"Gregort Maguire - Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister" - читать интересную книгу автора (Maguire Gregory)

Looking

* • vhe painter lays down a twig of red chalk and blows JL lightly on his fingertips. The folds of his
clothes are lined with red as if powdered with the dust of bricks. He walks over to the window and
shakes his head. "What kind of assault is this?" he grumbles.

"No assault, sir," cries Margarethe, now that she has caught one, reeling him in, "only a mother with
hungry vir' gin daughters! What does the gentleman need to be done? A woman can be told to do
anything. I can help a man's tired wife at all the household tasks. Tell me to sweep, to scrub; I will. Tell
me to air a mattress, to fetch water from the well. I will. Tell me to kill a chicken?—I'll pluck it and stew
it, send its feathers to the sack for pillowing, its blood organs to the pan for the company of onions, its
bones thrown upon the dirt for the reading of fortunes."

"There's no wife here, or why would I be living in squalor? But hold your tongue while I think about it,"
he tells her, and he turns to glance at Ruth and Iris.

Ruth hides her eyes, but Iris looks right back at him. She

THE OBSCURE CHILD

isn't looking for her father, no no; he is dead these seven days—

A voice outside the door as the door splinters: "And the husband is boxed on the head, bleeding into his
bog, and we'll have his wicked wife next, and those girls!"—

—Stay in the present moment. Look at the present moment. She's just looking at a man who happens
to be roughly her father's age. That's all.

He's a man of middle years, with an unshuttered light in his eyes. Iris doesn't remember seeing its like
before. He strokes his gingery mustaches and draws fingers down a beard that needs hot water and the
attention of a razor. His bald head is glazed from being in the sun without the black hat favored by
prosperous burghers. His fingers are dyed with red and violet. Gingerbeard has calipers, scales, tools in
his eyes; he stares at Iris. It's a look that's clean of human emotion, at least just now. He stares some sort
of judgment at her. Iris drops her eyes at last, beaten by his attention.

"She will be of marriageable age within the month—" begins Margarethe. Iris winces.

"Silence," he murmurs, twitching his fingers at Mar-garethe.

And looks some more.

"This, then," he says at last. "There's a shed beyond where you can sleep a week or two, at least until my
apprentice returns from his journeys on my behalf. After that we'll see. There's work to be done if you
can live here in silence. You, Mother, will see to the needs of a bachelor's household. I

won't name or number the tasks, but I want to eat and to sleep and to work without stopping when the
mood arises. The older girl, can she wander about by herself?—there's a meadow not far from the
bridge, just beyond the Amsterdamse Poort, where the new canal starts its journey to Amsterdam. The
flowers of late summer grow there in abundance. She can collect them daily for my studio. The