Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister

by Gregory Maguire

  Iris can’t look at Clara. There is Gerard van Antum the clothier to pay, and worse, the dreadful Nicolaes van Stolk to surrender the house to. Margarethe has implied that each has been singled out as a possible suitor for Clara. Is Iris to be offered to whoever is the loser? No matter Clara’s willingness—what about her suitability for marriage now? If she isn’t still virginal, will that make a difference? Does Margarethe intend to pester Clara with questions about last night?

  They have scarcely nodded their glum acceptance of their tasks when a rapping is heard on the door. Margarethe straightens her spine and adjusts her cap on her head. “Iris,” she says, “the door, please.”

  “I haven’t had time to put on suitable morning clothes—”

  “Throw on a cloak, and quickly, let the visitor in.”

  Iris does as she is told, setting her face to betray no interest in the triumphant arrival of van Stolk. When she unbars the door and opens it, she blinks in the sunlight. Only after a moment does she make out that it is Caspar standing there. It’s hard to recognize him at first, not just because of the sun, but because he isn’t grinning at her. His face is oaken with seriousness. Iris feels a chill run over her shoulders and fold into spectral fingers at the base of her neck.

  “Good morning,” says Caspar, and he stands aside. Behind him is Philippe de Marsillac, in a red gash of a cape, his cheeks flushed from a brisk walk. “Let us come in,” says Caspar, almost rudely, and he pushes through. Iris is reduced to holding the door and, pressed up against the wall as she is, manages to make only a small, ineffectual curtsey.

  “We weren’t expecting visitors this morning,” says Iris, in crosscurrents of feeling about seeing Caspar and the Prince together.

  “Delighted to be here,” says the Prince. “Delighted to accept your hospitality.”

  There is nothing to offer in the way of hospitality, nothing at all—even the last browning potato has been mashed and eaten. “I will call my mother,” says Iris. “Please, if you will wait in the salon . . .” With that she flees into the kitchen. Her mother never laid eyes on the potential suitor the night before. Iris is able to derive some small pleasure in saying to her, “It’s just the Prince.”

  Margarethe is up on her feet at once, whirling about. “Clara! Run to the neighbor and beg a basket of bread and cheese! Bring back a flagon of ale and whatever else they can spare! He has come, he has come, and all is not lost! Hurry!”

  For once Clara doesn’t stand against her stepmother. She stumbles across the flagstones of the kitchen floor and barrels out the door without a backward look.

  “Girls,” says Margarethe, “come now, come quickly with me to the hall.”

  “We’re hardly dressed to entertain royalty,” sputters Iris.

  “Every second counts. Do as I say.” Margarethe is like a ship whose sails have just caught the wind again after a month of listlessness. She courses into the front of the house with her shoulders back and her chin high. Ruth tucks her hands behind her back and whimpers slightly. Iris can’t stop to be kind. She just grabs Ruth’s elbow and pulls her along.

  “There is no surprise like a complete surprise,” Margarethe is saying, in something of a blather. “We’re honored beyond our capacity to express it. To what purpose do you come calling so early on a spring morning?” She offers the Prince a chair, but he doesn’t accept it. Instead he walks across the room in a state of excitement, while Margarethe backs up against a sideboard and rests her hands behind her to keep them from shaking.

  Iris watches the two men in her life: the prince who deigned to chat with her like a person, and the painter’s apprentice who danced with her despite the disapproving looks of the townspeople. She finds herself lost in conflicting desires, but the presence of each man tends to calculate against the other. In the end it seems only tiring that they are both there at once, not thrilling. It is that Caspar is so hard of face today, so brutal-looking and wary.

  “There are secrets in this household,” says the Prince. “These very walls harbor the hidden answers to many questions. This, my young friend here, has promised me. But I have no talent at investigation, so I must ask you outright: Have you any knowledge of the owner of this slipper?” He nods to Caspar, who pulls out of a leather sack the slipper that Clara has left behind in her flight.

  Margarethe says, “My eyes are not what they once were. Give me that, so I may understand it.” She takes the slipper and looks at it closely, and says, “But of course, this is my own. How did you come across it?”

