The Secret Language of Stones (6 page)

A screech sent shivers down my spine. The sound of the stone scraping against itself was harsh. Ugly and rough, it disturbed the quiet and made me afraid. How long since someone had opened this drawer? Was I brave enough to peer inside and see what it contained? My imagination ran wild. What if it was proof of some awful deed committed here? I knew this had been La Lune's studio in the sixteenth century and my mother's just twenty-four years ago. I knew they were witches and that this star shape was a powerful occult symbol.

The moonlight fell into the drawer, a pool of it collecting, shining on silver, reflecting in my eyes. I reached in and pulled out a pile of metal sheets, stacked to create an object roughly the same size and heft of a substantial book. Examining it, I could see each sheet was engraved front and back with signs, symbols, equations, and words. Some in Arabic or Greek, others with medieval French spellings.

I studied the inscriptions, marked only here and there with fin
gerprints. I recognized them as formulas, some I'd even seen before in a book Anna Orloff had lent me when I'd first started making mourning jewelry.

These paper-thin sheets of sacred silver held secret rituals for creating talismans. I turned to the last page.

Make of the blood, heat.

Make of the heat, a fire.

Make of the fire, life everlasting.

I'd read a similar inscription on a painting hanging above the fireplace in my mother's studio. A self-portrait of her and my father, done in this very bell tower. They stood in front of a marvelous stained glass window, its ruby light bathing them and casting a shadow on the stone floor. The words painted on the window's border said something about stones too.

I closed the drawer but took the sheets and carried them carefully downstairs. I didn't return to my great-grandmother's bedroom but continued past the second floor to the ground floor and the kitchen. I needed a glass of water . . . or maybe wine. I was too shaken to go back to sleep.

It was past three
AM
, so I was surprised to see my great-­grandmother at the stove. From the smells in the kitchen, I knew she was making hot chocolate. Nothing like the powdery cocoa my relatives in Boston drank, this was pure melted chocolate with just enough milk added to make it drinkable.

“You heard him too?” I asked my great-grandmother.

“Who?”

I told her about the weeping. She shook her head sadly. “No, I didn't hear your soldier tonight, but I've heard other soldiers other nights.”

“Then why are you up?”

“I don't sleep more than two or three hours anymore. It is the
curse or the blessing of old age or a fear that I have so little time left I don't want to lose any.”

She smiled at me, and her fire eyes sparkled. Her astonishing youthful appearance was an inheritance of sorts. Like my mother, she seemed never to age.

“So many of the soldiers endure battle fatigue and terrible dreams,” she said.

“Are there two ways to exit the bell tower?” I asked.

“No. Why?” She looked suddenly agitated.

“The soldier I heard was up there.”

She shook her head. “No,
mon ange
, he couldn't have been. The door is always locked.”

“Mightn't he have found the key?”

“It's in the safe in my closet so I don't think so. I doubt anyone was up there.”

“But I was up there—”

“You were? I thought we agreed you would stay away from the attic. It's not safe.”

“It's perfectly safe. Solid stone that's been standing for over three hundred years.”

“That's not what I mean and you know it. How did you open the door?” Before I could answer, she put up her hand. “No, don't bother. I know. It simply opened for you. The way it did for your mother.”

“Well, however it opened, I heard him.” I needed the cries to be real, to be coming from one of her guests.

“Couldn't it be your voices?”

She knew about them. I had told her about them when they first started.

“I only hear them that clearly when I'm with a client,” I said, forgetting until the words were out of my mouth about hearing what I'd thought was Jean Luc's voice the day before.

Changing the subject, I laid the silver sheets out on the table. “Look at what I found.” I explained about the moon and the pen
tagram. “Who do you think put these instructions there? They are directions for exactly the kind of work I've been doing, making talismans. Almost as if they'd been waiting for me.”

My great-grandmother sighed. “They have been.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing happens by accident, Opaline, you know that. And I'm too old to fight this house again.” She shook her head. “I blame your mother. It's all Sandrine's fault and will just continue now, generation after generation.” My great-grandmother's voice always grew resigned when she talked about my mother. As if she was a lost cause. “I don't like that magick and never did. I kept our family curse locked up in that bell tower for over forty years until it seduced your mother. Sandrine should have exorcised the spirit of La Lune. What business did she have embracing a long-dead ancestor and allowing her to transmigrate into her body? Going so far as signing her paintings with La Lune's name?”

“My mother couldn't help who she became.”

“Of course she could have. Don't defend her, Opaline. You don't know all the things that went on in this house between your mother and me. And you don't need to. Let me put those inscriptions back where they belong.” She reached for them with her bony, hard veined hands. The perfectly manicured oval nails making a screeching sound on the metal.

