Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 20 (2 page)

"It was a different world,” she said, heaving up a sigh that smelled of rot and peppermint; “we had to shovel goat dung all day, or else dig in the mines, even the children. None of this frolicking about the house with weapons, playing."

"Pish, posh.” My whisper was too low for anyone to hear. I looked at my sword, thinking with indignation that it was not a toy but an essential defense against the unknown. And when did I ever play? Who was there to play with me? No playmates but books. Words were my toys—I clicked and shook them together to hear their music. That was as close to
frolic
as I ever came. But at least she had given me an answer, even if it was to the wrong question. Most of the time my grandmother was simply an offering to darkness and absence, sunk in a bog of stupor and attended by a nurse, but her tales of the black powers stayed with me.

As I grew older, I ventured more often into my father's region; he, too, would often perceive me only vaguely, remarking my presence with a syllable of owl-like greeting like a call from a faraway grove. Not wishing to enflame him, I usually observed the state of his researches in silence and tiptoed away without a word. And that despite the fact that, as I grew more familiar with the library, I knew very interesting words indeed! I could have conversed with him well enough. But he was like my playmates, the books, and talked to me but seldom listened.

The speechless girl in glass was my only child companion. She always listened to me, and kept all my words stored in her heart, but never spoke.

Her name was
Vesta
. I couldn't recall the time when she had been out of the box, when she had held me, laughed with joy, and called me by my name,
Blaise
. Later, for a brief time, we were the same age. Then I passed her by, and she dwindled. Yet I still daydreamed above her, polishing the lid with a chamois rag and puffs of my breath.

"When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall, and down will come Vesta, cradle and all,” I sang. I rubbed the glass until the moonshine of her face blurred into reflected lamplight.

Because the chest had been inset into the floor, I could only view her from above; I wished that it had been otherwise. I would have liked to lie beside her, and to look across at her profile.

In my imaginings, she retained the same force as before. At night when I started awake, hearing raised voices, I thought about her, even prayed to her in a manner surely blasphemous—invoking her protection.

Vesta, remember me, your little Blaise. Be with me, take care of me, don't forget me. Keep me safe.

I hadn't yet reached the portion of the library devoted to holy saints and so knew nothing of them. Nevertheless, she was mine.

One morning I filled a blue vase with stems of snowdrops and set it above her crossed hands. From a certain angle, it appeared that she might be holding a bouquet. I had made similar attempts to share my sword, setting it straight down with the hilt at her hands so that, with the proper squint, she dimly resembled something I had seen in a picture book: the image of a Crusader lying on his tomb, pommel gripped in his fingers.

While admiring this arrangement, I noticed a miasma drifting across the nosegay of flowers. Already one or two had begun to wilt.

"Strange, Vesta,” I whispered.

When I knelt close to the glass, I saw that a slate tile had become separated from one of its neighbors. From this narrow cleft proceeded a wisp of smoke. I swept my fingers through it, and the cloudlet dissipated. I pressed my palm against the stones; they felt cool to the touch.

A bowl of earth and one of salt, symbols meaningful to my grandmother, stood near the glass pane; I tried poking crumbs of dirt and crystal through the gap. I couldn't seal it up and, in fact, made no progress at all with my efforts.

"You thumble-pin fool! You imbecile—” Hearing my father shout angrily in the distance, I set off in search of him—or, rather, to spy on him and his latest assistant. This was a tactical error, as I was excited by what had just happened and unlikely to be hushed in my mission. How well I knew that my father hated “dross and petty stratagems,” as he denoted any attempts at spying.
Dross
was a favored word of his, as was
gold
; he loved the space for transformation between them.

Frequently I surprised myself with my own temerity .....

He was angered by my actions in this instance. Hush! I do not have to tell everything. That much I have learned from the books, which often refuse to tell me the very thing that I want to know the most.

That night I dreamed my bedroom as an alchemical chamber with walls of glass, and I had been thrown alive into its bonfires. I shuddered in the heart of a star but could not die, though I shouted for the Black Man to come and reap me with his sickle.

