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

streets, and I come home muttering. Caspar reminds me that Clara, our Clara, our Cindergirl, is dead.
He says it to me kindly, requiring this old head to recall the now. But old heads are more supple at
recalling the past.

There are one or two windows into those far-off days. You have seen them—the windows of canvas that
painters work on so we can look through. Though I can't paint it, I can see it. in my heart: a square of
linen that can remember an afternoon of relative happiness. Creamy flaxen light, the blue and ivory of
porcelain. Girls believing in the promise of blossoms.

It isn't much, but it still makes me catch my breath. Bless the artists who saved these things for us. Don't
fault their memory or their choice of subject. Immortality is a chancy thing; it cannot be promised or
earned. Perhaps it cannot even be identified for what it is. Indeed, were Cinderling to return from the
dead, would she even recognize herself, in any portrait on a wall, in a figure painted on a plate, in any
nursery game or fireside story?

THE OBSCURE CHILD

marketplace

The wind being fierce and the tides unobliging, the ship from Harwich has a slow time of it. Timbers
creak, sails snap as the vessel lurches up the brown river to the quay. It arrives later than expected, the
bright finish to a cloudy afternoon. The travelers clamber out, eager for water to freshen their mouths.
Among them are a strict-stemmed woman and two daughters.

The woman is bad-tempered because she's terrified. The last of her coin has gone to pay the passage.
For two days, only the charity of fellow travelers has kept her and her girls from hunger. If you can call it
charity—a hard crust of bread, a rind of old cheese to gnaw. And then brought back up as gorge, thanks
to the heaving sea. The mother has had to turn her face from it. Shame has a dreadful smell.

So mother and daughters stumble, taking a moment to find their footing on the quay. The sun rolls
westward, the light falls lengthwise, the foreigners step into their shadows. The street is splotched with
puddles from an earlier cloudburst.

The younger girl leads the older one. They are timid and eager. Are they stepping into a country of tales,
wonders the younger girl. Is this new land a place where magic really happens? Not in cloaks of
darkness as in England, but in light of day? How is this new world complected?

"Don't gawk, Iris. Don't lose yourself in fancy. And keep up," says the woman. "It won't do to arrive at
Grandfather's house after dark. He might bar himself against robbers and rogues, not daring to open the
doors and shutters till morning. Ruth, move your lazy limbs for once. Grandfather's house is beyond the
marketplace, that much I remember being told. We'll get nearer, we'll ask."

"Mama, Ruth is tired," says the younger daughter, "she hasn't eaten much nor slept well. We're coming as
fast as we

can.

"Don't apologize, it wastes your breath. Just mend your ways and watch your tongue," says the mother.
"Do you think I don't have enough on my mind?"