Exit Lady Masham (13 page)

One evening, when he had withdrawn with me to a divan, he quizzed me about my fondness for cards.

"I was watching you tonight, Mrs. Masham. You appeared to be giving the game your total attention. Your body was erect and still. There was no movement whatever except when you pulled a card and placed it on the table with a click. Is the game so difficult?"

"One must remember the cards. After the first three tricks, it should be possible to calculate what each of the other players holds."

"And is this a source of keen pleasure to you?"

"It is a source of pleasure, Mr. Swift. My life has not been so filled with pleasures that I can ignore cards. Besides, whist is like life. You cannot expect to win with a poor hand, but with skill you may reduce defeat to a minimum."

"In chess there is no element of chance. I should think a person of your intellect would prefer it."

"Perhaps I should, were I a man. But as a woman, with so many disadvantages, I prefer the cards. They reflect the struggle as I see it around me: so much for luck, so much for skill. The high trumps may come to the undeserving, but there is always the chance that they may misuse them. And then, too, the contest proceeds so smoothly, so intellectually!" I clasped my hands in sudden recognition of how much I really
did
care for the game. "There is no blood, no squalor. It is a world of form. Or ideals, if you wish."

"No, I don't wish," Swift retorted with a rumbling chuckle. "I don't wish it at all! I see the game you're really playing. May I be so bold as to instruct you what it is?"

"By all means. I welcome candor."

"Then you shall have it! My friend Harley has told me something of your life before you came to court."

"I was a laundress, Mr. Swift."

"But no ordinary one. A laundress with some great connections."

"Those, you might put it, were my trumps."

"Precisely! You were dealt a poor hand, but you had a couple of high cards. And you played them with consummate skill."

"On the contrary, I had great good luck."

"You mean because the Duchess trumped her own ace? Perhaps, but you see it as whist, anyway. That's just my point. Be it luck or skill, you won your rubber."

"The game is hardly over yet."

"When you say that, do you imply that you may still lose? But you may also bid a slam! Aren't you settling for too little?"

"To what do you assume that I might aspire, Mr. Swift? Should I ask the Queen to replace the Duke of Marlborough with Captain Masham and build me a palace the size of Blenheim?"

"It would be an excellent start!" he exclaimed, slapping his knee. "Then we could call a halt to this crazy war!"

"We can dream, I suppose."

"Must it be just a dream, Mrs. Masham? Oh, I know what Harley says about your determination not to mix in politics. But I'm not suggesting that you appoint generals or build palaces. I'm simply suggesting that, as a person of known integrity and respected judgment, you might occasionally let your opinion be known on board this ship of fools!"

Of course, I knew that Swift was cultivating my friendship as a means of access to my mistress, but I found his company irresistible. He even shared the enthusiasm that I had inherited from my father for Mr. Shakespeare, and we had many discussions of the poet's characters.

One day we talked of Shakespeare's kings and queens.

"Do you find them real? You have had more occasion to view royalty from close quarters than a poor playwright ever could have."

"No," I replied, after giving this a moment's thought. "To put kings and queens on the stage as they are, you would have to show the etiquette, the ceremonial. It would be tedious. Shakespeare was quite correct to move his royalties rapidly across the boards. One forgives the error for the action. And then, too, his kings and queens speechify much more than monarchs do in life. Certainly Queen Anne and the late King William tended to silence. Who wants silent actors on stage?"

"But do you find that the personalities of Shakespeare's sovereigns correspond to what you have observed?"

"There's no queen in Shakespeare quite like ours, if that's what you mean, Mr. Swift."

"What of royal counsellors, then?"

I smiled. "There is no counsellor in Shakespeare quite like Mr. Harley, if that's what you mean."

"Or in any play in any language!" he exclaimed with his rumbling laugh. "But are there no characters in our court like the Earl of Kent in
King Lear,
or Paulina in
The Win
ter's Tale
? Counsellors who have the courage to speak up to their sovereign when he is wrong? Who can cry: 'Be Kent unmannerly when Lear is mad!'"

I reacted cautiously. "Surely, sir, you are not suggesting ..."

