The Secret Language of Stones (7 page)

“ ‘And when you are old enough,' she said, ‘I will teach you their magick.' ”

Anna took my hand and held it. “But she never did, because I wrote you and told you we needed jewelers and you ran away to come here,” she said. “I interrupted an important step in your development.”

“No.” I shook my head. “They were sending me to college in America, remember? You didn't interrupt my training. My mother never taught me because I wouldn't let her. Because I wasn't sure I wanted to be different like her. And I convinced myself I wasn't. Not even during that last summer I lived at home, working at the jewelry shop, spending time with Timur, when my abilities took on a whole new level of intensity. I wasn't prepared to deal with what was happening to me. And didn't know what to do, other than eventually backing away from his affections.”

Suddenly I worried I'd said too much. But Anna's eyes held mine as she gave me a small, sad smile and then nodded, encouraging me to continue.

“That's when I began to wonder if there was someone who might help me understand what was wrong with me. And when your letter came those months later, I knew you were the one who could.”

“And now that you can't escape the magick, you want to learn how to stop it?” she asked.

“No, that's what my great-grandmother wants me to do. I'm not ready to stop it. Can I learn to control it? I need to. Can you help me do that?”

She took my hand. “Opaline, every practitioner has a choice to make: enter into the darkness or stay on the side of light. Some of your ancestors made the choice to be swallowed by the dark. Your mother has always kept the light as her goal, but her methods sometimes take her over the line. You need to realize you're different from all of them. You don't just have your mother in you. You have your father in you too. And he's clear and clean and pure. You were born into the light. You'd have to choose to go dark. I promise.”

Chapter 7

Like a screaming child caught in a nightmare, the sirens rent the late afternoon and startled me. I dropped the rag I'd been using to buff the gold bindings on Madame Alouette's talisman. I should have been accustomed to the interruptions. They happened at least every other week. Sometimes for days in a row. But I wasn't used to it. The sirens were a nasty personification of the war itself: ugly, disruptive, brutish, and impossible to ignore. We all despised the danger signals, especially when they came after days of calm. False calm. For we were never able to keep thoughts of impending doom far from our minds. One day there was no heat. Another no milk. Hardly ever white flour. Every morning the papers brought news of shortages. And new troop activity. And the ever-growing casualty numbers. The endless warnings of German spies infiltrating our city accompanied every story about another enemy soldier caught in or around Paris. We were never safe, and we never could forget that for long.

As the alarm continued, I carefully followed Monsieur Orloff's routine. The door to the shop was always kept locked, but I was supposed to double-check it nonetheless. Next, with now-shaking hands, I pulled down the shades in the front window so our wares weren't visible. When all was secure, I took the first flight of steps to
the basement. Then down one more flight to the chalky and chilly subterranean level of the shop to the two rooms carved out of rock: Monsieur Orloff's vault and the makeshift shelter. There, under the Palais, in the dark, with only candles and matches to shed any light, I settled in.

Hoping to make the shelter less depressing and more comfortable since no one could ever be sure how long an air raid would last, Anna had decorated the room with two old couches covered in forest green velvet and a dozen pillows in shades of purple and blue. She'd added worn-out, ruined Persian rugs. Their reds and blues didn't match the couches but did hide the rough dirt patches. A low table in front of the couch offered magazines, books, and hard candy in a cracked crystal bowl. Chairs were stacked against the walls in case we brought clients with us and needed more seats. There was even a small kerosene burner for boiling water to make tea and a tray of chipped Limoges china cups. These flawed items, no longer fit for a home, gave the shelter the illusion of grandeur.

I hated being down there alone, too deep in the earth. I worried about the building on top of us. If a bomb hit, would the Palais collapse and trap us here—or, worse, cave in?

To keep myself busy, I started to make tea but abandoned the effort halfway through. I didn't really want the strong Russian tea the Orloffs favored. I didn't want to be down in that room. I wanted the war to be over. I wanted to stop making mourning jewelry and create jewels celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, accessories that would give delight and joy, that would dazzle rather than depress.

I hated the eerie silence in the bunker. Not a calm quiet, but a nerve-racking one. Had the raid ended? Sometimes they were over in less than an hour, but often, if the bombs hit, not for several hours. I'd stashed a stack of books under the tea things and riffled through it. The last time I'd been in the shelter, I'd started reading Gaston Leroux's popular gothic
The Phantom of the Opera
. I picked it up again
and found I didn't remember anything from when I'd read it the last time.

