Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister Read online

  A woman’s voice behind the child, coming from deep inside the house. The market is still. Why are the citizens so transfixed? “Clara?” says the inside voice.

  Margarethe clamps Ruth’s forearms tightly. The girl in the window cranes, watching Ruth shudder, judging Ruth’s nonsense syllables. The girl leans over the windowsill, one curved forefinger at her plump lips. She looks at Ruth as a dog will look at a turtle—closely, without sympathy. “Are you a lost one?” she asks Ruth, and then says to Margarethe, “Is she a changeling? Let her go if she is; let her go, and let’s see what she’ll do! Will she fly like a crow?”

  “What kind of town is this, that the young address their elders with such nonsense?” cries Margarethe in competent Dutch, and the girl rears back for a moment, but the look of scrutiny doesn’t vanish. Curiosity is too great.

  Suddenly Ruth reaches up through the open window and takes hold of the girl’s plaything—a small wooden windmill, with arms that pivot on a nail. Ruth puts the peg end of it in her mouth, by habit. She sucks as a new calf works at a teat. A dirty chuckle ripples through the crowd. But Ruth is calmed by the distraction, and Margarethe grips Ruth about the waist.

  The blonde girl doesn’t object. She leans forward, peering down at Ruth’s face almost as if looking in a mirror. “Thing,” says the girl, “oh, thing, get away from here.”

  The onlookers watch warily. The girl’s mother calls—“Clara!” And there is a flurry of action in the room. The girl is yanked back, the window slammed, the curtain closed.

  Iris turns. Had they hoped to steal anonymously into this new place, they couldn’t have done a worse job. Everyone in the town square is watching.

  Margarethe squares her shoulders again and, without saying anything more, leads her daughters through to the other side of the market square. When they reach the far streets, where shadows have already thickened the day into an early dusk, Iris brings out the fruit she has snatched from the pavement. The pears are hard and juiceless. The three travelers munch them down to the pips, and eat the pips as well, and throw away the stems after sucking them dry.

  The dusk is yielding to dark by the time they find Grandfather’s house, in the lee of a city gate. There they learn that he has died a few years ago, and those who live inside are not family and have no obligation to take in the hungry strangers.

  Stories Told

  Through

  Windows

  A night spent huddled in the piss stink of an alehouse alley. Dogs chase them away at dawn. The mother and daughters brush the mud and straw off their only skirts, and walk toward the marketplace again to advertise for a position.

  The mother’s voice is calculating: by turns brassy, pious. Whatever works.

  “I am Margarethe, Margarethe of the ten Broek family. My grandfather was Pieter ten Broek, who lived in the shadow of the Zijlpoort. A good family! I have come back here hoping to stay with them. But now I learn that he and his wife are dead, and my uncles are also lost through poxes and other whimsies of God. You don’t know my face, but you know my grandfather’s; he stood tall in this city. To honor his name, I ask you to stand by me, because there’s no one left to turn to.”

  First, Margarethe makes her plea at the half doors of merchant halls. She’ll do needlework in exchange for a clutch of blankets in a shed or byre. She’ll do barn labor, just give her food for herself and her ungainly daughters. She’ll mind the ill-tempered young, and she’ll wring milk from her breasts if fractious infants need it. (Her breasts don’t look up to the task.)

  The merchants lob wilting lettuces at her.

  So Margarethe turns to residential streets. Some of the houses are deafened, shutters like wooden muffs over their window-ears. Margarethe lingers in lanes till maids open up their masters’ homes. She chatters with brave familiarity at the girls who come out to wash the stoops.

  “Oh, you don’t want to know what hardship we leave behind, in the godforsaken muck of an English country village. Bog stench to remember, I’ll tell you now! But I was originally from here, one of you—my father left when I was still an infant, to Ely, to March, to teach the foolish English how to drain their damplands in the way we Hollanders perfected. He taught the trade to my husband, Jack Fisher, who performed it well enough . . . until the high tides of this fall. Then the earthworks were breached and the fens flooded and the fields and crops ruined beyond redemption. And the villagers of March and the web-footed fen folk could see what the coming winter would be like. They would rather have killed a Dutchman! But my father was dead of the ague, and no Dutchman was to be had, so they killed the next best thing: one of their own who had married a Dutch maid. My own husband, Jack.”

