Madame seemed like a good person with a pure heart, someone I might even be able to trust, and I realized I cared about helping her achieve her goal.
“My guests will be arriving tomorrow in the late afternoon. After dinner, we’re going to have a séance. You will attend, won’t you? First we need to communicate with a deceased friend, but if that goes smoothly, we can call on Nicolas Flamel and ask him, you and I together, where he’s hidden the book. He’ll tell you, I’m sure of it. Remember I told you he said that only someone who could see in the shadows would be able to find it? I have no doubt that’s you, Delphine.”
“I’m not sure I should attend. I don’t want to expend energy on anything but your drawings,” I said as an excuse. I had no idea if a séance would have any effect on me. But I would say anything to avoid it. Clearly, her party guests included friends from her occult circle. That meant people who frequented Pierre Dujols’s shop, the bookstore and meeting place that Mathieu now ran. The idea of interacting with so many of his acquaintances made me shiver.
“Are you cold?” Madame asked. “I’ve noticed you’re quite sensitive to temperature. Do you want me to have a fire lit in here for you?”
I shook my head. “I’m fine.”
“I’m excited to have my friends meet you. They’ll be so interested in your talent. Don’t worry, dear. None of them will judge you. It’s just a small group of sympathetic artists and writers and musicians. We gather frequently. The creativity feeds us all. And makes me feel young.”
Despite my anxiety, I smiled. There was so much vitality about her that the idea of her needing to feel young seemed impossible. I’d heard her singing earlier that day and had again been mesmerized. Certainly, her voice was ageless. And I knew the most powerful moments I’d experience at her house would not be those I spent drawing but when I was listening to her sing.
Some artists had magick. A power beyond them, often beyond their knowledge, that pulled energy from the cosmos. Moon-fed and star-polished, their artistic talent shone.
My sister Opaline said that she could hear that energy when she was around me or my mother when we were painting. Throughout history, there were great artists whose work transcended the material world, and what fueled them was itself a puzzle. I believed that’s what the occult was, at its most simplistic—a willingness to accept the impossible and try to understand the meaning behind it.
My mother spent hours teaching me how to harness my power during the time she helped bring my eyesight back. Yes, there were spells and potions and strange ceremonies of bathing in moonlight in the sea and chanting while standing in the middle of a pentagram made of shells. But it was when she taught me how to connect to the cosmos through my third eye—by pressing her forefinger to the space between my eyebrows—that I felt the energy change my world and sharpen the murky blurriness a little more each day. This essence or spirit had been with me all along. It was powered through my cells and my blood. It was a surge I felt inside me that she and our ancestors, and now I, knew how to call forth.
“So it’s settled, then. Did you bring an evening frock? We’re all dressing for our send-off for Erik Satie to wish him a safe journey.”
“Where is he going?”
“To the next plane. He’s the friend I mentioned who passed over.”
“Satie died?”
“Yes. It’s very sad. He was a great composer and friend. But a difficult man, and he didn’t make it easy for us to take care of him at the end. Did you know him? Your mother certainly did.”
“Yes, of course. He visited us in Cannes several times. I wonder if my mother knows he died. I can’t recall when she last spoke of him, but I’m sure she would be upset. Maman told me she first met him in Paris when she was at L’école. The same time you met her, from what you’ve said.”
“Yes. She was unsteady on her feet those first few times she came to Dujols’s library.” Madame smiled, remembering. “But how she changed once she found her passion! She became so brave. It was astonishing.”
“It must have been quite a metamorphosis. My great-grandmother has told me stories of how lost my mother was when she first arrived on her doorstep.”
“A true metamorphosis.”
I liked listening to Madame describe my mother’s transformation from a scared New York City socialite escaping a bad marriage into a bold artist who practiced the dark arts and accepted her heritage.
Madame continued, “Satie wrote some music for her once—celebrating her finding her wings, I think was how he described it.”
I nodded. “I’ve heard it. He played it when he visited.”
“Satie and Debussy astonished us all with their compositions back then . . .” She shook her head, drifting into a memory of Paris almost thirty years before. “We were all so sure of ourselves and our mission. Certain we could learn the greatest secrets of the universe and use them to change the world. But the secrets we searched for proved more elusive with every passing year.” She extended her arms. “When I met your mother, in 1894, I had just bought this chateau and naively believed it would reveal its mysteries willingly. For three decades, it’s held tight to its treasure, like an oyster refusing to offer up its pearl.” She shook her head, as if confounded that the house would still disappoint her this way. “Your being here is the first real hope I’ve had in years.”
“But I haven’t helped.”
“Of course you have. First you discovered a masterpiece. A painting that must be worth hundreds of thousands of francs. And you’ve uncovered a bit of history, in all its gruesomeness, about the castle’s past. And you’ve seen this . . .” She picked up one of the drawings of the stone room. “We don’t know where it is, but I’m certain I know what it is, and it’s where the book is hidden. How does it feel to you, how does it look to you, this world that is invisible to everyone else? I wonder if it is like what happens to me when I step onstage dressed as someone who I am not and take on her persona.”
“No, I don’t become the people I draw. Or in this case, the house. Everyone has a shadow life where his or her secrets live. When I put on the blindfold, I see through people into those shadows.”
“Are the shadows always in the past?”
“No, I can look forward, but it’s more difficult.”
“And with the castle, are you looking through the walls?”
I nodded.