The Secret Language of Stones

by M. J. Rose

  Only the fountain scene hadn’t occurred.

  Being well acquainted with my mother’s style, I knew it would take me days to decipher everything she’d included in the triptych, suss out the clues and their meaning. But I didn’t need time to interpret the overarching message. The triptych celebrated our love as if it were real.

  I continued studying the cemetery and noticed inscriptions on the mausoleums and tombstones. Names and dates. My mother never did anything accidentally. The engravings must be part of the message. Picking up a pencil, I proceeded to copy each of the names and the numbers onto a sheet of paper. After finding them all, I applied the simple cipher she used in all her paintings—each number standing for the letter in that position in the alphabet.

  Finally, I understood the message and realized the same message appeared on the silver leaves I’d found in La Lune’s bell tower.

  Make of the blood, heat.

  Make of the heat, a fire.

  Make of the fire, life everlasting.

  No less cryptic than the numbers, really. What was she trying to tell me?

  I worked at the puzzle on and off that night and for the next two days. I didn’t like to give up when it came to my mother’s artful challenges. And she didn’t make it easy for me to give up. Maman believed we all needed practice in dealing with mysteries and, by working out the riddles, we were honing our abilities for times of crisis.

  But after three days, I gave up and telephoned Cannes. Our housekeeper said my mother was on a sketching trip. I left word for her to call me.

  The mystery of the triptych’s meaning would need to wait.

  By Friday, my mother hadn’t been in touch. That night, after the shop closed, I decided to try once more.

  In my bedroom and while sipping wine, I resumed studying it. Before I’d tried with magnifying glasses; that night I used my jeweler’s loupe, searching for other clues. And I found them. In the shadows inside cracks and crevices on the tombstones and mausoleum lintels, I found yet more runes and symbols. Their meaning eluded me. In the morning I would ask Anna if she knew what they meant.

  Why hadn’t my mother sent a letter with the painting, explaining what it was she wanted me to know? My father always said she needed to create drama, but I’d never found this habit endearing the way he did. Happier in the dark than the light, she preferred the moon to the sun.

  The more I studied the minuscule signs, the more they looked familiar. And then I realized why. I opened my armoire. From under a pile of handkerchiefs, I pulled out the dozen silver sheets I’d found in the bell tower at Maison de La Lune. There, etched in metal, were the same symbols in the same order on the last page. But I hadn’t understood them when I’d seen them the first time. Neither had Anna.

  Frustrated, just after midnight, I finally gave up. As I did, the depression that had been hovering on the edge of my consciousness all day descended. What was I doing in Paris? Why was I fighting the facts about what my life had become? Surrounded by war, by loss, by death . . . so steeped in it, I’d manufactured an alternate reality populated by imaginary men. I was a fraud and my talismans were toys.

  Pacing my small room offered no relief. At home in Cannes, we’d wander the beaches at night. When our minds wouldn’t allow our bodies to rest, we would prowl around the jetties while the phosphorescent surf played around our ankles. While in Paris, I couldn’t even venture out alone after dark. There were government curfews, sometimes enforced, sometimes relaxed. But Anna had asked me to observe the nine PM cutoff, regardless. With so many lonely, wounded soldiers in the city, streetwalkers strolled the avenues and boulevards at night, hoping to make some money. Anna didn’t want me to become entangled with any drunken soldiers.

  Well, I was tired of the rules. If a soldier approached me, I would just keep walking and ignore him.

  Outside I found quiet. No sirens, few cars. The streets of Paris were eerily unwelcoming, but at least everything existed in three dimensions. Walking on cobblestones, looking above me at the stars, I focused on the facts of the world around me, not the fantasies I kept crafting in my little room. The buildings loomed large in the moonlight; footsteps of one other late-night pedestrian echoed in the still night. Glancing over I saw a lasciviously dressed woman hurrying in the opposite direction. Crossing rue Royale, I walked under the archway and into the Louvre’s courtyard and kept going until I reached the quai du Louvre. I descended the wide stone steps down to the path running along the river, the quai des Tuileries, and made my way as close as I could get to the water.

