The Ugly Sisters And Other Stories
By Lloyd Burton
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2011 Lloyd Burton
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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CONTENTS
THE UGLY SISTERS (15,117 words)
THE GOLDEN EGGS (4066 words)
PONTIFEX
REX (14,763 words)
One: The Rumour
Two: A Plague of Mountebanks
Three: A Midnight Visitation
Four Temptation
Five: The Contract
Six : A Royal Picnic
THE CONVOCATION OF THE ANIMALS (2,589 words)
THE GURU (1,956 words)
WINDOWS
IN HEAVEN (11,590 words)
When
Persimmon was bigger
A
Revelation
Temptation
and Consequence
The
Mission
Conclusion
The Story of Cinderella from Another Point of View
I have always known that I was not pretty. I was a plain child, I was an unprepossessing girl and I grew up to be an unlovely young woman. Now I am old I am downright ugly, and if I am spared to grow older, I expect I shall become uglier still. As to my figure, I have always been as bony as a starved horse, with a face to match, as my sister has kindly informed me from time to time. Why I should have been spared to an advanced age is a mystery, unless it is a punishment for my sins. What sins, you might ask? Well, we all have sins of one kind or another. The holy church teaches that we are born in sin anyway, but to have been punished with plainness from the very outset seems hard. Which is not to say I have not had my moments; though I have to admit that life has been a disappointment, on the whole.
My sister Beatrice, on the other hand always considered herself a beauty. It must have strained her imagination. Well-fleshed and Rubensesque are words she might have used about herself, though just plain fat – and I mean plain – was the reality. She was vain about what she liked to call her well-turned ankles, but failed to notice that she had a bum like a bolster, with boobs to match. Not that I ever had anything to boast of in the boobs department myself. Just flat-chested, that’s me. I could have passed for a boy.
My sister married a doctor eventually, an older man. She put on tremendous airs. But what is so grand about a doctor? When you think of the boils they have to lance, and the places they poke their fingers, it makes your flesh creep. Ugh! Give me a nice domestic appointment in the royal household any day where the worst that’s expected of you is to empty the royal slops. At least you don’t have to stick your fingers in the pot.
Have you ever tried to cut your toe off? Believe me, it can be done, if you have determination and the proper incentive. It can even be done by sheer girlish silliness, as I know to my cost. It’s painful, of course, and there is a lot of blood, at least until you cauterise, but it’s nothing compared to childbirth, and I know all about that. But we will come to the matter of the toe later.
Let me begin with my earliest childhood. My father was a banker, a profession less respected then than it later became. The first bankers were Jew moneylenders, and although my father was a good Catholic and claimed a pedigree in that faith going back at least to the time of Christ, if not before, I have always suspected that my appearance must owe something to the descent of Israel. My profile is uncompromisingly aquiline – or less flatteringly, hatchet-faced, as my sister, among others has not flinched from saying.
Besides being good Christians, as claimed, my father’s family had been well connected in the banking business for generations. My father used to joke that his grandfather knew Roth before he had children. But the association conferred no lasting benefit on our family, for they never became magnates of the banking world. They scraped along with barely enough for a house in town, a pied-a-terre in the mountains, and a carriage and domestic staff to manage it all. But we were not unhappy, that is before Father died prematurely after a succession of disastrous investments. We were left with little more than our personal possessions.
Mother did what any woman in similar circumstances would do: she looked for a new husband. She was past her prime, but she did her best. She shoehorned herself into her best gowns (before they went out of fashion), put on her jewellery and furs and put herself on display in all the best places. Of course people knew what the situation was and helped with invitations. They always do. Mother was no great catch with two gawky teen-age daughters and no money of her own and she could not afford to be choosy. She was lucky to catch Stepfather, who had a small daughter of his own in need of parenting. He was a prosperous sea captain in the Baltic trade, but it was a step down socially, none the less.
So we moved into the captain’s house. It was in a pleasant street near the waterfront with a view of the river from the upper floors, though it was not what we were used to and I remember in the beginning being quite ashamed to receive friends from our more prosperous days there. But you get used to anything, which is just as well.
We had only one servant, a sort of cook-general, so Mother had to help with the housework. We girls had to help as well, though we did as little as we could, which was only to be expected. After all, we weren’t brought up to it, you see. Which brings me to Ella.
