Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

by Gregory Maguire

“So I’ve heard tell,” says Iris, sighing. “In England the small folk live under the soil and deep in the hedges, and they come out to assist the deserving, to cast spells and to reward the poor.”

  “Clara is beautiful,” admits Caspar, “but deserving?”

  With a firmness that hides her doubt, Iris says, “At least Clara has paid some attention to Ruth, and Clara has seen to her father’s needs. She’s been a friend to me, and she remembers her mother nightly in her prayers. Don’t you think she deserves the hand of the spirit world?”

  “Some small magic,” says Caspar. “Didn’t you tell me once you thought there was an imp in residence? Couldn’t you ask it for help?”

  “Nonsense—the nonsense of my silly youth,” says Iris, blushing. “When I began to look at the world as it is . . . well, the unseen world of my fancy seems less beguiling, even less possible.”

  “As may be, but we’re painters, Iris; we ought to be capable of small magic together.”

  “I should think so!” says Iris. “Didn’t I make Ruth and myself into the Girl-Stag of the Meadow? I can do my own magic! And you as well. At least magic enough to find a gown, a set of shoes, an escort to the door? I can manage to groom Clara, to pinch her cheeks into redness; I can keep an eye on her once we are there. But how shall we get a gown for her?”

  “I can paint a gown, but I can’t sew one,” says Caspar.

  Iris thinks of the Master painting, with loving strokes, the gown worn by the Young Girl with Tulips. To paint such a gown again . . . To magic it up . . .

  In a low voice she says, “I’ve been considering this for some time. Do you remember the jewels that Clara wore for Young Woman with Tulips?”

  “I do. They were precious gems of Henrika’s, diamonds from Antwerp, I think. And some strings of pearls, weren’t there?”

  “And didn’t the Master bring them back to his studio so he could study them for highlights?”

  Caspar cocks his head to one side, shrugs, then nods.

  “I never listed them as among our assets to be sold. Margarethe has assumed that Henrika was buried in them. But I think they could still be at the Master’s studio, slung under some heap of painting rags or some bedding that needs airing. The place is such a mess! If they’re there, if you could find them, could you use them to barter for a suitable gown? At least as collateral on the loan of a gown?”

  “You’re bold!” says Caspar. “It’s a good thing we didn’t let you keep house when you came to draw, or you’d probably have unearthed them. Look, if the jewels are there, I’ll find them. And then? There are ways to do such things. Leave it to me. The Master has access to a number of the wealthier homes in recent weeks. I know maids and stable boys the whole town through. But I need to look at Clara first.”

  “You know what she looks like,” says Iris. “You know her coloring.”

  “I need to look with the eyes of a painter,” he says. “I need to look at her to measure her form, so I can find a gown that will fit her as well as suit her.”

  Iris says, with a heaviness of heart that surprises her, “Well, I hope you’re capable, for here she comes.” Clara comes hurrying into the kitchen.

  “Oh, the silly man is here,” she says.

  “Stand still and let me look at you,” says Caspar.

  “I don’t like to be looked at by painters,” says Clara.

  “I’m looking at you to costume you in gold,” he says. “Don’t think I can’t do it, Clara van den Meer.”

  Her mouth makes a clumsy pout, and her eyes flicker first to him and then to Iris, who shrugs. Clara raises her arms, and the form of her body stands out against the whitewashed walls of the fireplace nook.

  She is so beautiful to look at. Iris finds herself holding her breath as Caspar walks just a little closer. His eyes judge proportions. He holds a hand up quickly to frame relative shapes. He memorizes her form. Caspar isn’t indecent, and he doesn’t approach Clara too closely. When he’s done, he turns and says to them both, “I’ll find you a gold gown by this evening. I’ll take care of that part, you may rest assured. You spend your time worrying your other problems out.”

  They don’t know what to say. He bounds to the door and says again, “I trust you won’t marry the wrong man.” But this time it isn’t clear to which of them he is speaking.

  Tulip and

  Turnips

  Margarethe is back before the sun has reached its midpoint. Her eyes are puffy from the nursewife’s rinsing baths. She’s in a foul temper. She slams the door closed behind her when she comes in. Ruth hides from her mother beneath the stairs, in a nonsense space she has feathered with a spare blanket, old rags, and a few dollys.

