Before I had a chance to ask my question, she told me that she was being taken to lunch today by her dear friend who was in town and that she would be gone for most of the day.
There was no question what kind of dear friend he was. I’d been living with my grandmother for almost a month now and knew the difference between how she dressed on an ordinary day versus a day with an assignation. Today’s visitor was clearly even more special than the others.
“Who? Is it the count?”
I had wondered why her benefactor had not visited once since I’d been in Paris but had been loath to ask in case I was bringing up a sensitive topic.
Grand-mère smiled. “Yes. Now help me pick out my opals,” she said, patting the space beside her on the silk-covered bench.
Count Gregorio Carrara of Bergamo, Italy, spent most of his time overseeing his family’s marble business. I had met him ten years ago and remembered how much older he was than my grandmother. But from how nervously she prepared, I sensed he was still a demanding lover, and I worried for her.
“Yes, the count has been away but is back in Paris.” She pulled out an opal choker: four rows of the fiery beads with a diamond-and-emerald clasp. She held it up to her throat and looked at me. I nodded.
“After a certain age,” she said, “a neck full of jewels is the best camouflage.”
“For what?”
“Sad skin that is no longer taut.” Her voice was tinged with melancholy, but only for a moment. “Close it for me, Sandrine.”
As I snapped the clasp, she laughed. “At least,” she said, examining the effect in the mirror, “his eyesight isn’t as good as it used to be and he doesn’t see my lines and wrinkles.”
“But you don’t look your age, not at all.”
And she didn’t. My grandmother was sixty-six years old, but her skin was creamy and still quite firm. Her hair still thick and lustrous. Her hands were graceful and almost without age spots. Her opal de feu eyes were wide and sparkled, filled with all kinds of secrets.
“I don’t see any of the imperfections you do,” I said.
“Do you want to know my beauty secret, mon ange?”
“Of course.”
“Spend lavishly on creams. Wash your hair with henna at the first sign of gray. Never spend one minute thinking about what you do not have. And most importantly, indulge in everything but love.”
She looked at me, waiting for some response, but I didn’t have one. I had so little experience with love.
“Love,” she said emphatically, “is heartbreak. Now, pick something for yourself that you’d like from all these trinkets.”
The box she offered was brimming with jewels. Hardly trinkets. I knew, because she was quite open about how she made her living, that these were all gifts from lovers over the years. As she’d gotten older, she hadn’t needed to sell her treasures like so many women of her kind because Albert Salome had given her several properties that provided her with an income large enough that she would always be comfortable.
I picked through the necklaces and rings. Inspected earrings and bracelets. There were ropes of creamy pearls and . . . I lifted out a strand of black iridescent pearls from the South Seas. Holding them up to my neck, I looked in the mirror.
Grand-mère shook her head. “The color doesn’t suit you. But my fire opals will. They’ll pick up the highlights in your hair and the glints in your eyes that are like mine.”
“No, they’re your signature stones,” I said, and kept searching through the emeralds, sapphires, aquamarines, amethysts, and diamonds. Every stone but the one that I loved the best.
“You have no rubies,” I finally said.
She shook her head. “I don’t fancy them. Do you?”
“I love them.” I held out my left hand. On my ring finger was an oval ruby surrounded with diamonds. “I never take it off.”
My grandmother took my hand in hers and looked down at the ring that had once belonged to her mother. My father had given it to Benjamin to give to me when we’d become betrothed. I would have left it in New York, as I had my wedding ring, but it had never symbolized my marriage to me. It was a family heirloom that I treasured.
“Papa told me you once said every ruby is a frozen drop of human blood preserved forever as a jewel, and that if we could unlock the secret of how to turn it back into blood, we would have the key to immortality.”
My grandmother seemed to shrink into herself. “I never told him that.”
“Who did?”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t know,” she said emphatically.
“Then why did he tell me you said it?”
“I don’t know,” she insisted, but there was something in how she turned away from me, almost imperceptibly, that alerted me. She was lying. She knew exactly where my father had heard it, but for some reason wanted to keep that from me.
“You haven’t chosen anything,” she said, scooping up a handful of gleaming jewels and sorting through them herself. “Earrings, perhaps, since you didn’t bring any with you?” Picking out a pair of turquoise-and-diamond earrings, she held them up to my face. Each smooth stone was the size of a hazelnut and surrounded by a halo of pink diamonds that sparkled in the morning sunlight.
“It’s believed by the ancients that turquoise can draw evil to itself and away from the person wearing it.” She held them out. “I think these will do.”
“So you know a lot about stones and their properties, too?” I asked as I screwed in the first earring.
“A bit. Why?”
“Papa loved studying gems and stones. He once told me how Renaissance painters made their own paints by grinding stones: turquoise, lapis, ochre, malachite, and then took me to the museum to show me the masterworks that had been painted with stones.”
“The two of you spent a lot of time together, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
“He was a wonderful father to you. And a wonderful son to me.”
Grand-mère’s eyes closed for a single second, and I saw her eyelashes quiver against her cheeks. Then she shook her mane of glorious sunset hair and forced some gaiety into her voice. “So what will you do today? I think you should get out of the apartment even though it’s drizzling. No moping around. The time for that is over.”
“Yes,” I said. “You’re right. I think I’ll take myself off to the dusty Louvre.”
This made her smile.
But I was lying. I wasn’t thinking about going to the museum but rather visiting the Maison de la Lune. If Monsieur Duplessi was there again today, he’d let me in, and I wanted to walk around the house, wanted to see all the rooms that were still so vivid in my memory. I wanted to surround myself with La Lune’s treasures.
Chapter 6
Getting up my courage, I asked, “Monsieur Duplessi, what is it you are doing here exactly?”
We were once again in the kitchen, eating his croissants and drinking the bitter coffee he’d brewed for us.
“Haven’t you asked your grandmother that?”
I could see he was confused by my question.
“No.”
“And why is that?”
“She is too upset to speak of this house.” It was true: whenever I brought up La Lune, she’d become uncomfortable. I guessed that since she had raised my father here, the memories were bittersweet and too painful.
“But she doesn’t seem upset when she’s here,” he offered with a slightly sly smile, as if he was half teasing, half challenging.
His hair had fallen onto his face, and I found myself wanting to reach out and feel its silkiness. I stared down at my hands as if they belonged to a stranger. I had never given a single thought to touching my husband’s hair.
“Mademoiselle?” Julien was looking at me, waiting for a response.
“Perhaps you don’t understand Grand-mère well enough to judge whether she’s happy or unhappy. Exactly how do you know her?” I asked, finally.
“I’m an architect,” he said, and I noticed that he lifted up his head a little when he said it. “She hired me.”
“So you are renovating the house?”
“Yes. Didn’t she tell you?”