"Come get me! Take me, take me, take me!” My screams went on, unavailing. My nightmare father strode outside, implacable.

The alchemist's sun, trapped in a bottle, burned for freedom, its enormous spangled flames shooting up to the ceiling. An emptiness that dwelled inside the hood of night called me:
Blaise, Blaise, Blaise
.....

"Vesta! Ves-ta! Vesta—"

I sobbed until the words blurred into nothingness. Eventually, I found myself sitting on the edge of my bed, legs dangling. The fire had receded to a safe distance. I listened hard to steps that echoed down a long hall, until they ended in silence.

I counted the minutes because I knew.

I did not raise my head to look but counted
one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand
, like that. Because I knew the alchemical process was not complete. Such a blaze could not go out so easily. The remains smoldered, occasionally snapped with sparks. A rumor of steps: soon mounting in intensity and becoming slaps and then thunder in the infinite hallway as the fire increased, fed by noise, until it touched not just the glass floor but ceiling and four walls, and I was metamorphosing to gold and shrieking—
Mama! Mama, save me!
—though my mother was surely in the remotest district of the library and could not hear or help.

Immolation. Burnt sacrifice
. I woke, trembling, moist with sweat, my skin smelling like lead. For some time my thoughts were confused; then I remembered the crack between the tiles. Although I wanted the blank of a dreamless sleep, I forced myself to get up and pad down the hall to the living room. Moonlight trickled across the stones. The chink seemed subtly larger than before. I lay on the pane that divided me from the girl and stared at her face, washed by moon glow. A long time had fled since I had been exactly the right size to fit on the case, yet I still pressed against its hard, slick surface.

"Vesta.” I yielded to drowsiness, and in the morning my cheek was stuck to the glass.

The breach in the floor aroused no fresh concern in my parents. They seemed, rather, to be relieved from an old dread and to have expected such an eventuality. By the end of the second day, the irregular slit was about seventeen inches long and nearly four inches wide at the widest point. Another day later, tiles began to shatter and tumble into the hole. I hung over the lip, craning to see bottom, but could detect only fog and flares of ruddy light. Nor could I tell when the fragments of clay struck any remote solidity.

Little by little, the room was tugged apart. Vapors poured from the damaged floor. In less than a month, a canyon some four feet wide and thirteen long gaped before me. The stench seemed to do me no harm, although a line of poetry from the library drifted into my mind and made me wonder if its influence might be subtle, a taint: “internal difference / Where the meanings are.” Intermittently an edge would give way, collapsing in a shower of shards. Once I glimpsed lizards moving in mazy patterns a few feet below the brink. Though I assumed that their motions were senseless, later on I wondered if they could have had purpose. The sooty, red-eyed creatures inspired an instinctive revulsion.

Out of reluctance, I have failed to mention the most important features of this domestic cataclysm, having to do with the plan of the house and with Vesta. Because it had been designed to narrow down to a single chamber at the living room, the building was soon chopped in twain. This queer state of affairs went unacknowledged by any word from my parents, who resorted first to jumping and later to navigating via ladders laid across the opening and anchored to form bridges. Most of the time, however, they simply stayed in their own preferred regions on either side of the fissure. Although I, too, crawled on the ladders, I never failed to plumb the depths of an intense terror when peering down through the rungs at globes of fire, floating in the smoke.

Vesta
was my mantra on these journeys.

My father took a certain professional interest in the gaseous exhalations emanating from the gulf and penetrating the two halves of the living room. Seldom did he make the crossing without collection devices—a jumble of beakers, rubber tubing, glass retorts, and other alchemical-looking paraphernalia. I believe this curiosity of his led to a number of the explosions in his laboratories.

"What's happening?” I asked, thinking that his scientific knowledge might explain what I could not fathom.

He emitted a sharp laugh. “Don't bother me."

My mother looked helpless when I asked her in turn.

"Your father and I,” she said hesitantly, but got no further.

