The Secret Language of Stones

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 herself 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.”

Over the centuries, starting in ancient Egypt, mystics, priests, shamans, astrologers, doctors, and witches assigned properties to each earthly material. They knew all stones, including gems and crystals, are living things. Made up of water, earth, air, minerals, they are all related. Certain stones function better as conduits. Crystal, jet, white and blue and black diamonds, which are all coal based, and moonstones are the best conductors.

Once dug up, stones need to be uncovered or split open, cut, polished, or sometimes heated for them to reveal their beauty and offer up their powers.

Symbolically, they are reminders of the beauty within, of time, of life and death, of the permanence of the earth and the impermanence of those of us who inhabit it. These rocks will exist long after all the people who trod over them, who dug them up, who touched them, are gone.

Their beauty is not just in their colors and shine, their luminosity and glitter. The energy the gems possess can be read like a book if you understand its language. The secret language of the stones. A language that I spoke-though often wished I did not.

I poured the coffee and handed Madame Alouette a cup. “Would you like milk? Sugar?”

She looked down into the steaming dark liquid as if the answer lay there.

“No, black is fine.” She took a sip and then sat quietly for a moment.

I didn’t like to rush clients into talking. It often took a few minutes for women to begin the conversation they wished they didn’t need to have. But when the silence lasted too long, I gently prodded.

“You said a friend of yours came here to see me?”

“Yes, Colette Maboussine, do you remember?”

“I do.” I remembered every one of the fifty-nine grieving women I’d worked with, but especially the first one. Of Madame Maboussine’s sons, one had been badly hurt in the war but survived; the other had been killed. The locket I made held his hair.

“Colette Maboussine told me how you helped her,” Madame Alouette repeated. “She said you made her a piece of jewelry. An amulet or a talisman? I’m not sure what the difference is.”

“An amulet possesses properties that can protect you against illnesses and accidents. Even evil spells. And anything can be an amulet, from a shark tooth to a scarab. A talisman is an amulet, but it can also help you create or orchestrate events or actions. Books I’ve read explain that talismans are enhanced with magick symbols that reinforce the attributes of that stone, gem, or metal.”

“So there’s more magick attached to a talisman?” she asked.

Madame Alouette didn’t seem disturbed by the idea. Few of my customers did. After all, since the middle of the last century, séances and psychics have been very much in vogue, often discussed and dissected, despite whatever laws were in effect to tamp them down. Famous figures from Victor Hugo, more than seventy years ago, to the present-day author Arthur Conan Doyle were convinced there was more to our world than what we could see and hear and rationally know.

“Yes. Magical powers can be produced by tapping and then trapping astral influences.”

“Which do you make?”

“Talismans.”

“How?”

“I enclose an object belonging to the soldier inside a piece of rock crystal that I’ve carved with the soldier’s name, astrological symbol, his birth and his death dates. I fill in the crevices with powder from his birthstone. Then, using gold wire, I enclose the crystal and lock it in.”

“You know, I’m a sculptor,” she said. “I never realized it until I heard you talk just now, but jewelry is miniature sculpture, isn’t it?”

“I’ve never thought of it that way before either, but of course you are right. What kind of sculpture do you do?”

“Before the war I did portraits, mostly busts. But three years ago, Anna Coleman Ladd commandeered me. She’s the American who opened a studio here to make metallic masks for soldiers who return from war with facial disfigurements. To give them back some dignity. She believes each of us has a divine right to look human. That is how Madame Maboussine and I met. She brought her older son to our studio. He had extensive cheekbone and ear damage.”

I knew about Anna Coleman Ladd. The newspapers had printed a series of reports about her “Studio of Miracles,” as they called it. Shrapnel made a horrible mess of many soldiers’ faces that couldn’t be repaired with surgery. Some men lost sections of their noses, chins, chunks of their cheeks, an ear. Ladd’s studio provided a noble service to those boys. In London, another sculptor, Francis Derwent Wood, did the same work.

“It’s really a pleasure to meet you then. I’ve read about the amazing work you are all doing. This war is…” I shrugged.

What more could be said about the never-ending war?

“I prayed my son would never need me to help him… but now I wish he did. At least then he would be alive… Well, it doesn’t matter what I wish, does it?… Now I am here.”

“Tell me about your son,” I said, steeling myself for a fresh onslaught of heartache.

With measured motions, she unclasped her purse, reached inside, and pulled out a piece of paper that fluttered to the floor. I bent to retrieve it and found myself holding a black-bordered obituary notice, carefully cut out of a newspaper.

“No… no… that’s not what I wanted to give you.” She held out her hand.

As I returned it to her, I tried to read it, but it was upside down and I wasn’t able to make out the details.

