The Secret Language of Stones

by M. J. Rose

  I fell asleep holding the golden orb.

  I woke to a dark room and a warm breeze. The rise in temperature confused me. My nightgown suddenly constricted me. I pulled it over my head, dropping it on the floor. Now naked between the sheets, I felt wanton. I fingered the orb resting between my breasts, even warmer than the air.

  I’d been dreaming of Jean Luc. I was sure of it. He’d been kissing me. Not the way Grigori had, not tentatively, not asking permission, but rather with a desperation as if he needed my kisses to keep him alive.

  A cruel dream since he wasn’t alive and I couldn’t do anything to bring him back.

  But you weren’t dreaming the kisses, the wind whispered.

  “How long have you been here?”

  I don’t know. Time isn’t real for me. But I loved watching you sleep.

  I worried he’d seen Grigori kiss me.

  “Were you here when I got home?”

  I arrived when you put on the memento mori. I haven’t figured out how to get here without that pathway.

  So he hadn’t seen the scene at the door.

  “As long as you are here now.” I smiled.

  I am.

  His ethereal warmth stroked me, from my feet, up my legs, between my legs, around my hips, around my waist, up my back and then my neck and then, when I turned, around each breast.

  “I want you to kiss me.” How brazen I was, asking for the embrace.

  His lips lowered onto mine again as he kissed me, and I kissed him back, certain I was with a man, not a specter. Jean Luc brushed the hair off my face and kissed my forehead and then my eyelids.

  Don’t open your eyes. If you keep them closed, you’ll be able to see me better.

  “How are you doing this?”

  You must stop asking. I don’t know. I only know that I want to be with you and that everything that’s happened seems less terrible when I am. All the guilt I feel is still there, but it’s as if your very presence is a forgiveness.

  The war. There it was again. “You weren’t at fault.”

  I might have prevented it.

  “Other than by seeing the future? How?”

  If I’d been smarter, I would have realized we’d been exposed for too long. That we should have sought shelter sooner.

  I stayed quiet. What could I say about the actions he’d taken in battle? I didn’t understand how warfare worked; I could offer nothing but platitudes.

  No, you offer me so much more. Solace, for one.

  “Wait, I wasn’t talking out loud. You just read my mind.”

  So I did. I’m sorry.

  “That’s all right. But you said you wouldn’t.”

  I won’t. But what’s bothering you? I can tell something is.

  “So many things. For one, my great-grandmother thinks I’d be better off not listening to my mother and not developing my talents.”

  What does she mean?

  “My mother is a witch who developed her abilities here in Paris against my great-grandmother’s wishes. And I’ve inherited some of those same powers but haven’t developed them. They’re the reason I can communicate with you.”

  I don’t want you to stop communicating with me.

  “Neither do I.”

  And I don’t want to stop kissing you.

  I smiled.

  You’re even lovelier when you smile.

  “I don’t want you to stop kissing me either.”

  His hands cupped my face as he kissed me. Not the gentle kiss of someone waking me up but a hungry and urgent pressure. The warmth against my lips.

  I wanted more of it, more of Jean Luc. A man not of flesh and blood but of incandescence that suffused me.

  He continued arousing me, and as he did, I became the gold that I worked with in the workshop and he the fire that heated me. His mouth was the blue-hot flame that moved up and down my arms and legs and torso and breasts and warmed my flesh, making it hotter and hotter. Melting me. Turning me into another form. I became a circlet of gold, reshaped, with a space for a gem. He would be my ruby, my jewel, in my center.

  I writhed.

  His warmth flooded the space between my legs; I squeezed them closed, tight, held him there. Released my grip for a fraction of a second and then held him there again. The most exquisite heat tickled me behind my ears, then down my neck, in the crook of my shoulder. Unable to remain still, I twisted and turned in delight. Feeling more. And more. And then felt tickling between my legs, and inside of me, and I couldn’t move fast enough or spread my legs far enough apart or press them tight enough together. I heard my name then, a whisper that moved inside of me as if his mouth were up against my cleft, and somehow the sound traveled up into my womb.

