“What a gift,” she said.
I shook my head. “It doesn’t always feel like a gift. It’s not pleasant to look into someone’s darkness. We tell people—Sebastian does and I do—that I might see moments from their past that they don’t want exposed. Usually, they aren’t terrible secrets. But some have been truly embarrassing, perverse, unethical, criminal, and frightening. When I did shadow drawings at parties in New York, I always asked people if they wanted me to draw negative secrets if I saw them, or if they wanted me to render only more innocent ones. A childhood game of stealing candy. A first kiss at a dance. Taking out a book from a library and never returning it. Trying to hurt a little brother or sister out of jealousy. Even when they were warned, I was continually surprised at how many people told me to draw whatever I saw—good or bad—because they didn’t believe I was for real and never expected me to expose anything dreadful. And then I’d have to deal with the consequences.”
“We humans are odd creatures, aren’t we?” Madame said. “Craving the unknown, flirting with disaster instead of enjoying what we have. Years ago, I traveled to India and Egypt with a wise Hindu monk. We visited ancient shrines and temples and places of holiness. He taught me more than anyone to accept what I don’t understand with equanimity and find solace and joy in the moment.”
“What was Egypt like? I’ve always wanted to visit, especially since seeing photos of Howard Carter’s expeditions.”
“I’m not sure that in the long run Carter will be happy that he’s disturbing so many burial places. There are ancient curses protecting those sacred spaces that shouldn’t be tampered with.”
We spent another half hour together, sipping wine as Madame regaled me with tales about her adventures in the Valley of the Kings. As she recounted stories and described the ancient rites and cults, I wondered about her own secrets.
Before I took this trip, my mother had reminisced about Madame Calvé and how despite being in the public eye, she had kept her occult life a closely guarded secret. She was not only a member of the most extreme occult circles in Paris—a clandestine cult rumored to practice black masses—but she was one of its priestesses. She was also sexually linked to several well-known mystics—the occult master Papus, the novelist Jules Bois, the illustrator of the tarot Oswald Wirth, and the master Péladan.
As kind as many members of the group had been to my mother during her first exploratory year, she said they had sometimes frightened her. Their single-minded commitment to finding the secret to transmuting matter and expanding their minds to reach heretofore unknown levels of consciousness led to dangerous practices that she eventually decided she wanted no part of.
Now, after Madame left my room, even though I’d drunk two glasses of wine, I decided to try once more to conquer the impenetrable castle’s secrets. But this time with paint, not pencil.
After I set out a canvas and put a curl of black paint on my palette, I placed a brush in my lap, where I’d have no trouble finding it, and then I put on the blindfold.
I began, dipping the soft bristles into the mound of silky pigment and dabbing. How many times does an artist pick up a brush in her lifetime? How many times does she dip it in paint? Sweep or dot or smooth it onto the canvas? Millions, I would imagine. It was an action as natural to me as breathing. With just a pat of my left hand to orient me to the edge of the canvas, I touched the brush to the stretched fabric. And so the dance began.
With the silk over my eyes, I once again saw what I had seen an hour before: the inside of the grotto. As I’d told Madame I would, I forced myself out of the stone chamber, through the thick rock wall. I looked around. I was in the forest. But where, exactly? I turned around and around, looking for a landmark. Tall pine trees surrounded me, their sharp resinous smell so intense I felt almost dizzy.
Find a spot where you can see through the trees, and look for the spires, Gaspard had told me. So I walked forward in as straight a line and as far as I could until I came to a clearing and looked out toward the horizon.
I saw the chateau with its sandy-colored stone walls built as a fortress against eleventh-century invaders. And there on the watchtower someone stood, peering out. Looking right at me. Who was it?
After almost thirty minutes, I took off the blindfold and studied the canvas. The chateau perched on its hill. A perfectly fine painting. With no magick about it at all. No subtle pointers to where the secret chamber might be. None at all.
Perhaps the chateau had a veil around it. Maybe it was protected from eyes just like mine. Tomorrow I would have to try to pierce it another way. There was still enough time to do that and leave before guests began arriving for Madame’s evening event.
Chapter 35
Book of Hours
August 23, 1920
I can barely hold my pencil. Am hardly able to string my thoughts together. But I promised to keep all my days with Mathieu recorded here, even the very last of them.
Tonight feels endless. The pain unrelenting. What began as a perfect day will forever be etched in my memory as the worst. I know what I must do, even though it seems impossible that I will be able to.
To love someone so wholly and completely. To be in harmony with another soul. To have him give himself to me. To have given myself to him, withholding nothing. And now to have to walk away in order to protect him? And why? I did this to myself because I was impatient, stubborn, and full of pride. Sure that I could help Mathieu when no one else had been able to. And yet I have to remember that what I will do next will save his life. Would it have been better not to have looked into the shadows? To selfishly stay with him and then be the very cause of his destruction?
Today began in the Bois de Boulogne, where Mathieu brought me for lunch.
“This is one of my favorite secrets,” Mathieu said, as he helped me into a boat.
He gave me another of his history lessons, describing the park as quite large. “Almost nine hundred hectares, it’s what’s left over from an ancient oak forest. In the seventh century, royalty hunted boar and deer and other game here. There was a monastery built on some of the land and an abbey. It’s been a sanctuary for monks, nuns, and robbers and several times the site of battles. In 1852, Napoleon III gave the land to the city of Paris, and Baron Haussmann supervised its creation into what you see now.”
He rowed our boat across the lake toward an island in the distance. I watched as he dipped the oars into the water and they emerged dripping. The droplets catching the sun and shining like diamonds.