The Library of Light and Shadow

by M. J. Rose

  “I suppose it could be.”

  “And you will try again in the morning?”

  “Yes, I promise. I’ll see if I can get on the other side of the walls and try to get in. So far, I’ve put myself inside and tried to find a way out.”

  Madame seemed like a good person with a pure heart, someone I might even be able to trust, and I realized I cared about helping her achieve her goal.

  “My guests will be arriving tomorrow in the late afternoon. After dinner, we’re going to have a séance. You will attend, won’t you? First we need to communicate with a deceased friend, but if that goes smoothly, we can call on Nicolas Flamel and ask him, you and I together, where he’s hidden the book. He’ll tell you, I’m sure of it. Remember I told you he said that only someone who could see in the shadows would be able to find it? I have no doubt that’s you, Delphine.”

  “I’m not sure I should attend. I don’t want to expend energy on anything but your drawings,” I said as an excuse. I had no idea if a séance would have any effect on me. But I would say anything to avoid it. Clearly, her party guests included friends from her occult circle. That meant people who frequented Pierre Dujols’s shop, the bookstore and meeting place that Mathieu now ran. The idea of interacting with so many of his acquaintances made me shiver.

  “Are you cold?” Madame asked. “I’ve noticed you’re quite sensitive to temperature. Do you want me to have a fire lit in here for you?”

  I shook my head. “I’m fine.”

  “I’m excited to have my friends meet you. They’ll be so interested in your talent. Don’t worry, dear. None of them will judge you. It’s just a small group of sympathetic artists and writers and musicians. We gather frequently. The creativity feeds us all. And makes me feel young.”

  Despite my anxiety, I smiled. There was so much vitality about her that the idea of her needing to feel young seemed impossible. I’d heard her singing earlier that day and had again been mesmerized. Certainly, her voice was ageless. And I knew the most powerful moments I’d experience at her house would not be those I spent drawing but when I was listening to her sing.

  Some artists had magick. A power beyond them, often beyond their knowledge, that pulled energy from the cosmos. Moon-fed and star-polished, their artistic talent shone.

  My sister Opaline said that she could hear that energy when she was around me or my mother when we were painting. Throughout history, there were great artists whose work transcended the material world, and what fueled them was itself a puzzle. I believed that’s what the occult was, at its most simplistic—a willingness to accept the impossible and try to understand the meaning behind it.

  My mother spent hours teaching me how to harness my power during the time she helped bring my eyesight back. Yes, there were spells and potions and strange ceremonies of bathing in moonlight in the sea and chanting while standing in the middle of a pentagram made of shells. But it was when she taught me how to connect to the cosmos through my third eye—by pressing her forefinger to the space between my eyebrows—that I felt the energy change my world and sharpen the murky blurriness a little more each day. This essence or spirit had been with me all along. It was powered through my cells and my blood. It was a surge I felt inside me that she and our ancestors, and now I, knew how to call forth.

  “So it’s settled, then. Did you bring an evening frock? We’re all dressing for our send-off for Erik Satie to wish him a safe journey.”

  “Where is he going?”

  “To the next plane. He’s the friend I mentioned who passed over.”

  “Satie died?”

  “Yes. It’s very sad. He was a great composer and friend. But a difficult man, and he didn’t make it easy for us to take care of him at the end. Did you know him? Your mother certainly did.”

  “Yes, of course. He visited us in Cannes several times. I wonder if my mother knows he died. I can’t recall when she last spoke of him, but I’m sure she would be upset. Maman told me she first met him in Paris when she was at L’École. The same time you met her, from what you’ve said.”

  “Yes. She was unsteady on her feet those first few times she came to Dujols’s library.” Madame smiled, remembering. “But how she changed once she found her passion! She became so brave. It was astonishing.”

  “It must have been quite a metamorphosis. My great-grandmother has told me stories of how lost my mother was when she first arrived on her doorstep.”

  “A true metamorphosis.”

