The Secret Language of Stones

by M. J. Rose

  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.

  “ ‘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 accustome
d 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.