I put my hand on top of the silver sheets I'd taken from the drawer to keep them where they were.

“Listen to me,” she said. “Concentrate on the jewels you are making. Become the artist I see emerging in you.” She put her hand on top of mine and stroked my skin. “My darling Opaline, don't throw yourself any deeper into this shadow land of voices and spirits. Has it given you anything but grief so far?”

I shook my head.

“I know people who can help you rid yourself of all connections to that world. Will you let me take you to them?”

I wanted to say yes, that I'd heard enough dead soldiers and seen too many of their wives and mothers weep. But was I really ready to give up what I was doing? Especially now after I'd been stirred by Jean Luc's deep velvet voice?

“No.” I gestured to Grand-mère's kitchen, to her house. “Just like what you are doing here, entertaining these soldiers, what I'm doing helps those who the soldiers leave behind.”

“At what price? Here you are, up in the middle of the night, nervous and exhausted, hearing things, your imagination spinning out of control.”

The diamonds in my great-grandmother's many rings glittered as she poured out the chocolate into two fine china cups, white with a border of violets and green leaves. “Drink this, it will restore you.”

Grand-mère liked diamonds she could scratch on the mirror to prove they were real and pearls whose veracity she could check with her teeth. She liked paintings and sculpture and listening to the raucous laughter of the men she entertained. She dwelled in the world of flesh and passion. Of men's needs and women's struggles to survive. Magick, second sight, speaking to the dead . . . she was suspicious of all the dark arts. She'd never attended a séance and didn't believe in anything she couldn't touch or see, except love. And she'd argue she could see even that. When I first came to Paris, I yearned to be more like her than my mother, and in many ways I did still. But I was beginning to question if that was at all possible.

Chapter 6

“You're not eating,” Anna said as she watched me refill my wineglass. “What's wrong?”

We'd closed the shop for
l'heure déjeuner
as usual at twelve thirty and, since it was the first sunny day in two weeks, brought our lunch out into the garden. The velvety ruby and pink pastel roses were open, perfuming the afternoon, and birds sang as if there were no war, as if men were not dying and mothers were not mourning, and as if I weren't hearing voices.

In addition to the wine was cold roast chicken leftover from the night before, mustard, cornichons, and a coveted baguette from the bakery. With so many supplies acquisitioned for the front and rations in effect, white flour was a luxury, but Anna had secured a rare loaf.

“Nothing serious,” I said in answer to her question, and picked at the chicken.

“From the look in your eyes, I doubt that. What's wrong, little one?”

I'd been hesitant to tell her. Like my great-grandmother, she'd want me to take action. But whereas Grand-mère wanted me to divorce myself from my potential abilities, Anna wanted me to do the opposite: embrace my heritage and explore the gift my mother had given me.

“You know it might make you feel better to talk about whatever is
troubling you. I believe you need to delve deeper into what you might be capable of, but I won't push you, Opaline. You have to make up your own mind that you're ready . . .”

Maybe she was right. I was exhausted trying to understand on my own. I told Anna about the voice I'd heard on Friday in the workshop, the weeping that woke me up on Saturday night, and the sheaf of ancient silver leaves I'd found in the bell tower.

“I read in my book of gems that Arabs during the time of Mohammed believed opals came to earth on bolts of lightning. Another legend claims that in ancient times, of all gems, the opal was considered the most magical and the multicolored stone bestowed the power of prophecy. What does that say about me?” I asked her. “The opal is not just my birthstone. It's part of my name. Is that why these things are happening?”

“You are double cursed and double blessed,” Anna said as she gathered up our plates and put them in her wicker basket. “Let's go upstairs to my reading room and we'll see what we can see.”

We walked through Anna's sitting room, all done up in a mauve silk, and into her closet. Here, behind a rack of the lavender- and deep-amethyst-colored clothes she favored, all scented with her powdery iris perfume, was the secret door leading to her reading room, her
monde enchanté
.

Anna's hidden enclosure had been built by the apartment's previous owner. We often wondered who might have required such a hideaway. What nefarious, clandestine business had been transacted here? Had it been an opium dealer's den? A lover's trysting place? A torture chamber dating back to Richelieu's reign?

Using the ambient light from the closet, Anna lit an ornate silver candelabra. One by one, the five candles burst to life, revealing a wondrous cave.

