The Wood Wife by Terri Windling (the false prince TXT) 📕

off until it was too late. It was absurd to be angry with a dead man, but she was angry with Davis nonetheless—and at the same time overwhelmed by his last unexpected gift: the chance to finally know the man, to understand the life he’d led. The study was crammed full of notes, letters, journals, marked-up manuscripts; an entire life sat in these pages, was filed away in trunks and drawers. He’d been a reclusive, secretive man. But he’d trusted her with all this.

The task before her was daunting. She wondered how and where she should begin. By living here, she answered herself. By sleeping where he slept, eating where he ate, walking this raw, uncomfortable land and trying to learn what kept him here, away from all his colleagues and friends back in Europe and New York. Were the demons that drove him still in this place, or had he taken them with him to his grave? Had he ever written poetry again? It was Maggie’s belief that he had.

His letters weren’t the work of a retired man, but of an artist still struggling with his craft and his muse. His study confirmed that impression. This was a working writer’s room. The walls were filled with poetry, other poets’ work as well as his own, written in brown ink right on the walls in that distinctive calligraphic hand: Blake, Shakespeare, Yeats, Pound, Stevens, Neruda, Adrienne Rich. Quotes from sources as diverse as popular fiction, science texts and the Bible. He’d written on the walls in other rooms too; she’d come across poems in surprising places (Keats by the john, Borges by the sugar tin, a line from one of her own poems on the back of the bedroom door) but here he’d covered the walls with them, a collage of words, in four languages: his own English, his adopted Spanish and French, and Rilke in German.

Above his desk was a line from Homer:

Sing heavenly muse.

Under that were the last words of Michaelangelo upon his deathbed, to his apprentice:

Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio,

draw and do not waste time.

The first was written in faded ink; the second quote was fresh and new, written in a slanted, urgent hand. Why would a man who had given up his craft write out those particular words? She was certain that somewhere in this room she would find evidence that he’d been writing still, writing up to the very end. But if so, why had he kept it a secret? And would the work be any good?

She looked long at the bulletin board hanging above Homer’s exhortation. Old photographs were pinned to it and she recognized her friend from the photos printed in biographies of other poets: the young Davis, fair-haired and clean-featured, in the square-shouldered suits of New York in the forties; a more weathered face in the fifties in the harsher Arizona light. Here was one taken with T. S. Eliot in London, another with Pablo Neruda. A grainy snapshot of Anaïs Nin and Henry Miller had been taken in Paris before the war. There were several photographs of Anna Naverra, the Surrealist painter he’d become involved with when he fled his brief marriage to a New York socialite and ended up in Mexico. All the photographs were black-and-white; there were none more recent than thirty years before. As though his life had then ground to a halt, like the poetry did.

She examined the other items pinned to the board: A grocery list. A phone list. A list of book titles—all nonfiction. A list of what seemed like place names. A list of the titles of Maggie’s early poems. A list of words with no obvious connection between them at all.

Three small pictures tacked to the board were the only images of art in the room. One was an old, faded postcard from London’s V & A Museum: “The Moon’s Betrothed,” by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Charles Endicott Bete. The second postcard, from a Tucson gallery, was a contemporary painting by Holly Roberts: the abstracted figure of a man with stag horns rendered in greys and blues. Below that card was a larger reproduction of a painting by Brian Froud, an English artist the poet admired and with whom, she knew, he had corresponded. Froud lived on Dartmoor, the wild corner of Britain where Davis himself had been born. The painting was of a mysterious woman in a mask of leaves and crowned with horns. The figure could have easily stepped from the pages of Davis’s “Wood Wife” poems. She wondered if it illustrated the poems, or simply grew from the same rocky soil—the landscape she had always assumed inspired the poems. Until she came here.

Tucked behind the Froud picture was an envelope, a thick one, of heavy starched paper. Maggie pulled it out and looked at it, startled. It was addressed hastily in Davis’s hand to “Black Maggie”—his name for her. The envelope was sealed with wax, and covered with thick, grimy layers of dust. Whoever had cleaned the house since then—Johnny Foxxe or his mother, she supposed—had not discovered the envelope, or had left it there undisturbed.

As she stood holding it in her hands—half-eager, half-afraid to open it—the phone began to ring again. Nigel, she thought to herself crossly as she pocketed the envelope and headed back to the kitchen.

It was not Nigel, it was her best friend, Tat, calling her from London and blithely unaware of how early it was on this side of the world.

“Hey, Tat!” Maggie said, ridiculously glad to hear her voice again. She and Tat had known each other for half their lives, ever since their university days at Exeter, in the west of England—not far from where Cooper had been born, and where she’d discovered his work.

“I’ve been trying to reach you all week,” Tat said. “What happened with what’s-his-name in Mendocino? When I called, he said you’d left him and he wouldn’t say where you’d gone. I had to track down Nigel to get your