  A maid splashes a bucket of dirty water on the cobbles; Margarethe has to leap back to keep from a dunking.

  A goodwife at a window, examining a stain in a lace collar.

  Margarethe: “They cornered my man, my sorry Jack Fisher, out in a haunted copse one night last week! They hit my poor Jack on the head with an eel spear. My daughters and I left under cover of darkness the very same evening, fearing for our lives. English peasants are a vengeful lot, and we were seen as strangers, though the girls were born there.”

  . . . the sounds in the lane, of ale-courage and ale-anger, and the girls started from their sleep, and Margarethe’s eyes darting, crusty; and her frightened voice: “We must get away from this place! Up, you lump-kin daughters, up!—or this sleep is your last!”—

  The goodwife ducks her eyes away, as if Margarethe has been only a chirping jackdaw on the sill. The window shuts gently. Margarethe moves along to the window of a neighbor without losing the momentum of her recital.

  “The English have a morbid fear of the foreigner among them! You know it! And though the girls have an English father, I trained them to speak the language of my grandfather, Pieter ten Broek, who served this town well, or so I am told. I thought we might need to return to our home soil, and so we have. We aren’t wastrels or refugees. We’re not dirty gypsies. We are your own. Welcome us back.”

  Iris sees that her mother isn’t good at generating sympathy. Something about the hard edge of her jaw, the pinching nostrils.

  “Look at my girls,” says Margarethe. “If your stomach can bear it. Haven’t I suffered enough?—with one of them gibbering and staggering like a drunken farmer on market day”—she shrugs at Ruth—“and the other”—she pushes Iris forward—“plain as a board, an affront to the eye? Why did God deny me sons, who might have been a comfort to a mother in distress? If we die on the streets of this town, for your coldness the hand of God will visit pestilence upon you! Good day. Bitch hound! Iris, mind your sister.”

  A palsied hand has reached out to draw the window closed against Margarethe and her daughters. A murmured prayer against Margarethe’s curse.

  “Let me tell you what I know about hunger and plague,” says Margarethe, pestering a burgher who is trying to slide by her unaccosted. “Your townsmen refer us to the poorhouses here, and promise that the needy can fatten themselves there on butter and beef. But I have seen the poor fight over a sick dog, to kill it and char its meat, and puke it up within the hour. I’ve known hunger to turn father against son, and husband against wife!”

  “Mama, the things you say!” Iris is amazed at her mother’s testimony.

  “You think I embroider these things? Hunger is real,” says Margarethe. “Haven’t I seen children munching on rats?” But she softens her voice and tries a new approach.

  “I have skills, old mother, I know the herbs and tisanes for the stiffness in the joints. I know what to gather, and how to dry it, and what to mete out, and what to reserve. I know the worts, the simples, the roots. I know”—she pauses, judging her next audience of one weak-chinned old dame—“I know the holy words to pronounce, and when they fail, the unholy. I know the spells, I know the secret charms, I know the invisible comforts . . .”

  The frightened crone bangs her shutter closed so hard that it nearly catches her cri
ppled hand at the wrist.

  “What we need is a table,” says Iris, “a table that always groans with a weight of food, appearing by magic every day—”

  “Fancy won’t feed us, Iris,” mutters Margarethe. “God’s truth,” she cries in anger, “is there no mercy in this damp town? Will the ill chance that chased us from England catch up with us at last, when we have no strength to keep running away?”

  Midday. The sun doing its best, dragging its golden skirts through gritty streets. In a back lane, where the smells of the brewery get trapped in alleys and mildewy work yards, there is one window that doesn’t swing shut. Margarethe stands, her hand pressed against her ribs, heaving, trying to keep from weeping with rage. At wit’s end, she’s working to invent a new story. Ruth plays with the pretty toy that the girl named Clara has thrust in her hands. Iris looks in the window.