"That good Queen Anne is mad? No, God bless her, such treason could never fall from my lips. But does she have any around her who would dare speak up if she were? Are there any plain men in court? Or women?"

"Remember what the Duke of Cornwall said about Kent's plainness." I paused, trying to recall the lines. Swift, of course, at once supplied them for me with his customary exuberance:

"'These kinds of knaves I know, which in their plainness

Harbor more craft and more corrupter ends

Than twenty silly-ducking observants

That stretch their duties nicely.'

"But
distinquo,
" he continued. "Cornwall is a tyrant who sees plainness as the mask of a man's resistance to his tyranny. He knows that had Lear listened to Kent, Lear would still be king."

"And you suggest that the Queen may need a Kent?"

"I suggest that every crown needs a Kent."

"Let us pray, then, that Her Majesty may never be in such dire straits as her mythical predecessor," I said firmly, disliking the subject. "Shall we talk of other characters in Mr. Shakespeare? What about Irishmen?"

"There are none. Except in
Henry V,
and that's a libel."

He talked to me, as we became better friends, more and more about the war. I was interested in it, of course, and I sympathized, as what sentient woman would not, with the desirability of an early peace, but I preferred to hear him on literature or history or even on personalities at court, about whom he could be devastating. So he offered at last a kind of conversational exchange. He would descant, fascinatingly, on my adored Congreve, emphasizing the playwright's utter immorality, pointing out that Mirabell, in
The Way of the World,
my favorite of the heroes, marries off his pregnant mistress to an unwitting friend, and then Swift would insist on my attending his argument that we were really fighting in Flanders for Dutch interests and that the war party was the dupe of the ancient policy of William III, who had always placed the Stadtholder ahead of the English monarch. Or if he delighted me with an account of how Wycherly managed to debase a theme of Molière, I had to pay for it by acknowledging the absurdity of the British fear of French domination in Spain, when our own candidate for the throne in Madrid was an Austrian archduke who was striving to unite Iberia with all the Germanies and restore the empire of Charles V!

"Is
that
what you're killing English youths for?" he would demand, hitting his fist against a table. And finally he would direct his attention, hypnotizing me with that stare that seemed to address me sometimes as a woman, sometimes as a senate, sometimes as an unruly mob, to the individuals who were profiting from the war. For there had to be such, he insisted.
Somebody
had to be gaining from it. And it was surely not the foot soldiers who died or were maimed, or the taxpayers who were gouged, or the poor who never cared for anything but sex and gin. Who could it be but those who were paid in the wages of money or glory? Or both? And who had greater such wages than the Marlboroughs?

"You say the Duke has never been beaten, Mrs. Masham. It is true. And if we had a proper war, he'd be worth a kingdom to us. But what are victories in a fight that's already been won? Must we go on until he has laid Europe in waste, and Blenheim is the greatest palace on the globe?"

What could I say? I hated it when people attacked my former patrons. I had suffered too much from the Duchess to be able to join in any criticism of her conduct without appearing vengeful, and my admiration of the Duke was a private part of myself that I wanted to keep away from the world. I had made him, in my Holywell days, into a kind of household god, and he belonged on a mantel in my heart that I had no wish to expose to the sweeping hand of this would-be house cleaner. For would not the vision of those shattered fragments on the floor confirm what was already beginning to be a dim suspicion that my noble idol might be made of clay?

Obviously, I was being groomed for a mission. I began to feel like a schoolchild on a spring day. Out of doors, shimmering through the open windows of my classroom, was the verdant, inviting countryside of my new life. I yearned to be allowed to fling my lesson books into my desk, slam down its top and run out to the fields to play. But only if my teacher would release me of his own accord. I was held, rooted, by that presence.

The reader by now may be curious as to the exact nature of my feelings for Jonathan Swift. Certainly he was never in the least amorously inclined toward me. He used to say that I reminded him of a landlady of his in Ireland, one Mrs. Malolly, and although he was never specific on the nature of Mrs. Malolly's looks, I pictured her as a red-nosed laundress. And I? What did I feel about him? Well, can a woman be in love with a mind? I never had the carnal desires for Swift that I initially had for Masham. Yet I would have followed him across the African desert. I wanted ... how can I put it? I wanted somehow to be a part of him. I wanted to obliterate Abigail Masham and be all Swift. I was like an Eastern mystic whose idea of Nirvana is to blend with the godhead. Swift made the life around me, even the splendors of Windsor, seem unreal, quaint.

