by M. J. Rose
From the doorstep, I took in the grand two-story ancient stone staircase leading up to the next floor. A basil-green, juniper, and powder-blue rug with purple flowers the shade of amethyst—Aubusson, I guessed—covered part of the green marble floor. Ficus trees with trunks twisted like gnarled fingers, sitting in copper pots, stood sentry on both sides of the stairs.
A crème de menthe teardrop crystal chandelier hung overhead, its arms silver tree branches. The light it offered was enough to show the way but not to chase away the shadows in the recesses of the room. And in their depths, I saw faint movements, as if I were wearing my blindfold or looking into a mirror or a pool of water. Was I suddenly scrying without a reflective surface for focus? I’d never been able to do that before. But, emanating from those dimmed alcoves, I heard footsteps and whispers and saw figures made of smoke.
A wave of cold greeted me, which was then replaced by one of warmth. As if I were being welcomed by parts of the house and warned away by others.
I wanted to step further inside and at the same time wondered if I should leave. It felt as if the house had been waiting for me. And that without knowing it, I had been waiting to visit it for a very long time.
Madame Calvé descended the stairs, making an entrance wearing an emerald frock with several gold necklaces that jangled melodically as she walked.
“Welcome to my farmhouse.” She opened her arms expansively.
“Hardly a farmhouse,” Sebastian said. “It’s magnificent.”
“It may have the bones of a castle, but this is the one place that offers me peace and accessibility to nature. Here I’m not a star but a farmer. We employ more than a hundred people, and I often work alongside them, feeding my chickens, raising my donkeys, milking my cows. It’s not what you expected?” She laughed.
“Hardly,” Sebastian said, and I agreed.
“Don’t worry. I promise you won’t have to collect your own eggs for breakfast. And I’m sorry I wasn’t outside to greet you. I was practicing,” Madame said.
So it had been her singing, not a recording.
“We heard you as we got out of the car,” I said. “It was a privilege.”
“Thank you, dear. After dinner sometimes, I perform a bit. Now that I know you’re interested, I’d be happy to do a little entertaining. Come this way, dears, and let’s have some refreshments before I show you to your rooms.”
She took my hand and drew me deeper into the foyer, past shadowy recesses. My vision remained hyper-sharp. Although we were inside, it seemed we’d stepped into a forest. The walls had been painted by a muralist to suggest that we were gazing into an ancient grove of twisting yews.
We followed her into a drawing room, where a fire was lit and tea had been laid out. There were no shadows there. Nothing out of the ordinary except that it was an incredibly beautiful, delicate, and exotic room.
Gilded tree branches formed frames around mirrors and paintings. Ferns sat on glazed majolica jardinieres in the forms of flowers. The furniture was velvet and silk in various shades of green. Arms and legs were carved animal heads. More majolica—garden seats—sat on either side of the fireplace; these were black with a lotus leaf and flower pattern. Large moss balls sat atop copper pots covered with aqua verdigris.
“Let’s all sit. I’m just so delighted you’ve come to visit,” Madame said.
She made it sound as if we were on holiday. Quite the contrary, Madame was paying handsomely for Sebastian and me to spend as long as it took for me to paint shadow portraits of the castle in order to discover the hiding place of Nicolas Flamel’s lost book.
“You have the most beautiful home,” I said.
“Thank you. Yes …” She looked around the room. “My home, my castle, my fortress … mostly my enigma. I’ve spent a long time here, captive to its mysteries. I hope that your visit may finally answer some of the questions echoing through these halls.”
And, I thought, while I was here searching for them, I hoped I would be vigilant and alert enough to save my brother from whatever darkness followed him.
Chapter 26
After tea, which we drank out of green china cups in the shape of leaves with handles resembling twisted stems, on saucers in the shape of larger leaves, Madame suggested giving us a tour of the downstairs and then showing us to our bedrooms for a rest before evening.