I'd only managed a few pages when I sensed someone outside. I waited in vain for the door to open and, when it didn't, wondered why anyone would linger in the hallway. Should I check to see who it was? Only Monsieur Orloff's paranoia about German spies using the underground, a fear fueled by the press, stopped me.

As I sat waiting, listening, trying to ascertain if anyone was there or not, I grew more nervous. No one came in, but I still thought someone was there. And then, I became aware of warmth against my thigh, directly beneath the pocket of my jeweler's apron, which in my haste I'd forgotten to remove. When my skin started to burn, I reached into the pocket and found Madame Alouette's crystal orb. Had I slipped it into my pocket when the siren started?

And why was it so hot? Yes, I'd been polishing it and that heated up the metal, but only while the process continued. The warmth could not have lasted this long.

I turned the piece over in my hand. The crystal was almost all clear, with a single star-shaped inclusion in the center of the lower right segment, like a piece of the night sky captured in glass. Like the orb that I'd chosen in Anna's reading room.

I had hoped I'd never hear it again, but there was that howling, sad wind. And the mixture of voices and screams, water rushing, stones breaking. I tried to block it all out. To shut it down before it began. But I didn't know how and the voice broke through.

I think I'm lost.

I wasn't sure I heard the words as much as sensed them. I didn't know what to do. Where to go.

Can you help me?

I recognized the dark voice. The voice I'd prayed was my imagination.

“Are you . . .” I hesitated. I still couldn't bring myself to name him. If it were true . . . If I'd conjured him, then it meant that like
my mother, I was . . . Except I had to know. I took a deep breath and whispered my question.

“Are you Jean Luc Forêt?”

Yes.

Even though I'd assumed he was, I was stunned.

How do you know my name?

“From your mother.”

Can you help me? I don't know where I am.

“I'm not sure.”

Was his soul trapped between this world and the next? I'd read about the Bardo in Anna's books. A Buddhist concept describing the place a soul waits between the end of life and being reborn. She'd thought some of my soldiers might be speaking from that astral plane, but I didn't know what I believed.

Before, it seemed as if the dying soldiers had somehow left behind messages for their loved ones as they moved on, and all I'd done was sift through the detritus of everyone's thoughts to find the right ones.

With Jean Luc I still had to sift through the clamor and racket of the universe, but his voice pulsed with urgency and desperation as he communicated directly with me.

Am I with you? Where you are?

“I'm not sure. I'm in a shelter underneath a shop.”

A shop?

“In Paris.”

This was bizarre. Impossible. Beyond reason. Irrational.

I'm not actually there, though. Am I?

“I don't know.” I looked around the shelter in its shadows. I waved my hands in front of me and to the side. I felt nothing.

“I don't see you. What can you see? Can you see me?”

I'm staring into
darkness, but up ahead I can see light where your voice comes from.

“Light?”

Lovely light. It's the light that you're made of, I think. It's almost the shape of a woman.

“But you can't see anything else? Nothing around you?”

Nothing around me. Just your form made of light. Golden light streaming from your outline.

“Golden light?”

Yes. It's beautiful. As if you were made of gold.

“I'm a jeweler.”

He sighed. As if the color of the gold made sense to him now.

How did you find me?

“I think you found me. Through the jewelry I was working on. I make mourning jewelry. Sometimes I get messages from dead soldiers to give to their families. I was making a talisman for your mother.”

There are a dozen soldiers dead because of me and . . .

His next words faded out, and I leaned forward into the gloomy shelter as if that might help me hear him more clearly. Jean Luc's voice sounded anguished.

It was all my fault.

“You couldn't have known a bomb was going to hit. You can't blame yourself.”

All my men.

“How can I help you?”

Can't. No one can. It's too late.

“You must need something.”

Why do you think so?

“Because I can hear you. Why else would I be able to hear you if it wasn't so I could help you?”

I'd never had a conversation with one of the soldiers before, and even as I was having this one, I knew the impossibility of it. My imagination finally had taken over. The war and the endless reports of more soldiers dying and the sadness that multiplied with every passing day and the ever-present threat from the bombs that kept
coming . . . it was all too much. I'd snapped like the soldiers who came back, I thought. My fate was mirroring theirs. Surely I was a victim of the same war fatigue as so many others in Paris, in France, all over the world. Too much death, too much grief, too much fear. And now I'd manufactured my own soldier so I could help someone and feel I was pulling my weight.