Perhaps I may give the reader some inkling of what I mean if I relate the conversation that enlisted me at last in his great project. We were standing in a window embrasure during one of the Queen's levees at Greenwich, watching the red-sailed barges on the river.

"You have surmised that there's something I want of you, Abigail."

It was the first time he had called me that. It was like him not to ask my leave.

"I have been dreading it, Jonathan."

"One dreads an invitation to live. The semi-death of our fellow men seems vastly preferable. But a few, a very few, pick up the challenge. I dare to hope that you will be one of them."

"And what has given you that hope?"

"An affinity between us. I believe you have felt it."

"Something of the sort, perhaps."

"We are observers, you and I. We stand apart and watch the others play their parts. Somersets and Marlboroughs, even Queen Anne herself, God bless her sullen soul. Look at her now, the poor dear mistress of our destinies!" I followed his eyes to where the Queen was sitting, bored and disconsolate, the end of her folded fan resting against her lips, listening to a Scottish divine who seemed to be offering her a private sermon. "Oh, yes, we see them, you and I! And we see them without envy, too. That is where we differ from the rest. We might be visitors from another planet. But we are in danger of the sin of pride. The pride that takes refuge in a passive superciliousness. It could damn us."

"It seems to me that you are active enough. Your words are everywhere. We hear you. We read you."

"My words reach everywhere but where they are most needed."

"You mean the Queen. Well, she
did
read you, in your tale of the tub, and she won't do so again. That was your fault."

"That is why I can reach her only through you."

I sighed, but I knew it was no use. "What must I do for you, Mr. Swift?"

"I have but a small favor to ask of you, Mrs. Masham. Simply that you put an end to a great war."

He smiled, but the fixed stare in which he embraced me was not amused.

"Is that all? And how must I do it?"

At once now he exploded into his theme. "It will be through the Queen, of course. The Queen is the key to the salvation of Europe. I have studied every official act of her reign. She has used her power rarely, but whenever she has done so, it has been decisive. With the patronage of the Treasury she could have a Tory House of Commons. With the creation of a handful of new peers she could have a Tory House of Lords. Then she need fear no repercussions when she dismisses Marlborough and negotiates a peace directly with King Louis!"

"Assuming that is what she wants to do."

"But she
does
want to. She abominates the war! You know that. What must be overcome is her inertia. Oh, Abigail, I have studied you, as I have studied the Queen. The puzzle is solved if you are only willing. And you will have played a glorious role in history!"

"You mean a kind of inside-out Joan of Arc? With you as St. Michael to bid me tell the armies to throw down their arms? It doesn't sound like such a glorious role. And, anyway, I don't think I care for glorious roles."

"Do you think I'm such a fool as to tempt you with worldly fame? Do you imagine I don't know you better? I only want you to go on with your own private game. Your own little drama, played out in the theater of Abigail Hill, with Abigail Hill as author, actress and audience!"

"And Jonathan Swift as stage manager!"

"Well, I hope I shall have some function. Even if only a small one. I shall prompt you."

I was suddenly exhausted, depleted, by all of this sparring. "I fear I am not up to it, my friend."

"But will you consider it?" The Queen had risen to depart, and we turned now to face her. I prepared to curtsy. "For her sake I" Swift whispered. "Don't you want to help her to greatness?"

I dipped into a deep curtsy as the Queen turned to the door. Her eye had caught mine; it directed me to go to her. "Very well, sir. I shall consider it."

I knew there was no point in my telling him the extent of the sacrifice that he was asking of me. He would simply have contrasted it to the conglomerate suffering in a single day on the bloody plains of Flanders or on a sinking frigate at sea. But I was still bitter. My fidelity was the single diamond in the simple headband of my life, and he was asking me to change it for one of paste.