  The room is tall and airy, more stable than salon, an old storehouse for arms maybe. Iris peers. The room is in disarray. A table holds pots and mortars and grinding stones. A kettle of nose-wrinkling oil gently steams on a low fire. Paintbrushes brandish themselves out of clay pots, unruly as autumn bracken. Against the wall lean freestanding panels of wood, like a series of doors, and one or two panels are propped on easels in the center of the room. Every surface is worked over with color, fields of fog cut with strokes of unapologetic brightness. Every color that Iris has ever known, from midnight blue to the sourest citron.

  A man turns, only slowly hearing Margarethe’s words. He seems irritated to be yelled at through his own window, which has been opened for air and light, not for prying eyes or beggars on the prowl.

  Iris leans farther to look. The consolation of gray, of green, the surprise of pink. The redemption of cloudy white on four new panels yet to be touched by image.

  “Iris, don’t be forward with the gentleman,” murmurs Margarethe, readying her latest version of woe.

  Iris ignores her mother. “What are you doing?” she says through the window.

  Looking

  The painter lays down a twig of red chalk and blows lightly on his fingertips The folds of his clothes are lined with red as if powdered with the dust of bricks. He walks over to the window and shakes his head. “What kind of assault is this?” he grumbles.

  “No assault, sir,” cries Margarethe, now that she has caught one, reeling him in, “only a mother with hungry virgin daughters! What does the gentleman need to be done? A woman can be told to do anything. I can help a man’s tired wife at all the household tasks. Tell me to sweep, to scrub; I will. Tell me to air a mattress, to fetch water from the well. I will. Tell me to kill a chicken?—I’ll pluck it and stew it, send its feathers to the sack for pillowing, its blood organs to the pan for the company of onions, its bones thrown upon the dirt for the reading of fortunes.”

  “There’s no wife here, or why would I be living in squalor? But hold your tongue while I think about it,” he tells her, and he turns to glance at Ruth and Iris.

  Ruth hides her eyes, but Iris looks right back at him. She isn’t looking for her father, no no; he is dead these seven days—

  A voice outside the door as the door splinters: “And the husband is boxed on the head, bleeding into his bog, and we’ll have his wicked wife next, and those girls!”—

  —Stay in the present moment. Look at the present moment. She’s just looking at a man who happens to be roughly her father’s age. That’s all.

  He’s a man of middle years, with an unshuttered light in his eyes. Iris doesn’t remember seeing its like before. He strokes his gingery mustaches and draws fingers down a beard that needs hot water and the attention of a razor. His bald head is glazed from being in the sun without the black hat favored by prosperous burghers. His fingers are dyed with red and violet. Gingerbeard has calipers, scales, tools in his eyes; he stares at Iris. It’s a look that’s clean of human emotion, at least just now. He stares some sort of judgment at her. Iris drops her eyes at last, beaten by his attention.

  “She will be of marriageable age within the month—” begins Margarethe. Iris winces.

  “Silence,” he murmurs, twitching his fingers at Margarethe.

  And looks some more.

  “This, then,” he says at last. “There’s a shed beyond where you can sleep a week or two, at least until my apprentice returns from his journeys on my behalf. After that we’ll see. There’s work to be done if you can live here in silence. You, Mother, will see to the needs of a bachelor’s household. I won’t name or number the tasks, but I want to eat and to sleep and to work without stopping when the mood arises. The older girl, can she wander about by herself?—there’s a meadow not far from the bridge, just beyond the Amsterdamse Poort, where the new canal starts its journey to Amsterdam. The flowers of late summer grow there in abundance. She can collect them daily for my studio. The commonest weeds die within hours, and I need to look at them regularly. Is she capable of this? Good. Perhaps you—your name, your name in one word and no narrative—”

  “Margarethe,” she says, and lifts her head, “Margarethe Fisher, of the good Haarlem family ten Broek.”

  “Margarethe, if you attend, perhaps I can teach you to grind minerals for me and mix them with oil and powders, to make my colors.”

  “I am clever with grinding herbs and peppercorns and roots. Minerals and powders are as nothing to me.”