  Opaline, Opaline, Opaline.

  At once a plea and a promise. Too wrapped up in the sensations that his warmth created, I could only moan in response, not even sure I managed to repeat his name.

  Reaching out, grasping for shoulders, for arms, I tried to enclose him, but my hands found no hold. For all its pleasure, this one-sided lovemaking frustrated me. I could not embrace, only be embraced.

  “I need to touch you,” I whispered.

  You are touching me, Opaline. You don’t feel me, but I feel you. Lie back, let me give this to you. It’s so much more than I could hope for.

  He became the jeweler then, his kisses little flames licking my body, heating every inch of skin, twisting and turning me to his will, sending shocks coursing down my arms and legs. Bending me into his design.

  On fire, my skin must have turned from pale to rose by now. Inside, the temperature of my blood must have risen to the melting point. He was kissing me and entering me and filling me up with rare, deep purple-red rubies, blood-red, pulsing with their own life, and my thighs spread wide for him and my back arched for him and I opened for him in a way I never could have imagined.

  Jean Luc rocked me and caressed me and teased me with his heat, and for long, long minutes I just allowed him to give me all of this blue-hot orange pleasure as I pooled beneath him. Melting gold. Molten metal. Dripping with pleasure, stretching with delight and desire.

  It certainly was never like this when I was with my young lover, stealing our time away from his shop at the Carlton, hiding on the beach at night, pretending at love. Never like this with Grigori in his halfhearted efforts to pleasure me.

  This desperate lovemaking between two people who could not be together, who should be able to be together, who were defying science and logic to lock together in an embrace, exploded inside.

  Opaline, Opaline, Opaline.

  Jean Luc moaned my name as he left kisses on my lips, my breasts, inside my thighs, that surely were branding my skin the way we imprinted our jewelry with our maker’s mark. The backs of my knees and my ankles. And surely inside my body because waves of fire throbbed inside me. I had no choice but to give myself up to the heat. It was worth it to feel this burning passion, even if it meant I would be scarred for life.

  Chapter 21

  “I don’t want to speak of it here,” Monsieur said to me the next day, shortly after lunch. “But you will come upstairs for dinner tonight, yes? I have a favor to ask you.”

  I couldn’t very well refuse.

  We worked in companionable silence through the next hour. I was halfway to completing a complex necklace that would be displayed in the window when it was finished. The amount of pavéd surface made it difficult and painstaking work, but I was really only at peace with myself when living inside the process. Even though the magnifying glasses were heavy on my face, they centered me. Bending over strained my back, but at the same time the physical exertion distracted me from thoughts of my late-night visitor and my curiosity over the favor Monsieur was yet to ask of me.

  “I need to visit the vault—may I have your key?” I asked Monsieur midafternoon.


  “What is it you need?” He came over to my table and inspected the piece.

  The necklace consisted of twenty large round sapphires, each cut so as to expose a wide flat table. They were the canvas, the dark blue nighttime skies. I’d carved a crescent moon around one side of each stone, pavéd with light blue sapphires, and planned for tiny diamonds in the curve that would sparkle like tiny stars.

  “I don’t have the stars . . .”

  Monsieur looked at me quizzically. “I thought you’d already brought those diamonds up.”

  “Yes, I did. But when I interrupted this to finish the grape brooch, I replaced them. I didn’t want that many stones in my desk.”

  Nodding, he handed me his key. I threw my shawl around my shoulders and went down the hall to the doorway to the steps.

  Despite how much I despised going underground, how much I hated the chalky smell of the dungeons, how the damp got into my bones, how the cries and whines and whispers made me shiver, I had to learn more about what was going on.