Ella was our stepsister. She was quite a bit younger than we were, which matters a lot when you are a child, and she had been taught to make her contribution to the household duties from an early age. She swept the floor, she tended the kitchen fire, she carried water, she peeled the vegetables and did a dozen chores that no one else wanted to do. Of course the servant loaded her with work, especially when she found we were unwilling to do our share.
The very first time I saw Ella I took an instant dislike to her. She was a whey-faced little thing with a butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth expression that made one want to pinch her. It was a pleasure I did not defer for long. Even at that stage she spent most of her time in the kitchen, it being the warmest part of the house. Her father was mean about fires upstairs. No wonder we took to calling her Cinderella.
The sea captain spent most of his time at sea. He was the master of a Baltic trader, which kept him away for weeks and sometimes months at a time during the sailing season, going from port to port and doing whatever it is that sea traders do. In the winter he stayed at home. During the daytime he supervised the maintenance of his vessel for the coming season, or conferred with other mariners in the taverns and coffeehouses along the waterfront, though I must say he was not one to overindulge in strong drink. I never saw him drunk. Of an evening he sat at home and puffed his meerschaum pipe while Mother darned his socks and we girls worked on our samplers – that is, after we had helped with the washing up. I can tell you, those were wildly exciting times.
Ella, or Cinderella as we had taken to calling her, including the cook, liked to sit on a cushion by her father’s chair. I suppose she felt the need for affection, like a dog, for she certainly got none from the rest of us. We had none to spare, for we were not an affectionate family. When I say ‘we’ I mean my mother, my sister and I. I don’t think any of us ever thought of the captain and his daughter as family, not even Mother. They were just a convenience – or an inconvenience, depending how you looked at it.
When the captain was away on his voyages we gave Cinderella a hard time, I’ll make no bones about it. That is, Beatrice and me. Mother took no part in it. She might not have been what you would call a loving stepmother, but she did not put herself out to be unkind. She just did not notice. She spent a lot of time out of the house, visiting friends in the town, so we were left to our own devices.
While she was out we made our mischief. Can you blame us? We had nothing to occupy us except some boring old books and the everlasting mending– now that was something we had never had to do in the old days when Mother employed a mending woman and a seamstress to make our clothes. So we amused ourselves tormenting Cinderella. We did nothing violent mind you, not in the beginning. It was just the usual sort of thing vicious kids get up to when they are not checked. You know, teasing and hair pulling and pinching, for the pleasure of making her cry. As the saying goes, we drew out her soul.
She might have fared worse, had it not been for that odd kinswoman of hers – I never did find out what the exact relationship was – who used to put in an appearance from time to time.
I should explain at this point that Cinderella’s mother was a Balt. The captain had married her on one of his voyages and brought her home to Kuestenmeer. She was never quite accepted, even in that seafaring town. Well, you know about Balts, some of them are not even Christian, and those that are, haven’t been so for very long, not many generations. They say the old religion is still practised in secret, even among so-called converts. So it is hardly surprising that they are regarded with some reserve.
The first time I saw Cinderella’s kinswoman was not long after Mother married the sea captain and I ran unexpectedly into the kitchen. The cook was out, but Cinderella was sitting at her usual place by the open hearth, toasting her toes in the warm ash while she peeled a bowl of vegetables. Seated on a stool in the ingle nook was a funny little woman I had not seen before. She wasn’t exactly what you could call old. Ageless would be better. Her figure was plump. Her hair was hidden by a cloth snood, her little round cheeks were like wrinkled russet loft apples and the tip of her sharp little nose glowed pink. Her eyes were exactly like Cinderella’s – cats eyes, I’d call them, and green. You could see at once that the two were kin. The visitor had on a gown of durable cloth the colour of old leaves, like a countrywoman, and beside her was a countrywoman’s basket.
“This is Frau –, my godmother,” said Cinderella, making a polite introduction and mentioning a foreign-sounding name I was quite unable to get into my head, let alone reproduce on my lips.
The visitor responded with a murmured greeting and a polite little countrified bob, for all that she was the adult and I the child. I thought it was very gracious of her, generous even, considering the account her godchild might have been giving her of the kind of games her new sisters liked to play. But if she were aware, she gave no outward sign, except for a very direct and what I took to be penetrating look in her brown eyes, which may have been entirely the product of my guilty imagination. Feeling somewhat ashamed of myself, I made an exit as quickly as I could.
I am sorry to say – yes, I can say that now – sorry that this incident did not put an end to our cruel tricks, but it did mitigate them and they somehow lost their savour.