  “Good. And the girls, they are called—?”

  “My elder daughter, Ruth, and the smart one, Iris.”

  “Not the usual Dutch names,” he says, amused.

  “They were born in the fens of Cambridgeshire. Their English father wasn’t inclined to the names of saints and martyrs,” says Margarethe, “so the choices were few. When we saw how our first child was spoiled, we named her Ruth, which I’m told means sorrow for one’s own faults. Then we chose to name the next daughter Iris, with the hope it might encourage her to grow in beauty like a flower.” She looks at Iris and her lips twitch. “As you can see, our hopes were badly abused.”

  “Iris is the smart one,” he says.

  “Smart enough for what you need, I’d guess.” Is Margarethe leering a little? Surely not.

  “For Iris, a difficult task,” says Gingerbeard. I’d like her to sit on a chair in the north light for hours at a time so I may observe her. She must sit without fidging, without speaking. She must keep her mouth shut. I will draw her in red chalk on parchment, and perhaps paint her if I’m pleased by my drawings.”

  Margarethe can’t help herself. She says, “For what possible reason could you wish to render the likes of her?” Margarethe puts her hands on Iris’s shoulder. The gesture is partly loving but partly a negotiation. And why not, Iris admits, when we can barely reach from one loaf to the next?

  The painter replies, “My reasons are my own. Decide and answer me, for I have no more time for this right now. Tell me, yes or no.”

  “Your name, before we come in your door and accept your kind offer.”

  But he laughs. “My name can’t seal a deal, my name doesn’t increase the value of my canvases. My name has no place in a world in which Lucas Cranach and Memling and the Florentines show their paintings! Even in my own time I am anonymous, not quite known as the Master of the Dordrecht Altarpiece. That effort is much admired, but I’m not remembered as its creator. Just call me the Master, and my cock’s pride will be assuaged. Will you enter or no?”

  They troop inside. The smells in the studio are slightly offensive. Iris picks out the pungency of sappy, new-milled wood, the resin-scented oil, an eggy stink of sulfur, male sweat.

  She stops hearing the clucking of her mother and the hulking shuffle of her sister. Iris looks at the works once her eyes have become accustomed to the inside light.

  The panels are limned in red or black line. Some of them are worked with an olive or a sepia wash. A few have been taken further, the solid forms of human beings beginning to emerge from the gloom of the Master’s preparations. Scraps of paper, scratched with silvery ink, are
pinned to the edges of panels—sketches, she can see, of what the finished work might include.

  The sketches are largely of people unclothed. Women and men alike.

  Iris grabs her mother’s hand and points wordlessly. Margarethe sets her jaw and considers the situation. At length she says, in a voice intended to be agreeable, “Master, is my daughter to sit undraped for you?”

  “I am a painter, not a monster.”

  Eight or nine pieces in process, or pieces started and abandoned; Iris can’t tell. Figures who are naked in the sketches appear clothed in the finished works.

  Iris stares in distress at her mother. Behind the Master’s back Margarethe makes a face at Iris that means: First we eat, then we refuse. Caution, daughter! But Margarethe goes on to remark, “We are in a Roman chapel, full of idols. In England few would sanction such blasphemy anymore. Does all of this painted beauty serve any purpose?”

  “Who can say what purpose beauty serves? But at least the Roman Catholics used to pay well for work that inspires their devotions,” says the Master, hunting through a pile of brushes for one to serve in the task at hand. “Back when the Roman Catholics were more than merely tolerated in this land.”

  “I see the Virgin in blue and scarlet; I see the Christ like a fat Dutch baby raised on cheese. I notice angels everywhere,” says Margarethe dismissively.

  “I paint my devils, dwarves, and depraved in a separate room,” says the Master, waving a hand. “The door to which I keep locked. Not superstitious, I, but nor do I court the wrath of God any more than I need do.”

  Iris wants to ask: Do you paint imps, thwarties, sting-demons? The kind that run with soundless howling at the heels of mobs, egging them on? But she can’t speak about this; her mouth won’t collaborate with her mind.