Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

by Gregory Maguire

  Iris also manages to observe Caspar, who is grinning at her whenever their eyes meet. She’s not entirely sure what their campaign is all about, but at least they’re working at it together. She remembers his remark, perhaps to Clara—“I trust you won’t marry the wrong man.” What man is that? Has he possibly meant himself? But if Margarethe is to be believed, he isn’t interesting in marrying any woman. So why is he even dancing with Iris? Because she’s so ordinary-looking that she’s more like a plain boy than anything else?

  How hateful the thoughts that can spring in her heart, even in a room of candlelight, music, and dancing! Iris can’t even glance at Caspar now, not so much out of anger or remorse but out of a shame at her own hot jealousy.

  She thinks instead of Clara, sequestered in a side room with the visiting Prince Philippe de Marsillac. And Iris is flustered. She feels the surprise and delight at Clara’s competence—Henrika, bless her, had done a great deal for her daughter, even while keeping her in seclusion like a hothouse flower! But Iris also feels a pang of something else, for she hadn’t expected either to meet the Prince or to like him. Does she really enjoy his company, or was it the speaking in English, or just talking about painting, or the sudden strain of homesickness that lurched up in her when he mentioned the fens?

  The flooded fens, the dead man floating, unburied, unshriven . . .

  The cries in the night, the knocks on the door, the words in the dark . . .

  Fleeing by flatboat on black glassy fields, Margarethe hooded and faceless in the moonlight . . .

  She can’t, she can’t. She won’t allow those memories. She thinks with sudden fury at Clara. What a change! Clara’s much vaunted shyness hasn’t kept her from being led to the Prince, or kept her from addressing the Dowager Queen with cleverness and courtesy. And then Clara disappears like a courtesan behind pretty doors painted in white and picked out in gold.

  I have been duped, thinks Iris. Indeed, I stumbled upon a small chance at happiness, and in a single evening I set my own trap for myself and caught myself there. Who could have guessed the Prince might find me amusing? But Clara is capable of charity toward no one but herself, as always was the case.

  The music doesn’t end a moment too soon. Iris tears away from the hand of Caspar and loses herself in a throng of laughing neighbors. Let Caspar handle van Stolk as he will. Iris never thought she would even talk to the Prince, but she had, and he had liked her—liked her!—and she is losing the Prince, just as she is losing Caspar, to the prettiest girl in Holland.

  She says to herself, Oh, beware, that Margarethe herself should rise in your breast! And suddenly the absence of her mother all this while seems more than peculiar—it is unsettling.

  She sees that the Master is still tending to Ruth. So that is all right. With boldness Iris mounts the stairs to the gallery, and asks a maiden where she might find Margarethe, who is resting her eyes. The maid tells her that Margarethe had indeed tumbled into a deep sleep, troubled by twitches and fits. But she has just awoken and has wandered down the servants’ staircase—at the end of this corridor—to look in at the exhibition hall, though none were to go in until the visiting Queen Mother of France flung open the main doors and entered the room.

  Iris explains that her mother is illish and needs minding, so she will follow down the back stairs and take her mother safely where she belongs.

  The exhibition hall is narrow but long, and the long opposite walls are punctured on each side by three high windows hung with velvet. There are candles fixed in sconces at intervals, but they’re not lit yet, so most of the paintings—on walls and on easels, and a few propped up on low tables—are merely patches of blurry shadow. But toward the end at the right, one painting gleams in a spot of amber light.

  There is Margarethe, standing before the painting of Young Woman with Tulips, holding a candle up to it, peering through bleary eyes.

  “Are you trying to set the thing on fire?” asks Iris.

  Margarethe turns. “Oh, it’s the Queen of France herself,” she says huffily.

  “Mama,” says Iris. “What are you doing?”

  “I am looking to understand what is the truth of this painting,” says Margarethe. “Can it be that my eyes have become so crusty with the ugliness they have been exposed to that I don’t know how to appreciate the beauty that everyone tells me is here?”

  “Do you mean that honestly?” says Iris.