No, not your imagination.

I heard his frustration. He wanted to prove to me that he was real. Or as real as a dead man might be.

Suddenly I felt a bit of warm wind in the shelter, almost as if someone had opened the door, but it remained shut. Then a lock of hair blew off my forehead. I quickly reached my hand out, as hopeful as I was terrified I might feel his fingers.

You felt that, didn't you?

My shoulders started to shake. Inside of my chest I felt the wings of the trapped bird fluttering to be let out. My fear. I didn't want to feel it. I closed my eyes. The wind brushed against my cheek.

I'm here. At least right now, I'm here. You believe me, don't you?

The very last thing I wanted to say was that I did. For surely it would be proof of only one thing: my madness.

Do you believe me? Haven't I
proved I'm here?

“Are you here all the time?” My voice sounded like a child's.

No.

“And you don't know where you are the rest of the time?”

No.
I don't know.

I shivered; his voice was heartbreaking. The wind slowed to a breeze and then the breeze was gone. All was still. I shivered again. The room temperature had dropped, and I knew Jean Luc was gone.

If he really had been there at all.

The door opened, and Grigori stepped inside the shelter.

“I heard you talking . . .” He looked around. “But it appears you are alone.”

I gestured to the room and tried to act as if nothing out of the ordinary had occurred. “You can see for yourself. No one's here.”

“Yes, but I thought I heard you talking.”

“Only to myself.” I smiled, trying to make light of his question. I didn't want to start a conversation with Grigori about my talents. Just like his stepmother's gypsy readings, my ability to relay messages from the departed disturbed him. Russia, he'd told me, possessed a long history of mystics who attempted to control people with their powers. Like Rasputin, he said with disdain, as he blamed the self-proclaimed holy man
for much of Russia's misfortune.

“You're too young to be talking to yourself.”

“It's an occupational hazard of working so many hours alone,” I said.

“Spending too much time by yourself is unwise. It can lead to troubling, even frightening thoughts, especially in a place like this dungeon.” He shook his head as if trying to dislodge a thought. Or memory. “I saw what the trenches could do to a soldier. Confinement is a harsh punisher.”

Noticing my abandoned effort at making tea, he took up where I'd left off. “And why
are
you down here alone? Where are my father and Anna?”

“Both out. I thought you'd be down sooner, though. What kept you?”

“Seeing a customer.”

I smelled kerosene.

“I insisted we take shelter, but he was adamant to get back home. I went with him as far as the gate where his car waited. Stupid of me, but he couldn't carry his purchases himself.”

“Couldn't he return for them?”

“It was his wife's birthday and he wanted to take them home.”

“What did he buy?” I asked, happy to move the conversation away from myself. I didn't want to think about the voice, but the charm was still warm in my hand.

“Two small end tables inlaid with porcelain.”

I nodded, picturing the delicate tables in Grigori's store. His eye for antiques was as fine as his father's for jewels.

“I'm sorry to see them go, but he didn't even haggle on the price,” he said, as he poured the water. While he waited for the tea to steep, he looked over at me. His dark brown eyes were unreadable but penetrating. Although he seemed to be able to see through me, I couldn't even guess what he was thinking.

After Grigori had been wounded and was on his way back home from the front, Anna warned me her stepson was prone to moodiness and quite enigmatic, and she feared his injury would exacerbate both traits. I found his mysteriousness attractive and his sulkiness poetic, but lately his inscrutability had been frustrating.

“This is such a godforsaken hole, isn't it?” he said. “Let's imagine we're in Ladurée, enjoying afternoon tea with delightful pastries.” Unlike his eyes, his smile was uncomplicated, his dimples appealing.

“Yes, let's.”

He took a handkerchief from his pocket and put it over his forearm, impersonating a waiter. “Would you like some tea, Mademoiselle?” he asked in an exaggerated accent.

“I'd love some.” I laughed with relief that his mood had lightened. And that I could, at least for a while, pretend that mine had too.

He poured the tea with a flourish, placed it on the tray, and then came toward me with a pronounced limp. He'd almost reached me when his knee gave out and he went sprawling and teacups fell and the liquid soaked the rugs.

Too stunned to talk, I immediately went to his aid, but he brushed me off and struggled to get up and then clean up the mess. I knew better than to try and make light of the situation. His infirmity embarrassed him enough. I believed if there were not an air raid going on, he would have bolted.