The room was half the size of a bedroom and windowless. Antique mercury-spotted mirrors covered the ceiling; midnight blue wallpaper covered the walls. Sitting on the floor, on shelves, and on
tabletops, Anna's vast collection of crystal balls sparkled and shone and reflected in the mirrors, like hundreds of dazzling stars in an infinite universe.

Anna, descended from gypsies, had inherited the ability to use these orbs to see someone's past and into his or her future. Combined with the fortune-telling, she used astrological readings in order to fully divine the complex paths a human psyche traveled and where that person was headed.

“Choose one,” Anna said to me, gesturing to her collection, her bracelets jangling and sending more rainbow flecks onto the walls. Being married to a jeweler, Anna could have worn different jewels every day, but she always wore the same pieces: three bracelets on her right wrist with ancient cultural, mystical, religious, and astrological symbols dangling from the gold chains; an Egyptian amethyst scarab ring surrounded by diamonds; and amethyst teardrop earrings hanging from diamond studs.

Scanning the shelves, I spotted a sphere on the third shelf with slightly bluish occlusions that looked like starbursts. I placed it in the depression in the leather-topped table, a hollow made from all the readings Anna had conducted over the years.

Pulling out a chair, I joined her at the table and watched as she leaned in and began to study the orb.

After a few moments, Anna looked up. “When was the last time we did this?”

“About four or five months ago.”

“Something has changed.” She smiled. “You've met the man you are going to love.”

“The only man I've met is your stepson, and that was seven months ago.”

She looked into my eyes, back into the ball, then shook her head. “Yes, you are on a path with Grigori, but . . .” She hesitated. “But I'm not sure he's who I see here. I'm trying . . .” She hesitated as she focused. “Your aura has definitely altered. I believe it has to do with the voices, Opaline.”

“What do you mean?”

“I'm not certain. What you described, it's the first time a voice has interacted with you, yes?”

“Yes.”

She studied the ball again. The quiet was profound in the small room. If there was an air raid, would we hear it so deep inside the apartment? The thought of bombs was never out of my mind for long.

“Have I ever asked you when you began hearing things others couldn't?”

“I'm not sure when it started. I remember being a little girl sick in bed. My mother would bring me her large jewelry case, covered in silver sharkskin, and let me rearrange her treasures. Mostly she had rubies, blood-red earrings, rings, bracelets, and brooches. They shone with purple and deep blue highlights. And if I held them up to the light, I could find a rainbow of colors inside them. She owned a shell-shaped pendant set with opals. I used to put it up to my ear and listen to it.”

“Did you hear anything?”

“I heard the sea. My mother came in one afternoon and found me lying in her bed, the pendant up to my ear, and asked me what I was doing. When I told her, she seemed pleased. She explained that opals were layers of water trapped in a stone and maybe that's what I could hear. I asked if she could hear it and offered it to her. She listened for a minute and then shook her head. ‘No,' she said, ‘but I'm proud of you that you can.' And then she smiled and gave me the pendant to keep.”

“Did you know why things were different in your house?”

“Not really. I thought it was because my mother was beautiful, the same way our house was exquisite, hanging off a cliff, high up in the hills, overlooking the sparkling bay.

“Only when I turned thirteen and my menses started did I begin to understand all that beauty contained. My awareness came with the extreme cramps that made me double over. Suddenly a layer covering
my world lifted. All that had been invisible and inaudible before was revealed.

“To help ease the pain, my mother fed me tea and lavender honey that helped me sleep. When I woke, I would feel better until she came to check on me and the cramps would return. When she asked how I was, her words would turn into pearls rolling around on the floor. When she left, her footprints glowed red.

“One night, when my father had returned home, she brought him to my bedroom. Half asleep, I heard my mother tell him she was worried because she herself had never suffered so badly.

“ ‘The difference,' my father said, ‘is that Opaline is your daughter.' ”

“I opened my eyes then and saw a glance pass between them I didn't understand. ‘What does that mean?' I asked.

“She shook her head and said I shouldn't worry about anything. Then she gave me more honey-laced tea. After I drank it, the pain went away. I tried making the same tea on my own when I got cramps and she wasn't there, but it never helped. Only when she made it. The tea was bewitched, I know that now.”

“Or dosed with laudanum,” Anna suggested, smiling.

“Do you think so?”

She nodded. “Much more likely than a spell. What about the stones? Were they more audible after that?”

“Yes, the day after I first became unwell, I went into my mother's room for something and noticed a topaz bracelet on her vanity rattling like a snake. I went to find her. As soon as I entered her studio, a bowl of smooth round black stones started humming. When I explained, she told me not to worry. But the expression in her eyes informed me she was holding something back, keeping a secret from me.