  “I don’t know what could be wonderful about this painting,” says Margarethe.

  “You’ve taken against Clara, so how could you love her portrait?” says Iris.

  “You don’t understand what I mean, says her mother. “I’m trying to tell you. What perturbs me, in the few quiet moments I have when not worrying about feeding myself and my ugly daughters, is that life has wrung from me any ability to respond to the beauty of the world. I’m not sure I ever had the ability in the first place, even as a child. Whether it be Young Woman with Tulips,” she goes on, holding her hand up high, “or this portrait of a burgher, or that study of a sleeping housemaid, or, for that matter, the moon that spills its cold light on this floor. I derive no pleasure from any of these effects. I look on them coldly and without interest. Is it my eyes, I wonder, or is it my soul that is bruised?”

  “Mama,” says Iris.

  “Doesn’t it occur to you sometimes to kill yourself?” says Margarethe. “If you have lost the ability to respond to what makes other people giddy and silly, are you the stronger for it or the weaker? I could for many months, even years, draw up my spine because life was against me, and I refused to be beaten by it. But what is the point, if the very daughters one is working to protect are up in arms against me, and the very husband one has struggled to marry has become a blithering idiot? The world rocks on around me, and the noise of it is louder as the sight of it deteriorates. And I see minor demons in the corners of the room.”

  “Mama,” says Iris. “We are not up in arms against you—”

  “And here,” says Margarethe, turning back to the painting, “here is the foolish Clara, and any Dowager Queen who sees this bundle of physical splendor will ask about the model. We’ll have emissaries of mad Prince Philippe at the door within the week, to invite her to come and bed the Prince before he dies of consumption or whatever it is he has—”

  “What nonsense is that?” says Iris.

  “Do you really think that such a highborn fop needs to go trawling for brides among the daughters of Holland merchants?” says Margarethe. “For all your love of how things look, are you really so blind that you never think? There isn’t a woman of his rank who would marry the man, however pretty his brow or however satisfying his technique in the bedroom! The Dowager Queen is playing a game with the likes of us desperate souls, knowing she can dangle a certain amount of wealth and privilege to get a bride capable of bearing a child before the poor dim prince falls off his rotten legs and expires! Having a husband predecease you isn’t such a bad thing, Iris, assuming he is well stationed to keep you provided for—”

  . . . Jack Fisher wasn’t a poor man, exactly, and the family had their cottage, but still they had to flee . . .

  “—and a prince of de Marsillac’s rank who has the sense to die an early death might be the most glorious marriage a headstrong, resourceless maiden could hope for!” Margarethe grins.

  “You are truly mad,” says Iris. “You are lying. No one would be so callous.”

  “Look at me,” says Margarethe, holding the candle up in front of her face, “and paint what you see here, my dear. As the mother, so the world. Alas.”

  “You are here to burn the painting,” says Iris, “and you are standing here getting up the courage to do it. Give me that candle. I’ve done what you told me to do. I have talked to the Prince. He is not mad. We even talked about England. I even liked him. It’s you who are mad, making stories of such crabbed scheming. Get away from that painting. Give me the candle, I say.”

  “He is a handsome enough thing, I ag
ree,” says Margarethe. With a sigh she hands the candle to her daughter. “It would be hard to do better, my dear. You could bear his child and take care of your baby, your bruised sister, your mother, your addled stepfather, even your reclusive stepsister. You could do all of this. I give you the light. You see with it as best you can.”

  Walking away from the painting, Margarethe says, “I stood and looked at it for as long as I could stand it. I can know nothing of it at all. Is it my eyes or my soul that is bruised, I ask you again? I would murder the girl if it would do us any good. I would murder myself for the same reasons. I am too tired of this difficult life. And the damn writhing goblins under my feet at every step!”

  Midnight

  So the clock tolls on, toward the hour in which the Dowager Queen of France will examine the work of Haarlem’s best artists, and maybe select the man to memorialize her on her deathbed.

  Iris has snuffed the candle out and left it on a side table just inside the doors to the salon. Then she has followed her mother out into the ballroom.

