Besides, the Prince and the mysterious maiden from Aragon have never emerged from the private salon. There are rumors that a hidden staircase must lead to a bedchamber upstairs. What the French get up to! The scandal is more delicious than the food.
Therefore it’s something of a relief when the Dowager Queen rouses herself from her catnap and requires to be lifted to her feet. The orchestra lurches into a sarabande, but the Dowager Queen frowns and the first violinist cuts off the music with a chop of his hand. Marie de Medici steadies herself by holding onto the back of a chair, and she lifts her rotund chins and speaks in a Dutch tinged affectingly with a French accent.
“My godchild and I are in your debt,” she says, “for the hospitality of Haarlem, in the form of the Pruyn family, is worthy of note. The affairs of state and the affairs of the sanctuary and the affairs of the heart, I believe, are all related. You have given me much to brood about in my dotage. But now I am an old woman and I should repair to my chambers, to pray and sleep, passing first before the paintings assembled in the long hall adjacent. Don’t bother me with farewells; let me say au revoir to you all and thank you for coming. I won’t soon forget this night.”
The guests nod their heads slightly, and the young women standing nearest the Dowager Queen have the presence to curtsey. She pays them no mind, but turns and heavily walks the length of the hall. She entered the room with Philippe de Marsillac, but she is leaving it on the arms of Heer and Dame Pruyn. The implication is lost on no one, and feeling runs high. Surely the Prince should reappear and escort his famous godmother through the gallery? Is all the fuss this evening for nothing, that a veiled maiden should arrive and sweep the eligible gentleman right out from under their noses?
But before the surprise can develop into murmurings of disapproval, the doors to the gallery are thrown open. The Dowager Queen stands still, suddenly looking a bit more awake, and it is her voice that says the word in their minds: “Smoke.”
At once the room descends into chaos. Many of the men surge forward around and past the Queen Mother, to force themselves through the doorway and assess the problem; the women fall back, some of them hurrying out into the night, forgoing their cloaks and shawls. Iris looks about and, through the crowd, sees Ruth lurking massively against a pilaster, biting her fingernails. Iris races up to her sister and says, “Come, Ruth, don’t dawdle now. Move those clumsy feet.”
Ruth moans the sound that, in recent months, has come to mean Mama. She repeats it urgently: Mama!
“She’ll be outside, for sure; she’ll have gone home,” says Iris, making things up, “we aren’t to worry about her. Quickly! If there’s fire and it catches on the timbers of the ceiling or the floorboards, this could be an inferno in minutes. The oils themselves in the paints will flare—”
Mama, says Ruth, and then the sound that means Clara!
Iris slaps her hand and says roughly, “Even now, hush! Now hush!”
But Ruth bolts across the ballroom floor to the closed doors of the small salon. The servant who has been guarding the door has left to help with a bucket brigade setting itself up. Ruth doesn’t wait for an answer; she puts her broad shoulder against the door, and she pushes. By the time Iris has reached Ruth’s side, the older sister has forced the lock and splintered the door’s frame, and flung the door open.
“No!” says Iris.
The Prince is standing there, looking somewhat rumpled and glazed, but he takes the measure of the situation at once. He glances from Ruth to Iris and back again, beyond them into the broad chamber, sees the panicking guests crowding, hunting for family members, reclaiming their wraps, calling advice. The Prince darts across the room to the side of his aunt. The Queen Mother has fallen back into a chair and is being fanned by Dame Pruyn, who is rather hopelessly shrieking, “Madame! Madame Marie!”
“Just what I need. The Dowager Queen will expire tonight before I can do her death portrait,” says the Master, suddenly at Iris’s side. “Come, get out of here while you can, girls.”
Clara appears at the door, fixing her veil in careful drapes over her face, and looking this way and that. “Get on, get on, get out of here, all of you,” says the Master. “How can they save the paintings when there’s all of you people to worry about first?” He shoos them toward the door, but Clara seems reluctant to get caught in the press of guests. She turns and disappears back in the small salon. Ruth moans in worry and follows her, and Iris, cursing, does the same. They are in time to see the edge of Clara’s golden skirts disappearing over the ledge of a windowsill.
