The Secret Language of Stones Read online

  Years ago, when she was closer to my age, my mother’s journey to Paris had begun with her meeting La Lune, a spirit who’d kept herself alive for almost three centuries while waiting for a descendant strong enough to host her. My mother embraced La Lune’s spirit and allowed the witch to take over. But because Sandrine was my mother, I hadn’t been given an option. I’d been born with the witch’s powers running through my veins.

  Once my mother made her choice to let La Lune in, she never questioned how she used her abilities. She justified her actions as long as they were for good. Or what she believed was good. But I’d seen her make decisions I thought were morally wrong. So when I was ready to learn about my own talents, I knew it had to be without my mother’s influence. My journey needed to be my own.

  “I’m sorry, but I plan to stay in Paris and work for the war effort,” I told my mother when I telephoned home the following day to tell my parents I’d arrived at my great-grandmother’s house.

  When my mother first moved to Paris, my great-grandmother tried but failed to hide the La Lune heritage from her. Once my mother discovered it, Grand-mère tried to convince my mother that learning the dark arts would be her undoing. My mother rejected her advice. When Grand-mère’s horror at Sandrine’s possession by La Lune was mistaken for madness, she was put in a sanatorium. Eventually my mother used magick to help restore Grand-mère to health. Part of her healing spell slowed down my great-grandmother’s aging process so in 1918, more than two decades later, she looked and acted like a woman in her sixties, not one approaching ninety.

  Grand-mère was one of Paris’s great courtesans. A leftover from the Belle Époque, she remained ensconced in her splendid mansion, still entertaining, still running her salon. Only now she employed women younger than herself to provide the services she once had performed.

  “But I don’t want you in Paris,” my mother argued. “Of all places, Opaline, Paris is the most dangerous for you to be on your own and . . .”

  The rest of her sentence was swallowed by a burst of crackling. In 1905, we’d been one of the first families to have a telephone. A decade later almost all businesses and half the households in France had one, but transmission could still be spotty.

  “What did you say?” I asked.

  “It’s too dangerous for you in Paris.”

  I didn’t ask what she meant, assuming she referred to how often the Germans were bombarding Paris. But now I know she wasn’t thinking of the war at all but rather of my untrained talents and the temptations and dangers awaiting me in the city where she’d faced her own demons.

  I didn’t listen to her entreaties. No, out of a combination of guilt over Timur’s death and patriotism, my mind was set. I was committed to living in Paris and working for the war effort. Only cowards went to America.

  I’d known I couldn’t drive ambulances like other girls; I was disastrous behind the wheel. And from having three younger siblings, I knew nursing wasn’t a possibility—I couldn’t abide the sight of blood whenever Delphine, Sebastian, or Jadine got a cut.

  Two months after Timur died, his mother, Anna Orloff, who had been like an aunt to me since I’d turned thirteen, wrote to say that, like so many French businesses, her husband’s jewelry shop had lost most of its jewelers to the army. With her stepson, Grigori, and her youngest son, Leo, fighting for France, she and Monsieur needed help in the shop.

  Later, Anna told me she’d sensed I needed to be with her in Paris. She had always known things about me no one else had. Like my mother, Anna was involved in the occult, one reason she had been attracted to my mother’s artwork in the first place. For that alone, I should have eschewed her interest in me. After all, my mother’s use of magick to cure or cause ills, attract or repel people, as well as read minds and sometimes change them, still disturbed me. Too often I’d seen her blur the line between dark and light, pure and corrupt, with ease and without regret. That her choices disturbed me angered her.

  Between her paintings, which took her away from my brother and sisters and me, and her involvement with the dark arts, I’d developed two minds about living in the occult world my mother inhabited with such ease.

  Yet I was drawn to Anna for her warmth and sensitive nature—so different from my mother’s elaborate and eccentric one. Because I’d seen Anna be so patient with her sons’ and my siblings’ fears, I thought she’d be just as patient with mine. I imagined she could be the lamp to shine a light on the darkness I’d inherited and teach me control so I wouldn’t accidentally traverse the lines my mother crossed so boldly.