  I liked listening to Madame describe my mother’s transformation from a scared New York City socialite escaping a bad marriage into a bold artist who practiced the dark arts and accepted her heritage.

  Madame continued, “Satie wrote some music for her once—celebrating her finding her wings, I think was how he described it.”

  I nodded. “I’ve heard it. He played it when he visited.”

  “Satie and Debussy astonished us all with their compositions back then …” She shook her head, drifting into a memory of Paris almost thirty years before. “We were all so sure of ourselves and our mission. Certain we could learn the greatest secrets of the universe and use them to change the world. But the secrets we searched for proved more elusive with every passing year.” She extended her arms. “When I met your mother, in 1894, I had just bought this château and naively believed it would reveal its mysteries willingly. For three decades, it’s held tight to its treasure, like an oyster refusing to offer up its pearl.” She shook her head, as if confounded that the house would still disappoint her this way. “Your being here is the first real hope I’ve had in years.”

  “But I haven’t helped.”

  “Of course you have. First you discovered a masterpiece. A painting that must be worth hundreds of thousands of francs. And you’ve uncovered a bit of history, in all its gruesomeness, about the castle’s past. And you’ve seen this …” She picked up one of the drawings of the stone room. “We don’t know where it is, but I’m certain I know what it is, and it’s where the book is hidden. How does it feel to you, how does it look to you, this world that is invisible to everyone else? I wonder if it is like what happens to me when I step onstage dressed as someone who I am not and take on her persona.”

  “No, I don’t become the people I draw. Or in this case, the house. Everyone has a shadow life where his or her secrets live. When I put on the blindfold, I see through people into those shadows.”

  “Are the shadows always in the past?”

  “No, I can look forward, but it’s more difficult.”

  “And with the castle, are you looking through the walls?”

  I nodded.

  “What a gift,” she said.

  I shook my head. “It doesn’t always feel like a gift. It’s not pleasant to look into someone’s darkness. We tell people—Sebastian does and I do—that I might see moments from their past that they don’t want exposed. Usually, they aren’t terrible secrets. But some have been truly embarrassing, perverse, unethical, criminal, and frightening. When I did shadow drawings at parties in New York, I always asked people if they wanted me to draw negative secrets if I saw them, or if they wanted me to render only more innocent ones. A childhood game of stealing candy. A first kiss at a dance. Taking out a book from a library and never returning it. Trying to hurt a little brother or sister out of jealousy. Even when they were warned, I was continually surprised at how many people told me to draw whatever I saw—good or bad—because they didn’t believe I was for real and never expected me to expose anything dreadful. And then I’d have to deal with the consequences.”

  “We humans are odd creatures, aren’t we?” Madame said. “Craving the unknown, flirting with disaster instead of enjoying what we have. Years ago, I traveled to India and Egypt with a wise Hindu monk. We visited ancient shrines and temples and places of holiness. He taught me more than anyone to accept what I don’t understand with equanimity and find solace and joy in the moment.”

  “What was Egypt like? I’ve always want
ed to visit, especially since seeing photos of Howard Carter’s expeditions.”

  “I’m not sure that in the long run Carter will be happy that he’s disturbing so many burial places. There are ancient curses protecting those sacred spaces that shouldn’t be tampered with.”

  We spent another half hour together, sipping wine as Madame regaled me with tales about her adventures in the Valley of the Kings. As she recounted stories and described the ancient rites and cults, I wondered about her own secrets.

  Before I took this trip, my mother had reminisced about Madame Calvé and how despite being in the public eye, she had kept her occult life a closely guarded secret. She was not only a member of the most extreme occult circles in Paris—a clandestine cult rumored to practice black masses—but she was one of its priestesses. She was also sexually linked to several well-known mystics—the occult master Papus, the novelist Jules Bois, the illustrator of the tarot Oswald Wirth, and the master Péladan.