“She’s gone out through the garden,” says Iris. “Now shall we follow her?”
There seems little else to do. The Master has turned and joined the other men pushing into the long corridor. Anti-phonies of alarm and instruction. The smell of fire is rich, rancid, and already the sound of the roar is louder than the music had been.
At the end of the garden an iron gate leads to the front courtyard and the carriage drive. There Iris and Ruth join the other guests of the party, a safe distance from the Pruyn manor house. Sleek greyhounds leap and tumble and snap at each other’s heels, and the horses hitched to carriages are skittish and need removing from the courtyard at once. Margarethe van den Meer is wandering about on the edge of the crowd, stumbling over herself, pawing in the shadows, calling for Ruth and Iris. The strengthening orange glow of the flames—already beginning to devour the roofline of the wing—illuminates the men carrying paintings out through the broad windows.
Suddenly Caspar is at their side. “The Master’s work?” he says. “Young Woman with Tulips?”
“Where did you go?” says Iris, clutching his sleeve.
“I suspect the painting is gone,” murmured Margarethe, looking into the shadows. “I suspect it is.”
Ruth bursts into tears, as if they have just said that Clara herself had disappeared for once and for all.
“A most unholy night,” says Caspar. His face is tight, his eyes unreadable. He hurries to learn the worst of it, and to help where he can.
Without speaking, Margarethe and her daughters begin to walk along the drive, looking for their carriage to take them back to Haarlem. Iris and Ruth keep to either side of their mother, and link their arms with hers so she will not stumble. For the first time in a long while, Iris feels the imp again, nearer than ever. But now she knows she doesn’t need to peer in the hedges. Perhaps—behind a tumble of branches and tossing leaves—she might see the Queen of the Hairy-Chinned Gypsies. Or it might just be a shrub shaking in laughter at how human lives are so easily ruined.
Any imp to be found is nestled snug in the pocket of her heart.
And it’s a cold place, the world, especially when warmed by arson.
A Most
Unholy Night
Iris can’t help but imagine the sound of the fire as she tries to sleep. The Pruyn estate is miles out of Haarlem. But Iris is caught by the hissing and crackling sounds that come from the embers in the kitchen hearth; in her head such noise turns into the ruin of artwork and houses. Beside her, Ruth moans, dreamy woes and maybe gas pains from all that rich food.
And Clara hasn’t returned at all, though Margarethe, mercifully, never thinks to look in on the girl in her nest of blankets by the hearth.
Where can she have gone, a panicked girl-child in a gown suitable for wearing at any court in Europe? All those miles outside of town? And abroad, on her own, she who hardly knows where the end of the street goes? Several times Iris racks herself up on her elbows, out of dreams, because she thinks she hears a latch rattle, a floorboard creak. But always it is nothing, and down into her moiling anxieties she sinks, again and again.
Finally she falls into a sort of waking dream, a drumbled dream that unfolds even while she can feel the frame of the cold kitchen around her. The long, flat water, the moony night, Ruth in shudders, Iris staunchly poling the flatboat, and Margarethe with a dark shawl over her head . . . And the echo of the accusations the villagers were making as
they pounded on the door. Witch, they called, Witch.
Witch!
Iris starts up again, and she realizes that she has been stirred by a real sound, not just by dream panic. She hears a footstep in the hall, the rustle of cloth.
“Clara!” she hisses, and she thrusts a poker into the hearth to stir up the fire so that the girl can see her way.
The brightening light reveals Clara entering the house in her gown, ruined beyond repair, and Margarethe approaching from the hall opposite, in nightdress and shawl, rubbing her bad eyes and peering in a sleepwalker’s stupor.
Iris thinks for a moment it’s merely another gust of dream. If she treats it gently, it might transform itself into something milder than it threatens. “Come to bed, sister,” she murmurs to Clara, whose face, she now sees, is raw with weeping.