“I became a spy in my parents' house after that. Listening at doors, peering through windows, stealing into my mother's room and rifling through her things. I didn't know what I was looking for, but I was
determined to find something that would explain it all. My trespassing yielded nothing until one night the summer I turned fourteen.

“Well after midnight, I woke up hearing a high-pitched hissing. I pulled on my robe and went out onto the balcony. A full moon splashed diamonds across a calm bay. The noise couldn't have been coming from the sea. I crept around to my parents' balcony and peered into their bedroom through the open window. With the moonlight's help, I saw my father asleep on his side of the bed. My mother's side was empty.

“Creeping downstairs, I went outside. A glow emanated from her studio. I padded across the dewy grass toward the separate structure far enough from the house to afford her privacy. Not easy to spy on, the studio didn't have any ground-floor windows, expressly because she didn't like people looking in while she painted. But since a painter needed light, there were skylights. And so the only way for me to see what was going on was to climb up one of the oak trees hanging over the structure.

“I'd been climbing trees all my life. Secure in my ability, I shimmied to one of the topmost branches, then inched my way out to the end of the limb and peered down.

“My mother sat cross-legged on the floor, her eyes closed, surrounded by what appeared to be burning embers. In her hands, two of the orange glowing stones. It was those stones making the terrible fizzing, hissing, whistling sound that had awakened me.

“Petrified, I watched as she just sat, unflinching, unblinking, encircled by the fire, holding the fire. One of the orange flames licked at her sleeve. Why wasn't she moving? Was she unconscious? Did I need to wake my father? Did I have time to get him before her clothes burst into flames? The hissing sound intensified, hurting my ears.

“So rapt by the scene, I didn't realize I'd climbed out too far and was stressing the end of the tree limb until it broke off. I fell, crashing through the tree, branches scratching me. I crashed onto the studio roof, my body missing a pane of glass by millimeters.

“I'd landed on my arm, which was screaming with pain. My left shoulder hurt too. Certain I'd broken a bone, I looked around, trying to figure how to get off the roof. Then I saw my mother staring up at me from below, from inside, a horrified expression on her face. Despite my pain, I noticed there were no burning embers anywhere beside her. Only large egg-shaped agate stones in a circle on the floor.

“Hours later, I woke up in my own bed. Nothing hurt. I flexed my hands. Rotated my shoulders. There was not a thing wrong with me. At the end of the bed, I found my robe, which I was sure I'd ripped in the tree, but it was neither stained nor torn.

“Dazed, I made my way down to the glass-enclosed breakfast room. In the distance, the sea sparkled like blue-green sapphires.

“ ‘Good morning,
mon ange
,' my mother said.

“My father looked up from his newspaper and smiled, angling his cheek so I could kiss him.

“Remnants of my brother and two sisters' breakfasts were at their places. The twins were seven, Jadine was five. All of them had too much energy to sit at the table for long and were probably already down at the beach.

“ ‘Did you sleep well?' my father asked. I glanced over at my mother, but she didn't look up from her newspaper.

“ ‘Maman?'

“She picked up her head. ‘Yes?'

“ ‘What happened last night? What were you doing?'

“I still remember her little insouciant shrug when she said she'd been painting until two in the morning.

“ ‘I saw you. You weren't painting, you were sitting on the floor with burning stones in your hands. I was in the tree and then I fell, but nothing hurts.'

“ ‘What a terrible dream that sounds like, Opaline,' my father said.

“ ‘You need to start drinking chamomile infusions before bed,' my mother added. ‘There's no reason to suffer so in sleep. Dreaming should take you to places of wonder and delight—not terror.'

“ ‘It wasn't a dream. You
were
holding burning stones in your hands. I saw you.'

“My mother held her hands open to me. Her palms were pale, unscarred, the pink color of the inside of a shell.

“ ‘Dreams can be like that,' she said. ‘More real than the life we live awake. And nightmares can be confusing. Sometimes when you wake up, you can think it's real for hours and hours.'

“By the time I finished my café au lait and croissant, I'd almost been convinced everything I'd seen had been a dream.

“ ‘After all,' my mother pointed out, ‘if you'd fallen, you would have scratches, you would be in pain. And you're not, are you?'

“It wasn't until I went back to my room to dress and fix my hair that I found a tiny twig caught in my brush. Only when I confronted my mother with it, telling her I knew what I witnessed was neither a dream nor a nightmare, did she finally admit the truth to me, that we were descendants of a sixteenth-century courtesan accused of being a witch. And the same bloodline ran in me and I too had abilities. But mine were unlike hers, she said. I could hear stones.