  The Prince doesn’t answer her. “Does someone in your household choose to wear it from time to time?” he asks.

  “They might,” says Margarethe, “if it were to please a prince for her to do so. Shall my Iris model it for you? Iris, put your foot in the slipper and show the Prince how delicate an ankle you have.”

  “There is no need,” says Iris.

  “Do as I say,” says Margarethe.

  Iris takes the slipper with too abrupt a gesture, and sets her foot in it, but though the shoe fits from toe to heel, Iris’s foot is too narrow. It won’t give form to the shoe, or fit it snugly. “You see, it doesn’t fit, Mama,” says Iris. “Such an exercise! I’m not made for delicate slippers such as these.”

  “Then Ruth shall try, if it’s a wearer of slippers you seek,” says Margarethe. Ruth is hard pressed to obey, but finally she squats on the floor and accepts the slipper. The Prince is watching with careful eyes and an inscrutable expression. Ruth’s feet are huge, and the whole exercise is pointless and insulting. But Ruth tries to fix the slipper on her foot, grimacing at the effort—not because the slipper doesn’t fit, but because her fingers are sore.

  “Ah,” says the Prince. “Look at the maiden’s hands.”

  Ruth put her hands behind her back, and the ill-fitting slipper falls off.

  “Let me see,” says the Prince. “What I have come to see, let me see.”

  Ruth won’t obey.

  “What kind of misbehavior is this?” cries Margarethe. “Ruth, show the good man your pretty fingers, or I’ll thrash you soundly!”

  Weeping suddenly, Ruth thrusts her hands forward. Two of the fingers on her right hand are raised in white blisters.

  “How did you come by such a burn?” asks the Prince.

  “She can’t answer you,” says Margarethe. “She is shy.”

  “She is mostly mute,” says Iris. “Her tongue is twisted at the back where it connects with her mind.”

  “A kitchen accident?” asks the Prince.

  “The very same,” says Margarethe. “The sores will heal nicely.”

  “Or did a lighted taper drop its untrimmed wick upon you as you set out to burn the painting by Master Schoonmaker?” says Caspar.

  Margarethe gasps, and Iris feels her heart tumble into a chasm. All now is lost, even more, it seems, than the night before. Every creature with blood in its limbs is a traitor, one of God’s mistakes. Has Margarethe given poison to her employer?—Ruth, Ruth, set alight Schoonmaker’s masterpiece?—Has Caspar cast suspicion and the weight of law upon his terrified friends? And Iris herself has collaborated too, by encouraging Clara to attend the ball without permission.

  There’s no one left to stand and act in contrast to betrayal, to give the help so sorely needed. No one.

  Ruth drops her face into her hands and weeps with loud animal snortings of phlegm. “I told you their iniquity is profound,” says Caspar. “They are drunken with odd tales of malice, the whole lot of them. For their jealousy they’ve ruined my Master’s greatest work, and likely his career as well. To say nothing of broken his heart.”

  “You will be held accountable, and you will pay for it, and suffer,” says the Prince. “I have alerted the Haarlem schout of the suspicion that attends this household, and I will testify to the governors of the prison of this girl’s confessional wailing. The damage done! Not just to your own household, to the honor of the Pruyns, to the nerves of the Dowager Queen of France, but also to the p
ainting itself, which by all accounts was a masterpiece. I only wonder,” he continues, “how can one be jealous of a painting? Who could have planted such severe rage in your breast?”

  No one speaks.

  Behind them, a step across the kitchen floor, and then Clara comes forward into the salon with a basket of bread. “What you have asked for, you have received,” says Clara, setting the basket on a table. “Bread, and a small pot of butter, and some conserve and some cheese.”

  “Another maiden in the house,” says the Prince, and then, looking back to Iris, remembering, “your stepsister, the one who minds the hearth.”

  Iris nods.

  “Let her try the slipper,” says Margarethe wildly, perhaps to shift the attention of the Prince from the sniffles of Ruth.

  “There is no need; the slipper was merely a ruse to get you to open the door to me,” says the Prince. “A ruse, I see, that I did not even need to enact.” But Clara has come forward and taken the slipper from where it has fallen. She puts it on, and stands and lifts her chin.

