Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

by Gregory Maguire

  “We do what you say,” says van den Meer in a small but steady voice, “or we do not eat at this table.”

  “Well, apparently I’m not eating at this table anyway, so what means that to me?” says Clara.

  “I won’t draw here if my presence causes anyone to go hungry,” begins the Master.

  It’s unclear what will happen next; the room is struck silent. Iris glances from one person to another, and Ruth hides her face in her apron. Clara sits up straight, and she is suddenly no longer a child but a stripling adult, with that creature’s feisty disregard for authority. Her lower lip stops trembling and her eyebrows draw closer together. She seems about to rise from the table and fling something at Margarethe.

  But before she can, a sound from the kitchen causes all heads to turn. Margarethe won’t move, and Iris is too much intrigued by the dynamics of the argument to budge from her bench. So it’s Ruth who makes her cautious trundling step to the doorway of the kitchen to see what has caused the ruckus.

  Pausing, Ruth turns back to the table. A white panic has come up in her face. She trembles and, to everyone’s astonishment, makes a face that they can all read. She grasps her own neck and bulges her eyes out. The gargle of her uneducated throat completes the message. Rebekka is sick, sick or bludgeoned, or fainted, or dead.

  Wind and Tide

  “The imp again!” says Iris—she can’t help herself. But in the commotion no one hears her, and she bites back the urge to repeat it, in case a stoat-toothed devilkin is crouching beneath the hutch or worming through the embers, listening. The fury in Margarethe’s face is interior storm, and over the roof and against the windows, the wind has come up. The house is besieged.

  Margarethe rocks Ruth aside and takes a closer look at Rebekka. “Go for the doctor, Caspar,” she barks. “And you girls, back, out of here. All of you.”

  Caspar is at the door, winding his cloak up against his chin, when there is a sharp rap. He starts, and so do Iris and Ruth, who stand with him in the shadows of the hallway, gossiping and worrying about Rebekka. Caspar moves to open the door slowly, to peer around it and see who might be approaching at this hour. But the wind strikes a blow as he unlatches the hasp, and the door is thrown to with a crash.

  “High wind, it’s all,” gasps Caspar to Ruth, who cowers against the wall as if more spirits are abroad in the dark and galloping their spectral steeds in the noisy air. Branches crack, and out in the nursery it sounds as if a table suddenly turns on its face, or is that more mischief afoot?—and there, at the door, a stocky man in a heavy green cape, one hand raised to pound again.

  “Do you bring this wind with you, sir?” cries Caspar in what even Iris can see is a voice of false courage. But it’s a kindly gesture meant to console Ruth, whose eyes are by now leaking down along her chin, which she holds in her clenched fists.

  “Don’t make small words with me,” growls the stranger. His voice is rough and cracked, as if he’s been shouting himself hoarse in the wind. “Let the scoundrel van den Meer come to hear the news himself, I want to see his face.”

  “This is not the hour,” says Caspar, drawing himself up, offended at the stranger’s tone. “He is taken up with a household crisis.”

  “Get the man or I’ll push you over and call him myself,” says the stranger. Without thinking, Iris puts her hand on Caspar’s shoulder, a quiet apology for the man’s rudeness, and she feels the apprentice shudder.

  That she can make a young man tremble!

  But the young man—her young man—Caspar—is no match for the visitor, who uses his broad chest to heave Caspar to the side as a bull will tumble a pesky hound. “Van den Meer,” caws the visitor, “there’s news from the dunes, and on the street; come and hear it from me before you hear it elsewhere!”

  It’s Clara who appears first—not to meet a stranger—she has been hurrying up the stairs away from the kitchen. At the sound of the stranger’s voice she pauses at the doorway. The man looks at her with interest. Suddenly Iris recognizes him: the kind stranger at the churchyard who chucked Clara’s chin in his hand.

  He drops his head and calls again, “Van den Meer!”

  Clara doesn’t mount the steps into the hall. She turns and goes back into the kitchen, and out the back door into the wind and the night, heading for the nursery, probably.

  Van den Meer drops a bloody rag in the doorway of the kitchen. “Haven’t you gone for the doctor yet, are you mad?” he yells at Caspar. “What are you waiting for, you simpleton?”