  In a side room with doors left slightly ajar, the Dowager Queen has ensconced herself with the Pruyns. She chatters in a desultory way and picks at a plate of nut meats.

  Nicolaes van Stolk is gone, and Caspar seems to have disappeared too.

  Of the room in which the Prince has repaired with Clara, the doors stay closed, except for once, when a footman approaches with a tray bearing two crystal glasses and a decanter of something golden. Iris isn’t able to see over the shoulders of the people who peer in, but it’s only moments before she hears the remark that the Prince has removed one of the maiden’s white slippers. He has been seen on his knees before her, caressing the pretty ankle that has suffered from twisting. News of such indecency thrills the Haarlem townspeople, since the maiden guilty of such license isn’t a local maiden and so can’t impugn their celebrated Haarlem morals.

  Iris goes looking for the Master and Ruth. They’re sitting outside in the warm air, watching the stars.

  “I found Mama, if you believe it,” says Iris. “She was staring at Young Woman with Tulips by candlelight.”

  “I hope she sets it on fire,” says the Master. “Though there are storks’ nests on the roof here to protect against lightning, arson, and the random baking accident, so I suppose fire wouldn’t take.”

  Ruth’s mouth drops open in alarm, and spit spills off her rotund lower lip. Iris snaps, “Stop saying that, you annoy me! You don’t want the painting destroyed!”

  “Maybe I do. Ah, who knows what we want? We’re all mysteries, even to ourselves. You grow to learn that, my girl. You do. You will.”

  And Iris feels she has learned this, the mystery is in herself. The imp of the episode is herself. After all, it was she who urged Clara to break out of her prison and come to the ball, so to entice the Prince and save the family, whether she admitted as much to Clara or not. It was she who served as the well-intentioned agent of hope. And now it is she who is punished, as much by self-knowledge as by the loss of the Prince.

  “What do you want, my dear? I noticed your friendly conversation with our guest of honor. You were all set to be the most roundly cursed girl in Haarlem until the stranger from Aragon came in the room. Now she seems to have captured the prize. I hope you aren’t too disappointed, Iris.”

  “Disappointed?” Iris had hoped it didn’t show.

  “Are you disappointed?”

  “He was modestly amusing,” she says, shrugging.

  “Look at how everyone is still eyeing you.”

  “Surely not!” She’s horrified.

  “Why so surely not?” he replies. “Look what they see. The girl most unlikely to interest anyone, being only part Dutch, and only recently arrived in this tight, smug little city. Yet you hold your chin up high, you answer him in a language few of your neighbors can understand. You are mysterious and alluring. Besides, you do what few other young women have done: You’re an occasional apprentice to the painter who may be the last portraitist of Marie de Medici, Dowager Queen of France. Are you still so young that you can’t see you have some cachet of your own?”

  “I with my nose like a spring carrot, I with my arms like awls, my bosom small and indistinct—”

  “You, you, you,” he says, “aren’t only what you look like. Aren’t you enough of a painter yet to realize that? Even Caspar seems taken by you.”

  “Oh, Caspar,” she says dismissively. “Who can know about him!”

  “What’s to know about him?” says the Master sharply.

  Iris feels beside herself—she feels irate—she feels to be her mother’s daughter. “It’s said he has no eye for girls, for one thing,” she states, her words running together.

  “Who publishes such nonsense about my Caspar?” says the Master. “That would make me into an even more interesting scoundrel than truth allows.”

  “Who cares who says it, it’s common knowledge,” says Iris.

  “Not common to me, and the lad has lived in my house these several years,” says the Master, “and boy’s blood being what it is, I doubt I would have overlooked such a matter. Now answer me. Who tells you such tales?”

  Iris mutters, “Margarethe, for one.”

  “Margarethe, and Margarethe alone, I’ll warrant,” says the Master, and on reflection, Iris has to admit that this is true.

