by M. J. Rose
But my great-grandmother was too happy taking care of her boys to worry about losing a jade frog with ruby eyes or a salamander made of gold. She wasn’t alone in her war efforts; she just offered more delights than most of the other godmothers, or marraines de guerre, as they were known, women who wrote to soldiers at the front who had no family. Too many people had lost their homes because of the bombings and in the wake of the destruction had scattered and lost touch with their sons and brothers, fathers and husbands, at the front. The godmothers sent long letters and care packages and did wonders at keeping up the armed forces’ morale.
Generously, my great-grandmother’s letters to the boys always included an invitation to the Maison de la Lune when the soldiers came to Paris on leave. She opened the doors of her elaborate house, put them up, fed them, soothed them, and made sure there were lovely girls to offer them the kinds of entertainment they most craved.
The men fighting for France deserve nothing less than to be treated like the most wealthy industrialists and bankers who we have always catered to and lived off of, Grand-mère often told me. She thrived on what she did for the troops, and while I admired her for it, I hated being in the house with all the soldiers, all strangers, all trying to forget where they’d been and what they were required to go back to. Even if they bantered and joked, ate and drank and laughed and danced, I could see the suffering and fear in their eyes, the residue of the nightmares they’d lived. Their suffering overwhelmed me. I soaked it up like a sponge and became subdued, depressed, and haunted by it.
“They need your good cheer and smiles,” my great-grandmother would chide me. “Not your pity and tears.”
But I had nothing else to offer, so often, instead of dining with them in the overcrowded dining room, I asked for a tray to be brought to me in my grandmother’s suite and went upstairs, past the haunting portraits of all the female descendants of the original sixteenth-century La Lune.
My great-grandmother’s boudoir nestled in the far corner of the second floor. I opened the door and, for a moment, stood enthralled anew by its loveliness. Here too the fabrics and carpet were chosen to set off Grand-mère’s red hair. But the murals captivated me the most. My father’s friend, the celebrated artist Alphonse Mucha, had painted a pastiche of the four seasons covering the walls. In high Art Nouveau style, winter scenes segued into spring, then summer, and finally fall. Through each season, a woman wandered, a younger, stylized version of Grand-mère who could have been me with her long russet hair, almond fire opal eyes, and pale skin.
In the corner of the room, an ornate wrought iron staircase led up to my great-grandmother’s private library. Beside the expected classics and volumes of exotic and provocative erotica, I’d been surprised to find shelves devoted to the occult as well as gothic and horror fiction. Ever trying to understand and come to terms with the storied history of the house and our ancestors, she read everything, looking for clues and answers. Sharing her morbid fascination and equally curious, I’d made my way through Bram Stoker, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe and Maurice Level and Villiers de l’Isle-Adam. I’d even stumbled on a book with my grandfather’s ex libris plate pasted in the inside cover, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Seeing me reading it, my great-grandmother told me my mother had brought it with her when she’d first come to Paris.
While I ate my dinner, I read from a book of ghost stories by Edith Wharton. There was, for many of us, a great escape in reading about the fantastic and supernatural during wartime. Terrors more terrible than those we were living through gave us an outlet for our anxiety. Some found it strangely hopeful to read fiction suggesting there was more to our existence than what established religions suggested.
I fell asleep reading Wharton’s Tales of Men and Ghosts. Some hours later, I woke up from a terrible dream. But it wasn’t a dream. The sound of weeping was real. Lonely and anguished, these were the kind of tears that could only be shed in the darkest hour of the night. Could it be my great-grandmother? I looked over at her bed. No, she was quiet and calm. I should have known better. I’d never even seen her eyes fill. She’d told me once she’d used up her quota of tears when her son, my grandfather, died the year before I was born.
Tying my robe around my waist, I went out into the hall and followed the sound. When I reached the end of the corridor, it grew fainter. I retraced my steps. The hallway was dark and the house otherwise silent. Only the forlorn crying echoed. Concentrating, I tried to locate its direction. Was it coming from above? I climbed the steps to the third floor.
Yes, the sound was more pronounced. I walked down another long hallway, past rooms used by servants. At its end, in front of another staircase, I stopped to listen again. It seemed the weeping was still coming from above. Was that possible? Were soldiers sleeping even in the attic?