  As kind as many members of the group had been to my mother during her first exploratory year, she said they had sometimes frightened her. Their single-minded commitment to finding the secret to transmuting matter and expanding their minds to reach heretofore unknown levels of consciousness led to dangerous practices that she eventually decided she wanted no part of.

  Now, after Madame left my room, even though I’d drunk two glasses of wine, I decided to try once more to conquer the impenetrable castle’s secrets. But this time with paint, not pencil.

  After I set out a canvas and put a curl of black paint on my palette, I placed a brush in my lap, where I’d have no trouble finding it, and then I put on the blindfold.

  I began, dipping the soft bristles into the mound of silky pigment and dabbing. How many times does an artist pick up a brush in her lifetime? How many times does she dip it in paint? Sweep or dot or smooth it onto the canvas? Millions, I would imagine. It was an action as natural to me as breathing. With just a pat of my left hand to orient me to the edge of the canvas, I touched the brush to the stretched fabric. And so the dance began.

  With the silk over my eyes, I once again saw what I had seen an hour before: the inside of the grotto. As I’d told Madame I would, I forced myself out of the stone chamber, through the thick rock wall. I looked around. I was in the forest. But where, exactly? I turned around and around, looking for a landmark. Tall pine trees surrounded me, their sharp resinous smell so intense I felt almost dizzy.

  Find a spot where you can see through the trees, and look for the spires, Gaspard had told me. So I walked forward in as straight a line and as far as I could until I came to a clearing and looked out toward the horizon.

  I saw the château with its sandy-colored stone walls built as a fortress against eleventh-century invaders. And there on the watchtower someone stood, peering out. Looking right at me. Who was it?

  After almost thirty minutes, I took off the blindfold and studied the canvas. The château perched on its hill. A perfectly fine painting. With no magick about it at all. No subtle pointers to where the secret chamber might be. None at all.

  Perhaps the château had a veil around it. Maybe it was protected from eyes just like mine. Tomorrow I would have to try to pierce it another way. There was still enough time to do that and leave before guests began arriving for Madame’s evening event.

  Chapter 35

  Book of Hours

  August 23, 1920

  I can barely hold my pencil. Am hardly able to string my thoughts together. But I promised to keep all my days with Mathieu recorded here, even the very last of them.

  Tonight feels endless. The pain unrelenting. What began as a perfect day will forever be etched in my memory as the worst. I know what I must do, even though it seems impossible that I will be able to.

  To love someone so wholly and completely. To be in harmony with another soul. To have him give himself to me. To have given myself to him, withholding nothing. And now to have to walk away in order to protect him? And why? I did this to myself because I was impatient, stubborn, and full of pride. Sure that I could help Mathieu when no one else had been able to. And yet I have to remember that what I will do next will save his life. Would it have been better not to have looked into the shadows? To selfishly stay with him and then be the very cause of his destruction?

  Today began in the Bois de Boulogne, where Mathieu brought me for lunch.

  “This is one of my favorite secrets,” Mathieu said, as he helped me into a boat.

  He gave me another of his history lessons, describing the park as quite large. “Almost nine hundred hectares, it’s what’s left over from an ancient oak forest. In the seventh century, royalty hunted boar and deer and other game here. There was a monastery built on some of the land and an abbey. It’s been a sanctuary for monks, nuns, and robbers and several times the site of battles. In 1852, Napoleon III gave the land to the city of Paris, and Baron Haussmann supervised its creation into what you see now.”

  He rowed our boat across the lake toward an island in the distance. I watched as he dipped the oars into the water and they emerged dripping. The droplets catching the sun and shining like diamonds.

  Reaching the shore, Mathieu docked the boat in front of a rustic pink-and-green building outfitted with terraces. Across the front were wooden letters spelling out Le Chalet des Îles.

  “Proust and Zola came here often during the Belle Époque. And it hasn’t lost any of its charm. At least, I don’t think it has. You’ll have to decide for yourself.”

