by M. J. Rose
“I will leave you then. When do you think you’ll be done?”
“By dinnertime as promised.”
I wished I didn’t need to read the talisman until the next day. If it was bad news, I preferred giving it to the empress in daylight, when she wouldn’t have a long lonely night ahead of her. But time, I knew, was of the essence. No one was aware the empress had left Yalta. For her to be away for more than a few days invited danger.
Monsieur had said it over and over again: the Bolsheviks’ hate knew no bounds. The world feared for every member of the tsar’s family. And I for this strong, lovely woman most of all.
Once Grigori left, I put down my tools and stood to stretch. His presence had affected me, almost as if the storm clouds from the outside had come in. I rubbed my forehead, feeling the beginnings of a headache coming on. There must be aspirin powder in the house. That would help. Unless of course this was the first harbinger of the fate of the children.
I closed the door, locked it, pocketed the key, and took off for the kitchens. But the castle stretched out too far and the hallways twisted too many times and there were too few lamps lit for me to easily find my way. As I wandered, the shadows danced in macabre patterns, portraits on the walls sang to me, and objets d’art buzzed or murmured.
Maybe Grigori was right and I’d spent too much time invested in the dead. But hadn’t everyone in France? In England? In every country in Europe? The four-year-long war had claimed an unfathomable number of men. Not just unimaginable to me, but to all of us. You could picture a room with a dozen people in it. A theater with a thousand people in it. But enough men to fill a thousand theaters?
I’d managed to reach the main floor of the castle but wound up lost, following a darkened, narrow hallway that seemed to go on interminably. Retracing my steps, I tried to get back to the main staircase. From there, I would try again to find the path to the kitchens. After five more minutes of wandering, I found myself in a gallery.
The room was as long as a half dozen normal rooms and twice as wide as one. The walls were hung with portraits. As I made my way down its length, every ten feet or so I passed under another elaborate crystal chandelier. None of them lit, none of them glittering, but all of them emitting a high-pitched crystalline keening. As if the very crystals were weeping with grief.
With only gloomy daylight filtering in through the occasional windows, I peered into the faces of these noblemen and women, some going back to the fourteenth century. All of these people, I thought, were dead. Like all the souls in Père-Lachaise were dead. Like all the soldiers were dead. Like Jean Luc was dead.
Darling, you are becoming morose.
Jean Luc! I smiled despite myself.
I can go wherever you go, but I’m not happy about being here.
“Why is that?”
Because you aren’t happy here. Something is bothering you.
“How can you know?”
I think sometimes I can hear things you are thinking before you acknowledge them.
“Is that possible?”
Is any of this possible?
I smiled again. “It shouldn’t be, but it is. I still wonder sometimes if I invented you. The way children invent imaginary friends.”
Haven’t I proven myself to you?
“I would have thought so. But you’re hard to believe in—even with everything you’ve shown me and all that my mother and Anna have explained, a part of me still believes reading the stones, getting the messages, could be some manifestation of madness. The mind is more powerful than scientists and doctors know and—”
Please stop.
His voice sounded terribly sad, with much angst in just those two words.
“What is it?”
My presence is making life more difficult for you, and I can’t bear that. I don’t want you to miss me and long for me. I didn’t come this far to find you in order to hurt you. All my men dead and my mother suffering and now you are questioning your own sanity.
“No, no. Jean Luc, even if I spend the rest of my life missing you, I’m not sorry. Do you know why pearls are so rare? Each one begins as an accident when a microscopic grain of sand becomes trapped within an oyster’s mantle folds. Perceiving the sand an irritant, the oyster then manufactures layers of nacre to soften the irritation. Hundreds of very thin layers covering one another, building up a metallic, mirrorlike luster. Of the millions of oysters, how many contain pearls? Very few. We know to find just one luminous pearl, thousands of oysters must be killed, opened, and searched. And when one is discovered, what a treasure. What value it has. The incandescent glow of a pearl is like nothing else. The colors that play on its silky surface are one of nature’s most unique and striking rainbows. I don’t have any pearls, Jean Luc. But I have you. And forever I will be able to take out the memory of you and look at it, like the glorious rainbow on a pearl, and remember what it was like to be with you. Would I regret being able to wear a queen’s pearls for a day? No. Not even for an hour.”
In answer, his warm wind blew against my cheeks. I wish I believed that. I don’t. I’ve seen grief. You’ve seen it.
“You are fixated on the raw, early grief. But think about what happens later. What happens when we build up our own protective layers of nacre and our very misery turns to something beautiful, a memory of love.”
He didn’t respond.
“Jean Luc?” My voice sounded panicked even to me.
Yes.
“What happened? Suddenly you weren’t there, were you?”
No, I wasn’t.
“Why?”
I’m not sure.
“Has it happened before?”
Only the last few days. I try to reach you, and it seems you’re just too far away. Or I’ll be listening to you and then suddenly I feel as if I’m being pulled back.
“Are you telling me it may be time for you to go?”
It might be. I don’t think I’ll be allowed to remain in this limbo for much longer.
I nodded, feeling tears springing to my eyes.
The warm wind wiped them away.
