now there is only this. The fallen snow. This dread. She places the book in a shallow drawer, scans the room to fill her eyes and so to fill her mind: the bed, the mirrors, the tapestries, a portrait of herself. But even with the curtains drawn she finds her eyes are burning, a headache coming fast, and she calls again to Lucy to assist her in retiring to a sofa of pillows embroidered with garden scenes. Off come her skirts and petticoats, her lace cuffs and collar, her shoes and whalebone stay, until she lies on her side in nothing but a cotton shift and endless strands of pearls. Dust hangs in a crack of light between red velvet drapes, like stars.
Her dreams are glimpses, bewildered—celestial charts, oceanic swells, massive, moving bodies of water, the heavens as heavenly liquid, familiar whirlpools, the universe as a ship lost at sea—but the ship she imagines arrived safely, years ago, loaded with their possessions. It’s true her crates took long to find her—something mismarked or misnamed—and she wept for her missing manuscripts as she would have wept for an absent child. Long reconciled to childlessness, she worries instead about barrenness of the brain: “I should have been much Afflicted and accounted the Loss of my Twenty Plays, as the Loss of Twenty Lives,” she’s written, “but howsoever their Paper Bodies are Consumed, like as the RomanEmperours, in Funeral Flames, I cannot say, an Eagle Flies out of them, or that they Turn into a Blazing Star, although they make a great Blazing Light when they Burn”—and as she wakes, her mind alights on something she read last night, Copernicus’s dying words: “It moves!”
*
When he returns, the snow is melted, the almond trees in bloom. “I nearly forgot what you looked like,” Margaret says. It was only those two weeks he’d planned for, plus another six or seven he could never have foreseen.
William has brought her a gift: Experimental History of Cold , the latest from Robert Boyle, which includes an account of experiments touching the force of freezing water, experiments touching the weight of bodies frozen and unfrozen, bodies capable of freezing other bodies, and bubbles formed in ice. “It is,” he says, “the latest talk of learned men.”
She turns it in her hand.
Like throwing an apple into the pond without causing a single ripple—has no one read her Blazing World ?
“Give it time,” says William. The plague has only just passed, if it has; the theaters are still black; the birdmen with their leather masks still step between the corpses. Yet when he
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