  “So you’ve been falling in love with Caspar?” asks the Master. “I should have seen it. And our ever scheming Margarethe wouldn’t consider such a match in your best interests, since Caspar is only a poor boy, an apprentice painter, dingier than dung. Do you think she wants you attached to someone with such dismal prospects? Isn’t that a good enough reason for her to spread scandal and rumor about a boy too innocent to defend himself?”

  “You are a painter,” says Iris, oddly furious at him. “You don’t know how to see how things are, only how they look.”

  “And is it true you’re angry at him for admiring the beauty of the blond-haired maiden of Aragon?” says the Master. He bobs his chin at her and his ginger beard bobs too. “Think things through, Iris. If you really believe him to be interested in boys, why should it bother you that he, like everyone else in the room, followed the mysterious beauty with his eyes? Is that why you flung yourself away from him at the end of the dance? He chased after you and couldn’t find you again. He’s left in dismay and, I might add, no small amount of disappointment in you. He’s afraid he has lost you to the Prince.”

  “He hasn’t lost me, for he never had me,” says Iris. “Besides, the Prince seems bewitched by Clarissa, as you say.”

  “Ah, Clarissa, is that her name?” says the Master. He looks at Iris. “Clarissa, the blond-haired stepsister of Iris van den Meer?”

  Ruth, sitting nearby, claps her hands over her mouth, which gives the whole thing away. “You fool, Ruth,” cries Iris. “Now, not a word, Master Schoonmaker, or all will go poorly with you!”

  Ruth is dismayed by the rebuke, and gets up and wanders away. For once Iris doesn’t follow her to mind her. Let her mind herself.

  “Who would I tell, and why?” he says. “It’ll come out sooner or later. How the townspeople will gossip, though, when they realize it was your own stepsister who attracted the handsome Prince Philippe de Marsillac just when he had begun to focus on you.”

  “Did I ever tell that I hate you?” she says. “For all your splendor of realizing things in paint and canvas, you are a cold man. You only want to see and to capture, and you pay no attention to making anything better for anyone. Margarethe is right: You chase the wrong beauty. I found that I had some chance of interesting that Prince in myself, and you laugh at me and mock me for it.”

  “You have some chance of interesting Caspar the painter’s apprentice, and you pay no attention to that,” says the Master. “I won’t be accused by you, Iris. You’re too young for your criticisms to sting. Let the story happen the way it will. “

  “I don’t know what will happen; stories don’t tell you how t
hings will turn, really,” says Iris. “Paintings and stories are different. Paintings are steady, unchangeable; stories convulse and twist in their revelations.”

  “We never know what’s about to happen. Maybe the Prince truly will be smitten with love for Clara, your own Cinderella!—and maybe the Dowager Queen this very evening will see the painting of Young Woman with Tulips and choose me to do the most significant work of my career. If I can bring myself to paint something better than Young Woman with Tulips, I will do a work worthy of the ages. Steady, unchangeable, and perfect. I should be able to die a happy man.”

  “The painting of Clara stands in your way,” says Iris. “You won’t be able to paint better than it.”

  “Now you’re being even more cruel than usual,” says the Master complacently.

  “Than usual?” she says.

  “You’re your mother’s daughter, I say,” he goes on, “though you try vainly and remarkably and honorably to escape it.”

  “There’s no escaping that,” says Iris.

  “There’s no escaping the torment of having painted Young Woman with Tulips, and having it dog me for the rest of my life,” says the Master. “But still, we must try.”

  Iris rises to her feet and turns away. “I am not cruel,” she says.

  “And I,” he replies, “am not blind.”

  * * *

  The clocks of the hall strike the third quarter of the eleventh hour. The food tables have been descended upon. The wreckage looks like the sacking of Rome. Marie de Medici seems almost to have fallen into a sleep, and the puzzled guests are unsure: Is it more polite to leave quietly, or are they expected to stay until she awakes and can bid them good-bye? The hardworking merchants aren’t accustomed to keeping such late hours, and more than one droopy-lidded wife tugs on the coat of her husband to beg for home and bed. But this evening will never come again, and most families have brought unmarried daughters or nieces in tow. No one wants to leave without seeing the spectacle to its end.