“My decorating is a bit of a hodgepodge, isn’t it?” Madame said, as she led us through a warren of rooms, each one more dramatic than the last. Darks played against lights, mysterious sculptures and framed calligraphy from the Orient mixed with Belle Époque posters advertising her performances.
In every corner, Emma Calvé had created small theater sets, with flowers, ferns, dried moss, shells, silvered orbs, malachite pyramids, lapis lazuli eggs, and quartz plinths. Majolica jardinieres, garden seats, and vases of every configuration added splashes of color and whimsy. Dried Spanish moss hung from branches arranged artfully in vases covered with sea glass or shells. Topiaries in the shapes of orbs and pyramids sat on mantelpieces. Where there were no murals, the walls were covered with paintings. Ivy grew around their ornate gold frames, forming second frames, with no thought to how the plants might be affecting the gilt wood.
And there were Buddhas everywhere. Sitting on mantels, shelves, and side tables, tucked into pots, mixed in with photos on top of the piano. Ivory, jade, quartz, gilt, wood, silver, in every size and shape. Some rustic, others so refined they looked as if Fabergé had carved them.
One room had been turned into a Japanese-style meditation garden, with rice-paper screens, a koi pond edged in rocks, and fragrant bonsai. Its Buddha was the largest of them all, almost as tall as I was, carved out of rosewood, so smooth it invited touch.
There were also very fine oil paintings hanging on the walls. At first, I thought they were scenarios from operas Madame had performed in, but on closer inspection, I saw that each was a staged tableau of magickal events and occult spectacles throughout history. While the styles were different, the subject matter corresponded, and together they created a fantastic narrative telling the history of the arcane and esoteric.
Rich rugs covered the marble floors. The furniture was upholstered in velvets and silks in a riot of wild purples and blues and deep, rich reds and pinks—chairs, couches, and pillows—creating gardens of fabric flowers.
Madame’s home was a giant stage with a hundred sets. Shelves and tabletops and corners, each a story waiting to be deciphered. With an air of fantasy and theater, secrets and drama, which Madame moved through like the diva she was. Hidden everywhere were mirrors of all shapes and sizes, and in their reflections I saw moving shadows that surprised and disturbed me.
The more of the house I saw, the more I understood my initial excitement. And my fears.
“I keep bringing in architects and interior designers to work on one section and then another. We rip out walls and floors and renovate them, all the while looking for the book. We’ve taken apart and rebuilt almost every room, to no avail. Everything would suggest it’s not here, yet I’m certain the book is hidden here someplace.”
I opened my mouth to ask her why she was certain, but Sebastian, anticipating my question—which he did too often—shot me a silencing look. In the car, he’d warned me that I should humor Madame Calvé, since she was paying the largest commission he’d ever been able to secure and the last thing he wanted was for me to plant doubt in her mind that the treasure might not exist.
We’d made it back to the grand staircase.
“Your rooms are up here. My students are usually housed in this wing, but they are in Paris for a week, taking a bit of a break from my hammering away at them. I’m a brute of a teacher, and every few weeks, I send them off to see the sights. This year, they are all from America.”
I couldn’t help but wonder if that was the only reason they weren’t here. Sebastian had warned me that the search for the book was a secret. In order to protect her reputation, Madame had never publicly associa
ted herself with the occult in any way. For more than thirty years, her interest had gone undiscovered by the press, and she was determined to keep it private.
We reached the first landing, which was decorated with a large painting of Madame Calvé as Carmen, the role she was most famous for. In the painting, she was at the height of her career, sensual, powerful, and seductive. The artist had somehow managed to catch the music playing in the swirl of her skirts, and I could hear strains of her aria in my mind.
She looked at it with me for a moment. “Carmen was a wonderful combination of uncontrolled desires and strange powers. An interesting combination, don’t you think?”
“I do.” Hadn’t I been living a life that combined both those things since I’d left Paris almost five years before?
“I first performed it in 1894,” Madame continued. “That was the year I met your mother. Carmen was an auspicious role for me. My life had already become enmeshed in the occult, and my knowledge of fortune-telling and supernatural phenomena allowed me to bring something unique to the role.”
