by M. J. Rose
Over the centuries, starting in ancient Egypt, mystics, priests, shamans, astrologers, doctors, and witches assigned properties to each earthly material. They knew all stones, including gems and crystals, are living things. Made up of water, earth, air, minerals, they are all related. Certain stones function better as conduits. Crystal, jet, white and blue and black diamonds, which are all coal based, and moonstones are the best conductors.
Once dug up, stones need to be uncovered or split open, cut, polished, or sometimes heated for them to reveal their beauty and offer up their powers.
Symbolically, they are reminders of the beauty within, of time, of life and death, of the permanence of the earth and the impermanence of those of us who inhabit it. These rocks will exist long after all the people who trod over them, who dug them up, who touched them, are gone.
Their beauty is not just in their colors and shine, their luminosity and glitter. The energy the gems possess can be read like a book if you understand its language. The secret language of the stones. A language that I spoke—though often wished I did not.
I poured the coffee and handed Madame Alouette a cup. “Would you like milk? Sugar?”
She looked down into the steaming dark liquid as if the answer lay there.
“No, black is fine.” She took a sip and then sat quietly for a moment.
I didn’t like to rush clients into talking. It often took a few minutes for women to begin the conversation they wished they didn’t need to have. But when the silence lasted too long, I gently prodded.
“You said a friend of yours came here to see me?”
“Yes, Colette Maboussine, do you remember?”
“I do.” I remembered every one of the fifty-nine grieving women I’d worked with, but especially the first one. Of Madame Maboussine’s sons, one had been badly hurt in the war but survived; the other had been killed. The locket I made held his hair.
“Colette Maboussine told me how you helped her,” Madame Alouette repeated. “She said you made her a piece of jewelry. An amulet or a talisman? I’m not sure what the difference is.”
“An amulet possesses properties that can protect you against illnesses and accidents. Even evil spells. And anything can be an amulet, from a shark tooth to a scarab. A talisman is an amulet, but it can also help you create or orchestrate events or actions. Books I’ve read explain that talismans are enhanced with magick symbols that reinforce the attributes of that stone, gem, or metal.”
“So there’s more magick attached to a talisman?” she asked.
Madame Alouette didn’t seem disturbed by the idea. Few of my customers did. After all, since the middle of the last century, séances and psychics have been very much in vogue, often discussed and dissected, despite whatever laws were in effect to tamp them down. Famous figures from Victor Hugo, more than seventy years ago, to the present-day author Arthur Conan Doyle were convinced there was more to our world than what we could see and hear and rationally know.
“Yes. Magical powers can be produced by tapping and then trapping astral influences.”
“Which do you make?”
“Talismans.”
“How?”
“I enclose an object belonging to the soldier inside a piece of rock crystal that I’ve carved with the soldier’s name, astrological symbol, his birth and his death dates. I fill in the crevices with powder from his birthstone. Then, using gold wire, I enclose the crystal and lock it in.”
“You know, I’m a sculptor,” she said. “I never realized it until I heard you talk just now, but jewelry is miniature sculpture, isn’t it?”
“I’ve never thought of it that way before either, but of course you are right. What kind of sculpture do you do?”
“Before the war I did portraits, mostly busts. But three years ago, Anna Coleman Ladd commandeered me. She’s the American who opened a studio here to make metallic masks for soldiers who return from war with facial disfigurements. To give them back some dignity. She believes each of us has a divine right to look human. That is how Madame Maboussine and I met. She brought her older son to our studio. He had extensive cheekbone and ear damage.”
I knew about Anna Coleman Ladd. The newspapers had printed a series of reports about her “Studio of Miracles,” as they called it. Shrapnel made a horrible mess of many soldiers’ faces that couldn’t be repaired with surgery. Some men lost sections of their noses, chins, chunks of their cheeks, an ear. Ladd’s studio provided a noble service to those boys. In London, another sculptor, Francis Derwent Wood, did the same work.
