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

slowly. “But I don’t think I’d call it Anna’s world. It’s more concrete than that. It’s the mountain.”

“What do you mean?”

Dora was embarrassed suddenly. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, “I’ve probably just read The Wood Wife one time too many.”

“You’re not comfortable talking about this, are you?”

“Not really,” Dora admitted. “Talking about the things you secretly believe in is a bit like talking about sex, isn’t it? It’s a private thing. Words diminish it somehow. And I guess I worry that I’m crazy too, the things I feel about this land—or at any rate that someone else would think so.”

“Like who for instance?”

“Like you for instance.”

“Why me? Do I seem so narrow-minded to you?”

“No, it’s not that. But what I feel about the mountain here isn’t entirely … rational. I feel it with my belly,” she placed a hand on her stomach, “not so much with my head. You’re more … cosmopolitan than me. You’ve seen more; you know more. I just know what I feel.”

“Yeah, that’s me,” Maggie said drily, “the original Cosmo Girl. Why do you think I wouldn’t respect your perceptions? You’re smart, you’re sharp and you’re hardly naive.”

Dora bit her lip. “But not like you.”

“What on earth do you mean, not like me? Look, Dora, I’m just a cracker from the middle of Nowhere, West Virginia. I grew up in the country. And I know it has a kind of … spirit to it, that you can’t easily put into words. Unless you’re Cooper. He did it. He used words like they were an incantation, a spell, a glamour—do you know what that old word used to mean? A glamour was a kind of spell or enchantment. Somehow Cooper learned to speak the ‘language of the earth’ while he was living up here.”

“But those images in his poems: the Wood Wife, the Spine Witch, the boy with the owl’s face, the drowned girl in the river… Maggie, are you saying you think they’re real, not symbolic?”

“Why can’t they be both?” Then Maggie shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I think about anything anymore, to tell you the truth. Living in this house, on this land, has turned everything I thought upside down and back again twice over. But I can’t dismiss Cooper as just a drunk, or crazy. The old man may have been both those things, but he was too smart to be only those things. There is something behind those poems and Anna’s paintings, and I reckon Cooper expected me to find it or he wouldn’t have left them to me.”

“You reckon, huh?” Dora smiled. “Now you’re beginning to sound like Fox.”

“I am?” Maggie looked more startled by this than she was by any of Cooper’s mysteries.

“This place is going to rub off on you yet,” Dora warned the other woman as they put away Anna’s paintings in the storage loft overhead. Maggie looked thoughtful. She closed the door of the studio behind them as they left, and as she did so Dora noticed Fox had installed another lock.

Dora returned to the bedroom while Maggie stopped to put music on the CD player. It sounded medieval. “Is that Estampie?” she asked when Maggie came back into the room.

“No, Symphonye,” Maggie said. “But you’re close—Nigel has recorded this too. I love this piece of music. It was written by Hildegard Von Bingen, a twelfth-century abbess, and a mystic. She had visions—but she was able to reconcile them with her Catholicism.”

“Unlike our poor Anna.”

“That’s right. That’s what made me think of Hildegard just now.”

“It’s pretty,” Dora said, although in fact she liked music with a little more kick. She boxed up clothes without seeing them, thinking about Anna’s painting.

She was going to have to talk to Juan, breach that wall that was going up between them. Last night he hadn’t even come to bed. He’d stayed out till well past midnight, and then he’d sacked out on the couch. She had woken up in an empty bed, wondering what had happened to their marriage…

They finished packing Cooper’s things, and then opened up two bottles of beer, taking them outside to the cool shade of the front porch. The day was a scorcher, more like summer heat than the middle of October. The ocotillo were blooming again, resembling wands in a tarot card deck, bursting into bright plumes at the top, brilliant red against the new green leaves.

Two figures walked down the road by the wash, kicking up the dust with long, boney feet. “Hey!” Dora called, waving her hand. The taller of the women waved back.

“Are those Fox’s sisters?” Maggie asked with surprise. “They look so young.”

“You haven’t met them yet? Come on over then, I’ll introduce you.”

She called out again, and the women stopped and waited in the shade of a paloverde tree. They were slender and graceful, and looked very much alike. Each had brown hair loose to her waist, and eyes of a brown so dark it was almost black. Their faces were thin and delicate and their long noses ever-so-slightly hooked.

Each put a long, thin hand in Maggie’s just briefly, and gave her a hesitant smile. Dora often wondered how they could perform when offstage they were so painfully shy. But she’d seen how the sisters transformed when they danced. They’d given an impromptu performance once at the Alders’, at Cooper’s seventy-eighth birthday party. They’d danced to Debussy, Lillian on piano and Fox on an Irish concertina. The magic of that evening was one she’d not forget—nor the sound of Debussy on a squeezebox.

“If you’d like to come over,” Maggie was saying, “you’re welcome, anytime.”

Isabella cocked her head, with a strange little smile.

Angela was silent, her eyes very wide. Then she said, in her quiet, breathy voice, “And you must come to the place where we live. Mustn’t she, Isabella?”

The other woman said, “My sister isn’t well. She’s had an injury and she needs to rest now.”

“What’s wrong?” asked Dora with concern.

“I can’t dance,” Angela told her. For a