Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister Read online

  Margarethe begins to arrange pots on the table in order of size. “Get on through to the house, don’t handle my things,” the Master says, “out back, go on! Be useful with pastry and broom and boiling water! Go to the marketplace and find a healthy fish for my dinner! Get out of my way!”

  “What shall I use for coin, Master?” says Margarethe.

  “My name,” he says.

  “The Master of Debt?” she says.

  “Schoonmaker,” he answered, “but the Master will do. It better do.”

  Margarethe straightens her spine. “Iris, attend your sister,” she says. “You are the smart one. Enough of this mooning about, these vaporish sighs! Keep Ruth under your fist. Do you hear me?” Iris nods. “Reliable Iris,” says Margarethe. “So off I go, and tonight we eat.”

  Iris keeps a hand on Ruth’s shoulder till their mother has hurried out of sight. Then Iris continues her inspection. Since Iris doesn’t speak, the Master doesn’t seem to mind her being there. As he scrubs a patch of green to apply a yellow glow upon it, he mutters to her, or to himself. She listens as she wanders and looks.

  He has a nice voice, rustly and gruff. “So your mother, like other small people, disapproves of sacred art! I should pack up my trunks and remove myself to the Spanish Netherlands, where a healthy Roman Catholic faith still requires a supply of religious imagery. But no, though the Calvinists here tolerate the Papist presence, even turning a blind eye to the secret chapels, the market for sacred art has disappeared.”

  Iris doesn’t know or care about any of this.

  “But seventy years ago? A hundred? Imagine this. Every eight miles found a clutch of houses with its own small church, and every church boasted a painting of the Holy Family. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The Gospels are peopled suddenly and forever by the images that artists deliver for you. We did our work, and God reaped the reward in increased prayer. The true consequence of beauty—tell your mother!—is devotion.”

  Iris has no idea what he means, but it seems to please him to talk. She sees Josephs and Marys, and Jesuses of all ages and humors. Abandoned over and over again, because imperfect, because unworthy?

  The Master rails on, punctuating his pauses with caresses of his brush. “Painting holy subjects has always made a good living for painters! Though who among us doesn’t fear being dashed into hell when we paint into a sacred scene from Scriptures some baby we see on the street, a woman we love, a man we admire?”

  The Master becomes morose. “And besides picturing the blessed”—this in a sour tone, carping—“as a painter I catalog the corruption of the world! In staggering honesty. The misshapen, the unholy aberrations. The Girl-Boy of Rotterdam? I painted that cursed soul the year before it was stoned to death by the devout. I painted the Seven Stages of Plague, including the gray-green face of the unburied corpse. The hunchbacks, the split-skulls, Dame Handelaers with her horrible donkey jaw. The other side of revelation! Through that door, should you want to see. I’ll unlock it for you. All the proofs of our need for God.” He points his brush at the door and raises his eyebrows in a question.

  Iris doesn’t even dare to look at the door, much less ask for it to be unlocked. She doesn’t want to see. She wraps her thin arms around her thin chest, and asks herself again: Where have we come to?

  The Master turns back to his canvas. “And I’ll paint that changeling child yet,” he says grimly. “Haarlem’s hidden beauty. More witness to the weirdness of this world.”

  Iris remembers the girl at the window, the girl who gave the toy to Ruth. She had asked if Ruth was a lost one, a changeling. Was Haarlem a haven for such goblin beasts? Iris had heard that from time to time a poor infant might be kidnapped from its cradle and replaced with a rotten, illish creature resembling it in looks alone. A changeling is said to be deficient of something essential, either memory, or sense, or mercy. Iris wants to ask the Master about the nature of changelings, and how to identify one, but he interrupts her thoughts, mumbling on.

  “And even though I testify about the terrible human state, and its rescue by the sanctity of Jesus, what, what, what in this annus dominus are we brought to, we the laborers, the artisans, the cooks of linseed stew?” The Master throws his brush across the room. “They want flowers, flowers for commerce, beauty to sell as if it had its own sake! Why don’t the dreamless Calvinists just go off to Constantinople? Why don’t they join the pagan Mohammedans who rebuke the notion of portraying divinity in anything but Euclidean tiles of blue and gold? Or why don’t I just take myself to the Spanish Netherlands and set myself up there? Where I can paint what I want, and keep food on the table as well?”

