charlotte racioppo

2022

Pyre

    “It is my professional opinion that young Miss Elizabeth suffers from pyromania,” Doctor Hastings said. Hastings hadn’t meant to utter the word in her presence, of course. But neither he nor the great beast of a father nor the Countess knew how simple it was to hear what occurred in the sitting room downstairs when one pressed their ear to the library floor above.
    Someone - excluding the Countess, naturally - rattled their spoon in their teacup. Elizabeth rattled overhead.
    “It is not suffering,” she muttered into the hardwood. She frowned, shifted, such a soft, itching word. But the sitting room denizens did not have their ears pressed to the ceiling, and so the doctor pressed on.
    “I will admit I am reluctant to resort to such drastic measures for a girl of her age. But if the problem is as severe as you say…”
    Here Doctor Hastings trailed off. Elizabeth closed her eyes to better see the elderly man shrink as he deferred to the Countess, a cowardly paper-white shriveling like singed parchment. Elizabeth didn’t begrudge him the impulse; people tended to shrivel in the Countess’ presence despite, Elizabeth knew, how her mother made such a practice of silence, was the picture of restraint. Her father, on the other hand-
    “Get on with it, man,” she heard Pyotr growl. Perhaps he had been the rattler.
    “I would prescribe extensive rest. No more than an hour out of bed each day. She should be confined to her rooms as completely as one might manage. And a tincture,” Hastings said, and Elizabeth heard a new clinking sound, sharp and delicate, the first snowfall of Moscow, “to be administered once daily with a meal, should her symptoms escalate.”
    “Good lord,” Pyotr said. “We’re talking about a young girl, not a grizzly. You’d have us sedate her?”
    “I don’t believe you understand-”
    “She’s sick, Julian. We expect you to offer a cure, not an opiate.”
    “Your daughter is not afflicted with something easily healed by a bandage or removed with a surgery,” Hastings said. “Pyromania
  Πῦρ, pyr, from the Greek word meaning fire, she had already dragged an encyclopedia down from the shelf
  is an ailment of the mind. We are treating thoughts. Would that it were something bloodier.”
    Elizabeth wondered if her father would yell at the doctor then. He had rattled and he had growled, and naturally-
    Yes, naturally. He might thunder, might crash upon the good doctor. After all, speaking of blood was not unlike speaking of war, Elizabeth thought, and she was fairly certain the wars of which Pyotr forbade her to speak were of the bloodiest kind. She flipped the pages on her encyclopedia. Bolshevik, read the entry. Perhaps her father might combust.
    Instead, the room below fell silent.
    “...great swathes of destruction as the Russian contingency abandoned Vilna, then Vitebsk,” said the encyclopedia, “setting fire to stores of materiel, bridges, and even crops as they fled.”
    “Do it,” said the Countess.