  But this was nothing like walking by the sea in Cannes. I missed the scent of salt, the sound of the waves crashing, the give of the sand underfoot. Instead, the swiftly flowing river smelled cold and slightly metallic; the stones underfoot were uneven and unforgiving. Only the moon was the same. At that very moment, the same moon was shining down on the beach at home. And the soldiers in the field. And the tombstones in the cemetery.

  The path appeared empty. I was alone. With no destination in mind, I just kept moving forward, hoping I might walk into proof that my mind wasn’t infected. Or even proof that it was. I just wanted an answer.

  If I could just know I wasn’t insane, I could live with the discomfort. I could withstand the bittersweet romance with a lover whom I knew I would lose one day. I could tolerate the noise. But this lack of proof? This uncertainty? That’s what I couldn’t endure anymore. Were the voices in my head or in some other place? Was I making up Jean Luc, or was he a trapped soul communicating with me?

  And if Jean Luc was real—if any ghost could be real—then this love affair was doomed, wasn’t it?

  I’d reached the oldest bridge in Paris, the Pont Neuf, and stood underneath it. Water swirled in eddies around the bridge’s piles. So many had walked across its span since it had been built in the sixteenth century. How many times had my ancestor, the original La Lune, traversed it? Had she stood here and stared down at the water, missing her lover, wondering how she could live with the mistakes she’d made in trying to recapture what she’d lost, what she’d destroyed? Had she ever stood here and wondered if the river would welcome her and offer her the release she so badly wanted . . . freedom from longing, from loneliness?

  Despondent, I climbed the stairs to the street level. I meant to turn away, not to walk out onto the bridge. But I did. I walked halfway out, stood at the railing, and stared down.

  Paris’s bridges cross from the Left to the Right Bank. For many, they also span this life to the next. Every week, broken soldiers jumped off this bridge and the others, unable to cope with how the war left them.

  The thought alarmed me—not because I found the idea abhorrent, but because I found it so tempting.

  What would it be like to disappear into that blackness? To feel the shock of cold water swiftly surround me? To sink into the river’s murky, colorless depths?

  Would I find Jean Luc then? Finally? On the other side? And what a nasty joke if he looked at me like a stranger, proving I’d imagined him. Why continue living with this question of sanity? So what if all those women did need my help. If I was a fraud, I wasn’t helping them anyway.

  I leaned over the railing. The river looked even more sinister. A snake waiting for her next feeding.

  The sound of far-off footsteps advanced. To the right, far in the distance, a figure approached. A few more steps and I made out a woman. A few more and her gait became familiar. Clouds shifted in the night sky, and her namesake, la lune, shone down, illuminating the color of her hair and then her very features.

  “Maman?”

  She reached me and pulled me close to her. “I came to take you home.”

  “To the Palais?”

  “No, to Cannes. It’s too dangerous in Paris for you.”

  “I’m careful. The sirens warn us and the shelter at the Palais is very safe.”

  “Yes, the war is ha
zardous, but I meant what you are doing with the talismans and how it is affecting you. That’s the true and real danger.”

  “No, I can’t leave my job.”

  “But I can see it in your eyes, mon ange.” It was what her grandmother called her, “my angel.”

  “How did you find me? I didn’t tell anyone I went out.”

  My mother gave me her most beguiling smile. The one that said everything: I love you. You know who I am. You know what I can do. We are mother and daughter—how can you even wonder?

  “But why now?”

  “You haven’t finished working out the message in the painting?”

  “No.”

  “And you’re questioning everything you should be embracing. It’s all a gift, Opaline, but you’re being tortured.”

  “A gift? You mean the voices?”

  She nodded.

