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

"Yes, of course," agrees the younger daughter, by rote, "it's just that Ruth—"
"You're always gnawing the same bone. Let Ruth speak for herself if she wants to complain."

But Ruth won't speak for herself. So they move up the street, along a shallow incline, between
step-gabled brick houses. The small windowpanes, still unshuttered at this hour, pick up a late-afternoon
shine. The stoops are scrubbed, the streets swept of manure and leaves and dirt. A smell of afternoon
baking lifts from hidden kitchen yards. It awakens both hunger and hope. "Pies grow on their roofs

THE OBSCURE CHILD

in this town," the mother says. "That'll mean a welcome for us at Grandfather's. Surely. Surely. Now is
the market this way?—for beyond that we'll find his house—or that way?"

"Oh, the market," says a croaky old dame, half hidden in the gloom of a doorway, "what you can buy
there, and what you can sell!" The younger daughter screws herself around: Is this the voice of a wise
woman, a fairy crone to help them?

"Tell me the way," says the mother, peering.

"You tell your own way," says the dame, and disappears. Nothing there but the shadow of her voice.

"Stingy with directions? Then stingy with charity too?" The mother squares her shoulders. "There's a
church steeple. The market must be nearby. Come."

At the end of a lane the marketplace opens before them. The stalls are nested on the edges of a broad
square, a church looming over one end and a government house opposite. Houses of prosperous people,
shoulder to shoulder. All the buildings stand up straight—not like the slumped timber-framed cottage
back in England, back home . . .

—the cottage now abandoned . . . abandoned in a storm of poundings at the shutters, of shouts: "A knife
to your throat! You'll swallow my sharp blade. Open up!". . . Abandoned, as mother and daughters
scrambled through a side window, a cudgel splintering the very door—

Screeeee—an airborne alarm. Seagulls make arabesques near the front of the church, being kept from
the fish tables by a couple of tired, zealous dogs. The public space is cold

from the ocean wind, but it is lit rosy and golden, from sun on brick and stone. Anything might happen
here, thinks the younger girl. Anything! Even, maybe, something good.

The market: near the end of its day. Smelling of tired vegetables, strong fish, smoking embers, earth on
the roots of parsnips and cabbages. The habit of hunger is a hard one to master. The girls gasp. They are
ravenous.

Fish laid to serry like roofing tiles, glinting in their own oils. Gourds and marrows. Apples, golden, red,
green. Turn' bles of grapes, some already jellying in their split skins. Cheeses coated with bone'hard wax,
or caught in webbing and dripping whitely—cats sprawl beneath like Ottoman pashas, open-mouthed.
"Oh," says the younger sister when the older one has stopped to gape at the abundance. "Mama, a
throwaway scrap for us! There must be."

The mother's face draws even more closed than usual. "I won't have us seen to be begging on our first