  “What I put up with,” rails Margarethe, “what is asked of me! What have I done to deserve indignity after indignity?”

  Iris and Clara exchange glances. Clara ducks her head over the pot, though there’s little in it but water, a knob of butter, a last carrot, a handful of dusty old herbs—and the last of that red pepper.

  Iris draws in her breath, tightens her apron strings, and goes hurrying out into the hall.

  Margarethe is stalking back and forth on the black and white tiles, holding her hands out to keep from hitting the walls. “Here at least I might open my stride, and not fear the laughter and scorn of my neighbors!” she cries, bumping against a chest of drawers and striking it with the flat of her hand. “And is there an argument to be made, then, for the plague to attack the lowly, who don’t deserve to live and thrive? If so, let me make it, and beg for the privilege of buboes and sores.”

  “What are you talking about?” says Iris.

  “Oh, it’s you, my younger daughter,” says Margarethe, turning toward Iris and raising the back of her hand as if to smite her. “The one who schemes and connives behind my back!”

  “I do no such thing!” cries Iris. “What are you about, flapping there like a crow?”

  “Like a blind crow,” admonishes Margarethe, “but not a deaf one. I hear what I hear, even being led through the streets of Haarlem like a pig to the slaughterhouse.”

  “What have you heard?” says Iris.

  “That it was you who first suggested that Luykas Schoonmaker send the painting of Young Woman with Tulips to the exhibition hall at the Pruyn household,” says Margarethe.

  “Is that all? Of course I did. Why not? It’s his best work,” says Iris. “It’s better than the fawning Madonnas and the bleary-eyed angels—”

  “You will undermine every strategy I undertake on your behalf, will you,” Margarethe roars. “Come near to me, girl, so I may strike you as pleases me!”

  “You are not to strike me,” says Iris. “This world is not yours to arrange as you please!”

  “Is it not, is it not,” says Margarethe, turning around and around in the middle of the hall, as if in her rage she can no longer tell where Iris’s voice is coming from. “I’ll say it is not. Everything and everyone stands in my way, I who have nothing but the humblest intentions. Who is it who called me the fisherman’s wife, greedy to be housewife, duchess, queen, empress, and god? A woman wants the smallest things in life—a man to take care of her daughters, food for their mouths, a little bit of security, no more than a shawl and a hunk of bread—and everything that she is seen to do is a scandal, a testament to avarice, an emblem of greed. And the world conspires against her to show her up, to bully her at every corner, to scratch at her with its clawed opinions, until the very breath that she draws is resented.”

  “You will want some tea,” says Iris.

  “I—will—want—something—more—than—tea,” says Margarethe. She advances on Iris and makes to glare at her through her red-rimmed eyes. “I will have my way, though my own flesh and blood sees fit to conspire against me like a two-bit demon from an outlying village of hell. The imps that plague me, the little demons like squirrels that scamper in my path! Your brain should ache, you reprobate, you turncoat, for daring to meddle in things that are beyond you! Have you no idea
what a burden a thankless daughter is?”

  Iris draws herself back into the doorway. Despite her anger, regret makes her timid. “I didn’t mean a thing by it—what is a girl’s foolish opinion to a man like Master Schoonmaker?”

  “You are the greatest fool in the land,” says Margarethe. “I can no longer hope to marry myself to a stronger man than van den Meer—”

  “—not least because you are still married to him,” snaps Iris.

  “—but you, more fool you, have no idea of your own value. You’re to be presented to a minor nobleman, and yet at your own suggestion that painting of a rival beauty is to be hanging in the same house! Have you no sense?”

  “You are clearly deranged,” says Iris. “I am young and stupid—you have kept me such, barely teaching me my letters—and I am going to the ball to gawk at the highborn, nothing more—”

  “No mother, however hard she tries, can convince her children of their own worth,” says Margarethe. “Their children turn to evil sprites around their knees. I’m not going to stand for it. I’m going to go early to the Pruyns’ house and argue that the painting be removed. Clara is the most splendid beauty the town has to offer, and any fool worth his salt would seek her out on the basis of that painting, even if just to see how far from truth the lecherous painter may have strayed. Anyone who sees Clara knows old Schoonmaker hasn’t even been up to the task; she is more amazing than he could capture. You will thwart me at every step, but when it comes to a struggle between mother and daughter, my little one, remember”—she draws near to Iris and grins at her—“mothers have the advantage of knowing not only how and why they behave, but how and why daughters behave as they do. For mothers were all daughters once, but daughters take their time to learn to be mothers . . .”