  “Some gift. I think I’m becoming as crazy as the owl lady who used to live next door to us in Cannes.” I hadn’t thought of Madame Sorette in so long. Our delightful but crazy neighbor who kept an aviary of almost a hundred owls she believed were all Greek gods.

  My mother laughed at the memory. Deep throated and velvety. My father always said my mother seemed sensual even when she buttered bread. He was right. If there were any men around, they would have come running at the sound of that laugh, like dogs sniffing out a bitch in heat.

  “You need to come home so I can teach you how to use your talents. Every Daughter of La Lune is born with them, but only through training can you control them.”

  “How do you know what’s happening to me?”

  “I studied. I trained. And lest you think I’m so prescient, Anna wrote me, Opaline. Mystics like her can help, of course, but not teach. You need to come home. This Jean Luc is torturing you, isn’t he?”

  “I didn’t tell Anna about Jean Luc.”

  “No, you didn’t.” She smiled again.

  “You think he’s real?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t travel your threads.”

  “Threads?”

  “I wish I’d convinced you to study with me when we had the chance instead of rushing through the lessons now. La Lune taught me that each of us has silver or gold threads that tie us to other realms. On them, we can travel past this plane and go back and forth to other planes. I believe you are walking out into time and encountering all these lost souls who need help in cutting their threads and moving on. None of us can walk on one another’s threads, though. You can’t on mine; I can’t on your sisters’. But I can see them—” She took my hands and pressed her fingertips to mine. “I can feel them here, Opaline.”

  As she spoke, I became conscious of a slight warmth where our fingertips touched.

  “I can’t come home, not yet. I have to stay here and help the widows and mothers as long as the war rages. I would be selfish to leave. I feel as if what I’m supposed to do here isn’t finished.”

  My mother’s silence lasted for a full minute.

  “But so far sweet Anna hasn’t helped. Are you sure you won’t come home with me?”

  I nodded.

  “Always so stubborn. So stubborn. You know I can’t stay here and train you. I have the twins and Jadine to take care of. Please, reconsider.”

  At that moment, the sirens screamed. I looked around in a panic. There was nowhere to go. We were too far from either bank. Maybe it was all for the best. If the bombs fell on us, if they took us, then I’d go to Jean Luc in whatever place he was and we could be together. My mother was a fully evolved witch; she’d most likely be able to keep herself safe no matter where she was.

  The first bomb hit deep in the city to the right. Close enough that we could feel the vibration through our feet. A huge explosion of orange-red flames and smoke filled the sky.

  Grabbing my hand, my mother pulled me. I resisted. I wanted to stay. To watch the fireworks, to tempt fate.

  “Opaline,” she yelled just as the second bomb hit not as far away. The bridge shook as the sound echoed through the canyon of the city streets. The lights were brighter, this one much closer.

  My mother screamed my name, tightened her grip, and dragged me, using an inhuman force I couldn’t withstand. She ran, towing me with her to the end of the bridge just as the third bomb hit the far end of Pont Neuf. The explosion rocked the ground. We went flying. Thrown by the power of the blast. Incredibly, my mother never let go of my hand, and we landed more softly than seemed possible on a patch of grass quite close to a large plane tree.

  Gasping for breath, I sat on the ground, the trunk of the tree at my back, looking at my mother. At her disheveled hair, dirt-streaked face, ripped duster. Smiling at me, she shook her head.

  “You were born stubborn, Opaline. The next time I tell you to come with me, you come. Do you understand? We’re going home.”

  Even there, sitting under the sky smoky from the bombs, hearing the cries of people who were scared and hurt, not knowing what would happen next, I remained sure. I shook my head.

  “I can’t.”

  “Then you are going to go on suffering.”

  I stood. Stumbled. I’d twisted my ankle in my fall. “I’m going back to the Palais,” I said. “Do you want to come with me? I’m sure Anna would be happy to put you up.”

  “No, I’m going to your great-grandmother’s. I want to see how she is. Why don’t you come with me? I brought something I need to give you. It’s there with my bags.”