    It was the simplest of things her mother misunderstood, these fires. Elizabeth had tried to explain once - well, twice, truly, though a shriek and a water pail in the foyer did not quite constitute a conversation - for such a plain thing surely could be illuminated, a deep clarity unearthed like soil or sunrise or sin. Elizabeth was only doing that which was required of her. She only set the correct fires. She knew, and so could her mother:
    The house was meant to burn.
    Elizabeth had felt it straight away, an immediacy equal to her steps across the threshold of the Countess’ family estate some years ago. Her memory prior to this crossing was bleak- an unknown country- a vague lethargy like insufficient sleep. There was a dense feeling of wrongness about it. There was an echo of a young girl, loud and quick, too loud, too quick, filling up a different house like a hollow corpse with meaningless sound. That girl lobbed her words ungracefully and could define none of them, raged dumbly against herself. She did not speak so much as scream for lack of understanding. It was cold there.
    Pyotr often spoke of this corpse house through a smile Elizabeth once thought sarcastic. The Countess, Elizabeth remembered exactly, used to leave the rooms of the house when the girl entered.
    But they had left together, eventually, all of them. The trip across the world wasn’t much more than a comma in Elizabeth’s dull recollections, and then they reached the stop. The ancestral home of Countesses past and present could not possibly be mistaken for a dead thing for all its muttering. A young Elizabeth passed through grand double doors and, listening, found the world suddenly intelligible. When this house spoke, she understood - one word, one urge whispered ad nauseum like the endless lilies papered on the walls, and that word was: burn.
    It was not a request, Elizabeth learned. The house did not question, inquire as her brother did, trailing behind her with grasping hands, Please, Lisbeth, I want to play, too! Can I play with you?, did not plead with her in desperate tones up and down the halls, did not squeal when she acquiesced and taught Alexei what it was to hold one’s hand over an open candle flame despite, she reminded him, the fact that he had asked and she had answered.
    No.
    The house demanded. It spoke as she bounded up the grand stairway and whispered in the forgotten corners of her old nursery. It wrenched at the meat of her from the tinderbox of a larder, left her gifts of unvarnished mahogany mantles in the sitting rooms. It had felt a pressure in the old country, a stifling always-heat beneath the skin regardless of the cold, untranslated; but she had been young. The old house did nothing but contain. Pyotr had not yet left a matchbook on the lowermost shelf of the study.
    Now Elizabeth knew matches. She put meaning to the incessant pulling thing in her chest that must expand beyond her or perish, the itch in her fingers that others so frowned upon; she knew the primordial rumbling of her mother’s house for the language it was. Not pressure, dear girl: nature. The brittle boards beneath the carpets. The tapestries in the halls. The draft in the study, the chipped frame on the Rembrandt and the accidental dent in the skull of the Rolls Royce, running through the chamomile after supper and greeting the Blackburns in the drive and watching Hastings from the parapet.
    Wood was meant to catch. Words were meant for meaning. This new-old place was meant to be unmade.

    The Countess was not distressed by Elizabeth’s extracurricular fires, not quite, if only because she was not capable of dishevelment. Perturbed. That was the word. Rounded and dense on Elizabeth’s tongue, a strange tentacular shape in the depths of the encyclopedia. Its definition was simply printed. Troubled in mind. The thing which moved a mother to leave a room.
    It was just language, Elizabeth thought. Everything could be defined. Even Countesses.
    Perturbed meant upset.
    Upset meant disordered.
    Disordered meant wrong.
    Ergo-
    “Look, mother,” Elizabeth said through desperate breaths, caught by the wrist with the foyer rug extinguished. She held out the still-burning match until flame kissed the tops of her bare fingers. “It’s meant to do it, see? It wouldn’t catch otherwise.”
    “Sweet girl,” Pyotr said, and snatched the matchstick so hard it snapped in his hand.
    “Positively feral,” the Countess said. “Where are your gloves?”
    “It’s right,” said Elizabeth.
    “Look what she’s done, Pyotr. We’ll be smelling smoke for ages.”
    They left her in her bedroom with the encyclopedia. They took away her matches and her candles and her hidden flints, which were not hidden enough when her brother smelled smoke from the garden. They sent for Hastings.

    (It was the basement, for the Russians. They locked their royals away in the basement until they decided what to do with them. Then they shot them all. Then they drove the bodies out into the countryside and burned them.)

    The Countess haunted the open doorway while her husband knelt at Elizabeth’s bed. He raised a spoon to his daughter’s lips.
    “Just a sip, love. That’s my girl.”
    “Perhaps we should give her two.”
    “Mary, please.”
    “Is that Lisbeth, mother? Is something wrong?”
    “Go to your room, Alexei.”
    “But-”
    “Are you sure it will be enough?”
    “Lay back, love. It’s time to rest.”
    “The Blackburns have invited us to dine with them at Ragden this evening.”
    “Can I come, mother?”
    “Mary, for the love of-”
    “I will not refuse them a second time, Pyotr. They already talk about the girl.”
    “That’s all they do, the ingrates. They’re all talk.”
    “They are also title and capital, neither of which we have to bargain with. I will not suffer them alone. We are going.”
    “Have you seen my flints?”