“I am a ghost in my own household,” mumbles Margarethe. “Who is this who hovers here? Some tenant who buys the property when we sell it to pay our debts, and we repair to the poorhouse to die? Is this years on? Who are you, in your golden raiment, dripping rainwater onto the clean floor?”
“Mama,” says Iris, now sitting bolt upright. Might this yet be salvaged? “It’s a dream. You’re only having a dream. Come back to bed.”
“Could it be Clara?” says Margarethe, but her voice is dim and faltering, as if she thinks it might indeed be a dream. “Clara turned into an angel? Or is it Henrika? Come to plague me for my sins?”
“Henrika, then,” says Iris, moving forward, as if Margarethe is a wild beast to be caught . . . the fox in the trap . . .
“Henrika come back from the grave, to assail me with tales of my wrongdoings, is that it?” says Margarethe. Her eyes are squinting against what little light there is. “Or is it the sad and beautiful daughter left behind, who is out to ruin our lives?”
“Let me be,” says Clara, “let me out of these terrible clothes, let me back to my ashes where I belong—”
“But the clothes are as angel garb,” says Margarethe, and only then does Iris realize that Margarethe, probably alone of all the guests at the Medici ball, didn’t see the arrival or departure of Clarissa Santiago of Aragon. Margarethe mutters, “So Henrika returns to the scene of her murder, to accuse a poor housemistress of poisoning her, but why should she complain? Look at the vale of tears I released her from! I have sprung her from her trap, I have taken on her burdens, a little spoonful of the right strength of the right tincture at the right time, and her indenture to this mortal struggle is paid, and her shackles unlocked! If she has come to accuse me, let her agree to exchange places with me! For if her lodgings are now in hell, she’s put herself there by her own actions, and if mine are to be the same, let me drop there at the earliest opportunity and claim a comfortable place among the ashes and cinders of that hearth of Lucifer! There are enough of his minions pestering me at my heels and in my eyes already.”
Iris says, “Mama, you ramble in your sleep, you mustn’t say such things—”
“Is it the day of fire and brimstone? It’s the day that rains glowing coals. I saw the face of Young Woman with Tulips wreathed in flames!” cries Margarethe, not so much with triumph but with terror. “Henrika, I assisted you to your grave, but I didn’t consign your daughter to the flames. Another hand than mine burned that beauty.”
“I am not Henrika,” says Clara, shaking loose her mantilla. It drops, a fringey heap of wet lace. She struggles with the buttons on her gown and snarls at Iris, “Are you going to help me, or do I need to sleep standing up tonight?”
“This can’t be Clara, she disappeared in flames,” says Margarethe.
“She escaped for one night,” says Clara. “She left her place at the hearth, and look where it brought her! My parents were right to train me close to home, for that is all I am suited for!” Iris is at her side then, working at the buttons, kissing Clara’s wet neck, soothing her, before more is said than can ever be taken back.
“Clara did not break my wishes and escape to the ball?” says Margarethe. “It can’t be possible.”
“Clara went to look at the world once more, and once more she pays the price,” says Clara coldly.
“It seems to be the girl herself, emerging with damp limbs from a dress of impossible splendor,” says Margarethe. She is crooning to herself as if drifting on an opiated dream. Soon Ruth will awaken and be terrified at the sound of Margarethe’s unmusical humming. “Where could you get such a dress, I wonder?
“I prayed to the spirit of my dead mother,” says Clara, “and she came out of the linden tree in the form of a green finch, and dropped the parcel down.”
“To avenge me,” says Margarethe, eyes closed. “A green finch. A bird with the face of a woman. In the practice of distributing herring, I should have been more generous to the cats.”
Clara steps out of the gown, which crumples into a sodden mass. With a sudden shriek she bundles it up and throws it into the hearth, but instead of burning, it douses what is left of the fire. The room falls into blackness.
“And how could a Cindergirl make her way to such a ball?” asks Margarethe with tempered syllables.
“The spirit of my dead mother told me collect a pumpkin from the garden, and with the magic that comes from beyond the grave, she changed it into a coach,” says Clara.
“It’s a capable spirit that can coach an autumn pumpkin from a garden not yet planted with spring seeds,” says Margarethe. “And I suppose she made coachmen out of the rats that gnaw the last of our tulip bulbs?”