  Inside the vault, I started removing the objects from the shelves on the back wall. I needed to work quickly. Monsieur would be concerned if I took too long, and I didn’t want to alert him to what I was doing. He’d forbid me from getting involved. Anna too would have me stop. They wouldn’t want me inviting danger by investigating further, but after the confrontation with the stranger and the note he’d shoved in my hand, I was scared.

  At least I didn’t waste time picking out stones. The diamonds I required for the necklace were in my smock pocket. I’d chosen them the week before and, as Monsieur had thought, taken them upstairs. I hated lying to him, but I’d needed an excuse for visiting the vault again.

  Only halfway through my efforts, I heard voices. Hurrying, I removed six jeweled goblets and three frames, and then two large silver candelabras, almost dropping one. I had to be careful: if I could hear them, then they could hear me.

  I dug the mortar out of the crevice, fragment by fragment, hoping once I’d exposed the peephole I’d see a more complete clue.

  Who were these men? Why were they meeting? And why had one of them warned me away?

  Rising up on tiptoes, I put my eye to the crevice and . . . nothing but blackness. Gently I reached in with my forefinger and hit an obstacle. Either plaster or mortar—I couldn’t be certain which one because my view was obstructed. I could hear them, but mixed in with other voices, other sounds, I couldn’t glean any information at all.

  That night at the Orloffs’ apartment, there were two other Russian men whom I’d seen at dinner before, Serge Kokashka and Alexi Vanya. Along with Monsieur and Grigori, they were drinking vodka and arguing loudly in their mother tongue when I arrived upstairs.

  Anna greeted me warmly, kissing me on both cheeks and taking me by the arm to sit with her on the couch.

  “Would you like some tea or wine?”

  I asked for wine and she winked. “For me too.”

  She filled two glasses and handed me one. The same gold double-eagle insignia on all of her china and silverware glinted in the candlelight as if the bird were preening.

  Grigori broke away from the caucus to come over to me. He gave me a formal bow and smile, then pulled me up and kissed me as his mother had, on both cheeks. At the same time, he whispered he’d gone to the police.

  I looked into his eyes, and he nodded. Anna, sensing we wanted to be alone, though for very different reasons than she probably thought, busied herself with the dinner. Once she left, Grigori and I sat on the couch and I told him what I’d seen in the vault and that mortar had been put in the crack.

  “I must have been discovered, which had to be why I was attacked.”

  “I’ll go back to the police tomorrow. I don’t want you to worry. I’m here, Opaline. I can watch out for you. I can protect you.”

  “Thank you . . .” I wanted to say more but was confused about how to show my appreciation without him thinking I was encouraging him romantically.

  Anna announced dinner, and we all sat at the table. The men continued their conversation in Russian, while Anna and I chatted in French. But once the maid served the soup, everyone switched to French and Monsieur directed his comments to me.

  “We hear the Dowager, the tsar’s mother, is distraught. The lack of news about Tsarina Alexandra and the children weighs on her more and more every day,” Monsieur Orloff said. “No one has any idea if her grandchildren are alive or dead. It’s a terrible situation, as you can imagine, and she is not coping with it well.”

  “Why would they have been killed? What political purpose would that serve?” I asked.

  “The Bolsheviks are monsters. They easily could have murdered the children simply to destroy any chance that royalty would ever rule over Russia again.”

  “But it will happen despite them,” Serge said. “If there are no children, there are cousins. Dozens of them. The Romanov line cannot be wiped out so easily.”

  The soup, a fine consommé with delicate dumplings floating on top, tasted of beef, sherry, and dill. The cuisine served at the Orloffs’ combined French food with a Russian sensibility.

  “The Dowager,” Monsieur Orloff continued, “will do anything to get an answer about the fate of her beloved grandchildren. Are they alive? Where are they?”

  “Yes, I know, it’s indeed terrible,” I said.

  Serge and Alexi nodded at me, murmuring their agreement. I noticed Anna had stopped eating her soup to watch me. So had Grigori.

  “You know the Dowager Empress’s sister Alexandra is mother of the king of England?” Monsieur asked me.