    To which did the royals succumb first: the bullets or the boredom? Elizabeth pushed her bed along the floorboards until the bedposts bit. Her rending routine broke only in the wake of new doses of medicine, and the occasional sorties by Alexei whose whispered parleys ended, preemptively and always, deadened into silence by the thick bedroom door. She wished someone might enter the room so she might leave it. She wished she might sleep in her uneasy circles and avoid the new questions, white hot and scalding, pursuing her like shadows in her wake.
    Could she ignite the room?
    Would she not burn as well?
    The encyclopedia chanted at her heels in ritual repetition. Tantalus, Tantalus, Tantalus.

    Countless revolutions into the revolt, there was a rent gap enough beneath the door to slip a word through unmaimed.
    “Lisbeth!” The house spoke with her brother’s voice. “Lisbeth, are you alive?”
    “No,” Elizabeth said. Fall chill seeped through the walls to taunt the passage of time.
    “Oh, but I’m so bored, Lisbeth. Play with me, please?”
    “No,” Elizabeth said. Her finger twitched; a splinter from the bedpost played lodestone beneath the skin of her index, an indeterminate compass. Had the corpse house been so combustible? The necessity behind her ribs had shrunken now, refined itself into something more sharp and malicious. Elizabeth felt now the inverse of that battering ache born across the ocean, for the Countess’ house was a quiet living thing that had committed the irredeemable crime of making sense. Bleary-eyed, suffering, Elizabeth could do nothing but know her mandates gut-deep. Pale paper lilies. Loose threads along the ottoman. The mirror on the boudoir multiplied each slight without mercy. Everywhere she looked, something waited to burn.

    “Read me something,” the second attempt sounded. She was pressed flat beneath the duvet. She was a mass of limbs succumbed to slow leaden sleep. Elizabeth dreamed a caustic smothering.
    “No,” Elizabeth said, jaw slack, fists clenched. “Too tired.” Tantalus, Bolshevik, pyromania, crucible.
    The lilies frowned. “Then I’ll read something to you,” the house said.
    A taunt. A jeer, what did the house want with yet more words? What clarity could it possibly bestow? Elizabeth was not in want of explanation but action, hers was a fury of obstruction alone and it would undo her, she felt that as she felt the house’s necessity as she felt her own go, please, Lisbeth, please, she realized now what the loud girl from the old country had suffered from and that was freedom and for a moment Elizabeth thought she felt her compass finger move before the heavy black descended to take her once more.
    “You don’t understand,” she said.

    The third attempt was a glint.
    Elizabeth paused mid-trance. Too locked inside herself for much more than waiting to be released, much less than incandescent madness. The bed lay unmoored on the leeward side of Ursa Minor as it had since Tuesday. The lilies grew beneath her skin. The curtains knit along her throat. She let them.
    But here- a star fallen onto the floor. It had caught itself on a planetary groove; it was a spare flint gleaming at Elizabeth. It existed to be struck. It was its nature.
    “Please?” said the house, and Elizabeth found it within herself to beam.
    A holy sign! A great rending! Here, the abating storm, the siege broken, the cutting thing inside her dulling to feathers.
    Elizabeth stood at last from her bed. Bare feet traced canyons in the wood to linger in front of the petite boudoir which used to be her mother’s. She stared at her silvered double in the mirror.
    Elizabeth pocketed the divine sparking thing passed beneath the door just as Pyotr’s footfalls rocked the stair, and Alexei’s deadened into silence. The door opened a cold portal into Hell.
    “My God, but she’s gouged the place.”
    “How are you feeling, my sweet?”
    Elizabeth smothered her breathing beneath the duvet. On his knees again, Pyotr tucked it tight around Elizabeth’s shoulders, under her chin, around the flint clutched bloodless in her tiny hand. The Countess would see her only as the portrait of an invalid in the boudoir.
    Elizabeth smiled.
    “Better, papa.”
    “Truly?”
    “The house is a shambles.”
    “The Blackburns are joining us for dinner tonight, my sweet girl. Would you like to come?”