  Over a luncheon of delicious lobster bisque followed by a delicate roasted capon with a chestnut sauce, Mathieu told me stories about the park and the days he’d spent there with his brother.

  “My aunt and uncle used to bring us every weekend, and we’d explore another section. There’s a waterfall I must take you to see. We used to run under the rushing sheet of water. Behind it is a hidden grotto. If you could get past your fear of water, I could show it to you. It’s a marvelous, gloomy, secret place that stirred our imagination when we were boys. We used to hide in there and look for buried treasure, sure we’d find it. And one day, we did. A bag of gold coins. We whooped and hollered. It was the very best of days.” He smiled. “Years later, my uncle told me he’d buried the coins there the day before and hoped no one would come across them but us.”

  After lunch, I invited him to our house. I wanted to show him my studio and so rarely had a chance, but my great-grandmother was spending a few days in Fontainebleau with friends. Sebastian was in Cannes. And Opaline always stayed at the shop during the week. We would have the maison to ourselves.

  “I feel as if I’m walking through a museum,” Mathieu said, as I showed him through the downstairs rooms. He stopped to study a nude painting of Diana done by Corot in the front parlor.

  “I thought I saw this painting in the Louvre,” he said.

  “A very similar version.”

  He stopped in front of an almost full-size marble sculpture of another Diana wearing her crescent-moon headpiece. Someone had once draped a double string of gray pearls around her neck, and they hung there still.

  “This place is both appalling and appealing,” he said. “I’ve only read about the homes of the Grand Horizontals,” he said, using one of the more eloquent terms for Paris’s great courtesans. “Every inch is designed to please her gentlemen callers, isn’t it?”

  “Just wait.” I took him upstairs and showed him the many fantasy bedrooms. “Whatever a man’s desire, there is a room to match,” I said, as I opened the door to one that recalled the mirrored palace of Marie Antoinette and then another that resembled a monk’s chamber with a single bed, a straw rug, and religious frescoes on the wall. I showed Mathieu the Egyptian room, a Chinese pagoda, and a Persian garden, its walls painted with trees and flowering bushes against a midnight-blue sky complete with stars, a perfect crescent moon, and the onion-shaped minarets of Persepolis in the distance.

  “Would you like to try one out?” I asked, half-teasing, half
-serious. I’d fantasized about being with him in these rooms in the last weeks since we’d become lovers.

  “No, I think I’d rather see yours.”

  “Down this way,” I said, and led him to the cream and blue bedroom that had none of the fanciful decorations of the chambers where my great-grandmother and her ladies entertained.

  Mathieu laughed when he saw it. “Quite subdued compared with the rest of the maison. And a relief,” he said, as he looked around. He walked to my dresser and touched my silver repoussé mirror and the bottle of perfume that he’d bought me. He studied a picture frame that held a photograph of Sebastian and me at the beach when we were both about ten.

  “Is this after your sight was restored?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  Mathieu peered at the photo as if he were gleaning some critical information from it. “What a terrible time you must have had.”

  I sat down on the edge of my bed. I didn’t want to talk about it and was about to change the subject. But then I thought that if I did open up, perhaps it would encourage Mathieu to talk more about his brother. It was like an itch that demands to be scratched, and I was obsessed with helping him discover the secret buried so deep in him that he couldn’t cast any light on it.

  “Everything was dark. I kept waiting for morning. But it never came. And I became so clumsy. Always bumping into things and hurting myself. I don’t know how I would have endured it if it hadn’t been for Sebastian. He attached himself to me as if we’d become Siamese twins overnight. He was my eyes. I became so dependent on him and my art. Because I could still draw. I couldn’t see what I drew, but I could feel the paper under my hands and the weight of the pencils in my fingers, and I had control of the sweep of the lines. My sisters and I became more discreet about our gifts after the accident. Psychics and séances and fortune-telling may be popular and acceptable to discuss even in polite society. But we are all wary of using stronger words to describe our abilities.”