  Iris guesses that in Caspar’s anger at the destruction of the Master’s painting and possibly his career, Caspar hasn’t bothered to tell the Prince that Clarissa of Aragon is really Clara van den Meer. Iris watches the Prince look at Clara with surprise. More than one story comes together.

  Outside, a bank of clouds slides sideways, and more spring light advances into the room. It falls upon Clara as always it will, as if it has traveled the thousands of miles from the sun just for the benefit of illuminating her beauty. She is ill-kempt, raw-eyed, nearly slatternly in her robe, and more splendid to see than any painting. The Prince says, dubiously, “Clarissa!” and he takes a step forward.

  Clara moves a half step backward—but only a half step. Her hand goes up to block the Prince’s accusatory finger from Ruth’s cowering form. Clara’s is a gesture of charity, the only beauty that has consequence. It is the oniony heart finally delivering up its goblet blossom.

  “Shield my family from harm,” she says, “and let everything else follow as it may.”

  Epilogue

  So now children play our family’s shame as a story in the streets. And Clara, our Cinderella, our Ashgirl, is dead, and all these old dilemmas awake in my mind as if they happened yesterday. What no one tells the young is to be careful of their childhoods. The memories from those days are the most compelling paintings in the mind—to which, with nostalgia or dread, you must ever return.

  Caspar has heard the tale and he has told it back to me, and as he tells it I play a small and stupid part, and this is as it should be. But I wasn’t as insensible as he portrays me. I was silent but not dull. I was slow but not vacant. The night of the ball I didn’t lie snoring in the hearthside, but weeping silently from the pain to my burned hands. This is how I overheard the conversation between Margarethe, Clara, and Iris, in which Margarethe betrayed herself.

  Clara came forward to save me, just when my treachery was likely to bring our family down. I hadn’t seen that she would do so. I don’t believe I would have set her portrait aflame had I known the turn that events would take. Cinderella—girl of Cinders! I never saw the ruined canvas once I had lit it—I turned and fled—I never saw the most beautiful girl in the world become char, ashes. A real cindergirl.

  Maybe with the destruction of that perfect image of her, Clara was released from one of the many spells that bound her. There she was, for all we knew, pregnant with the Prince’s child, perhaps in love with him or not—who could tell what that meant, when we were so young and foolish?—certainly she was eager to escape the household in which she had learned, the night before, that her mother’s death had been murder. Clara’s understandings about the world, never easy to ascertain, were even more veiled from that day forward. But she was removed to the protection of the Pruyns by the end of the day, promising, with cold tears, to take care of Iris and me from a distance. How we chose to tend to our own mama, poor evil Margarethe, was our own affair, and she never once inquired after her, in letter or in person.

  If you ask me why I set the painting alight—I’m not sure I can answer with honesty. I think I knew the Master was terrified of his masterpiece. And I had my share of pride and jealousy. My ears worked! I could hear Margarethe call me an ox! And there Clara stood, preserved for eternity as an angel. In the end I probably despised the glorious canvas, but, give me credit, I also could see that Clara hated it too. Hated it, and also was afraid it was an emblem with which the horrendous van Stolk might possess her. What is strange is that we may remember what we have done, but not always why we did it.

  Caspar was always in love with Iris, from the first day he met us. He took his revenge on our family only when he learned from the Master what Margarethe had been saying of him. Clara’s forgiveness of me went a good deal to soften Caspar’s rage on behalf of the Master. And Caspar was right to be patient with himself. In time he made Iris a good husband, while she painted at his side, and sometimes under his name.

  Now Caspar dutifully cares for his ugly sister-in-law. He continues to bring me along to the chapel when I require it, to the meadow when I need it, to the studio when he wants my company so he can keep from sinking into a melancholia, missing his Iris.

  She is in my mind, gray dawns to mothy dusks—she is as often Iris the fanciful child as she is Iris the struggling, arrogant, angry daughter-of-her-mother she could sometimes be in her adult life. And the stronger for it too, I might add, the richer life lived for it.

