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

preferred strong, talkative women. If Lillian had been a generation younger he’d have fallen in love, John or no John; yet none of her daughters were quite her match. Emma, the youngest, had been his lover, but it was friendship between them now, nothing more.

The lock mechanism came apart at last. Fox looked thoughtfully at the scarred wood door, resisting the strong impulse to push it open. He went to help the women finish up, and only when the rest of the kitchen was put to rights did they gather around the back-room door.

“You go in,” Maggie said, nudging Fox’s shoulder. “Go on. Go in first. I haven’t been waiting thirty years for this.”

Fox took a deep breath. He pushed the door. It moved stiffly on the hinges, groaning. Inside, the air was stale, filled with dust. The room was dark, the windows heavily curtained. He found a light switch and turned it on. The bulbs were old, but they still worked, filling the room with an amber glow.

The room had been an art studio. Anna Naverra’s, Fox realized. It looked like Cooper hadn’t moved a thing in all the years since Anna had died. The long tables still held scattered sketchbooks and dusty tubes of dried-out paint. Brushes stood in jars with their stiff bristles down, adhered to the rust-colored residue caked at the bottom. Old postcards from art museums were curling away from their tacks on the walls. The small room was crowded with canvases, watercolor studies and smudged chalk sketches. Piled in one corner were the pictures that had hung for years on the walls of Cooper’s house. But why had he moved them all right before he died, when his death was so sudden?

Lillian came into the room behind Maggie. “I thought that’s what you’d find in here. I thought he would have kept her things. Cooper was a romantic at heart, and he fell apart when Anna died.”

“Did you know her?” Maggie asked Lillian.

“Not very well. None of us did. Anna and Cooper kept to themselves. And I wasn’t here much in those years. I was nineteen when they came to the mountain, and I’d just moved north to marry John. But what I remember is the change that had come over Cooper when I moved back here. This was after Anna was gone. Cooper was a different man then. Lost without her. But driven somehow. He was writing the ‘Wood Wife’ poems like there were devils hanging on his tail.”

“After she died?” Maggie said. “I thought he wrote them when they lived together.”

“Oh no,” said the older woman firmly. “I remember when Cooper started working on them. I’d inherited the Big House by then, and John had come with me back down to Tucson. Why? Does it matter when he wrote them?”

“In terms of literary scholarship, yes. The assumption has always been that her pictures with the same imagery were illustrations of his poems.”

“And not that the paintings may have come first. I see,” said Lillian.

Dora said, “I can think of a lot of feminist scholars who would love to hear about that.” She was bent down by a shelf of books. She pulled one out and opened it, biting her lip as she turned the pages. She looked up at Maggie. “There are journals here. Full of sketches, mostly, and notes for compositions. But there are also long handwritten blocks of text. Do you read Spanish, Maggie? Maybe when you’ve finished your book on Cooper you might do one on Anna Naverra.”

Fox said to Dora, “Do you remember when that woman from the Tucson Art Museum was trying to get some of Anna’s paintings to exhibit?”

“Yeah, and Cooper all but ran her off the mountain with a shotgun. There was something he was protecting in here.”

“His reputation,” Lillian muttered. “He won the Pulitzer for The Wood Wife and I don’t recall Anna’s name ever being mentioned.”

“It was Exile Songs he won the Pulitzer for,” Maggie corrected her. “His collection of poems about the war. People think it was for The Wood Wife because that’s the book he became famous for. But it came out after Exile Songs and the critics didn’t like it one bit. It was too full of fairy-tale allusions—and the popularity of it with the general public didn’t help his credibility in poetry circles. In fact it was the kiss of death.”

Fox said, “So whatever he was hiding here wasn’t his reputation. Because by that time he didn’t have as much of a critical reputation left to lose.”

Dora stood, still holding the journal and looking flushed, excited. “It’s going to be fascinating, don’t you think, to pore through all of this and piece the truth of their lives back together? If you want help, Maggie, just say so. My Spanish isn’t as fluent as Juan’s, but I’d give it a go.”

“Thanks. I may take you up on that,” she said, “since I don’t speak Spanish myself.” She was looking through the piled canvases, an expression of wonder on her face.

Dora came over to stand beside her. “Are you going to put the paintings back up in the house? It looks strange here without them.”

“Which ones did he have up?” she asked.

Lillian said, “Never mind Cooper. This is your house now. You should hang the ones that you like best. Assuming you like Anna’s work?”

“Heavens, yes,” said Maggie. “I’m just a little stunned, that’s all. I knew Cooper had left me his own work—I didn’t realize till I got here that he’d also left me hers.”

Fox crossed his arms and looked at the paintings, relieved to find that they were indeed here. It had frightened him to think they might be missing. They belonged on this mountain. Cooper had been right about that, although he couldn’t say why. And there were more of them in storage here than Fox had ever expected. Anna had died young, and he’d never imagined that she’d been so prolific.

Fox moved to help Maggie pull more