The Secret Language of Stones Read Online Free PDF Page A

reinforce the attributes of that stone, gem, or metal.”
    â€œSo 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.
    â€œYes. Magical powers can be produced by tapping and then trapping astral influences.”
    â€œWhich do you make?”
    â€œTalismans.”
    â€œHow?”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œYou 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?”
    â€œI’ve never thought of it that way before either, but of course you are right. What kind of sculpture do you do?”
    â€œBefore 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.
    â€œIt’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?
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œTell 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.
    â€œNo . . . 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 andgently 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.
    â€œHe 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