  “Why don’t you?” asks Iris, goaded from her shyness by his ranting.

  “I love my home, and this is my home,” he yells. “Don’t you understand that?”

  Iris doesn’t answer. Home is hard to recollect already, usurped by that nightmare of torches, accusations, an escape in a flatboat over fields flooded with sea water, as the full moon blazed upon them like the eye of a vengeful judge. Her family had left home so quickly—who really knew if Jack Fisher was even given a Christian burial, or was he still drifting in the suck of the receding tides, a bloated corpse leaching his blood into the ruined crops?

  “What, what is it?” says the Master, coming toward Iris, but she starts, and jumps away.

  —a minor demon, sniffing the midnight air, on the hunt, chasing after them—

  “No,” she says, keeping it all unremembered, “no, no.”

  “Then if you won’t say, out, out in the air, enough of my prattle; what do you care for the madness of an obsessed man? Go for flowers. Go with your enormous sister for flowers. Trot off and drag an armload of pretty weeds for me, so I can waste my time and feed myself.”

  He looks at Iris, then peers down into his brushes, splaying the bristles of one with his clean left thumb. “Bring me flowers, child,” he says, more softly. “Out into the air with you. You look like a crone before your time.”

  Meadow

  Schoonmaker—the Master—gives Iris a short knife. He tells her how to find the meadow. Iris helps Ruth put her wooden shoes back on, and she fits on her own pair. Then the girls clasp their hands and run.

  Past the brewery with its rich active smells, down a lane that leads through a city gate. Out the gate, across a foul canal, up an embankment, through a mess of hedge, and then: the meadow. A few cows are companionably lowing. Ruth is scared of cows, so Iris flies at them and windmills her arms about, and the cows amble away without taking offense.

  The sisters are alone for the first time since leaving their home in England. They aren’t Dutch girls, no matter how well Margarethe had taught Iris essential words and grammar. But they’re no longer English girls either, since home has been swept away from them. So for now they’re merely alone, but together, as together as they can get.

  Before the death of Jack Fisher, Iris and Ruth had been no farther from March than the next village over, and that only once, for a fair. What a disaster. The ale had flown too freely and the reticence that masquerades as Christian charity had collapsed. Men had set down their bowls of ale and taunted Ruth with a stick, saying they were hungry for bacon, and how much would the pig fetch? Iris had snatched that very stick and gone at them, and caused blood to flow, though even with dripping nostrils and split lips the men had fallen against each other in mirth. “The pig and the hound! The hound and the pig!”

  The Fisher sisters had never gone to the market fair again. Nor had Iris told Margarethe or Jack exactly what had happened, for what would that mean? Just that Ruth would be kept closer to the hearth than ever. Iris has always thought this isn’t right. Without question Ruth is an idiot, but she is not a pig.

  Iris can’t think about these things, though; when the memories threaten to return, she has to brush them away. She’s left those things behind. She’s left England behind, and all it means. Any cursed imp is left behind, surely, surely. But have they really arrived in Holland? Or di
d the boat go awry in the storm? Have they come instead to a place of bewitchment? Perhaps it only looks like Holland, and that’s why the grandfather who was to take care of them is not in his house.

  Don’t be fanciful, says Margarethe’s voice in Iris’s mind. But Iris can’t help it. The mysteries of this place! Whatever could the Girl-Boy of Rotterdam have been? Or Dame Donkey-Jaw? Or what about the changeling child? If this is no longer England, perhaps it’s not Holland either. It’s the place of story, beginning here, in the meadow of late summer flowers, thriving before the Atlantic storms drive wet and winter upon them all.

  Iris lectures herself. Be commonsensical. Be good. Deserve the food you’ll be fed tonight. She says, “So many varieties. What sorts does he want, do you think?”

  Ruth plucks a daisy and holds it up.

  “That’s one, and a good one it is,” says Iris, “he wants many. Here, Ruth, can you use this knife without stabbing your thumb? If you pull them like that, the leaves are crumpled. Make your cut down here—bend your knees, that’s better. Yes, that’s a good one. I don’t need to approve each choice. All flowers are good ones, Ruth. Yes, that’s another nice one.”

