Charles de Lint - Forests of the Heart

As for today’s seesaw… Well, she’d had the pleasure of meeting Bettina, and wouldn’t she make a great subject for a bust with her striking Latina features—those eyes, that hair—but then Donal had to start acting like such a little shit.

And now this.

Musgrave Wood, if that even was his/her name, was proving to be more cantankerous than Donal at his worst, and wasn’t that saying something? The Old World charm Wood had conveyed when they’d met the other night wasn’t even remotely in evidence today. Ellie had been nervous enough about coming to Kellygnow in the first place, and she was of half a mind to simply walk right out of the cottage now, if this was what she could expect. But for all her dislike of mysteries and puzzles, curiosity had managed to get the better of her and she found herself staying. She supposed she’d been hanging around with Tommy too much lately. The next thing you knew she’d be driving up to the rez with him to ask the Aunts for advice.

“Would you like some tea?” her androgynous host asked.

Ellie glanced at the door Wood had so recently closed in Donal’s face. She was surprised that he wasn’t hammering on its panels.

“My friend,” she began.

“Will be fine. No doubt they’ll be waiting for you in the house.” When Ellie didn’t immediately respond, Wood added, “You’ve come this far. At least hear me out.”

“I suppose. It’s just…”

“First let me get the tea,” Wood said. “Go on and take off your coat and sit. And don’t worry about your boots. The floor’s seen worse than a bit of snow in its time.”

Ellie hesitated a moment longer before finally crossing the floor to where a pair of rustic wooden chairs stood at an equally roughly hewn table. Her boots shed melting snow with every step.

She’d often had a fantasy of moving into some little log cabin in the Kick-aha Hills—the idea of it appealed to the same part of her that thought she liked camping. However the two times she’d actually gone camping, the discomforts had seemed to far outweigh the pleasanter aspects of those outings. But she thought she could live in a place like this.

The open-concept room was dominated by a rather large cast-iron wood-stove. One corner of the floor space, the part where she was sitting, had been sectioned off as a kitchen area. The rest formed a combination sitting room and bedroom, furnished with a rather narrow four-poster brass bed that had a cedar chest at its foot, and a reading chair that was pulled up by the stove, a floor lamp standing behind it. The kitchen boasted a sink and counter, a hutch, fridge, and some cupboards under the counter. There was a row of books on a shelf near the bed, leather-bound, their titles indecipherable from where she was sitting, and a small curtained area in the far corner that was probably the bathroom, or a closet. Or both. It seemed wonderfully cozy, with the views from the windows looking out on only trees and lawn. One could almost think they were out in the hills somewhere, instead of the middle of the city.

Before Ellie sat down, she unzipped her parka, but kept it on, making it plain that she didn’t expect to stay long. She glanced at her host. Wood gave no indication that she’d noticed, or understood, what was implied by Ellie’s keeping her coat on, and busied herself at the woodstove. Pouring hot water from a kettle into a brown betty tea pot, she brought it and a pair of mugs over to the table where Ellie sat waiting.

“Milk? Sugar?” Wood asked.

“Both, please.”

“Now then,” Wood said, returning from the small old-fashioned refrigerator that hunched, murmuring to itself, beside the sleeker wooden kitchen hutch. “Where shall we start?”

She placed a sugar bowl and a carton of milk between them on the table and sat down across from Ellie, giving her an expectant look. Ellie was still holding the business card she’d found in the van the other night. Smoothing out its creases, she dropped the card onto the table beside the brown betty.

“Outside,” she said. “When I asked you if this was your name, you were… evasive.”

Wood nodded. “Yes, I was. I’m sorry. It’s a bad habit.”

“So is it? Your name, I mean.”

“Why is it so important?”

Ellie shrugged. “I just like to know who I’m dealing with.”

And what, she added to herself. She was sure, now, that Wood was a woman. A very mannish woman, though a woman nevertheless. But there was still something odd about her that had nothing to do with the blurring of genders.

Wood tapped the business card with a long finger and smiled. “I do answer to this,” she said, “though it’s not the name I was born to. It’s a bit of a joke, really. Do you know what ‘musgrave’ means?”

Ellie shook her head.

“ ‘Grove full of mice.’ ”

All Ellie could do was give her a blank look.

“When I was a child,” Wood explained, “the Kickaha lived closer to the lake than they do now. I used to be haunted by the ghosts of the dead mice that we had to kill—to keep them out of our dry goods, you understand. So the Indian children that I played with took to calling me Many Mice Wood—‘Wood’ is my actual surname. I related this story to a philologist friend of mine some time later and he promptly christened me Musgrave. Wood/grove—do you see? Full of mice.”

“And all of this relates to… ?” Ellie asked.

“You wanted to know my name.”

“Yes. Of course.”

“I was born Sarah,” Wood went on, “which was also my best friend’s name in college. To lessen the confusion, I decided to rename myself.” She tapped the card again. “To this. Of course Sarah—my friend Sarah—is long gone now and I’ve since reclaimed the name.” Her gaze rose from the card. “Though Musgrave, I’ll admit, still has a certain resonance for me that Sarah will never have, and I can’t quite seem to let it go.”

Since sitting at the table, Wood’s manner had regained that Old World charm that Ellie remembered from the other night. The woman’s moodiness was something else Wood shared with Donal, she realized. When the fancy struck him, he could switch as readily as Wood had between being cranky and wonderfully likable. Still, while that was true, and interesting on some level, it brought her no closer to understanding why Wood had left the card in the van than she’d been before coming up here to Kellygnow.

Opening the lid of the brown betty and peering inside, Wood pronounced the tea steeped and poured them each a cup. She drank hers black, pushing the sugar and milk over to Ellie’s side of the table.

“So you used to see the ghosts of mice,” Ellie found herself saying.

That was the sort of thing she expected from Jilly or Donal, not this rather formidable woman sitting across from her. Whimsical was not a word Ellie would have used to describe her.

“I still do,” Wood informed her. “Mousy ghost,... and others, too.”

I’m not going there, Ellie thought.

She stirred her tea and took a sip. Setting her mug down, she regarded her host.

“Why am I here, Ms. Wood?” she said. “Why did you leave your business card in our van the other night? And what did you mean with ‘you’ve finally come’ when you opened the door?”

“I have a proposition for you,” Wood said. “A commission.”

Don’t let it have anything to do with ghosts, Ellie thought, of mice or otherwise.

“A commission,” she repeated.

Wood nodded. “I would like you to cast a mask for me. You still do masks, don’t you?”

“I haven’t for years, but I can still do them.” She paused, and gave her host a sharp look. “But how would you even know that? Actually, when it comes down to it, how did you know to approach me on the street the other night? And why didn’t you ask me then?”