  Ruth flinches, as always, when such a word is used.

  Iris says, in a voice she hasn’t previously used to Papa Cornelius, “He is answering the knock on your door. Don’t criticize him for showing courtesy—”

  “Iris,” groans Caspar, “please!” With that, he throws himself into the dark and disappears from view.

  “What fresh discontent is this, then, Nicolaes van Stolk?” says van den Meer.

  “Collect your cloak and draw on stout shoes, if you would watch your fortune grow or collapse before your eyes,” says van Stolk sourly, “for at the same time that a storm wind crosses the sea, tossing whales before it and scattering shoals of herring like flecks of sand from the dunes—indeed, tossing the very dunes themselves in the air, and shaping again that insubstantial margin that keeps Noah’s flood from punishing the speculators—”

  “God has promised not to punish us again with the flood—remember your Scriptures,” says van den Meer harshly. “Pity when He was about the business of drowning useless species, He didn’t include the flowery-tongued gossip among them. Tell me what you have to say, you who love the darkest news. Then take your leave.”

  “You aren’t listening to me,” says van Stolk. “The seas are high and the winds are of gale strength, and most of Haarlem is out on the sands to watch for whales—”

  “What do I care about whales,” says van den Meer heavily. “I have a housegirl with a bloody stomach, and it may be the plague—”

  “The plague,” says Iris, “no!—”

  “—your fellow citizens watch,” says van Stolk, “and they see at last the ship bearing your cargo, making small progress in the storm. The ship, van den Meer. Half of them have invested in your stock as primary investors, or else they have sold their shares for an impressive gain to more grasping souls. Many of your friends and neighbors are among them, who have more to lose by a sunken cargo even than you do. You who gorge on the fat of someone else’s fortune. The least you can do, profiteer, is to join the anxious and keep watch over your wares in the water, and see how the hand of God treats one who prospers on the greed of others . . .”

  “Stop your preaching,” says van den Meer. “I’ll come, because I must, but if you stand near me and prattle, I’ll drown you myself in the first helpful wave.”

  The Master appears at the door from the kitchen to see what the fuss is. “Surely,” he says, “you aren’t going to leave when your kitchen girl is heaving blood—”

  “She’s a new girl,” says van den Meer, “and as Margarethe married me to get a household to manage, this is part of the task. I will not,” he says, and repeats in a stronger voice, “I will not be lectured by two guests, one at either side of my own hall!”

  Van den Meer and van Stolk stumble out into the stormy evening, where, despite the clouds and the rising winds, a little late light is still dragging across the sky. The Master returns to the kitchen, where Margarethe can be heard heating a cauldron of water and calling for the slicing of lemons. Caspar is long gone, and Clara too. But Clara won’t have ventured far. There is no place very far she can go.

  Iris and Ruth look at each other. Ruth doesn’t like it when two kitchen cats claw at each other. She likes it less when her family squabbles. She sits on her haunches, her petticoats and skirts every which way, her face mucky with fretting. Iris catches her breath, one hand out to steady herself against the dark oak chest. “Ruth,” says Iris, “you mustn’t fuss yourself. Everything will turn out all right.
The weather is the hand of God, and so is the course of sickness—”

  “Are you gaggling in there like goose sisters, when I need your help?” calls Margarethe, so the girls go in to help their mother.

  Rebekka is laid on a cloth near the warmth of the fire. Iris can’t help herself: She studies the scene for color. The bright red of the newest coughed blood, the brick brown of older, dryer spatterings, the goldfish scales of the copper kettle, the brown shadows in which the Master works at assembling a poultice of garlic and lemons. The smell is ferocious, and even the cat looks offended and keeps his distance. “Is it the plague, as Papa Cornelius says?” asks Iris.

  “I’m no student of the physic. I’m merely trying to help the woman breathe,” says Margarethe. “Lord preserve us, the plague at last in our own house, to bring us down just when we have survived our trials. I should cart this girl out into the storm and let God take her there, if take her He will!” But she makes no move to follow her own advice, and Iris is sent to hunt for extra blankets in the cupboard upstairs, as Rebekka seems unaccountably chilled, even near the fireplace.

