M. Rose - The Secret Language of Stones

“Your mother must miss you.”

“And I miss her. She’s wild and exotic. A very well-respected poet.”

“Has the revolution been hard on her?”

A mixture of emotions passed across Grigori’s face. I wasn’t sure why, but he seemed to be weighing my question.

“No, she’s a revolutionary. That’s a large part of why their marriage ended. They became political enemies. Both were young when they married and didn’t know their own minds yet. As they grew, they grew apart. I think Mother ignited Papa’s soul, but seared it too. She hated cages and was unable to accept the mores society placed on her. My father was old school, part of the staid middle class. He couldn’t accept her radicalism.”

“But Anna is exotic and wild too,” I said.

“Yes. That’s my father’s type. But not politically. Not sexually. Anna has been a better wife than my mother ever could have been. I know that. And Anna gave Papa Timur and Leo. Apprentices. With nimble fingers and natural affinities for being a jeweler. Not like me with my clumsy hands.” He glanced down at the offenders. “My brothers were already making some of the best pieces in the shop when the war started.”

“Did you all go to the front right away?”

“Yes. The French desperately needed bilingual soldiers who could help train Russian troops. The rest you know. Timur died, I was injured, and Leo’s gone on to be promoted three times. I think, as much as my father is proud of Leo’s heroics, he wishes Leo had been the injured son so he’d have come home. Or that I’d been in Timur’s place.”

“That’s a terrible thought. I’ve seen him with you. You might rub each other like sandpaper sometimes, but I know he loves you.”

Grigori shrugged. “Love? My father saw himself in Leo and Timur. All his talent. All his potential. Passed on to both of them. As for my talent… all I am to Papa is a salesman of antiques.”

“Your father is a salesman of jewels, that’s very similar.”

“You are kind to try and mitigate this, but it is all the difference in the world. Even if my father sells his own jewels, it doesn’t matter. What is relevant is that he creates them. He is an artist and my brothers were artists and I am a journeyman.”

The waiter brought our food, and as we ate, I changed the subject, encouraging Grigori to talk about some of the characters whom he bought the antiques from. A good mimic, he made me laugh with his impressions. Even though his mood lightened, I sensed the murky river running beneath everything he said. The conversation about his father couldn’t be all that was on his mind, for he’d lived with that for years. Not for the first time, I wished I possessed the ability to hear the thoughts of the living instead of the dead. It would be far more convenient.

The rain ended, and Grigori and I headed back to the Palais Royal on dark streets lit only with intermittent moonlight when the clouds shifted. He didn’t live with his father and stepmother but in his own apartment on the other side of the complex.

“It’s kind of you to see me home,” I said when we stopped at the entrance.

“I’d like to come in,” he said, and put his arm up against the building, enclosing me.

I wasn’t immune to his dark eyes and charming manner. And he’d not only entertained but also moved me that evening. But I was thinking about the locket I’d taken off from around my neck before going out. Illogical though it might have been, I couldn’t be unfaithful to my ghost lover.

“I don’t think so tonight, Grigori. That scare on my way to meet you, it’s shaken me. And I’ve been so caught up with the talismans this week… in the stories of the lost men… my own lost soldier is very much on my mind.”

I’d used Timur Orloff, “my own lost soldier,” as an excuse many times in the last three years to keep away other soldiers home on leave. My guilt over what I’d done to him made me fear unintentionally hurting any other man returning to the front. I couldn’t be responsible for breaking any hearts just before they might stop beating forever.

I’d never used any excuse with Grigori. He wasn’t going back to the front. I’d accepted his attentions, trying them on for size, not encouraging but never discouraging him either. I wondered if his being Timur’s brother made it easier for me to be attracted to him. Did my loyalty to the Orloffs encourage me to be with one son because I’d failed the other? The lack of passion I felt was calming. I never worried that being with Grigori would intensify my powers the way my experiences with his brother had.

I’d noticed that, though I liked Grigori, my feelings for him never grew. But my feelings for someone else had grown. And that night, when I gave Grigori my excuse, it wasn’t his half brother I was thinking of but another lost soldier. That night, a deeper truth haunted me.

“I thought you’d forgiven yourself for what happened with Timur.You can’t dwell on it, Opaline. It’s been almost four years. My dead brother is not coming back. And I’m here.”

Yes, it was ludicrous. Forsaking a flesh-and-blood man-albeit a troubled one-for Jean Luc, for a ghost.

“He’s just in my head tonight.”

“Why?”

I shrugged. “Every woman who comes to the shop and wants a memory locket makes me remember all over again.”

He dropped his arm, leaned in, and kissed me on the lips. I was at first too shocked to move back. He wasn’t rough, and the kiss wasn’t an assault, and yet that was how it seemed compared to Jean Luc’s ethereal embrace. I knew it was unhealthy for me to be in love with a ghost. Because that’s what had happened. I hadn’t admitted it to myself yet, but everything about this kiss was proof.

Grigori pulled away first and looked at me askance. He’d felt what I hadn’t said in my lukewarm response.

“It doesn’t seem possible that as more time has passed your sadness has increased. Why are you allowing yourself to be so preoccupied? My father and Anna have moved on. It’s unhealthy that you can’t.”

It was so easy to let him think it was Timur coming between us.

“I know,” I said. “Believe me, I do.”

When I got inside, I locked the door to my room, undressed, and slipped a nightgown over my bare skin. From my jewelry case in the armoire, I withdrew the locket I’d first made for Madame Alouette and stared into its depths at the green river of peridot and the lock of Jean Luc’s hair.

I hadn’t wanted to wear it to dinner with Grigori. I’d hoped that without it on, I’d feel more connected to the living than the dead. But it hadn’t worked.

When I slipped it over my head, the orb came to rest between my breasts. Almost instantly, the gold warmed against my skin. I clasped it.

What was wrong with me? Grigori, a living breathing man near my age and not at the front. That alone made him a catch that anyone would envy. And yet when he’d kissed me, I hadn’t responded. His warm lips hadn’t moved me the way the ghost’s spectral touch had.

The hopelessness of the situation settled upon me like a shroud. How had I allowed myself to fall in love with a phantom? Certainly, there was no future in it-I almost laughed out loud. The man I was fantasizing about, who I was communicating with, was a lingering echo of the past.

My mother had left me with a grimoire and a list of spells. She’d guaranteed I could control the portal if I studied. And yet I hadn’t opened the book. She’d warned me the longer I dwelled in this netherworld, the harder it would be to break the ties.

She’d spoken the spell I needed to use. Make of the blood…

No, I didn’t even want to think the words for fear they’d do their job. I’d rather be lonely with my ghost. Crying for the stolen dream I could imagine as mine if the war had not intervened.