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

Margarethe straightens her spine. "Iris, attend your sister," she says. "You are the smart one. Enough of
this mooning about, these vaporish sighs! Keep Ruth under your fist. Do you hear me?" Iris nods.
"Reliable Iris," says Margarethe. "So off I go, and tonight we eat."
Iris keeps a hand on Ruth's shoulder till their mother has hurried out of sight. Then Iris continues her
inspection. Since Iris doesn't speak, the Master doesn't seem to mind her being there. As he scrubs a
patch of green to apply a yellow glow upon it, he mutters to her, or to himself. She listens as she wanders
and looks.

He has a nice voice, rustly and gruff. "So your mother, like other small people, disapproves of sacred art!
I should pack up my trunks and remove myself to the Spanish Netherlands, where a healthy Roman
Catholic faith still requires a supply of religious imagery. But no, though the Calvinists here tolerate the
Papist presence, even turning a blind eye to the secret chapels, the market for sacred art has

disappeared."

Iris doesn't know or care about any of this. "But seventy years ago? A hundred? Imagine this. Every eight
miles found a clutch of houses with its own small church, and every church boasted a painting of the Holy
Family. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. The Gospels are peopled suddenly and forever by the images that
artists deliver for you. We did our work, and God reaped the reward in increased prayer. The true
consequence of beauty—tell your mother!—is devotion."

Iris has no idea what he means, but it seems to please him to talk. She sees Josephs and Marys, and
Jesuses of all ages and humors. Abandoned over and over again, because imperfect, because unworthy?

The Master rails on, punctuating his pauses with caresses of his brush. "Painting holy subjects has always
made a good

THE OBSCURE CHILD

living for painters! Though who among us doesn't fear being dashed into hell when we paint into a sacred
scene from Scriptures some baby we see on the street, a woman we love, a man we admire?"

The Master becomes morose. "And besides picturing the blessed"—this in a sour tone, carping—"as a
painter I catalog the corruption of the world! In staggering honesty. The misshapen, the unholy
aberrations. The Girl-Boy of Rotterdam? I painted that cursed soul the year before it was stoned to
death by the devout. I painted the Seven Stages of Plague, including the gray-green face of the unburied
corpse. The hunchbacks, the split-skulls, Dame Handelaers with her horrible donkey jaw. The other side
of revelation! Through that door, should you want to see. I'll unlock it for you. All the proofs of our need
for God." He points his brush at the door and raises his eyebrows in a question.

Iris doesn't even dare to look at the door, much less ask for it to be unlocked. She doesn't want to see.
She wraps her thin arms around her thin chest, and asks herself again: Where have we come to?

The Master turns back to his canvas. "And I'll paint that changeling child yet," he says grimly. "Haarlem's
hidden beauty. More witness to the weirdness of this world."

Iris remembers the girl at the window, the girl who gave the toy to Ruth. She had asked if Ruth was a lost
one, a changeling. Was Haarlem a haven for such goblin beasts? Iris had heard that from time to time a
poor infant might be kidnapped from its cradle and replaced with a rotten, illish creature resembling it in