“It’s really a pleasure to meet you then. I’ve read about the amazing work you are all doing. This war is . . .” I shrugged.
What more could be said about the never-ending war?
“I prayed my son would never need me to help him . . . but now I wish he did. At least then he would be alive . . . Well, it doesn’t matter what I wish, does it? . . . Now I am here.”
“Tell me about your son,” I said, steeling myself for a fresh onslaught of heartache.
With measured motions, she unclasped her purse, reached inside, and pulled out a piece of paper that fluttered to the floor. I bent to retrieve it and found myself holding a black-bordered obituary notice, carefully cut out of a newspaper.
“No . . . no . . . that’s not what I wanted to give you.” She held out her hand.
As I returned it to her, I tried to read it, but it was upside down and I wasn’t able to make out the details.
Returning the notice to her purse, she pulled out an envelope and gently emptied its contents on the desk, as if handling something as fragile as a spider’s web.
I examined the lock of hair, the same dark chestnut as her own, tied with a faded blue satin ribbon.
“He had his first haircut at three years old. How he hated it,” Madame Alouette said, reaching out and touching her son’s hair with her forefinger.
I remained quiet while she lived out the memory. Her sorrow overwhelmed me and sent chills down my back. Any time a client began to recall her loved one and share her story, each word spun an invisible thread that connected us. Her emotions traveled via those byways, and I experienced them as if they were my own. I found no escape, no option but to suffer through each woman’s mourning.
“But he needed that haircut. My husband said he looked like a little girl with all those curls. And he did.”
She stroked the strands, and I pictured the child in the barbershop chair.
“The barber did everything he could to distract him, but my son fought back, covering his head with his arms so ferociously none of us could pry them apart. Such a determined little boy.” She looked up, her eyes bright with tears. “Who became such a determined man.”
“What did he do? Before the war, I mean.”
“He was a journalist. Maybe you read some of his pieces? Since the war began, he’s been writing a column of weekly letters from a soldier at the front to his fiancée.”
“She must be devastated.”
“Oh, he didn’t have a fiancée. I’m not even sure if he left a special woman behind.” She smiled sadly. “He told me there wasn’t one—except for me.” She smiled again. “But his editor wasn’t interested in a soldier’s letters to his mama. So my son writes to an unnamed, imaginary lover every week and in the process shares what the war is like, what he’s feeling.”
The suffering in Madame Alouette’s voice as she spoke of her son in the present tense was difficult to listen to. It always was. The mourners’ pain reached out and ensnared me. Encircled and paralyzed me. It infected the air I breathed, got into my lungs. I felt their anguish in my own heart.
“What is the name of the column?”
“Ma chère.”
“But isn’t Ma chère written by Jean Luc Forêt?”
“Ah yes, Alouette is my second husband’s name. His father died in a fire wh
en Jean Luc was only four.”
“How terrible.”
She bowed her head a bit and nodded.
“So Jean Luc Forêt is your son. My father and I read him all the time . . .”
Now it was my turn to be lost in thought. Before the war, my father and I had always read Forêt’s column on the avant-garde art scene. Like us, Forêt believed art was the highest form of individualism. He believed in beauty. In rage. In the pure form of expression through the arts. A fearless crusader for those artists who forged ahead, he never seemed to care how much criticism he got for it.
My father and I both admired him and worried for him whenever he went so far as to make a new enemy from what he published in the pages of Le Figaro. I remembered one column in particular he’d penned about a young artist being ridiculed for his work—for it being too ugly. Jean Luc argued that art frees us from our prejudices and gives us the chance to become our best selves, individuals who dare to dream. And even if those dreams aren’t always as pretty as we’d like, or don’t conform, or frighten us, it is our duty to encourage art to flourish. All art. Every kind.
I’d torn it out of the paper and glued it in my sketchbook. Without knowing him, I’d felt as if the writer in Le Figaro had spoken directly to me, offering a credo I’d taken to heart.