Returning the notice to her purse, she pulled out an envelope and gently emptied its contents on the desk, as if handling something as fragile as a spider’s web.

I examined the lock of hair, the same dark chestnut as her own, tied with a faded blue satin ribbon.

“He had his first haircut at three years old. How he hated it,” Madame Alouette said, reaching out and touching her son’s hair with her forefinger.

I remained quiet while she lived out the memory. Her sorrow overwhelmed me and sent chills down my back. Any time a client began to recall her loved one and share her story, each word spun an invisible thread that connected us. Her emotions traveled via those byways, and I experienced them as if they were my own. I found no escape, no option but to suffer through each woman’s mourning.

“But he needed that haircut. My husband said he looked like a little girl with all those curls. And he did.”

She stroked the strands, and I pictured the child in the barbershop chair.

“The barber did everything he could to distract him, but my son fought back, covering his head with his arms so ferociously none of us could pry them apart. Such a determined little boy.” She looked up, her eyes bright with tears. “Who became such a determined man.”

“What did he do? Before the war, I mean.”

“He was a journalist. Maybe you read some of his pieces? Since the war began, he’s been writing a column of weekly letters from a soldier at the front to his fiancée.”

“She must be devastated.”

“Oh, he didn’t have a fiancée. I’m not even sure if he left a special woman behind.” She smiled sadly. “He told me there wasn’t one-except for me.” She smiled again. “But his editor wasn’t interested in a soldier’s letters to his mama. So my son writes to an unnamed, imaginary lover every week and in the process shares what the war is like, what he’s feeling.”

The suffering in Madame Alouette’s voice as she spoke of her son in the present tense was difficult to listen to. It always was. The mourners’ pain reached out and ensnared me. Encircled and paralyzed me. It infected the air I breathed, got into my lungs. I felt their anguish in my own heart.

“What is the name of the column?”

“Ma chère.”

“But isn’t Ma chère written by Jean Luc Forêt?”

“Ah yes, Alouette is my second husband’s name. His father died in a fire when Jean Luc was only four.”

“How terrible.”

She bowed her head a bit and nodded.

“So Jean Luc Forêt is your son. My father and I read him all the time…”

Now it was my turn to be lost in thought. Before the war, my father and I had always read Forêt’s column on the avant-garde art scene. Like us, Forêt believed art was the highest form of individualism. He believed in beauty. In rage. In the pure form of expression through the arts. A fearless crusader for those artists who forged ahead, he never seemed to care how much criticism he got for it.

My father and I both admired him and worried for him whenever he went so far as to make a new enemy from what he published in the pages of Le Figaro. I remembered one column in particular he’d penned about a young artist being ridiculed for his work-for it being too ugly. Jean Luc argued that art frees us from our prejudices and gives us the chance to become our best selves, individuals who dare to dream. And even if those dreams aren’t always as pretty as we’d like, or don’t conform, or frighten us, it is our duty to encourage art to flourish. All art. Every kind.

I’d torn it out of the paper and glued it in my sketchbook. Without knowing him, I’d felt as if the writer in Le Figaro had spoken directly to me, offering a credo I’d taken to heart.

But once Jean Luc started reporting from the front, I’d stopped reading him. The war was too much of a presence in my life. Timur’s death still too fresh in my mind. And now Jean Luc was dead as well? My heart seized up, sharing Madame Alouette’s grief in a way new to me. I’d never before known of any of the soldiers I’d messaged.

“I got the telegram last week,” Madame Alouette said. “Jean Luc’s entire outfit was killed. All his men…” She shook her head desolately. “And for each is a mother and father, perhaps a wife or a sister or daughter or son.” She stopped speaking, closed her eyes, collected herself, and then continued. “I am trying to accept his death, but I find I’m in limbo. I have a sense Jean Luc left something undone he wants me to know about. My husband thinks… Well, it doesn’t matter what he thinks. Do I sound crazy to you?”

If she did, I shared her craziness. Of course, if you think you can commune with the dead, then you must be a little crazy. We all knew it was impossible. Except was it? Did I imagine it, or did I actually hear their voices? Did the souls of the dead soldiers whose lives had been stolen by the vagaries of the war really speak to me? Did they hover somewhere in the dark sparkling ether that we call eternity and communicate their last thoughts through the talismans I made from their belongings? Did those little bits of their lives-a lock of hair, a photograph, a baby tooth, a handkerchief with a shadow of scent clinging to it-function as tunnels through time and space, enabling one last message to reach their loved ones? Did they operate as doorways through which I gained access to another plane, where I received messages? Or was I, as Madame Alouette implicitly suggested, crazy?

After making a talisman, I would decorate it with jet and gold, lock it, and hang it from a cord. A small gold key, attached to the knot on the chord, dangled at the back of the wearer’s neck.