  Iris moves away as far as she dares, making sure that Ruth isn’t alarmed. Then she moves farther still. She sees an abandoned apple tree at the edge of the meadow. Though it’s crippled with age, there are boughs that can be used as a ladder, and she should be able to step from the apple tree to the limbs of the taller, weedy tree that grows next to it. Iris tucks her dark skirt into the band of her apron strings and puts her precious shoes at an angle against the trunk. She begins to climb.

  She hadn’t been able to see much of the world from the boat that had left from Harwich. Because of fright, hunger, and nausea, she had had to keep her head down on the creaking floor. Iris says to herself, I couldn’t stand on the prow of the ship and track our journey to this odd place. But here, on the edge, on the margin, an aging tree is a stepping-stone to a taller tree, and from there . . .

  Look one way, and beyond the lip of three or four more meadows is the broad gray ocean, crimped with white lines of water wanting to noise themselves against the dunes. From here the sea appears less monstrous than it had from the dock at Harwich. Then the light had been low, and the waves, close by, had pulled up weights of water, greasy, heavy, dark. Today the sky is hung with clouds random as sailing vessels, flat-bottomed and big-billowed, and the water seems smoothed, changed.

  Look the other way, and she can peer above and beyond the leafy hedge, locate the mouth of the brown-blue Spaarne, and trace the river inland to the city walls. She can make out the buildings of Haarlem. Their smart chimneys, their tall facades imitating steps-and-stairs. There: the building she’s come to know already as the Stadhuis, the town hall, with its green mountain of a roof. There: the Grotekerk—the Cathedral of Saint Bavo’s—its stone spire the color of toasted bread, one angle pink and pockmarked in this light. A small ribbed dome, open to the winds, is perched up top like an airy onion.

  Canals ring the town, joining to the Spaarne on north and south sides. Haarlem, or whatever world this might be, is a closed garden itself, of stone and glass and red roof tiles. Beyond, to the east, the occasional ouderkirk—as the Master told her—suggests a group of farmhouses, a crossroads, a ford. Iris looks to see some giant in the distance, some dragon laying a clutch of eggs. She finds an unraveling of smoke. It could be a dragon. It could be anything. “I think it’s a dragon,” calls Iris.

  Ruth has forgotten her task already and sits chewing the stems of flowers.

  Iris hasn’t attended to flowers much. Things that grow have been their mother’s concern: the roots, the herbs for their leaves and flowers, the flowers for their seeds, the many small snatches of sage, celery, and rue. Iris has overlooked them. But now she sees a nameless variety of wild blossoms. She can’t call their names, in English or Dutch. After a few moments in an artist’s workroom, she can see only flecks of gold, stalks of red and maroon, starry puffs of blue, stands of white, and all of it peppered against a glowing fold of yellow and green.

  Iris says to herself: I will bring Margarethe here for the benefits to be coaxed from seedling, stem, and leaf. Margarethe is a mistress of the simples, and she can treat any ailment with an infusion or a plaster.

  And there is Margarethe, striding back from the market already, a big fish shining from underneath her arm. Iris thinks her mother looks—from this height—ridiculous, her legs whipping out and her shoulders hunched over. She looks relieved.

  “I see a wicked witch, and a cow that gives milk of pure gold,” calls Iris. She decides she will drum up the courage to look at the paintings of the Master’s demons and unnatural figures. All the secrets of the world are to be discovered and recorded!

  A flurry of swallows on their way south. “Is that a school of fairies, flying from tree to tree?” she calls, to keep Ruth engaged. “Is that a changeling child I see?”

  Below, Ruth smiles and doesn’t bother to listen, a simple among simples.

  Sitting

  for

  Schoonmaker

  They come to know their patron and his tempers.

  He wakes up as Schoonmaker and becomes, by grumpy effort, the Master. Mornings are full of muttered curses and swallowed blessings. Enthusiastically he washes himself, paying no attention to the modesty of maidens or widows. The Fishers have to huddle themselves in the kitchen yard until he calls for his laving water to be removed. Then, a cambric shirt pulled over his head at least, he berates Margarethe for every annoying thing: the thinness of the porridge, the hardness of the cheese, the grayness of the bread, the miniature nature of herrings.