  Her hand sweeps out and knocks a bowl off the sideboard. Shards scatter. A moan from the space under the stairs: Ruth in distress. “Forgive us our trespasses,” says Margarethe, “and get out of our way.”

  * * *

  There is a bath, and a small amount of powder to apply, and bodices to lace, and skirts to step into, and bonnets to adjust. Clara helps Margarethe first, who calls in a hoarse voice for the hired carriage to approach the front of the house. She’ll send it back for Iris and Ruth in an hour or two. She leaves, cursing and braying and twitching, without the aid of an assistant. “What I need to do I can see well enough for,” she mutters. The whiff of approbation dissipates only slowly upon her departure.

  “She is a witch,” says Iris, but it isn’t as if that is what she truly thinks—it’s merely a notion to venture upon the air, and to consider how such a sentence sounds. Does speaking a dubious thing make it more true? How shallow the words are, really—She is a witch. One might as well say, She is a mother, thinks Iris; that about covers the same terrain, doesn’t it?

  It’s late afternoon by the time Caspar returns. He carries a dark cloth over his arm, a long cape of some sort, but in the slanting light of the dining hall he opens it gently. Inside is laid a dress of such sumptuousness that Iris, Ruth, and Clara all gasp.

  “It isn’t a gown,” says Iris, “it’s a waterfall of golden coins!”

  “Fool! I can’t wear such a thing and hope to hide my face!” says Clara. “I want a cloak of invisibility, and you’ve brought me a fountain of light!”

  “Mmmm,” murmurs Ruth, and strokes the thing as if it is a huge sleeping cat.

  Caspar’s face is pinched with pleasure. “You don’t expect me to be denied on such a matter,” he says. “I haven’t spent the day going hither and yon, striking my own bargains, paying such prices as needed to be paid, in order to procure this for you just to have you deem it too fantastic to wear! I’ll warrant you can slip into it in a moment. Try it on, anyway, and see. Look, the ruff that I chose—it will show off your chin and your subtle cheek the way a gilded frame displays a masterpiece.”

  Iris sees his delight, sees how his eye fall on Clara. Iris becomes no more than the cast-off brown cloak that has slipped to the floor, a puddle of shadow, a shade. “Try it on,” Iris mutters. She doesn’t mean to speak so softly. She has to say it again, and raises her voice above a whisper. “Go on, Clara; at least give us that much new to consider.”

  “I’ll step out of the room. You make the adjustments you need to,” says Caspar. He’s nearly cutting capers with satisfaction. “Now, for the first time, I wish I had pestered the Master to secure an invitation to the ball for me! I can’t bear to think what the expressions will be. Maybe I’ll dig up a dignified garb of my own and sidle in.”

  “Go on,” says Iris, “play the role. You’ve gone this far, Clara. You owe him this at least.”

  He prances out. Clara rolls her eyes and says, “This is becoming a terrible mistake. I will not heap attention on myself. Even Caspar, who I thought would understand, will turn me into a plaything for the eyes.”

  “He’s an artist, what do you expect?” says Iris crossly. “Go scrub your hands so you don’t soil the thing when we get it over your head.”

  “You are vexed,” says Clara.

  “I am bewildered by what we’re doing,” says Iris.

  “No,” says Clara, “you’re vexed. You don’t like the way Caspar looks at me.”

  There’s nothing for Iris to say. She goes and strokes Ruth’s chin, and thinks back to the times when she had only had one sibling, and an ugly, silent one at that. For a moment she wishes that time could come again.