Once completed, I would present the charm to my client. After putting it on, I would instruct her to clasp the talisman, and then I would cover her hands with my own. Shutting my eyes, I focused. Typically, I would hear a cacophony of all manner of noise at first. Human voices, wind, rain, the ocean’s waves, train whistles, automobile horns, ambulance sirens. Withstanding the onslaught, fighting the discomfort, I would concentrate, and in a matter of minutes, as clearly as if he were in the room with us, one soldier’s voice would rise above the rest. Inside my head.

Sons to mothers, husbands to wives, fathers to daughters, brothers to sisters, lovers to lovers, the communiqués were deeply personal, and often I blushed with embarrassment at having to speak their words aloud. But my discomfort only lasted a few minutes; it was clear to me that the solace I gave would probably last forever. From what I could gather from their messages, the soldiers seemed trapped in a kind of purgatory like the one Dante wrote about in his great poem. They were souls awaiting entry to heaven, unable to completely leave this realm until they found some kind of release I didn’t yet understand.

In all the time I’d been doing this, none of the soldiers had ever spoken to me. Their spirits seemed unaware of a conduit.

“What you said to Madame Maboussine, you weren’t making it up, were you?”

“What kind of monster would I be to lie? We don’t make profit on the charms. I have nothing to gain,” I said.

“You might be looking for fame.”

“As you yourself said, what I do is now illegal. Fame is the last thing I’d want.” This interview wasn’t getting off to a good start. I didn’t blame Madame for being suspicious, but her questions bordered on rudeness. There was more I could have said. I could have told her how frightening it was to dwell in the land of the dead and that I would never willingly journey there. I could have told her it was like entering what one might imagine hell to be like. If I could, I would have boarded up the gateway that connected me to these souls.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that I’ve never believed that what you do is possible.”

“Neither do I, actually.” I smiled at her.

Madame Alouette returned her son’s hair to the envelope, which she handed to me with a reluctance that tore at my heart. As I reached for it, the scent of apples materialized, and a combination of nausea and dizziness descended over me.

Pulling out one of the boxes we use to encase our jewels, I quickly slipped the envelope inside, trying to outpace the headache coming on. I’d learned that if I could tuck the soldier’s item away fast enough, I could prevent myself from becoming ill in front of my client.

Taking an ivory label from the desk, I picked up my pen, dipped it in the Baccarat inkwell on the table, and wrote out Madame Alouette’s name. After placing the label on the box’s lid, I slipped the package inside a drawer.

“Are you all right?” Madame asked.

Usually, so caught up in their own turmoil, my clients failed to notice mine.

“Just the beginning of a headache. How did you know?”

“I’m a sculptor, I study people’s faces, I recognized the changes on yours. Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’ll be fine.”

“It began the moment you touched the envelope, didn’t it?”

I nodded.

She placed her hand on top of mine. “This ability you have, is it painful?”

“Not compared to your pain.”

“Can you describe it?”

I hesitated.

“I’d like to try and understand.”

“The objects often cause me distress when I first come in contact with them. As if my body is rebelling and doesn’t want me to take on a new assignment.”

“You have to steel yourself?”

I nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s like that when a new soldier comes in to see me. I pretend I can deal with his deformity. That my stomach isn’t churning. That I didn’t wish I could look away. What happens to you exactly?”

“I smell apples, even if there are none to be seen. And my head fills with noise, starting an avalanche of pain.”

Madame Alouette nodded, but I stopped. She didn’t need to hear more, and it wouldn’t do to share any more details with a stranger, especially one suffering her own crisis. There was no reason for her to know that once I finished fashioning a locket I was so exhausted and depleted that often Monsieur Orloff sent me to bed. Anna would serve me hot tea sweetened with jam and laced with brandy and sit with me.

Neither did Madame Alouette need to hear about the despair that would follow the next day, that fell like a thick heavy curtain around me and made me feel as if I inhabited some other world… not quite here on earth… but not quite in the land of the dead either.

“And yet you do it? You willingly put yourself in this state of distress.” Madame Alouette wasn’t asking me a question. She was telling me something she knew about me because she shared that willingness with me. “You are very brave, Mademoiselle, and very kind.”

Tears came to my eyes. I shook my head. “Neither brave nor kind,” I said. “If I can help, I must.”

Yes, it all started with helping. That was what I had come to Paris to do. Or so I thought. I now know it was more selfish than that. Offering comfort to strangers, I tried to assuage the guilt I lived with. Timur had died without any hope. That was the real reason I forced myself to help these mothers and wives, sisters and lovers. As physically ill as it made me, as frightening as it seemed, it was my penance for what I’d done to one boy who’d gone off to the war and died without the comfort I could have given but withheld.