But once Jean Luc started reporting from the front, I’d stopped reading him. The war was too much of a presence in my life. Timur’s death still too fresh in my mind. And now Jean Luc was dead as well? My heart seized up, sharing Madame Alouette’s grief in a way new to me. I’d never before known of any of the soldiers I’d messaged.
“I got the telegram last week,” Madame Alouette said. “Jean Luc’s entire outfit was killed. All his men . . .” She shook her head desolately. “And for each is a mother and father, perhaps a wife or a sister or daughter or son.” She stopped speaking, closed her eyes, collected herself, and then continued. “I am trying to accept his death, but I find I’m in limbo. I have a sense Jean Luc left something undone he wants me to know about. My husband thinks . . . Well, it doesn’t matter what he thinks. Do I sound crazy to you?”
If she did, I shared her craziness. Of course, if you think you can commune with the dead, then you must be a little crazy. We all knew it was impossible. Except was it? Did I imagine it, or did I actually hear their voices? Did the souls of the dead soldiers whose lives had been stolen by the vagaries of the war really speak to me? Did they hover somewhere in the dark sparkling ether that we call eternity and communicate their last thoughts through the talismans I made from their belongings? Did those little bits of their lives—a lock of hair, a photograph, a baby tooth, a handkerchief with a shadow of scent clinging to it—function as tunnels through time and space, enabling one last message to reach their loved ones? Did they operate as doorways through which I gained access to another plane, where I received messages? Or was I, as Madame Alouette implicitly suggested, crazy?
After making a talisman, I would decorate it with jet and gold, lock it, and hang it from a cord. A small gold key, attached to the knot on the chord, dangled at the back of the wearer’s neck.
Once completed, I would present the charm to my client. After putting it on, I would instruct her to clasp the talisman, and then I would cover her hands with my own. Shutting my eyes, I focused. Typically, I would hear a cacophony of all manner of noise at first. Human voices, wind, rain, the ocean’s waves, train whistles, automobile horns, ambulance sirens. Withstanding the onslaught, fighting the discomfort, I would concentrate, and in a matter of minutes, as clearly as if he were in the room with us, one soldier’s voice would rise above the rest. Inside my head.
Sons to mothers, husbands to wives, fathers to daughters, brothers to sisters, lovers to lovers, the communiqués were deeply personal, and often I blushed with embarrassment at having to speak their words aloud. But my discomfort only lasted a few minutes; it was clear to me that the solace I gave would probably last forever. From what I could gather from their messages, the soldiers seemed trapped in a kind of purgatory like the one Dante wrote about in his great poem. They were souls awaiting entry to heaven, unable to completely leave this realm until they found some kind of release I didn’t yet understand.
In all the time I’d been doing this, none of the soldiers had ever spoken to me. Their spirits seemed unaware of a conduit.
“What you said to Madame Maboussine, you weren’t making it up, were you?”
“What kind of monster would I be to lie? We don’t make profit on the charms. I have nothing to gain,” I said.
“You might be looking for fame.”
“As you yourself said, what I do is now illegal. Fame is the last thing I’d want.” This interview wasn’t getting off to a good start. I didn’t blame Madame for being suspicious, but her questions bordered on rudeness. There was more I could have said. I could have told her how frightening it was to dwell in the land of the dead and that I would never willingly journey there. I could have told her it was like entering what one might imagine hell to be like. If I could, I would have boarded up the gateway that connected me to these souls.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I’ve never believed that what you do is possible.”
“Neither do I, actually.” I smiled at her.
Madame Alouette returned her son’s hair to the envelope, which she handed to me with a reluctance that tore at my heart. As I reached for it, the scent of apples materialized, and a combination of nausea and dizziness descended over me.