  Iris was burdened by her fancies. For years she insisted that she could remember the night we left England. The villagers had come marauding to our cottage, at the town’s end, where we lived little better than milking cows. They had pounded on the door and accused Margarethe of savage witchery. They said she had called forth the full moon, she had called up the high tides, she had broken the dikes by her own malice. She was a witch, and wasn’t it clear?—look at the ugly daughter she bore, as large as a slab of granite, and dull, and mute. Iris was slow to realize that when Margarethe talked about our family being saddled with an imp, she meant me—her curse, her burden. Iris was too good-natured to take this in. She invented an outside imp, a distant cousin, when she already had a sister.

  She liked to look, but not at the harsher side of things. She rarely remarked on my part in our family story. I had abused Margarethe’s eyes with red pepper, I had burned the painting, I had sulked and held myself back, pretend-dumb as the beast they likened me to. No, I wasn’t evil, but I was jealous of everything: Clara’s incredible countenance, Iris’s talent, Caspar’s attentions to them both. Iris never saw that, in some ways, I belonged in the gallery of God’s mistakes.

  Iris claimed to recall how we fled those flooded fields of our childhood, heading back to Holland, where Margarethe’s family might take us in. But how could Iris recall this? It was night, and we were asleep, and dreams pester children.

  “You want to find out for sure?” said Iris to me once. “Approach our old mother before she dies. Ask her one question. Ask her how she knew that Jack Fisher was dead. She only heard the villagers boasting about it. She never waited to hunt for his body. She didn’t bother to bury him if he needed it, or to nurture him back to health if she could. She pushed off from England without a single moment’s hesitation. For all we know he didn’t float there, a bloated corpse in the flooded fenlands. For all we know he’s still alive, and she named herself a widow out of fear and desperation. Don’t ask her if she was a witch, or if she is one now, or if she remembers that she poisoned Henrika so she could marry van den Meer. Just ask her how she knows for sure that Jack Fisher was dead on the night we fled for our lives.”

  I never asked Margarethe that, and I won’t. The old thing is a thousand years old, and refuses to die, though her own imps still writhe at her feet and chew on her corns. I do know that Margarethe confessed to murdering Henrika, but that famous night Margarethe was partly asleep, in a state of dreamy agitation. Was Margarethe really capable of s
uch a crime? I have no doubt. Did she actually do it? I don’t know, and don’t care to know. Probably she did, but what good would it have done any of us to be sure? Neither Iris nor I ever mentioned the midnight confession to Papa Cornelius, and the business marriage between him and Margarethe saw only quiet times from then on.

  I won’t ask Margarethe about those ancient times. Nor will Iris ask such dirty questions. Iris died long ago. Died fairly young, but not without some notice. With money that Clara supplied, Iris paid to apprentice at the studio of Pieter van Laer. She would have liked to apprentice with Judith Leyster, Haarlem’s brave woman painter, but then Judith Leyster married Molenaer and they moved to Amsterdam. Iris’s talent perhaps was not in painting as she always thought. But she loved to look—that never changed—and she talked a great deal, and told stories. I can’t think of a single painting of hers I admire. I only admire that she did them at all.

  Margarethe neither admired nor scorned Iris’s work, being blind.

  * * *

  The Master didn’t recover from his shock. In the end, with the loss of his Young Woman with Tulips, his reputation was indeed diminished. He is still better known as the Master of the Dordrecht Altarpiece than as Schoonmaker, genre painter. When he died, Caspar took over tenancy of his house and studio. I believe the paintings in the Gallery of God’s Mistakes were all thrown onto a bonfire. Face down, so that no one could see the sight of these miserable creatures tortured by flames, as surely their lives must sometimes have seemed. May they have their rest in some anonymous corner of the garden of Paradise!

  The Dowager Queen of France, to Dame Pruyn’s relief, rousted herself from her own fit and went on to live a good few years.

  To our surprise, Papa Cornelius’s health also recovered, in direct proportion to the recovery of his income. For one thing, Clara kept her word, and found ways to channel money from France to restore at least some of the money her father owed in debt. Also, the canny Dutch learned to regulate the tulip industry and to protect what few assets were left for those whose finances were imperiled. At length the market improved, and Papa Cornelius again prospered, but not wildly, being bound by government constraints on the tulip trade.