  The kitchen is too frightening for Ruth, and Clara is still missing, so after a while Iris settles Ruth in Clara’s bed and stays by Ruth’s side until she drifts into a fitful sleep. Iris naps too. It’s late in the evening when the doctor is located at last—on the dunes, with other witnesses of the disaster that is inevitable . . . that might be averted . . . Just wait . . .

  The doctor’s arrival wakes Iris. Though she crouches in the stairwell to overhear, she can’t make out his hushed report to Margarethe. But after the doctor leaves, Iris ventures into the kitchen, rubbing her eyes, pretending to be just awakened.

  “Papa Cornelius still frets at the shore, where the storm takes on a greater fury, so the doctor says,” says Margarethe. “I didn’t know how the citizens of this town have taken to these investments. Tulips, yes, the mad passion for strong flowers; but the passion to invest, and to make money on speculation? If this cargo is lost, my girl, we are in another stew; so if the plague takes hold in this household, we might find ourselves well out of this sorry dilemma.”

  “Mama,” says Iris. She yawns. “These are adult things, and I am a child.”

  “You’re less a child than your older sister, and I need some comfort tonight,” says Margarethe. “The Master has gone back to his studio, since there’s nothing else he could do. Prepare me some weak tea, while I keep at this messy work, and Rebekka more or less dies in my lap.”

  “Clara went out to the nursery—has she come back in?” says Iris.

  “That’s her business, or so I am told,” says Margarethe.

  “Mama,” says Iris. “Please. She is only a child—”

  “Find her and mind her yourself,” says Margarethe, “after I have my bowl of tea, to soothe me and keep me alert. Papa Cornelius will not be lectured by his guests, and I will not be lectured by my daughter. I don’t care if Clara catches the plague herself—”

  “Mama!” says Iris.

  “If there’s a fortune to inherit, should the cargo go through,” says Margarethe, “you’d benefit more if Clara had gone to her grave.”

  “Oh, you aren’t thinking rightly!” says Iris. She has no shame but she worries, for her mother has a wild look in her eye. “You rest, Mama, and let me sponge down poor Rebekka. This isn’t like you, you mustn’t say such a thing.”

  “You find Clara, then, and you do the deed of charity,” says Margarethe, “but not until after my tea.” She closes her eyes for a moment and says in a whisper, “Of course I don’t mean such dreadful things, Iris. Of course I don’t.”

  Iris makes the tea as quickly as possible and flees the kitchen sickroom.

  The shed is dark and cold, yet even as it creaks beneath the lashings of wind and rain, there is a smell of spring, of soil and the wet wooden handles of tools.

  Clara is lying beneath a table of tulip bulbs near to flowering. Her eyes are rolled up in her head, and for an instant Iris believes that Clara has succumbed to the plague too. But it’s merely a dreary half sleep, from which Clara starts as she realizes that Iris is approaching. “Who’s there?” cries Clara.

  “It’s only me,” says Iris. “Why are you out here when commotion plagues your family so inside?”

  Clara allows herself to be embraced, and she weeps in Iris’s arms. She doesn’t answer the question. She merely says, in a dull voice, as if to herself and without expectation of an answer from her stepsister, “Oh, whatever is to become of me?”

  The Girl

  of Ashes

  The death of Rebekka is a study in contrasts with the death, just six weeks earlier, of Henrika. Rebekka is bundled up and carted away within the hour, and if there’s a service for the poor thing, or if anyone makes any attempt to inform whatever scrag ends of family she might have back in Friesland, Iris never learns about it. Rebekka leaves the household as quietly and anonymously as she has come. Perhaps the household imp is trapped in Rebekka’s corpse and has been evacuated that way?

  Perhaps. The storm has lifted, and, against all expectations, the ship bearing the precious cargo of tulip bulbs has straggled up the ice-choked but navigable Saarne to the tie-up. The ship didn’t founder, there were no Leviathans washed up on the beach: The next day folks complain that they lost sleep over precious little in the way of disaster. But, Iris is realizing, this is their way of slighting their own anxiety. If the cargo had been ruined, a number of Haarlem investors would have suffered serious losses.