Clara doesn’t answer. She stands with one white slipper and a disarrayed rumple of undergarments. “You have lost a shoe,” says Margarethe, “and I see the track of red in your smalls. It is not a smear of oil paint, I believe.”
Clara kicks off the remaining shoe. “There are some walls that, once broken, can never be rebuilt,” says Margarethe. “A glass slipper, once shattered, can’t be resoled. A mother once poisoned can’t be revived. The chalice of virginity, once emptied, can’t be refilled. Ah, to cage a finch in a linden tree, and twist its wings off, even if the human face on it continues to shriek!”
Iris finds she is biting her knuckles. She can’t be hearing this. The shrieked accusations of her mother’s being a witch are so close to true. In the shadows Iris reaches a hand back to the wall to steady herself.
“I am nothing,” says Clara, as if talking to herself. “Leave me alone.” She removes the last of her clothes and stands shivering in the dark, naked as a child, but no longer a child. “I don’t want to be touched, nor held, nor scolded, nor remembered. I just want the ashes to hide me. I want nothing of princes and public, I want nothing of household and hearth. Leave me alone. Let me perish with some dignity.”
“She is already perished,” says Margarethe, turning from the room. “I put her in the grave myself. Why can’t the dead learn to hold their tongues?”
The
Second Slipper
The sisters sleep together, when they sleep at last, and the dreams that earlier have plagued Iris meander to a halt. All her nightmares have come true. No word is said about the Prince, or about the whispery scent of alcohol that Iris could smell on Clara’s breath. Not a word about what had happened in the small salon, or about the hours since Clara fled the Pruyn house through the side window.
The only remark Clara makes is that the old dame with the walking sticks saw her safely home.
When the dawn light is coursing through the slats in the shutters at last, making thin stripes on the floor, Iris, tossing, decides that for every human soul there must surely be a possible childhood worth living, but once it slips by, there isn’t any reclaiming it or revising it. Even by the act of painting, she thinks. Even by turning it into a fairy tale to bewilder a sleep-befuddled old mother, there is no revising the saddest of the truths that greet us daily when we awake.
So there she is, and the nub of the day upon her again. Ruth stirs and moans, hungry for the animal contact of warm skin that Iris has long outgrown. Upstairs, C
ornelius van den Meer is calling for the pisspot to be emptied. Clara is up at the hearth already. She has retrieved the gown and hung it on a hook, but there are a half a dozen singed blotches on its skirt, to say nothing of soot and soil. “We’re down to the last few soft-hearted potatoes,” says Clara in a voice without emotion. “But the final heap of flour for a morning loaf has been untroubled by mice, for they’ve already left the house to find better prospects.”
“It’s a fine morning,” says Iris. “Grant it that.”
“Oh, no one will take fineness from a morning,” says Clara. “The beauty of the day is the only thing that doesn’t fade in time. Day after day, such beauty revives itself.”
Before Margarethe comes downstairs, to begin whatever campaign for their survival she might next invent, Clara hides the golden gown in a wardrobe and kicks the white slipper under a chest. The pearls and pendants that Caspar pawned for the loan of such a gown are now irretrievable. Without a word between them, Clara and Iris behave as if the night before has not happened—neither Clara’s amazing visit to the ball, nor Margarethe’s sleep-throttled interview with them both.
So they all eat a small breakfast together. Margarethe seems more herself, though she is stingy with remarks, for once. The four women sip hot water with a modest dripping of honey stirred into it, and Margarethe says at last, “We have only a short time before our creditors descend upon us for payment. If you’re to accept van Stolk in marriage, Clara, you must be ready. Or if we are to go to the almshouse, we go looking like decent people. Clara, I want you to wash yourself and put on a decent skirt. No, don’t argue with me. The time has come to pay what we owe. Iris, you see that Ruth is well scrubbed and her personal things tucked into a scarf. I will bring myself to the bench in front of the house, for I won’t have it said that I met adversity with any less courage than I met success.”
Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister Page 27