    “...great swathes of destruction as the Russian contingency abandoned Vilna, then Vitebsk,” Elizabeth read under the table, dutiful finger tracing ink, “setting fire to stores of materiel, bridges, and even crops as they fled.”
    “They burned their own things?” young Marie Blackburn asked. Her gloved hands had perched docile in her lap until the dinner rolls were ferried to the table, at which point she removed the fabric finger by finger to better tear the crust.
    Elizabeth was not sure where her own gloves were. She turned the page.
    “Yes,” said Elizabeth.
    “How ghastly! Why would they do such a thing?”
    “To defend themselves,” said Elizabeth.
    “Well, it sounds dreadful to me,” Marie countered. “A dreadful thing, and I don’t see why you would want to read such dreadful things.”
    “Elizabeth,” said the Countess, who might have never raised her hand nor her voice in her life. “No reading at the table, dear. Put that away, please.”
    “The Russians are making a right mess of things at home, aren’t they, Pyotr?” Nathaniel Blackburn told Pyotr from the head of the table, a continent away. “That poor family, a dynasty cut to the quick, and quite the savage way to go to boot. The Red Army, and these massacres, and- well, it’s just brutal, truly, don’t you think?”
    Tantalus, Tantalus, Tantalus, thought Elizabeth. The crystal carafe rattled against Pyotr’s wine glass as he poured.
    “A lovely home you have, Mary. We’re delighted to see it back in your family’s care,” Eleanor Blackburn cooed. Her distant Ragden was built by some Norman great during his conquests, she had said, hadn’t she, by some ancestral rightness, she had explained its provenance while shuttling delicate quail bones from the table to her teeth.
    “The fruits of our labor,” the Countess said. “One must be ever industrious with such things, a matter of maintenance and aesthetics. These ancient homes, especially these ancient places, historical, really- they must be worked at. Glory is a thing to be tended to, as much with a great house as with a great family, one being deserving of the other. We are descended from Romans, you know.”
    Caesar, the encyclopedia read, and Nero, immigrant, orphan, liar.
    “I do believe you’ve mentioned, yes. Though of course the resemblance seems to have slipped your recent generations, hasn’t it? Elizabeth and Alexei do take after their father so.”
    “Oh, I don’t know, dear. Young Elizabeth does just look the spitting image of her mother. Wouldn't you say? And,” Nathaniel said, curl of the lip, a table of eyes turned to alight on Elizabeth, “what a delight it is to see her in such good health.”