  Van den Meer boasts of how he greeted the captain and escorted him to an inn for a hot rum and a bonus of a small sack of gold coins. A triumphant return! Van den Meer spends more time away from his home than he has before. He lingers at the public house where the college of tulip traders meets. He crows about lining up new investors for another shipment. He appears not to notice that Margarethe is being more strict and proprietary about the household—or, Iris wonders, is that part of what causes him to spend so many hours away?

  As Margarethe spends less time in the kitchen, so she can be parading about the streets of Haarlem in new clothes, Clara takes up the slack by the hearth. She has put off the very young way of clothing herself that Henrika preferred. Clara dresses in plain garb, suitable for a maid. She has decided that she doesn’t mind the chores, she tells Iris and Ruth. In fact, she’d rather learn small tricks of cooking instead of turns of Italian grammar or difficult passages in keyboard exercises. “It is a private place, the kitchen,” she says simply, and by that Iris suspects she means, Now that Margarethe is no longer here.

  Then the Easter season is upon them! At last! The brightening skies, the return of warm weather, the hilarity of children let out of doors, with less binding clothing, with longer legs than they possessed the season before. Iris wants to run with them, to ramble in the fields and meadows, but if Clara is growing into a young woman, so is Iris. The day comes when it’s Iris’s turn to seep and be sore as women do. Ruth lies with her and puts her hands on her stomach for comfort, and Clara stands in the doorway looking queasy. “Could a worse trial be devised?” says Clara, treating Iris like a horrible specimen at a medical demonstration. “I hope such a trouble never comes to me.”

  “Go away,” says Iris, who can’t be kind while her lower regions clutch and ache.

  Things settle down. Caspar arrives with word that the Master expects to see Iris in his studio, ready to learn to draw at the least, and to help out when the learning has made her ready. Iris won’t even ask Margarethe for permission, for she knows what the answer would be. Besides, she’s come to realize that what she feels for Caspar is love, pure and simple—well, now, isn’t she old enough to know what love is?—and she won’t be able to bear being so close to him every day without declaring herself. And she has no courage for that.

  Ruth doesn’t display much interest when she hears her sister and stepsister talking. Ruth has begun to pay more attention to the animals in the household—the cat, the chicken
s, the mice that can be rescued from the cat and kept in a small wire cage until they die. Is it merely that the family is getting older, and there are more diversions? Or does Ruth actually seem to be thriving, perhaps due to Margarethe’s increased absences? Margarethe refuses to hire another girl from off the street to do housework, for fear the plague will come back and gain the foothold that it hasn’t managed to get so far. So Clara does more of the housework, and Iris supervises and mopes and dreams of Caspar, and Ruth keeps to her small animals, and stands straighter and looks with a more secure gaze on the world than she’s been known to do before.

  It’s Clara who, with a somewhat devious expression, finally says to Iris, “You alone are unhappy now. What are you waiting for?”

  “I don’t know what you mean,” says Iris, folding some laundry that’s been airing in the strengthening April light.

  “There’s no reason you shouldn’t go to Master Schoonmaker’s studio and learn a few things about drawing if you like.”

  “What? And leave you to manage the entire household by yourself?” says Iris. “I may not like supervising you in the housework, but I could hardly think of abandoning you here.”

  “Don’t fret,” says Clara. “It brings me nearer to my mother, to do the things that she did. I don’t mind Margarethe out being the pride of Haarlem, making friends and spending money. The house is quieter when she’s gone. I have something of what I want. So why shouldn’t you? Don’t you want to paint?”

  “I do not know if it’s proper for women to paint,” says Iris.

  “It may not be common,” says Clara, “but surely it’s neither impossible nor illegal. Wouldn’t the Master tell you if it were? And why do you worry about propriety, anyway?”

  Iris took a deep breath. “The Master already has a student, Caspar,” she says.

  “What does that matter? Besides, don’t you care for him?” says Clara. Her frankness surprises Iris. “All the more reason to go spend time with him. A chance to get to know him better!”