  Undaunted, I’d fled from the dock in Cherbourg to Paris, and for more than three years I’d been ensconced in Orloff’s gem of a store, learning from a master jeweler.

  To teach me his craft, Monsieur had me work on a variety of pieces, but my main job involved soldering thin bars of gold or silver to create cages that would guard the glass on soldiers’ watch faces.

  To some, what I did might have seemed a paltry effort, but in the field, at the front, men didn’t have the luxury of stopping to pull out a pocket watch, open it, and study the hour or the minute. They needed immediate information and had to wear watches on their wrists. And war isn’t kind to wristwatches. A sliver of shrapnel can crack the crystal. A whack on a rock as you crawl through a dugout can shatter the face. Soldiers required timepieces they could count on to be efficient and sturdy enough to withstand the rigors of combat.

  Monsieur Orloff taught me how to execute the open crosshatched grates that fit over the watch crystal through which the soldiers could read the hour and the minute. While I worked, I liked to think I projected time for them. But the thought did little to lift my spirits. It was their lives that needed protecting. France had lost so many, and still the war dragged on. So as I fused the cages, I attempted to imbue the metal with an armor of protective magick. Something helpful to do with my inheritance. Something I should have known how to do. After all, I am one of the Daughters of La Lune.

  But as I discovered, the magick seemed to only make its way into the lockets I designed for the wives and mothers, sisters and lovers of soldiers already killed in battle. The very word “locket” contains everything one needs to know about my pieces. It stems from old French “loquet,” which means “miniature lock.” Since the 1670s, “locket” has been used to describe a keepsake charm or brooch with a personal memento, such as a portrait or a curl of hair, sealed inside, sometimes concealed by a false front.

  My lockets always contained secrets. They were made of crystal, engraved with phrases and numbers, and filled with objects that had once belonged to the deceased soldiers. Encased in gold, these talismans hung on chains or leather. Of all the work I did, I found that it wasn’t the watches but the solace my lockets gave that proved to be my greatest gift to the war effort.

  Chapter 2

  “Yes, I’m Opaline Duplessi,” I said to the woman who’d stepped into the workshop. “Can I help you?”

  “I hope so. I was told you are able to—” She broke off. “It’s about my son—” She couldn’t finish.

  The desperation in her voice told me everything. This tall woman with dark curls framing her pale face, with almost night-sky navy eyes, with her lovely lips trembling just a fraction, was shopping for solace.

  My stomach clenched. No matter how often women called upon me to help, no matter how many lockets—or “speaking talismans,” as I called them—I made, each time I took on a new assignment I felt as if I were being cut and bleeding afresh. The pain never lessened, and I never became inured to it.

  “My name is Denise Alouette and I have a son—” She shook her head. The curls fell, hiding her high cheekbones. “I had a son . . . who . . .” Her voice reduced to only a whisper, she couldn’t finish.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She quickly lowered her head, but not before I saw the single diamond tear.

  “My only son.�
�

  There was nothing I could say.

  She took a moment to compose herself. “I’ve heard about you,” Madame Alouette continued, finally raising her face. “About what you do. At first I thought surely you must be a fake and make it all up. There are so many charlatans in Paris now, the police are finally cracking down.”

  I knew all about the ancient French laws that were once again being enforced forbidding talking to the dead and reading fortunes. Monsieur Orloff warned me and his wife almost daily. With his strong Russian accent, the caution carried gravitas.

  Madame Alouette fussed with her reticule. Taking out a lavender-­colored tin, she opened it and offered me one of the deep purple sugarcoated violets and then took one for herself. In a moment, the candy’s sweet scent suffused the air.

  “A friend of mine told me about the message you passed on to her from her son. She seemed better afterward . . . almost at peace. So I’ve decided it might be worth a try.”