The Baltic godmother – I had decided she must be a Balt – continued to pay unannounced visits from time to time, generally when Cinderella was alone. You seldom saw her arrive or leave, she would just suddenly appear in the ingle nook helping with some kitchen chore as humbly as could be, and chatting away in that funny language that only she and her goddaughter understood. It was almost like having another servant. When she left she departed as unobtrusively as she came. Sometimes one would see her go by the door, but generally she would disappear while one was out of the room. She never came into the parlour, and I don’t think I ever saw her in the house when the sea captain was home, but then he was so often away.
I say Beatrice and I mitigated our pranks, but we didn’t stop them altogether. You know how it is with kids, even the best of them have a vicious streak, and in all honesty I cannot number Beatrice and myself among the best. Our vicious streak was well developed as it was never knocked out of us. One day when Mother was out visiting her swanky friends and the cook was not in the house we went a bit far with Cinderella. It was not that we wanted to do her any real harm, you understand, we just wanted to give her a good fright. The idea was to hold her down and bring a hot iron close enough to her skin without actually touching so that she could feel the heat and imagine she was going to be burnt. That was the theory anyway, and the point chosen for attention the tip of her little nose. Beatrice was doing the holding and I was applying the heat, but the silly girl struggled and the result was she got a dreadful burn on her cheek. She screamed horribly.
I got the most terrible fright, and so did Beatrice when we saw what we had done. Just then the cook ran in.
“What have you done!” she screamed when she saw the welt on the child’s face. “Wait till your mother comes home! Wait till the master sees what you have done – he’ll take the skin off you!”
We were terrified, and with good cause. When Mother came home, she gave us both the first instalment of the skinning we expected from our stepfather, who was mercifully away at sea at the time. Cinderella was rushed to the apothecary who applied sedatives and salve and predicted she would be scarred for life.
“It’s a wonder you didn’t put her eye out!” Mother shouted. She was very angry, not because she had much affection for her stepdaughter, but because the child represented our security. “It will be a wonder if her father doesn’t put us out on the street.”
As you can imagine, I was pretty subdued for the next day or two. It was on the morning following the incident as I was creeping about the house trying to be as unobtrusive as possible that I went into the kitchen, only to come face to face with the Baltic godmother. The little woman fixed me with an intense look, pointed her finger and muttered an imprecation in that unintelligible language. I blanched and ducked out, feeling inexpressibly relieved that she hadn’t grabbed me and given me the thrashing I so well deserved, for all she stood no taller than I. But she offered no violence and I made myself scarce.
Strangely enough, Cinderella suffered no scarring. The cook ascribed this to the godmother, who removed the apothecary’s salve and replaced it with a herbal poultice of her own, which she applied to the accompaniment of muttered words the cook declared to be a magical incantation. Within a week the child’s face had only the faintest pink mark to show, and even this vanished after a few more days.
Co-incidentally, on the morning following my latest encounter with the godmother I awoke to discover a carbuncle decorating the end of my nose. It was the first of many such I was to be plagued with throughout my teenage years. Even today my skin is seldom free of blemishes.
Beatrice and I never repeated a corporal assault on our stepsister, but I cannot say we were any nicer to her. There are many ways to be cruel without resorting to physical means.
Just at this time other distractions came into our life. Mother was determined to find us good husbands when the time came, by which she meant husbands of wealth and social standing. To this end she equipped us with every advantage within her means, or at least the means of her husband. Having mastered our letters and numbers at an early age we were now set to learn the social graces. We were sent to dancing lessons and music lessons. We were taught deportment and drawing and the art of minuscule embroidery on ladylike but useless scraps of cloth called samplers. Incidentally, this was the only skill at which I showed real aptitude, or which proved of any use in later life.
We ‘entered society’ at the age of sixteen, Beatrice following me by a year. This meant that we were available to attend social functions, suitably accompanied by our mama. In other words, we were put on display as available for marriage. Generally these functions took place at private homes. As you know, these were largely family affairs exactly as they are today. They were the opportunity for the older gentlemen to get tipsy, for the matrons to gossip, and for the unmarried young folk to look each other over. Ladies wore hooped skirts of course, and the men looked gorgeous in powdered wigs, tight breeches and the new long skirted coats with the turned back cuffs that were just coming into fashion then. For amusement there were cards, silly party games, chamber music and of course dancing. My sister and I featured regularly as wallflowers. It must have been trying for my mother’s friends to have to invite us year after year without either of us achieving a match.