  “Yes.”

  Outside, I could hear the wind beating on the windows, as if it wanted to come in and hear what it was my mentor was asking.

  Serge inched closer to the edge of his seat. Alexi kept flexing his fingers nervously. This was an important conversation, but I didn’t know why.

  “The Dowager is planning a clandestine trip from the Ukraine to England. As you can imagine, it will be dangerous, but she’s going to travel in disguise. The trip is a long one and there is a war on, but she is determined to find out what has happened to her family. King George has been using all his power to investigate, but still has no answers. She needs to know more than what the king can tell her.”

  Monsieur Orloff paused. Anna reached out and put her hand on mine. “You don’t need to do this. It’s as dangerous for you as it is for her.”

  “But I will go with you,” Grigori said. “I’ll make sure you are as safe as possible.”

  “Do what?” I looked from Anna to her husband. I’d missed something. I’d lost the thread of what they were asking.

  “We want you to go to England. The Dowager Empress is in need of your services,” Monsieur said.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We want you to meet with the tsar’s mother. To help her,” he said.

  “How can I help her?” I still didn’t understand.

  “If she gave you locks of the children’s hair, you could make talismans for her and see if they speak to you. If they don’t, then she can hope, she can believe they are still alive,” Monsieur said.

  “But you don’t even believe what I do is real,” I said to him.

  “Yes, he does,” Anna said. “It’s just Pavel’s way to always express his cynicism first.”

  “Will you do this, Opaline?” Monsieur asked.

  I shook my head before I even finished processing the request. “No, I can’t. What I do isn’t a discovery process. If I was wrong either way, I could cause her so much pain.”

  “We need you, there’s nothing else we can think of,” Alexi said.

  “The empress is distraught. Grieving,” Serge said.

  “And I’d be going with you. To protect you. You’ll be safe.” Grigori gave me a proud, almost smug smile.

 
; “I’m sorry to disappoint you all, but I can’t. I’m not a soothsayer.”

  Anna looked from Grigori to Monsieur. “I agree with Opaline. It is too dangerous to leave Paris, to cross the channel, to go to England with a war raging around us.”

  Not one of them responded to her.

  “Yes, it is dangerous, but the Dowager is a grieving mother who doesn’t know if she is also a grieving grandmother. She has five missing grandchildren and can’t find out what’s happened to a single one of them,” Monsieur repeated.

  “Do you actually expect me to travel across the channel during the war to meet with the mother of the tsar and the grandmother of his children and tell her the fate of her family? How could I bear the responsibility? What if I was wrong? I don’t predict death. I don’t read the future. These women come to me, and I tap into some tunnel of last thoughts for them.”

  “She is desperate, she’s lost her only remaining son,” Monsieur said. Then he turned to Anna. “Tell Opaline how it feels to lose a son.”

  Furious for Anna’s sake, I interrupted. “I know how she feels. I’ve looked into the faces of so many mothers in mourning. Don’t exploit your wife’s grief to pressure me.”

  I’d never talked back to Monsieur before, and he looked stunned. But I wouldn’t let him do this to her. I didn’t need a reminder of Anna’s anguish. I dreamed of her and other mothers like her. They haunted me even more than the voices of the men who’d died . . . for the men moved on to a place of peace after passing on their messages. All except for Jean Luc. Not moving on, he couldn’t let go. There was something he needed to do or to tell someone and hadn’t yet figured it out. But this was not the time to think about him. Not with Monsieur and his companions and his son trying to coerce me into taking this trip.

  “There must be some other way to find out. Aren’t there spies in Russia? Bolsheviks who would take a bribe for the information?”

  A shadow passed over Grigori’s face. I couldn’t tell if it was because I’d referenced the Bolsheviks—this family hated them with an all-consuming passion—or if, despite the risk, he’d envisioned the trip as a way for us to spend more time together. A way for him to prove he could stand up to danger and protect me.