  Ruth plays with her windmill, the little thing grabbed from the beautiful girl in the house at the marketplace, until the Master roars for flowers. It doesn’t happen every day—all field flowers don’t die at once, no matter what he says—but it happens often enough.

  After the first three or four trips, Iris doesn’t need to escort Ruth to the meadow, though if the cows have frightened her Ruth comes home empty-handed. Iris sees, though, that the Master often doesn’t look at the flowers Ruth brings. He stuffs them in a bucket and continues to paint the ones he already has, all the while quoting lines of Scripture, as if to punish himself by remembering what holy passion he is kept from because of the nonsense of flowers.

  Iris loiters about the studio, trying to get up the courage to ask to see the paintings in the locked chamber of misfits. She is curious to see if he portrays imps and thwarties there. Here the Master paints flowers. “What are you bothering me for?” he mutters, not sounding very bothered.

  “Have you ever seen a dragon . . . or a hell-imp?”

  “The patron who doesn’t pay his debt is a hell-imp . . .” What a middle-aged answer, and from one who claims to admire his own paintings of monsters and miserables!

  She’ll ask him tomorrow for the key to the other room. She will. She’s always known about imps, and she wants to see one—not in real life (please God, no), but in a painting. That would be safe, and even wonderful.

  But the tomorrow comes, and just as she is going to do it—she is, she is!—there’s a knock on the door. “Caspar?” says the Master. “Come in!”

  Nobody enters. “Iris, open the door, Caspar’s arms must be heavy with presents for me,” says the Master boisterously.

  Timidly, Iris swings open the top half of the sectioned door. She sees nothing, but hears a knock on the bottom half.

  “Be generous. Open the full door,” says the Master.

  She does. A horrible beast in a huge beard stands there, only as high as Iris’s apron strings. It’s a talking dog, or a bear cub? It growls at her: “Move aside, what are you staring at, you ugly thing?” A dwarf, a real dwarf. Iris is glad Ruth is in the meadow today. May she stay there safely until this creature leaves! “Where’s the old goosander?” growls the creature, pushing in.

  The Master seems unimpressed. “Who sent you here?” he said.


  “For a half loaf of bread, I’ll remove my smalls and show you how the barber tickled my gangrenous limbs with his knives,” says the dwarf, who, it appears, is this short because he has no legs. He rocks forward, using his arms to swing himself. Then he rests on two little stubs at the base of his pelvis. They are fitted over with leathery patches laced up by thongs that tie over his shoulders.

  “There’s a female present,” says the Master, “a girl.”

  “Oh, is it a girl?” says the dwarf. “Such a pretty face it has. I thought it was a monkey with an ailment. You’re Schoonmaker, aren’t you. Are you still drawing the likes of me?”

  “You want me to pay you a half loaf of bread?” says the Master. “Bread is dear, and I’ve seen your like before.”

  “I’ve a handsome package of knobs and knuckles dragging along on the floor,” says the dwarf, looking at his crotch.

  “Get out,” says the Master. “I’m interested in the varieties of the fallen, to be sure, but right now I’m busy with flowers. And I don’t like your uncivil tongue when there’s a girl present.”

  The dwarf looks at the Master’s study of wildflowers. “You’ve gone from cataloguing us queerlimbs to portraits of—cow food?” says the dwarf. “Damn you, your reputation is riper than that.”

  “Margarethe, bring your broom,” calls the Master calmly. “A talking clot of fur has rolled in the doorway. It wants removing, whether it knows it or not.”

  Iris loses her nerve about inspecting the gallery of misfits. When Ruth comes back, Iris tells her about the dwarf while Ruth sorts the flowers by height and lines them up on the windowsill for the Master to inspect. “Wonderful,” he says. “So nicely arranged!” He doesn’t move them. They dry and blow away the next day.

  “Ready to draw you, before another crazy fish swims by to interrupt me,” says the Master at last. Iris isn’t sure she wants to be drawn, but a bargain is a bargain.