  The maison remained undamaged. Grand-mère and all the soldiers were awake and drinking champagne—celebrating, they said, that they’d survived this most recent encounter with Bertha.

  I retired to my room, my mother to another. I undressed, turned off the light, and climbed into my bed. On the bridge I hadn’t been frightened. But now, with all quiet once again, with the smooth cool sheets pulled up and the down pillows under my head, I began to shake.

  And then I heard a knock on the door.

  “Entrez,” I called out, expecting my great-grandmother had sent her maid to make sure I didn’t need anything.

  The door opened, and in the pale yellow light from the hallway I saw my mother. Her long wavy auburn hair tumbled down around her shoulders. She wore a peach-colored dressing gown cut low. The lamplight in the hallway illuminated the ruby necklace encircling her pale peach skin and set the stones on fire. I’d never seen them glowing like they were then—like embers, I thought, about to burst into flames.

  Stepping into the room, my mother switched on the bedside lamp and then sat on the edge of the bed. Reaching out, she smoothed my hair.

  “I’m sorry we argued. Sorrier still you won’t come home with me. I guessed as much. I understand you feel like you have a mission to fulfill here. I brought this for you. It won’t solve all your problems, but it will help some . . .”

  She handed me a book. It fit in the palm of my hand. Made of cordovan leather with gold tooling on the front, elaborate letters spelling out five words.

  THE DAUGHTERS OF LA LUNE

  “It’s our history, and our rules. La Lune guided me to find it in the bell tower when I was just about your age. She taught me its lessons. I always dreamed I’d be the one to teach them to you. Promise me you’ll study it?”

  I took the book from her, held it, and heard far-off music. Soft and lilting. Bells and harps. If the stars sang, certainly this would be their song.

  The music grew louder when I opened the book. I touched the smooth parchment paper and breathed in its antique scent. I read my name printed on the frontispiece.

  OPALINE DUPLESSI, THE 44TH DAUGHTER OF LA LUNE

  Turning the pages, I discovered a highly illustrated account of our family, going back to the sixteenth century, followed by a list of rules of witchcraft and then . . .

  “What are these?” I asked my mother, pointing to what appeared to be the fi
rst of many complex recipes.

  “Spells. Those we’ve collected over the years, and some new ones I’ve created.”

  “This is a grimoire?”

  She nodded. “Yes, your grimoire. And it’s protected so no one else can steal it or alter it.”

  “But why is the last third empty?”

  “Each of us is charged with creating our own magick, Opaline. There’s room there for you to make notes and preserve your discoveries for future generations. You found the silver sheets, didn’t you? Those fit into the book, with space on them for you to engrave your own spells.”

  “How can there be so much I don’t know about you, about us?” I asked.

  “You didn’t want to know.” She smiled her mystical smile again, leaned forward, and kissed me on the forehead. “I know you won’t come home now, but you will come home when the war is over; promise me you’ll come then?”

  “Yes, as soon as the war is over, Maman.”

  Getting up, she turned off the light and walked to the door. She stopped, her hand on the jamb, and looked back at me.

  “Mon ange, your Jean Luc is real. How else could I have seen him to paint if he wasn’t?”

  Chapter 18

  The following afternoon, I went down to the vault again, this time to choose tsavorites and emeralds and amethysts of various shades for a brooch of my own design. The large cluster of grapes could be pinned to a lapel or taken apart to make a set of earrings and a smaller cluster brooch.

  Monsieur Orloff offered me a rare compliment, saying “Your piece is very well conceived,” and then he added several more grapes to the top, making the triangle a more interesting shape after the two grapes were separated out for the earrings.

  I’d found eight amethysts so far, large ovals with a lovely deepness. The facets flashed a tiny bit of pink when I held them to the light. My book of gems said that the royal purple stones becalmed their wearer but also increased awareness and psychic ability. Considering my state, I was almost afraid to handle the gems.