A signal event associated with the opening of the chasm was the near-loss of the girl in glass. By the close of the fourth week, she jutted headfirst into the rift. For the first time, I could see her from a fresh angle, but I could no longer stretch out on the box without fear. Neither could I have done so without becoming dizzy and perhaps sickened and confused by the vapors from the pit, for their odor had become more acrid as the days passed. I would crawl as close as possible and lie down, my eyes on her profile. Occasional blossoms of fire rocketed from the depths, falling back harmlessly or landing like a kiss on the glass pane that shielded her face.

"Vesta, what if you fell?"

My whisper surprised me, and I was startled by a wish that the floor would crumble and release her. I imagined the box rocketing through the air. I saw a hurled flower, a red comet with a tail of shattered tiles, a queen bee chased by a swarm: kaleidoscopic flights and freedom. I reproached myself. The swirl of images had the nature of a sin embraced, or a blasphemy uttered while praying.

The days fly, and the years ..... and yet I know nothing but books and the paths in the courtyard. I am a man, so my grandmother says, now that I am fifteen. On my birthday, she gave me a feather of red and gold, presented to her long ago by the nursery maid. Prince Krakus had snatched it from the wing of a firebird. How did a poor girl manage to obtain such a royal favor, I wonder? I'll never know, unless the answer's hidden in the library.

Stitching in the window seat, my mother has made me black mourning clothes, and when I look at myself in the mirror I am not displeased. The feather makes a dash of red in a buttonhole. Mama is grieving for the future, I suspect, just as she has done for the past. I close my eyes and picture a child, a boy in velvet pants and a white blouse frothy with lace. Back then I saw; I sensed. Yet I only stored what happened in memory. Perhaps I couldn't bear to consider what anything meant. Perhaps the strife of attempting such a thing would have led to a spontaneous combustion, the invisible aura around my body catching fire and rendering me down to charred bone and teeth.

Taking up my toy sword, I whip the air.

Yesterday I ran from room to room, and when I found my mother, I told her the news.

"I am leaving home to seek my fortune!"

What else could it be? Long ago she had taught me, reading from the house's treasure of storybooks, what a man does. He leaves his house and seeks adventure in the wild wideness, with its huts and caves and castles. When Mama laid her head on my shoulder, I could see how small she had grown.

Today my mother is in hiding and cannot be traced, but tomorrow I will take her hands once more before I run room by room through the world. I know that there will be times when I wonder if my story is not already complete, rather than about to begin. Some days I'll fear—as I do now—that I was consumed entirely by fire, and that what I'm living now is a kind of afterlife. Perhaps I am a human phoenix, who in a dream was scorched to ash, or reduced to a mere egg waiting to hatch. Perhaps this life is not a real life but only a veil, torn asunder but still covering the face of the living world. So close, so close: perhaps I have touched it with these fingertips that were once melted in flame and now have not so much as a whorl of maze to differentiate them. When I am fully a man, tested by adventure, I hope to know everything. The books I read in our library have told me that the years are worlds, and the lands, and the past is only a place one cannot reach.

I wonder what my father will say when he notices that I have gone.

Will he mutter to my grandmother that they both had a part in my metamorphosis?

I won't—can't bear to—consider my mother's sorrow.

And what of Vesta, the perfect child in the glass box, jutting into the abyss, all that was she drawn inward? Long ago I rocked from side to side, sending forth prayers that were like kisses of fire rising from an abyss. Sybil and sibling, Vesta, my idol: I never felt a final conviction that you were dead to me and unreachable, and I still don't.

At night when I dream, I see you face to face, though we are severed by a single pane, and I wake to cool drops of grief on my skin. The flame of those dreams is pale as moonshine.

My sister burns, snowy and purified, her lavender eyelids sealed. She may fall, a star, into the breach. The glass may melt in a lake of fire. I don't know. I've never known how it is with Vesta. She may float down as softly as a snowflake sifting from a cloud. The glow from her face may turn the lake to a moonglade and the salamanders to silver.

Is she, too, a phoenix? What then, I wonder, will be the manner of her uprising?