M. Rose - The Secret Language of Stones

It was past three AM, so I was surprised to see my great-grandmother at the stove. From the smells in the kitchen, I knew she was making hot chocolate. Nothing like the powdery cocoa my relatives in Boston drank, this was pure melted chocolate with just enough milk added to make it drinkable.

“You heard him too?” I asked my great-grandmother.

“Who?”

I told her about the weeping. She shook her head sadly. “No, I didn’t hear your soldier tonight, but I’ve heard other soldiers other nights.”

“Then why are you up?”

“I don’t sleep more than two or three hours anymore. It is the curse or the blessing of old age or a fear that I have so little time left I don’t want to lose any.”

She smiled at me, and her fire eyes sparkled. Her astonishing youthful appearance was an inheritance of sorts. Like my mother, she seemed never to age.

“So many of the soldiers endure battle fatigue and terrible dreams,” she said.

“Are there two ways to exit the bell tower?” I asked.

“No. Why?” She looked suddenly agitated.

“The soldier I heard was up there.”

She shook her head. “No, mon ange , he couldn’t have been. The door is always locked.”

“Mightn’t he have found the key?”

“It’s in the safe in my closet so I don’t think so. I doubt anyone was up there.”

“But I was up there-”

“You were? I thought we agreed you would stay away from the attic. It’s not safe.”

“It’s perfectly safe. Solid stone that’s been standing for over three hundred years.”

“That’s not what I mean and you know it. How did you open the door?” Before I could answer, she put up her hand. “No, don’t bother. I know. It simply opened for you. The way it did for your mother.”

“Well, however it opened, I heard him.” I needed the cries to be real, to be coming from one of her guests.

“Couldn’t it be your voices?”

She knew about them. I had told her about them when they first started.

“I only hear them that clearly when I’m with a client,” I said, forgetting until the words were out of my mouth about hearing what I’d thought was Jean Luc’s voice the day before.

Changing the subject, I laid the silver sheets out on the table. “Look at what I found.” I explained about the moon and the pentagram. “Who do you think put these instructions there? They are directions for exactly the kind of work I’ve been doing, making talismans. Almost as if they’d been waiting for me.”

My great-grandmother sighed. “They have been.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing happens by accident, Opaline, you know that. And I’m too old to fight this house again.” She shook her head. “I blame your mother. It’s all Sandrine’s fault and will just continue now, generation after generation.” My great-grandmother’s voice always grew resigned when she talked about my mother. As if she was a lost cause. “I don’t like that magick and never did. I kept our family curse locked up in that bell tower for over forty years until it seduced your mother. Sandrine should have exorcised the spirit of La Lune. What business did she have embracing a long-dead ancestor and allowing her to transmigrate into her body? Going so far as signing her paintings with La Lune’s name?”

“My mother couldn’t help who she became.”

“Of course she could have. Don’t defend her, Opaline. You don’t know all the things that went on in this house between your mother and me. And you don’t need to. Let me put those inscriptions back where they belong.” She reached for them with her bony, hard veined hands. The perfectly manicured oval nails making a screeching sound on the metal.

I put my hand on top of the silver sheets I’d taken from the drawer to keep them where they were.

“Listen to me,” she said. “Concentrate on the jewels you are making. Become the artist I see emerging in you.” She put her hand on top of mine and stroked my skin. “My darling Opaline, don’t throw yourself any deeper into this shadow land of voices and spirits. Has it given you anything but grief so far?”

I shook my head.

“I know people who can help you rid yourself of all connections to that world. Will you let me take you to them?”

I wanted to say yes, that I’d heard enough dead soldiers and seen too many of their wives and mothers weep. But was I really ready to give up what I was doing? Especially now after I’d been stirred by Jean Luc’s deep velvet voice?

“No.” I gestured to Grand-mère’s kitchen, to her house. “Just like what you are doing here, entertaining these soldiers, what I’m doing helps those who the soldiers leave behind.”

“At what price? Here you are, up in the middle of the night, nervous and exhausted, hearing things, your imagination spinning out of control.”

The diamonds in my great-grandmother’s many rings glittered as she poured out the chocolate into two fine china cups, white with a border of violets and green leaves. “Drink this, it will restore you.”

Grand-mère liked diamonds she could scratch on the mirror to prove they were real and pearls whose veracity she could check with her teeth. She liked paintings and sculpture and listening to the raucous laughter of the men she entertained. She dwelled in the world of flesh and passion. Of men’s needs and women’s struggles to survive. Magick, second sight, speaking to the dead… she was suspicious of all the dark arts. She’d never attended a séance and didn’t believe in anything she couldn’t touch or see, except love. And she’d argue she could see even that. When I first came to Paris, I yearned to be more like her than my mother, and in many ways I did still. But I was beginning to question if that was at all possible.

“You’re not eating,” Anna said as she watched me refill my wineglass. “What’s wrong?”

We’d closed the shop for l’heure déjeuner as usual at twelve thirty and, since it was the first sunny day in two weeks, brought our lunch out into the garden. The velvety ruby and pink pastel roses were open, perfuming the afternoon, and birds sang as if there were no war, as if men were not dying and mothers were not mourning, and as if I weren’t hearing voices.

In addition to the wine was cold roast chicken leftover from the night before, mustard, cornichons, and a coveted baguette from the bakery. With so many supplies acquisitioned for the front and rations in effect, white flour was a luxury, but Anna had secured a rare loaf.

“Nothing serious,” I said in answer to her question, and picked at the chicken.

“From the look in your eyes, I doubt that. What’s wrong, little one?”

I’d been hesitant to tell her. Like my great-grandmother, she’d want me to take action. But whereas Grand-mère wanted me to divorce myself from my potential abilities, Anna wanted me to do the opposite: embrace my heritage and explore the gift my mother had given me.

“You know it might make you feel better to talk about whatever is troubling you. I believe you need to delve deeper into what you might be capable of, but I won’t push you, Opaline. You have to make up your own mind that you’re ready…”

Maybe she was right. I was exhausted trying to understand on my own. I told Anna about the voice I’d heard on Friday in the workshop, the weeping that woke me up on Saturday night, and the sheaf of ancient silver leaves I’d found in the bell tower.

“I read in my book of gems that Arabs during the time of Mohammed believed opals came to earth on bolts of lightning. Another legend claims that in ancient times, of all gems, the opal was considered the most magical and the multicolored stone bestowed the power of prophecy. What does that say about me?” I asked her. “The opal is not just my birthstone. It’s part of my name. Is that why these things are happening?”