I followed the crying through a warren of storage rooms and a last ancient stone staircase leading to the bell tower, the one remaining structure from the sixteenth-century church that had once stood on this plot of land. This was where, in the late 1500s and early 1600s, my ancestor, the famous courtesan La Lune, entertained her paramours, including the king of France and the famous painter Cherubino Cellini, the man for whom she learned the dark arts in order to regain his love. After he died, she became a celebrated artist herself and lived, according to the family legend, into the 1700s while retaining the appearance of a forty-year-old woman.
As a little girl visiting, I’d been drawn to this very staircase. I would ask if I could go up and see the bell tower, but my great-grandmother insisted it wasn’t safe. Too old and too fragile to hold the weight of a person.
“The steps are broken, and you could trip. Inside the tower is only scaffolding now,” she’d warned. “If you even tried to walk there, you would fall right through!”
My mother, overhearing this, would laugh.
“But what is funny, Maman?” I asked. “It sounds dangerous, no?”
“Your great-grandmother told me the same thing once upon a time. And I believed her too. But it’s not true. You should see what is up there, it’s part of your heritage.”
Over my great-grandmother’s protestations, my mother took me up the last flight of steps. Yes, they were narrow and steep, but also sturdy and strong. My mother told me three hundred years of bell ringers had tramped up and down them and the tower they led to was constructed just as well.
At the top of the steps was a door carved with tiny bas-reliefs, each detailing an alchemical event and other amalgams of magick and religious symbols sprinkled through the rest of the house.
I tried the door, but it was locked. But when my mother put her hand on the knob, it opened for her. Inside was an artist’s studio with marvelous murals of Cupid and Psyche on the wall. To an impressionable child their suggestiveness was titillating, but it was the book of spells, hidden in a concealed cabinet, that made the biggest impression on me.
“Why is it here if it’s so valuable?” I asked my mother as she turned its old vellum pages.
“It’s safer here than anywhere else. No one can enter this room except for a Daughter of La Lune,” she explained, telling me about the legend for the first time. But the way she told it frightened me, and I ran crying from the bell tower, down the steps, into the arms of my great-grandmother, who held me safe. Glaring at my mother, Grand-mère insisted the story wasn’t true and that my mother was just indulging in make-believe.
That Saturday night, when I tried the door, it didn’t open. I stood still, frustrated, listening to the sound of weeping coming from within. The soldier’s plaintive cries sent chills through my body. I pulled my robe closer around me and leaned against the door.
“Can I help?” I called out softly, not wanting to disturb him, and at the same time feeling certain it was important I let him know someone was offering aid if he needed it.
There was no response.
Focusing, directing my energy the way I
did when I read the talismans for my clients, I tried the knob. This time it turned, and with a single creak, I opened the door.
“Can I help?” I called out into the moonlit chamber.
No response.
I stepped over the threshold. Everything looked just as I remembered from when my mother had brought me here. The amazing murals, even when illuminated only by the lunar light, were still mesmerizing. The daybed, where I’d expected to find the soldier, was vacant, the silk coverlet and overstuffed pillows undisturbed.
The weeping ceased. The tower now was as quiet as it was empty. Confused, I stood in the middle of the chamber and waited. But why? I should go. There was nothing to discover here. Yet something kept me glued to the spot.
I’m not sure how many minutes I stood in the darkened tower, but it was long enough to become accustomed to the musty scent of a room untouched for years, to notice warps and bleached patches in the floorboards and crevices in each stone in the wall. As the moon progressed westward, lunar beams illuminated parts of the tower and I noticed a pattern on the southern wall that hadn’t been visible before. By utilizing slightly darker and lighter rocks, some long-ago mason had designed a pentagram. At least as tall as me, the motif was totally invisible before the moonlight hit it at exactly the right angle. The path must have been calculated precisely.
Tracing the outline of the circle-enclosed star, I wondered what purpose it served. As I ran my hand over stones in the center of the star, I noticed they felt more uneven than those around them, with the rock dead center rougher still, prickly with points and clefts and crannies. My fingers found holds where they fit, almost as if the rock was sculpted to seem rough and natural but was anything but arbitrary. My curiosity aroused, I followed my intuition and pulled open what turned out to be a drawer.
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 fingerprints. 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 pentagram. “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 gri
ef 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?”