  A look of love and devotion blooms in Ruth’s eyes as Clara begins to transform herself from the maid of ashes to a golden lady. There, like a revelation, come Clara’s pink cheeks, emerging from under soapy scrubbing. There are the lithesome limbs, the limbs of a young woman already, though they have so often seemed to be the hardy pegs of a girl. Clara’s head turns, and though her eyes are doleful, the light in them is real and urgent. Of course Ruth has to smile. It’s a sisterly smile. She does better at this than I do, thinks Iris, and out of guilt she hurries to Clara’s side, to help her struggle into the remarkable gown.

  “I won’t wear a ruff,” says Clara. “Cast it aside. I’ll drape my head with lace in the Spanish way, and let them think me a spy from Castile or Aragon if they must. I can’t put my head forward like a haunch of venison on a platter, to be admired and devoured. I’ll hide myself in folds of closely worked lace.”

  Clara turns in the light from the window. The waist comes cinching in as if it has been sculpted exactly for her. The simple collar, designed with the expectation of a ruff to conceal it, falls open in a fashion just this side of censurable. The skirt is full and cascades to the floor in a sequence of stripes: gold, bronze, black, with a coppery red braid trained upon the seams of each panel.

  “There isn’t the draftsman in Holland who could capture you,” murmurs Iris.

  “Nobody will capture me,” says Clara defiantly.

  “I have caught you,” says Iris suddenly, and taps where her heart stands pounding in her chest. “It’s just that, looking at your loveliness, the tears in my eyes confuse my memory, and I won’t be able to hold you. But for now I have caught you.”

  Her voice breaks.

  “Don’t be ashamed,” says Clara. “And don’t be alarmed. I won’t take Caspar from you.”

  “Caspar isn’t mine,” says Iris boldly. “He is the Master’s, as I understand it.”

  Clara raises an eyebrow. Iris doesn’t explain what she has heard from Margarethe. Before Clara can ask, Ruth is suddenly on her knees before the chest, rummaging through folds of linen. She gives a grunt of satisfaction and withdraws from the chest the pair of white kid slippers that Margarethe has forsaken.

  “They’ll never fit me,” says Clara. But she draws them on, and they fit like a dream.

  She turns and drapes a black veil over her head. She tugs the folds to close upon her face. In the early evening spring light, the shoes glow, looking like glass, as if the pure white skin of her feet are shining through.

  White shoes, golden gown, black
lace veil, and the perfect features of Clara even more stunning behind the veil than revealed. Though by now Iris knows better than to say so, for the veil is the device that makes Clara capable of moving from the house and out to the Pruyn family home, in which the festivities will soon begin.

  “You look serene, and distant, and mysterious,” says Iris. “You make us look like a couple of turnips, but that is no different. We are turnips and you are a tulip.”

  “I’m not recognizable as Clara van den Meer?” she says.

  “Those who’ve seen you most recently know you as Cinderella,” says Iris. “But you’re not Cinderella, and you aren’t even Clara van den Meer. You are Clarissa de Beaumont, I say.”

  “De Beaumont is not a Spanish name. I am Clarissa Santiago. Clarissa Santiago of Aragon.”

  She stands, she spins. Clarissa Santiago in her dark veil. It’s the first time Iris has ever seen her stepsister look, for just a moment, as if she doesn’t mind being beautiful.

  “May I see?” calls Caspar from the hall. “Are you decent?”

  They don’t answer him directly. Everything about this moment hovers, trembles, all their sweet, unreasonable hopes on view before anything has had the chance to go wrong. A stepsister spins on black and white tiles, in glass slippers and a gold gown, and two stepsisters watch with unrelieved admiration. The light pours in, strengthening in its golden hue as the sun sinks and the evening approaches. Clara is as otherworldly as the Donkeywoman, the Girl-Boy. Extreme beauty is an affliction . . .

  5

  THE BALL

  The Medici Ball

  The great evening arrives at last.

  The girls at the door of the house, caught in a sweep of updraft that makes an airy rustle of silks. Ruth is panting with panic even before she has settled herself in the carriage, and she keeps ducking her face into her hands and sniffling. “Courage, and if not courage, then good manners, Ruth!” says Iris sharply. But she doesn’t know the manners for riding in a carriage herself, let alone the directions. She’s glad that the driver has already made several excursions to the opulent estate of the Pruyn family, where the ball is about to be under way.