  I’d heard a version of this same speech many times before. Women who visited me at the shop were usually both skeptical and desperate.

  “Let’s go into the showroom, it’s more comfortable,” I said as I got up. “It’s this way.” The workshop was no place for clients. In the middle of the well-lit room were four U-shaped wooden tables, all facing one another like a four-leaf clover. Now only two of the stations were occupied, Monsieur Orloff’s and mine. I was the sole full-time jeweler employed by the firm. Not only were precious metals and gems on our tables, but dangerous apparatuses also lay about: soldering guns and metal files.

  “A piece of jewelry should be a marvel,” Monsieur Orloff once had told me. “A little miracle the buyer looks at with awe and amazement, not understanding how it came together.” He wore a perpetually serious expression and had deep frown lines etched upon his brow, but when he spoke about his jewels, a child’s delight shone in his eyes and echoed in his voice.

  He loved invisible settings and was famous for them, as well as the otherworldly gems he searched out and used in his pieces. His artist’s eye found rubies that resembled wine turned to stone, emeralds as clear as a pool of water, sapphires that captured the essence of night, diamonds like stars pulled out of the sky, pearls glowing with the luminescence of the moon.

  “How do you do it? How do you speak to those who have passed?” Madame Alouette whispered as I escorted her toward the private viewing room.

  “I don’t think I do speak to them directly,” I said as I opened the door. “It feels more like I am able to access messages soldiers left behind as they passed over.” Or, I considered, it could be that I read your mind and hear what you wish he were saying. But I’d never admit that to a client.

  “As if the messages are in the sky and you pull them out?”

  “Yes.” I shrugged. “But I can’t be sure.” I held out a chair for her. “Here, have a seat,” I said.

  She sank down with the relief of someone who’d been on her feet for days.

  “Can I get you coffee or some tea?”

  “Coffee, yes, please.”

  Returning to the workroom, I turned on the kettle, prepared the press with grinds, then stocked a silver tray with Monsieur Orloff’s Limoges china service: cups and saucers with a green, gold, and purple Russian imperial pattern.

  Milk and sugar were often scarce because of the war, but we tried to always have some for clients, even if it meant going without ourselves.

  Arranging the silver pitcher, sugar bowl, and coffee, I returned to the showroom to find Madame Alouette no longer at the table but standing, studying The Tree of Life.

  Monsieur had wanted La Fantaisie Russe to be as much a work of art as the jewels inside its walls. An Art Nouveau masterpiece, the shop was one of the architectural commissions my father was most proud of. He’d chosen the themes of the wisteria vine and peacocks, the wisteria for welcome and the birds for their jewel-toned feathers. Walnut-veneered panels inlaid with purplish amaranth wood, to represent the cascading blossoms, covered the walls. The dual motifs were carried out in the carved showcases, as well as in the furniture, doorknobs, drawer pulls, lamp bases, and cabinet handles. Climbing vines carved into the wood led up from the floor to give way to blossoms hanging from the moldings, and vines framed the cabinets, doors, and windows. When it came to the lighting fixtures, standing lamp bases echoed the vines’ twisting trunks and the glass shades evoked the clusters of blossoms. The peacock color palette—amethyst, turquoise, sapphire, emerald—carried throughout the upholstery, rugs, and tiles laid around the shell-shaped fireplace and on the mosaic floor.

  No artwork decorated the walls; rather, tall mirrors, their carved frames suggesting peacock feathers, reflected back the jewels. In each corner, overlaid on the mirror, were peacocks, their jewel-toned feathers fashioned from stained glass.

  Only a limited amount of Monsieur’s wares were ever on view in the shop: two or three pieces showcased in each of the two display cases in the main gallery, another in the front window, and one in the private showroom.

  It was the latter that I found Madame Alouette inspecting. It held but one magnificent piece, The Tree of Life. Sculpted from silver, the oak tree stood almost three feet tall and sat in a glass case set flush with the wall. Instead of leaves, over 150 small gleaming guilloche enamel eggs, in a myriad of rich shades of green, from lime to forest pine, hung from its many branches. Each luminous egg designed and executed by Monsieur Orloff.