Pulling out one of the boxes we use to encase our jewels, I quickly slipped the envelope inside, trying to outpace the headache coming on. I’d learned that if I could tuck the soldier’s item away fast enough, I could prevent myself from becoming ill in front of my client.
Taking an ivory label from the desk, I picked up my pen, dipped it in the Baccarat inkwell on the table, and wrote out Madame Alouette’s name. After placing the label on the box’s lid, I slipped the package inside a drawer.
“Are you all right?” Madame asked.
Usually, so caught up in their own turmoil, my clients failed to notice mine.
“Just the beginning of a headache. How did you know?”
“I’m a sculptor, I study people’s faces, I recognized the changes on yours. Are you all right?”
“Yes, I’ll be fine.”
“It began the moment you touched the envelope, didn’t it?”
I nodded.
She placed her hand on top of mine. “This ability you have, is it painful?”
“Not compared to your pain.”
“Can you describe it?”
I hesitated.
“I’d like to try and understand.”
“The objects often cause me distress when I first come in contact with them. As if my body is rebelling and doesn’t want me to take on a new assignment.”
“You have to steel yourself?”
I nodded.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s like that when a new soldier comes in to see me. I pretend I can deal with his deformity. That my stomach isn’t churning. That I didn’t wish I could look away. What happens to you exactly?”
“I smell apples, even if there are none to be seen. And my head fills with noise, starting an avalanche of pain.”
Madame Alouette nodded, but I stopped. She didn’t need to hear more, and it wouldn’t do to share any more details with a stranger, especially one suffering her own crisis. There was no reason for her to know that once I finished fashioning a locket I was so exhausted and depleted that often Monsieur Orloff sent me to bed. Anna would serve me hot tea sweetened with jam and laced with brandy and sit with me.
Neither did Madame Alouette need to hear about the despair that would follow the next day, that fell like a thick heavy curtain around me and made me feel as if I inhabited some other world . . . not quite here on earth . . . but n
ot quite in the land of the dead either.
“And yet you do it? You willingly put yourself in this state of distress.” Madame Alouette wasn’t asking me a question. She was telling me something she knew about me because she shared that willingness with me. “You are very brave, Mademoiselle, and very kind.”
Tears came to my eyes. I shook my head. “Neither brave nor kind,” I said. “If I can help, I must.”
Yes, it all started with helping. That was what I had come to Paris to do. Or so I thought. I now know it was more selfish than that. Offering comfort to strangers, I tried to assuage the guilt I lived with. Timur had died without any hope. That was the real reason I forced myself to help these mothers and wives, sisters and lovers. As physically ill as it made me, as frightening as it seemed, it was my penance for what I’d done to one boy who’d gone off to the war and died without the comfort I could have given but withheld.
Chapter 3
“The tsar has been shot,” Monsieur Orloff said, looking up from the newspaper trembling in his hands like leaves buffeted by the wind. “The reports we’ve received since June twenty-fourth are all true.”
“What exactly does the article say, Pavel?” Anna asked.
Twice he tried to read it out loud, but his voice shook worse than his fingers. Anna put her hand on his shoulder.
“Let Alexi read it,” she said, taking it from her husband and giving it to their friend and fellow expatriate Alexi Vanya.
Often during the week I joined the Orloffs for dinner, as did an assortment of Russian émigrés. In Paris, there were thousands of tsarists, Russian refugees who despised the Bolsheviks and their actions against Mother Russia. Most White Émigrés, as they were known, had arrived in 1917. But others who were more insightful and less stubborn started to see what the future held as early as 1905. Every day still more escaped. And many of them found their way to a secret political opposition group called the Two-Headed Eagles, founded by Monsieur.
Named after the Romanov dynasty’s symbol, the group aimed to overthrow the Bolsheviks and restore the imperial family to the throne so they might all be able to return home. Fearful that Bolshevik spies would somehow infiltrate the group, the Two-Headed Eagles met clandestinely in one of the labyrinthine underground chambers here beneath the Palais Royal.