She continued gazing at the painting for a moment. “It’s been a wonderful run. Glorious. And now I teach other young women to be glorious.” There was a hint of sadness mixed with delight. “I still sing at my soirees, though. I’m having one this weekend for a few of us to gather and say good-bye to a dear friend who’s passed over. You’ll know a few of the guests. Some of my friends are also yours.”
“Mine?” I asked, worried that she was referring to Mathieu and at the same time wishing she was. There it was again; ever since I’d set foot in this house, I kept feeling a push/pull. Stay/go. Feeling welcomed/repelled. Elated/fearful. And now desperately wanting Mathieu to be one of her guests and praying he wasn’t. I wasn’t strong enough to renounce him a second time. But what was I even thinking? Renounce him? He wouldn’t even look at me long enough to say hello, and that would be worse, wouldn’t it? After the way we parted and the betrayal he must have felt, I was certain he’d never speak to me again. Hadn’t that been the whole point of my charade?
Madame nodded. “Yours and your brother’s. The art world is quite small, isn’t it? And so many artists from Paris are at the beach this year. It never used to be like this. The south is flooded with English and Russians during the winter, but in the summer we residents enjoyed it all to ourselves. Now Saint-Tropez, Cannes, Juan-les-Pins, and Nice are full of tourists, and the roads are clogged with cars.”
The mellifluous sound of her voice made me want to just go on listening to her. She was rumored to have had—and to still have—many lovers. I didn’t doubt it. Despite her body being a bit stout and the lines etched on her face, her every turn of phrase was luscious and rich. Her dark brown eyes drew you in and sparkled with a kind of bronze-colored glee and seductiveness that were ageless and infectious.
“Now, this is your room, dear Sebastian.”
She opened the door to a stately suite with pale green walls and dark gray accents, silver knickknacks, and silvery gray curtains hanging on the tall windows. The view looked out over the valley. Lush and green and still clouded over with dark shadows.
Leaving my brother, we proceeded down the hall, passing three more doors, until she stopped.
“I’ve given you my favorite room. And it has a secret.” She smiled at me conspiratorially and opened the door.
I felt as if I were stepping into the inside of a conch shell. The walls were painted an exquisite silvery pink-peach, a color made all the more intense by the sudden shaft of sunlight that broke through the clouds.
“This is your sitting room,” she said.
The curtains were the same color as the walls and shimmered in the breeze from the open window. Two velvet couches, upholstered in a slightly darker but still luscious peach, sat opposite each other, a low coffee table covered with books between them. Creamy peach marble faced the fireplace. Above it hung a painting of an elderly man who looked like Merlin, peering into a crystal ball.
“Come,” she said. “Let me show you the rest.”
We went through one of the two doors on either side of the fireplace and entered a studio. There was no carpet here, rather a floor made of stone pavers. The ceiling had a skylight and north-facing windows—the painter’s preferred light.
In the center sat an easel and a taboret, its shelves filled with supplies.
I looked at Madame. “Do you paint?”
She laughed. “No, but a long time ago, I was in love with a painter and had this room turned into a studio for him. I thought it would suit you. Will it suffice? Will you be able to work here?”
I nodded. I did think I’d be able to work there. The space had a peaceful quiet that was unlike the rest of the theatrical house, which sang with excitement.
For the first time since February, I felt calmer about donning the blindfold. After all, as Sebastian kept reminding me, what secrets could a house hold that I needed to be scared of?
“Yes, it’s perfect,” I said. “The light will be ideal.”
“Now, here”—she took me back out through the sitting room and through the other door—“is your bedroom.”
The walls were covered with a decadent damask in the same peach tones. A half dozen ancient mirrors hung on either side of the bed and on the facing wall, so it was like being inside an antique kaleidoscope. The reflections were softened by the weathered glass, but as I peered into one, I saw a distant vista.
“What is it, dear?” she asked.
Frozen to the spot, I couldn’t take my eyes off the mirror.