But not yet. And not here. Not until you are safely back in Paris. I promise.
What could I say? Was I meant to go to him? I stood beside the window and, hiding my tears, looked out at the sea. What if I just walked out onto the cliff and stepped over the edge? Then we could be together. There would be no separation between us. I could go be with him wherever he went. Life wouldn’t separate us.
No!
The word was so loud in my head I put my hands up to my ears. He’d shouted his admonition inside of my very soul.
There is a pattern to all of this, a method, a weaving. You cannot pull the threads out and control it yourself.
“Are you sure? How do you know? Do you believe in fate?”
Don’t you? You are a daughter of a witch, a Daughter of La Lune. Isn’t that fate? Isn’t there a pattern to whom you are born to and whom you become?
“I don’t know, I am not sure.”
And for what seemed the hundredth time, I cursed my mother and my history. This had been foisted on me. All of this. I leaned forward and pressed my forehead against the cool glass. My headache had worsened. I needed coffee and some headache powder. Resolving to find the kitchens, I walked to the end of the long corridor, alone now, without his voice in my head, and continued on.
Through a door, down a hallway. A stone staircase I hadn’t seen before. I smelled the scent of age, of undusted newel posts, of mice behind the walls and spiders that feasted on the neglect. Much older than the rest of the castle I’d seen—from the construction of the rough-hewn beams and cracked stone steps, I guessed this section dated from the Middle Ages.
As I followed the spiral down, the temperature continued to drop. The never-ending circle of steps went deeper than one flight, deeper than two o
r three. I thought about stopping, going back up. I really was lost. And then I heard a voice—indistinct and far off.
“Jean Luc?”
No response. In silence, I descended deeper, taking another step and then another. Suddenly I heard the voice again. More distinct. Two voices. Good, I could ask for help, get directions to the kitchens.
I hurried. The voices getting louder. I came around another spiral. Only a dozen steps now to the bottom.
Before me lay a darkened cavern. I peered into its depths to find the men, to call out, to tell them I was lost, to ask for help. I saw them. Opened my mouth to yell out—and then instead put my hand up to stop myself from screaming.
Two men stood with their backs to me: Grigori and Yasin. But they were not alone. The Dowager was with them. She was seated in a tall-backed wooden chair. Fury in her eyes as they bent over her, tying her arms to the chair with thick, rough rope.
In Russian, Grigori asked her a question.
And she answered him back, shaking her head no.
He asked the same question again, even more loudly.
She repeated her answer, this time without shaking her head.
Yasin yelled at her.
She only shook her head, no.
With a burst of anger, Yasin pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket and stuffed it into the Dowager’s mouth.
Grigori went to work tying her ankles together with another length of rope. Her expression remained stoic.
And then she noticed me. She shook her head slightly—the regal movement, an order telling me not to try to help but to leave, to escape. Then her eyes met mine. I wasn’t looking anymore at the Imperial Dowager who’d ruled Russia alongside her husband. In her eyes she was nothing but a frightened elderly woman begging me to save her.
Chapter 28
My instinct was to run the rest of the way down the stairs, but something held me back. My horror? My understanding that I couldn’t fight two men? My shock that Grigori, my sometime lover and certainly my friend, was in the process of committing a violent act against the tsar’s mother?
As stealthily as I could, I crept backward up the stairs. Worried my panic could be smelled. That my pounding heart could be heard. Why were they tying her up? I wanted to help her, but first needed to figure out how to help her. Rushing ahead wouldn’t do her any good if they restrained me as well.
The stairs turned, and I could no longer see into the dungeon. I climbed and climbed up those endless steps. There were servants in the main part of the castle. If I could just get back there, I would find Briggs. Explain. Get him to call the police. Gather the rest of the staff. Take on the two Russians.
Panting, I reached the top of the stairs. Looked around. Of course, nothing had changed. Still lost, I had no idea how to find my way out of the ancient wing of the castle. And I knew if I wandered around for too long, Grigori and Yasin might find me there and suspect I’d seen something.
I forced myself to take deep breaths and assess my options.
I stood in a circular stone room, with ancient tapestries covering most of the walls. Like the rest of this wing, the room appeared abandoned. I turned in a full circle. Trying to see something I could use to help. I focused on the narrow casement windows illuminating the stairs.
Finally, I thought of an idea. Maybe the view would help me figure out where I was.
Peering through the rectangular opening, I looked into fog and incessant rain. Straining through the atmospheric morass, I thought I saw the sea. But that was no help. The whole of the back of the castle faced the sea. I sank to the floor. If I was going to help the Dowager, I needed to understand what I’d witnessed, but first, I needed a hiding place in case Grigori and Yasin came this way leaving the dungeon—they mustn’t find me.
A narrow hallway off the main room led to a series of smaller rooms. I chose the last, empty with only a closed, locked door at its other end. From the dust on the warped parquet, no one had ventured this way in weeks, maybe longer. I sat down on the floor, leaned up against the door, and tried to think through everything I’d seen and what I needed to do.
