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

“You forget,” Maggie said. She sighed.

She rose from the kitchen table and took the empty bowls to the sink. She heard the scrapping of a chair, and when she turned around, Thumper had left the room. Maggie went to the door. The girl was running through Cooper’s front yard, laughing now, pleased with herself.

“Hey!” Maggie called. “Come back tonight. You’re welcome here. Remember that.”

“Thumper, Thumper, Thumper,” said the girl. She chanted, almost sang the name. Then she dropped to the ground and rolled in the sandy soil, covering her soft grey pelt with a layer of fine sepia-colored dust.

Maggie watched her as she rolled and scratched and stretched, and curled into a ball. When the girl uncurled, she had been transformed, or else she had transformed herself, into a grey hare, a desert jackrabbit, covered with a layer of dust. Then the jackrabbit rolled, exuberantly, somersaulting across the sun-baked earth. It turned into a blur of light, a shimmer of heat on the golden stones, and then the creature was gone.

The yard was empty. The hare, the quail, the skinny coyote—they had all disappeared. Maggie lingered in the doorway nonetheless, admiring the deep lapis blue of the sky, the wind in the trees, the sun on the stones. It took her a while to realize that behind her the phone had begun to ring.

It was her daily call from her ex-husband. “Nigel,” she said, “isn’t there anything I can say that will persuade you to call me later in the day?”

“This is later,” Nigel protested.

“Oh. You’re right. Sorry, Nige. I got up late this morning.”

“So where were you last night then? Had a hot date, did you?”

“None of your business,” she told him in a bantering tone. But in fact it was none of his business. “Nigel, what is it you want?”

“Go get your copy of today’s New York Times. There’s something I want you to see.”

“I don’t have today’s Times. I get it by post, so it comes a day late up here.”

“God, you are in the boonies. All right, I’ll read it to you.”

Maggie sat down, cradling the phone, to listen patiently to a long article on medieval music, Estampie, and the fabulous life of Nigel Vanderlin.

She was pleased for him, and gratified that those long years of work had come to fruition—even if she didn’t really need to hear the whole thing right now, word for word, long distance. But the words he read seemed unreal to her as she sat in Cooper’s dusty house. There was no hint of the Nigel she knew: those Amsterdam kitchens, underpaid gigs, rooms without heat, months of cabbage soup. In the Times version of Nigel’s history, Estampie was the labor of one brilliant man. Never mind the group, much less the network of people who stood behind the group, who had formed the safety net beneath the highwire rope of success Nigel walked. It wasn’t Nigel’s fault really; this was the mold their culture fit heroes in. The independent man, the solitary cowboy striding into town at high noon.

Halfway through the Times article, Maggie found herself tuning out Nigel’s voice. Her thoughts had strayed many miles away, following Thumper into blue-grey hills, when the words in her ear came to a halt, and then Nigel asked, “Aren’t you pleased?”

“Yes, I’m pleased,” she fudged and wondered what exactly she was claiming to be pleased about—the article? Or perhaps something Nigel had said. She’d have to read it tomorrow.

“But enough about me,” said Nigel. “I want to talk about this filmscript of yours. I’ve got a meeting with Harvey next Friday. He’s certain he can set it up at Tristar.”

“Earth to Nigel,” Maggie said, “listen to me for once. There is no filmscript. There won’t be a filmscript. I’m not even sure there will be a book.”

“Now Mags, you can’t be serious.”

“I am. Dead serious. Are you really listening? I don’t want to write a film about Cooper—”

“Look, you don’t even have to write it, although you’d make a hell of a lot more money if you did. Just give me a treatment. I know you can do it. They’ll probably want a real writer on the script anyway.”

“A real writer?”

“I don’t mean that. You know what I mean. A scriptwriter. Harvey represents Desmond Cappell.”

“Who’s he?”

“He wrote all the Deadly Touch movies.”

“You want him to write about Davis Cooper? You want to make a horror film?”

“Mags, calm down. Cappell is good, and those films made a lot of money. If you want to try screenwriting yourself—”

“This is a completely absurd conversation.” Maggie paced acrossed the room as far as the cord for the phone would allow. “Cooper was my friend. I’m not going to exploit his life—”

“What do you think a biography is?”

“I thought it would be a testament to Cooper. Done right, that’s what it would be. But I’m not even sure I can do that now. Cooper put his life into his poems; maybe we should all be satisfied with that.”

“You can’t film a bloody poem. You’ve got a great story here, why waste it?”

“Give it up, Nigel. I don’t really believe Desmond Cappell wants to write about an elderly poet anyway.”

“A poet, no. But a murdered poet, that’s a whole other kettle of fowl. Have the police found out who did it yet?”

“Fish. And no.”

“That’s good,” he said. “That leaves us more room.”

“More room?”

“For telling a good story. We can decide who we want to have done it. We’re not bound by the facts.”

“Nigel, you’ve been in L.A. too long,” Maggie snarled, and she hung up on him.

The phone rang again immediately. She sighed and picked it up.

“Don’t speak. Don’t hang up. Just let me apologize first,” Nigel said in his best contrite-Nigel voice. “I see that I’m being insensitive here. I realize Cooper was a friend of yours, so of course you’re still touchy about his death. It’s just that I want to see you do well, Puck, that’s all. And there you are, sitting