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

country village. Bog stench to remember, I'll tell you now! But I was originally from here, one of
you—my father left when I was still an infant, to Ely, to Ma, 'h, to teach the foolish English how to drain
their damplands in th: way we Hollanders perfected. He taught the trade to my husband, Jack Fisher,
who performed it well enough . . . until the high tides of this fall. Then the earthworks were breached and
the fens flooded and the fields and crops ruined beyond redemption. And the villagers of March and the
web-footed fen folk could see what the coming winter would be like. They would rather have killed a
Dutchman! But my father was dead of the ague, and no Dutchman was to be had, so they killed the next
best thing: one of their own who had married a Dutch maid. My own husband, Jack."

A maid splashes a bucket of dirty water on the cobbles; Margarethe has to leap back to keep from a
dunking.

A goodwife at a window, examining a stain in a lace collar.

Margarethe: "They cornered my man, my sorry Jack Fisher, out in a haunted copse one night last week!
They hit my poor Jack on the head with an eel spear. My daughters and I left under cover of darkness
the very same evening, fearing for our lives. English peasants are a vengeful lot, and we were seen as
strangers, though the girls were born there."

. . . the sounds in the lane, of ale-courage and ale-anger, and the girls started from their sleep, and
Margarethe's eyes darting, crusty; and her frightened voice: "We must get away from this place! Up, you
lump-kin daughters, up!—or this sleep is your last!"—

The goodwife ducks her eyes away, as if Margarethe has been only a chirping jackdaw on the sill. The
window shuts gently. Margarethe moves along to the window of a neighbor without losing the momentum
of her recital.

"The English have a morbid fear of the foreigner among them! You know it! And though the girls have an
English father, I trained them to speak the language of my grandfather, Pieter ten Broek, who served this
town well, or so I am told. I thought we might need to return to our home soil, and so we have. We
aren't wastrels or refugees. We're not dirty gypsies. We are your own. Welcome us back."

Iris sees that her mother isn't good at generating sympathy. Something about the hard edge of her jaw,
the pinching

nostrils.

"Look at my girls," says Margarethe. "If your stomach can bear it. Haven't I suffered enough?—with one
of them

THE OBSCURE CHILD

gibbering and staggering like a drunken farmer on market day"—she shrugs at Ruth—"and the
other"—she pushes Iris forward—"plain as a board, an affront to the eye? Why did God deny me sons,
who might have been a comfort to a mother in distress? If we die on the streets of this town, for your
coldness the hand of God will visit pestilence upon you! Good day. Bitch hound! Iris, mind your sister."

A palsied hand has reached out to draw the window closed against Margarethe and her daughters. A
murmured prayer against Margarethe's curse.