“There is so much shadow play inside the glass,” I said. I’d learned over the years not to blurt out what I saw and frighten people. It was one thing to tell Sebastian, who was used to it, or my mother, who in a way took credit for it because it was she who’d restored my sight and, with it, this other ability.
“These are the original mirrors of the house. We had them taken from different rooms and hallways so we could use them in this suite like wallpaper. It was the designer’s idea. Do you like them?”
“How old are they?” I was afraid my voice belied my wonder. For I was seeing within the depths of the glass fragments of stories that had to be ancient.
“I wouldn’t know exactly, but the château was built before 1200.”
I was afraid to speak, because I was watching a group of six pilgrims climbing up a mountain, slowly, painfully, carefully. As if a movie were trapped in the glass. As if the mirror were a peephole into a play being enacted on a faraway stage. I couldn’t see myself, which was atypical. Was it because these were so old and marred with mercury spots?
As long as I wasn’t in the images and they didn’t relate to me, I wasn’t as concerned as I might have been. If I started to see myself, I could always ask for fabric to cover them or have them removed. Based on what I knew of Madame’s extensive forays into the occult, she’d probably be fascinated by my scrying—if that’s what this was.
Then, in the mirror, I noticed that around the next bend, four marauders were lying in wait for the pilgrims. If only I could call out to them and stop them—but this scene was from the far distant past. I kept watching, riveted. As the group came around the curve, the robbers rode up and blocked their passage. Two of the thieves jumped off their horses, swords pointed. A sharp edge caught the light.
I could hear faint screams as the women watched the highwaymen attack the men, who fell despite putting up a fight. What were mere hands against foils? One woman fainted. Another threw her body over that of her husband—or maybe he was her father.
Laughing, the thieves began attacking the women, pulling rings off their fingers and necklaces from around their necks. Then one grabbed hold of a woman’s robe and ripped it off her body.
“No!”
I didn’t realize I’d spoken out loud until I felt Madame Calvé’s hand on my arm and heard her voice.
“Are you all right, dear? What is it?”
I was going to have to tell her about the mi
rrors. That she’d have to cover them. Even if it meant explaining more about my talent than I wished. I’d learned one thing very quickly. There were secrets in this house. And my instincts told me I was going to find them. I just couldn’t be sure they would be the ones Madame wanted me to uncover.
Chapter 27
Book of Hours
July 22, 1920
Mathieu shows me his secret Paris but keeps secret parts of himself locked away. I can’t bear to see his suffering. What is it that plagues him so that he won’t even allow himself to talk of it? What secrets hide behind the barricade he’s erected? I’m tempted to offer to draw his shadow portrait. Maybe I can help save him from the darkness that I can see he battles, even though he thinks he’s hiding it from me.
As we walked toward Notre Dame today, Mathieu stopped at various shops. By the time we arrived at our destination, the Square du Vert-Galant at the tip of the Île de la Cité, we had gathered a feast: a bottle of wine, peaches, cheese, and a fresh baguette.
Sensing that Mathieu’s emotional block had to do with his brother’s death, I decided to try to get him to talk more about Maximilian and asked what he’d been like. At first, he hesitated, and I thought he was going to refuse. But then, with a sigh of resignation, he turned his head, looked out at the flowing river, and began.
“Max was six years older than I. A student of history. I told you he was going to be a professor at the Sorbonne, didn’t I? When I was small, he used to take me all over Paris, showing me the important landmarks, telling me stories. He once said that history was soaked into the earth beneath every step we took.”
Mathieu picked up my hand and held it. If I could have willed him healed, I would have. I sensed the break in his soul again and wondered if it would ever mend.
Then he let go, pulled the cork out of the wine, and handed me the bottle. I took a sip and handed it back to him.
“Right here, for instance.” He gestured to the park around us. “This spot was created by King Henri IV. A most amorous ruler. They called him Le Vert-Galant—the grand spark—and his sexual exploits were notorious. His appetite insatiable. He kept several mistresses at a time and still visited brothels.”