I pulled the long chain from around my neck and wrapped my fingers around Jean Luc’s amulet. He was no seer, no witch, and no wizard. His voice in my head couldn’t solve this for me. But he’d become, in a way, my strength. My trajectory to the abilities I’d denied for all this time. Only when I spoke to him, when he was by my side, when he made love to me, did I allow there was really more to this plane, to this dimension, to my senses and my talents, than I’d accepted.
But what good would any of that do me now? I hadn’t learned how to harness any of my other abilities. I didn’t even know what skills were available to me. I’d read most of the history my mother had given me. I’d studied some of the spells. But I hadn’t yet begun to practice, and without practice, I remained a neophyte, incapable of effecting any magick.
The only way out of this was through logic and determination. As my fingers fussed with the talisman’s gold chain, I realized I’d twisted it up with the ruby enamel egg necklace. Still trying to think through my dilemma, I disentangled the two.
What did Grigori want? I tried to remember anything unusual I’d overlooked during the planning of this trip. Or on that last morning when we said good-bye. Yes, there had been some tension over Monsieur giving me the necklace. I’d never quite accepted Monsieur’s reason for not letting his son take on this task. Or why he wanted me to hide the emerald eggs from him. And when I’d asked, Monsieur had seemed disturbed by his own admission that he was afraid Grigori wouldn’t be able to hide its existence.
Buy why was its existence so important?
I pressed the spot between my eyes where Anna had shown me my third eye slept. I needed all the insight and intuition it offered now. The answer to this puzzle lay in small moments and odd comments. What had I seen but missed? Not knowing there was a secret, what had I overlooked?
Monsieur’s hatred of the Bolsheviks. Anna’s fear of them. And Grigori . . . I pictured his face when he’d told me how the Bolsheviks had destroyed the Russia of his father’s generation. I pictured Grigori as he described his mother and her revolutionary poetry. Not ashamed at all, as Monsieur’s son should have been, but proud of her? Yes, Grigori was proud of his mother’s revolutionary roots. When he’d talked about what the Bolsheviks wanted, about who they hated and how determined they were, he’d been angry. So had Monsieur Orloff. But now, thinking about Grigori’s comments differently . . . he’d never decried the Bolsheviks. He said they’d destroyed old Russia . . . it would never be the same again . . . the land his father and Anna wanted to return to had vanished.
But he’d never expressed regret. He’d only spoken facts.
Was it possible? Was Grigori a secret member of the very political party his father and Anna despised? The very opposite of a tsarist sympathizer? A spy in his own father’s house? Had Monsieur Orloff sensed his son’s betrayal on some deep visceral level? Anna too had said things that seemed harmless, but now, if I read them with this new knowledge, they took on an entirely different meaning.
When she said she thought Grigori might find his destiny with me, I’d assumed she meant it in a positive way. What if she hadn’t? What if she’d seen it but didn’t understand it?
If Grigori was in fact a Bolshevik, then coming here to meet with the Dowager suggested what?
What were they planning to do with the empress?
He’d told me the revolutionaries were obsessed with destroying the symbols of the monarchy. But if they’d wanted to, they would have killed her already. So then what did they want?
Monsieur often talked about how the Bolsheviks were in desperate need of money. Suddenly the antiques store took on a changed appearance. Was Grigori helping fund the movement from the heart of Paris? Were the cracks I’d found in the vault’s wall an effort to break through i
nto that treasure trove so he could steal from his father and give the party money?
My imagination spun wildly. This was all a story I was inventing. Like Jean Luc . . . making it up in my mind.
Except hadn’t my mother proved he wasn’t my invention? And seeing the Dowager tied up was no invention either.
The enamel eggs around my neck—the ruby ones on top of my blouse and the emerald ones next to my skin—began to hum and vibrate. What was the real meaning of the two necklaces? What hadn’t Monsieur Orloff told me? Why had he taken all of the emerald eggs off of The Tree of Life to give to the Dowager? Why those eggs?
I reached inside, pulled out the hidden necklace, and held the eggs up to the window. I’d seen them almost every day for nearly four years, locked in the display case, hanging off the sinewy sculpted silver branches. Now, inspecting them, I looked for anything atypical compared to the other eggs we made. The fine workmanship, a hallmark of Monsieur Orloff’s artistry, was evident. Perfect enameling, refined designs, tiny exquisite stones set in the bands, crossing the eggs horizontally or vertically. My jeweler’s glasses were still in my smock pocket and I put them on. But even when I looked at the work magnified, nothing shouted out.
Then, turning one egg, I examined its back and noticed a miniature lock in the center of the horizontal band. Examining another, I discovered it was locked as well. I looked at a third. All of them were locked. I studied the ruby eggs. Only one was locked. The single egg Monsieur had pointed out up by the clasp. The one with the note folded up inside of it.
Removing the small key from the end of the chain, I opened the ruby egg. As I unfolded the paper, a second, even smaller key fell out. I picked it up, examined it and then the note. All in Cyrillic. But I didn’t need to be able to read it to guess the purpose of the second key.
Refolding the paper, I enclosed it once more inside the egg. The second miniature key was difficult to hold. My fingers covered the ridges and notches, preventing me from fitting it into one of the emerald egg’s locks. Trying to position my fingers farther back, I fumbled and the key fell.