Besides home entertainments there were also the occasional public affairs, like the burgomaster’s banquet, or once in a while a ball at the palace when the king felt he needed to make closer acquaintance with his subjects. Naturally the hoi polloi were excluded, but everyone who had any social aspirations at all competed madly for an invitation. One had to have a sponsor, and Mother imposed heavily on her wealthy friends from days of yore. But more of this later.
So the time went by. These were supposed to be our years of magic, though we saw little enough of it. Mother lamented that we were already on the shelf and in danger of becoming old maids, unless we stirred ourselves. As if it lay within our power to take the initiative! What was a girl to do, to make a man look at her? Those who did quickly looked away again in spite of the paint and patches I applied to hide my spots, or the tightness of the stays in which my sister laced herself until she could hardly breathe.
It was at this juncture that a fresh disaster befell our family: the captain’s ship was lost at sea with all hands, the master included, and we were left without a provider.
The cook was sacked at once while Mother cast about for a means of living. Beatrice and I could no longer dodge our share of the chores. Although most of the real drudgery devolved on Cinderella, we had no option but to help with the daily household routine, unaccustomed as we were to soiling our hands.
Luckily there was still the house, which was Cinderella’s inheritance. Mother had managed to accumulate a small nest egg, in spite of her extravagance over our education, and this she lent out at interest to the servants and small traders of the town at usurious rates, after the manner of my grandfather. This gave the family a small income, though not nearly enough and Mother began to look for a husband again. Her value on the marriage market being considerably devalued by her age and encumbrances, she was obliged to take yet another step down socially. The best match she could find was an artisan, a cabinetmaker older than her self in need of a home and a homemaker. So the ground floor of the house was converted into a workshop and the upstairs rooms rearranged. Much to our disgust Beatrice and I were forced to join Cinderella in the garret.
After this calamity social invitations were fewer that before, though some of Mother’s friends from her palmy days remained loyal.
The cabinetmaker was not a nice man. His manners were crude when sober, and when drunk, which happened regularly, he would be abusive and upbraid my mother for loading him with unwanted responsibilities, meaning her daughters. Nor was he above physical violence. Mother bore the marks of it about her person, a thing that had never happened in her previous marriages, and made me wish we had appreciated the sea captain more.
The cabinetmaker’s other fault was wandering hands. If he caught either of us girls alone he couldn’t resist the chance for a quick squeeze, until we learnt to keep a pin handy. Attentions that might have been entertained from a personable young buck were not to be endured from a horny-handed old goat like our stepfather. He had a go at Cinderella too. Once when I walked into the kitchen unexpectedly I caught him trying to get his hand up her skirt. The poor child was frozen in an agony of embarrassment, twisting to escape yet fearful, I suppose, of resisting the authority of an adult.
“Stepfather!” I exclaimed involuntarily.
“You keep your mouth shut, if you know what’s good for you!” he threatened with an evil look. But he stopped his groping at once and left the room. I was not to know that Cinderella would remember this intervention.
The cabinetmaker left off pestering Cinderella quite suddenly after that. I don’t know if this had anything to do with me, or if there was some other reason, for she never confided in her stepsisters even when she grew older. All I do know for sure is that the old goat abruptly evinced a reluctance to enter the kitchen at all, and kept his distance from Cinderella at all times.
It was about this time too that the Baltic godmother paid another of her periodic visits. Shortly afterwards Stepfather had a nasty accident with a slipped chisel that cut him in the groin and bled badly. Though I never knew the exact nature of the injury, Mother looked quite relieved. Again, I don’t know if there was any connection, but with the wisdom of hindsight, I sometimes wonder.
To add to the catalogue of our new stepfather’s demerits, I must mention that he was extremely mean. Despite the fact that he was getting free accommodation he made it clear from the outset that he was prepared to pay for our food only, nothing more. Clothing we would have to find for ourselves, and as Mother’s income from money lending was very small, we had to find some way of getting money for ourselves.
Employment was difficult and neither of us had yet descended to the level where we were prepared to enter into domestic service. Eventually my sister started giving music lessons on the harpsichord, a survival from our wealthier days. She didn’t have much talent herself, but as the saying goes, those who can perform do: those who can’t, teach. As for myself, I applied my skill at embroidery to embellishing ladies’ garments. We both drew our clients from my mother’s friends, who felt sorry for us.