M. Rose - The Secret Language of Stones

“Opaline?”

“Yes?”

“What are you daydreaming about?”

“Nothing.” I hadn’t figured out how to explain.

“Is it your voices again?”

“No, no voices.”

The less we talked about the voices and my talismans, the better. As much as he tolerated it, Monsieur Orloff was not in favor of my messaging. Married to Anna, of course he was sympathetic about my abilities, but also nervous about the police discovering what we were doing since talking to the dead and reading people’s fortunes was against the law and there were stories in all the newspapers of the prefecture cracking down. Monsieur wanted nothing to do with the police. In Russia the proliferation of secret police, spy organizations, and corruption had left him suspicious. He trusted no one. Almost obsessed, he went out of his way to avoid bringing the authorities in on any matter-even when we’d discovered a client shoplifting. I wasn’t sure why and hadn’t found a polite way to ask, but assumed it was related to him harboring refugees from Russia below the shop.

As well, Monsieur wasn’t a spiritualist of any kind. Neither was he religious. To him, precious metals and gems were paints on a palette. A necklace or bracelet, ring or brooch, a canvas. He used gems to create art to adorn its wearer, not to stare into the faceted depths of the crystals and see the past or the future, as his wife was prone to do. He never closed his eyes when he held a stone and felt for its vibration, as I did. Monsieur Orloff bowed to its beauty; he didn’t commune with its mystery. So he tolerated Anna and her crystal balls and me and my voices. He watched us disappearing into her lair after dinner with a rueful smile.

“This is good work, Opaline. Thinking to include the darker brown diamonds was an excellent idea.”

I smiled. Compliments from someone who does not offer them often are all the more precious.

“There’s not much left to teach you. Now I just need to push you to spend more time refining your designs and not be quite so impatient.”

I wanted to laugh. He’d done nothing but push me since I’d first arrived almost four years ago.

“Take the stones upstairs,” he said. “I’ll lock up-there are some things I need to get from the safe. Monsieur and Madame Bouchard are coming tomorrow to pick out a stone for a pendant.”

Dismissed, I took the tray of stones upstairs to the workshop. As I climbed the steps, I worried that I hadn’t found a way to tell Monsieur Orloff what I’d witnessed. But what if it had been him and his group of Russians? He might be insulted I’d been spying. Besides, what had I seen? Really nothing suspect. Men in a chamber on the other side of the vault. Why was that suspicious? There were over fifty shops in the Palais and hundreds of residences.

I’d spent too long listening to the voices of the soldiers, collecting messages for their mothers. My imagination was overworked.

Later that afternoon, while I was still sorting the stones into gradations within their color groups, Grigori came into the workroom. Fresh from purchasing a collection of antique jewel-encrusted goblets, he wanted to show them to his father for an estimate.

“I’m going to make some coffee,” I told them. “Would you like any?”

They both declined. As I stood up, I knocked a pair of tweezers off my worktable.

I bent to retrieve them. They’d fallen close to Grigori’s feet, and I couldn’t help but notice pale gray mud on his shoes. Like the shoes of the men in the room next to the vault.

This was more proof I was being melodramatic. We were having the rainiest summer on record. Mud covered all the streets in Paris. It was on all our shoes. And so, once and for all, I put the incident out of my mind and made my coffee.

That night, after a light supper with Anna-Monsieur Orloff and Grigori were picking up someone at the train station-I retired early and nestled into the sanctuary of my basement suite.

Strangely, I didn’t mind it being windowless. My great-grandmother had contributed a few objets d’art to make it special. An old carpet, too worn in spots for her grand mansion but perfect for me. Dark green with lavender wisteria flowers, it set the tone for the colors of my room. She also had contributed a magnificent stained glass screen with a scene of Leda and the Swan on the shore of a pond in a forest. Cleverly, she’d told me to place a lamp behind it, and the screen lit up and offered a spectacular rainbow of magical blue, green, and lavender hues. My bureau was a fine piece of rosewood carved in an Art Nouveau style along with a matching headboard my father had brought from his factory. And I had a comfortable armchair upholstered in pine-green velvet, which my great-grandmother had donated. Retiring to my room was like escaping into the deepest part of the woods, where ancient pagans enacted rituals by the shore of a bubbling brook.

A pale green glass globe Anna had given me sat on the bureau. Beside it a bowl of stones, for practice. I’d picked out and polished each precious piece. There were chunks of jade, amethyst, lapis lazuli, jet, and three opals. Usually at night, before I went to bed, I worked with one of them, trying to control and fine-tune my ability. Anna believed I must embrace lithomancy completely in order to learn to control it. She’d taught me how to meditate using one of the stones. How to relax and concentrate fully, feeling the stone’s energy and connecting to it. To become one with the precious object. To lose myself in its depths and search its secrets without fear. To just be and see what came to me. Anna cautioned me she’d been practicing her art for over thirty years and still found much to learn. I’d only been studying mine for three. But as Monsieur observed in the studio, I was impatient.

Instead of practicing, I unbuttoned my chemise and withdrew the talisman I’d originally made for Madame Alouette. All day I’d been feeling its pull. As if it was calling to me, begging me to wrap my fingers around it and enclose it in my palm. Because the rock crystal lay between my breasts, it was warm. But it warmed even more as I examined its star-shaped inclusion. Wrapped in its gold cage of stem-like wires that wound around and then met at the top of the loop to create a link, it hung from its silk cord, shining in the room’s soft light. Removing the cord, I took a heavy gold link chain from my jewel box, strung it through the loop, and then lowered it over my head again. As the egg nestled once more between my breasts, I thought I heard a sigh.

Preferring low light, I shut off all but a small reading light and the lamp behind the glass screen. Bathed in a peacock blue glow, the room really might have been in the middle of the woods. The night stretched ahead before me. After work, after supper, without obligations, I could do whatever pleased me. Most evenings, I read of other times and places to dull the sharp edge of reality we lived during the day. I was still making my way through my great-grandmother’s book of ghost stories by Edith Wharton and opened it to my silver bookmark-a gift from the Orloffs on my twenty-second birthday.

Other women read love stories to forget the war; I preferred to go deeper into darkness, into manifestations of evil, to help understand the nightmare around us.

I read a few pages but was distracted. A presence imbued the room. Not a shadow, not a scent. Almost a blur.

Against my chest, the talisman seemed warmer than a few moments ago.

“Hello?” I whispered to the darkness, feeling a little foolish talking out loud to myself. I waited. If I’d imagined my previous conversations with Jean Luc, then surely I could manifest another now.

“We always need to weigh what we think we see and hear with our wish life,” Anna once explained to me. “Those of us with access to the future or the past, or who can speak to people no longer here, are prone to creative thinking. The line between reality and fantasy is so thin for us. Imagine a psychic says you’ll meet a tall stranger at the opera and marry him. The next time you go to the opera you find a tall stranger in the box next to yours. Believing in the reading, you might go out of your way to meet him, flirt with him, and entice him. If he then begins to court you, did you create that scenario, or was the psychic right? It’s important to learn to be strict with yourself and not manifest what isn’t there, what isn’t meant to be there.”