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

the truth, what I’m doing is looking for a missing manuscript. I thought getting the house cleaned out would help. I don’t know the half of what’s in this place. Here. Look at this.” She pushed another box toward Dora. “Old-fashioned women’s clothes. They’re Anna’s, I guess. Ah, look at your face. Well it’s Christmas today. Just take anything you want.”

Anna had been a small woman, and Dora was delighted. There were long linen skirts, lingerie of old lace, fringed shawls and a good pair of boots.

“You sure you don’t want them?”

“Me?” Maggie made a face. “I’m happy with some of Cooper’s old shirts.”

“Do you always just wear men’s clothes then?”

“I’m a menace around men’s closets—I’m always pinching clothes off my boyfriends.”

Dora grinned. “I had a boyfriend in college who used to pinch mine. I got rid of that one quick.”

“I dunno, I think men look good in skirts. Like that gorgeous lad in The Highlander.”

“It wasn’t my skirts he was after,” Dora said drily, and Maggie laughed.

Maggie went into the closet and pulled down another box. “You know what I like?” she said as she emerged. “I like seeing so many men wearing jewelry here in the west, all that beautiful turquoise and silver. There’s something so sexy about a bracelet on a strong, masculine arm.”

Dora smiled to herself. Fox wore a bracelet; maybe there was hope for him yet. “Perhaps it’s the combination of masculine and feminine together that’s so devastating. I find men with long hair sexy for the same reason.”

“Like the man in that painting,” Maggie said casually, but there was something in her face that was not casual at all.

“What painting?”

“You know. The one that Lillian said looks like Fox’s father.”

Dora sat down on the bed among the clothes. “Shoot, wasn’t that the oddest thing? I wonder if it really is Fox’s father? If it is, he’d be Cooper’s age by now; if he’s even still alive, I mean. It must be weird for Fox not to know. I come from a family almost as big as Juan’s, and I can’t imagine what it’s like not to have one. Oh no, I’m sorry. You don’t have much family either, do you?”

“Sure I do,” Maggie said cheerfully as she sorted through another box, “spread across half a dozen countries. Good friends, old lovers, Granddaddy Black. Just depends on how you define family.”

Dora said, “Do you know that whenever you mention your grandfather the West Virginia twang gets deeper?”

“Hmmm. It’s funny how a place stays in your bones.”

“Like Cooper and England. He never lost the accent, you know? You could always tell he was an Englishman.”

“But he never went back.”

“He couldn’t,” she said.

Maggie put down a fedora hat and looked at her. “What do you mean by that?”

“He said that this was where the poetry was—the ‘whisper of the stones’ he called it. He said if he ever left, it would all be gone. He was really pretty superstitious about it. At least during the years I knew him.”

“Did you know that he was still writing poems?”

“Well yes, didn’t you?”

“No. I don’t think anyone did—I mean, in publishing circles. I suspected that he was, but I didn’t know for sure until I got here.”

“Is that the manuscript you’re looking for?”

“That’s right. There’s supposed to be a whole new collection, called The Saguaro Forest. Did he talk to you about it?”

Dora put her arms around her knees. “Sure. A little bit. We’d talk about writing sometimes. He read me some of the poems.”

“He did?” Maggie came over to sit down as well, resting her back against the headboard. “You know, I feel a little jealous. He never said a thing about them to me at all. And I thought we were good friends.”

“Well, you were out in the world,” Dora pointed out. “I was here in the Rincons. I think maybe he didn’t want those poems to go off of the mountain any more than Anna’s paintings.”

“But why?”

She shrugged. “He was an eccentric old guy. Pissed on gin half of the time, you know. Who knows what was going through his head?”

“I want to show you a letter he left me.” Maggie reached for an envelope on her bedside table, weighted down with a chunk of raw turquoise. She opened Cooper’s letter from the stiff envelope and handed it to Dora.

Dora read it, perplexed. “April sixteenth. That’s right before he died, isn’t it?”

“The same day.”

Dora shivered. “What’s the ‘Night of the Dark Stone’?”

“I don’t know. Listen to this,” she said, picking up a book. “It’s from Pablo Neruda:

Return me, oh sun,

to my wild destiny,

rain of the ancient wood …

I want to go back to being what I have not been,

and learn to go back from such deeps

that amongst all natural things

I could live or not live; it does not matter,

to be one stone more, the dark stone,

the pure stone which the river bears away.

“He knew that poem, of course,” Maggie continued. “He referred to it in a letter to me not long before he died. And he’s written part of it here on the wall by the mirror, in ink that looks relatively fresh.”

“The dark stone, the pure stone which the river bears away,” Dora repeated. “And then he up and died in some dried out riverbed. That’s either ironic or spooky, Maggie, I don’t know which. Are you thinking maybe there’s some kind of connection?”

“With Cooper there are always connections. His letters were often like that; you couldn’t just read them, you had to mull over them, decipher them.”

“Like his poems.”

“That’s right.”

“The dark stone,” said Dora, musing. “Hmmm. Well here, take a look at this then.” She handed Maggie a scrap of paper from the pile taken from the pockets of Cooper’s clothes. “I found it in the green cardigan. He wore that sweater all the time.”

Maggie read the words scribbled on the back of a grocery receipt out loud: “It is ultimately stone in you and star.”

“What do you suppose that could mean: ‘stone in you