  Like the more elaborate fantasies he had created with Fabergé for the royal family and upper crust of Russian elite, these simpler charms, set with fewer stones, were created with the same engine-turned process. Monsieur Orloff used a machine that engraved the metal with a perfect pattern of wavy or straight lines so when the enamel was poured it created an optical illusion and iridescence no other jeweler had yet been able to replicate.

  “These are lovely,” Madame Alouette said. “Are they for sale?”

  “They’re samples, but you can order them in any color you prefer. I have a color chart if you’d like to see it.”

  We’d sold hundreds of eggs throughout the war. While some clients still bought and wore extravagant jewels, others considered it bad taste to show off during wartime and were more comfortable buying modest pieces like the eggs. Fashion in general had changed rapidly since 1914. Almost all women worked now, fulfilling jobs men at the front had once held, and our clothes needed to be more efficient. Long light-colored dresses that soiled easily and dusted the floor gave way to darker, shorter, and more streamlined skirts and blouses. Since you could see our ankles, boots gave way to shoes. Bobbed hair became not only acceptable but chic and very much in style. Even our underwear became less constricting since the steel once used to construct corsets was needed for weapons. Brassieres and undergarments made of jersey had become the norm.

  “Are these eggs your work?” Madame Alouette asked.

  “No, Monsieur Orloff’s. Enameling is not my forte.”

  “But you make the lockets?”

  I nodded. “Yes, lockets of all kinds.”

  A month earlier, Monsieur Orloff had displayed a suite of mine in the window—a necklace and a pair of earrings featuring diamond crescent moons strung together with the thinnest platinum chain, interspersed with pale blue diamond stars. Each star, a locket that opened. Inside, a single teardrop ruby.

  Unlike with those creations, the demand for my talismans wasn’t determined by style or gem quality. Women like Madame Alouette sought me out because of the talismans’ unseen beauty. It was the spirit and memory of their loved ones that made them exquisite, if not to a fashion connoisseur’s eye, then to the heart.

  Many of the descendants of La Lune had unusual talents, each different. One of my great-great-aunts was able to move objects by visualizing them. Another could manipulate the weather. There were stories that the original La Lune had been able to camouflage herse
lf to her surroundings and seemingly disappear.

  Since childhood, I’d experienced a special relationship with stones. Lights radiating from their opaque density that my brother and sisters couldn’t see. Far-off music emanating from their masses that no one else could hear. Sometimes, I could hold a stone and sense danger, or calm, or good fortune or bad. I could also perceive the emotions of whoever had been holding it before me.

  I had been afraid to tell anyone. Did these abilities prove I was a witch like my mother? The idea both excited and worried me. Like most little girls I wanted to be like her. She was beautiful and talented. Special. But at the same time I didn’t want people to think I was different and strange. I wanted to be normal like the other children at school. Not someone to be singled out and whispered about.

  When I was old enough, I searched my mother’s library of occult titles, researching various phenomena, searching for a description that fit what I did. A combination of psychometry and lithomancy came closest to matching my abilities. Psychometry is the ability to touch an object and learn about its past and the person who owned it. Lithomancy is the ability to tell the future by throwing thirteen stones, each assigned to an action, and reading the prophecy based on how they land. While similar, neither really fit me.

  But everything changed when I came to Paris and began to make talismans. Once I began combining stones with locks of hair and mementos from the dead, the noise I’d heard before became voices delivering messages.

  Anna was the one to explain what was happening to me.

  “Your talent is a variation on the art of lithomancy with a soupçon of psychometry. You can receive knowledge from stones. When you work on the watches, the materials you use are benign. They don’t belong to any particular soldier. It’s when you create the lockets, when you combine the soldier’s personal object with the crystal and add his loved one’s presence, that you ignite the magick.”