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

butt getting every magazine assignment I could. Cooper was furious with me but I wouldn’t listen; I was in love, and ready to join that long tradition of the little woman behind the great man, god help me.”

“Then what happened?” Dora asked her over the hiss of batter hitting the grill.

“I think I had this romantic vision of being The Artist’s Muse—but instead I was just The Hardworking Wife. And the muses were all the ladies that my husband had on the side. The ones that didn’t fuss about electric bills. We broke up right before he made it big.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Nigel Vanderlin; have you ever heard of him? He’s the director of Estampie.”

“What’s a stampy?” Dora said, the spoon in her hand dribbling batter onto the floor.

“An Early Music group. It’s been quite successful. Who would have thought that medieval music would end up on the Billboard charts? Not me, anyway. I thought Nigel would be like all my poet friends: known by a handful of people who care for the stuff, and thoroughly ignored by all the rest.”

“So he made it big, and then he went and left you? What a rat,” said Dora with disgust.

Maggie shook her head. “Nigel’s not so bad. Leaving the marriage was my idea. And ever since he came into money he’s been trying his best to help me out. But the thing is, I hate it. I don’t know why. He considers it perfectly reasonable to give something back after living off me, but it makes me uncomfortable all the same. There’s freedom in earning your own living.”

“If he’s not a rat, then why did you leave?” Dora asked her curiously. “The ladies on the side, I suppose?”

“For a lot of different reasons, really. One of them was that he was unfaithful, but that was only part of it—the easiest thing to pin it on,” she answered Dora honestly. “The truth is more complex than that. Our unspoken assumption that Nigel was the ‘real artist’ in the family was at the core of what went wrong between us. So you be careful of that, you hear?”

“I hear you,” Dora said with a smile. “And I’ll think about what you’ve said.”

Maggie smiled back at the younger woman. She had that feeling one got on rare occasions that here was a friend returned from a long absence instead of stranger newly met, and one could plunge right into real conversation without the months of small talk first. When it happened this way, these were the friendships she found she tended to keep—unlike the other kind, the fleeting ones that came and went like the ocean tide, dependent on such transient things as a shared neighborhood, a class, a job; chance meetings in foreign cafes; the rolling dice of circumstance.

Juan came out of the bathroom then, his dark hair wet, smelling of soap, tucking the tails of his paint-streaked denim shirt into his jeans. He kissed Dora on the top of the head and poured himself a cup of coffee.

“Good morning,” he said to Maggie. “Did you sleep all right on the couch?”

“Just fine. I had a furry foot warmer all night. I’ve missed having cats around; my own cat is still back in L.A.”

“Well take some of ours,” Juan said magnanimously, ignoring the murderous look Dora shot him. “We used to have just one, fat old Moose there. Then she had kittens and somehow we never gave any of them away. I suppose we should be grateful Moose didn’t have a dozen.”

“Ignore him,” said Dora. “He makes out he doesn’t want them, but he’s the one we have to blindfold every time we pass a FREE KITTENS sign. I wanted to leave Moose with my sister in Vermont because of all the coyotes around here. He’s the one who wouldn’t leave her behind.”

“She’s an excellent mouser,” Juan protested.

“So are the coyotes,” said Dora.

“And she’d miss us,” said Juan, in a smaller voice.

Dora smiled. “Admit it. It’s you who would miss her, not the other way around. Moose loved those woods in Vermont.”

“Juan,” Maggie said, “your paintings of Vermont are beautiful. I’d love to see your studio.” She saw a wary look pass between Juan and Dora, and she added, “If that’s all right?”

“Of course,” Juan said a little too heartily. “You can take a quick look while we wait for Fox.”

Dora looked troubled, and Maggie was sorry then that she had asked him. Perhaps his dissatisfaction with his old work extended to his new work as well.

She followed Juan over a cobbled yard to an old stone barn that reminded her of England—except here there was no green covering of thick ivy and old rose vines. Just the grey granite stones, the inevitable cactus, a scattering of red desert poppies. The morning air was crisp and fresh, but soon it would warm up again. A haze lay on the mountain peaks, promising another hot day.

Inside, the barn was spacious but the studio was crowded nonetheless, with tables, easels, shelves of fat art books, sketchbooks, pigments, sculpting tools, buckets of plaster and clay. Raw linen canvas was draped over the rafters; the floor was covered with bright splashes of paint. Walking into an art studio always gave Maggie pangs of jealousy. The tools of writing seem so much less romantic. Her computer. Her printer. A stack of fanfold paper. A legal pad of scribbled notes.

The room had a familiar turpentine smell that would always mean Tat and London to her. The walls were covered with drawings on large sheets of creamy paper: spiral designs and Celtic knotwork rendered in smudged black charcoal. Some were simple repetitions of patterns, others had images trapped inside: rabbits, deer, foxes, owls whose shapes were rendered as part of the overall pattern, tucked into the intricate designs. The entire effect, from one angle of the room, was a bit like Morris wallpaper. From another, it was simply obsessive, disturbing, although Maggie couldn’t say why.

She looked instead at the canvas on the