    The wallpaper tore away easily. Lilies pruned, in long thin strips like wartime bandages for mutilated men. Splinters collected from the spiraled gutters in the hardwood, from Elizabeth’s pillowed fingertips. The ottoman would hold all and catalyze them, too. Oven. Pit. Belly. Her hands were not quite as quick as in the foyer, she was not so nimble as with the match, but
    “Pour me another.”
    “Jesus, Mary. I think you’ve had enough.”
    “I wasn’t asking.”
     she could move quicker without her gloves and she knew, o! how she knew.
    It must be done. It must be done and quickly, if they did not sedate her, by God, she would. Somewhere histories away, Marie was being fetched from the gardens, bound to Alexei by conspiracy and fairy tale engagement among the hedgerows, the front doors were slamming, an exodus of Blackburns spurred into the crackle of a coach pulling away, pulling towards an eternity of Ragdens, pulling into nothing.
    “Well, that was quite the performance. The negotiation may have been a bust, but you’ve given them something to talk about at that royal estate of theirs.”
    “Don’t patronize me.”
    “I’m not. You know how I feel about ingratiating ourselves to those lackwits. You’re marvelous, Mary. Marvelous and cruel, and we should’ve given them the boot last June if I had my way.”
    “If you had your way, we would still be freezing to death in Leningrad.”
    “Yes. If we were lucky.”
    “Perhaps the Blackburns would prefer it.”
    “You mean, you would. Nothing for it, dear, not yet. That happy with your warpath, are you?”
    “Never, love. So many years in this wretched town. You’d think… ah, well. But that’s the rub, isn’t it. Thinking.”
    “We were, once, you know.”
    “Thoughtful?”
    “Happy.”
    “We should tend to Elizabeth.”
    Her name - accelerant, her name. One might hear the goings-on of the parlor room quite clearly if only they pressed their ear to the floor of the bedroom, but they might hear it dully without, she hadn’t been listening for such a thing but here now was her name. Elizabeth sat with flint poised over her small pyre of necessary time before she might sink into desperate, self-loathing stasis once more. She struck sparks.
    Nothing caught.
    She struck again.
    Was that the father’s foot upon the stair? Was that the house breathing? They would not catch, they would not take, she would not go back to the cutting pain or the soft dark, the flint sparked and flashed and still nothing and so naturally-
    Yes, naturally.
    Elizabeth dragged the encyclopedia from where it lay plunged in a far galaxy up to the hilt. Bolshevik. Crucible. Tantalus. In 64 AD, Rome burned.
    Elizabeth tore pages upon pages from the binding of the great book. She crimped and crushed them into a bouquet. How sweet, the smell of action; how delicious, no longer refusing herself. Flame does not care if you understand. Flame is.
    She struck the flint again.
    A light.
    A lift.
    “Elizabeth,” said the Countess.
    Her mother stood in the doorway still in her evening dress. In one hand, a wine glass and a bottle, a balancing act between sloshing dinnertime ruby and opaque, medicinal gold. In the other, a spoon.
    Elizabeth looked up at her from the floor.
    The Countess waited. She wobbled a bit, didn’t she. She wavered there like a mirage. Elizabeth couldn’t remember the last time she saw her mother waver; not in the old country, certainly. Elizabeth couldn’t remember much at all, aside from how to sit. Her mother seemed - but could not possibly be - quite tired.
    Elizabeth wavered.
    “I’m sorry,” she blurted. “I don’t know where my gloves are.”
    “Is that your book?” the mirage of her mother said.
    “Yes,” said Elizabeth.
    The heavy doors remained open. They let the outside in; a breeze disturbed the air and sent it sideways. Thin tendrils of sweet smoke brushed gently up the legs of the boudoir. Elizabeth’s desperate bonfire refused to do much but lap up ink and smolder. It would die soon, if not fed.
    “My girl,” the Countess said.
    She walked to the boudoir and placed the medicine down. Elizabeth watched in reflection as she finished her wine. She upturned the glass.
    Then she removed her gloves. Long, sleek and black things reaching up to her elbows. They settled on the boudoir like limp shadows. The Countess’ fingers, thin and delicate like tapered wax- no, steely, like flint, traced over the spoon before returning to the tincture.
    The gentle flames in the ottoman shone in triplicate now: the pyre, the mirror, the bottle. Gold sparked as the Countess uncorked the medicine, raised it to her lips, and drank, spoonfuls unknown, downed a sailor’s swig of the thickening liquid.
    The Countess strode across the cosmos in a step. She leaned down. She brushed Elizabeth’s cheek with her empty hand. She kissed Elizabeth on the forehead, leaving behind a small lipstick smudge in mellow mauve. She plucked the forgotten flint from the floor. She took it, and the bottle, and the warm with her.
    She left the room.
    The fire burned out.

    “Alexei! Elizabeth!”
    Conflagration, Elizabeth had never learned the word and yet. She rushed from the house with Alexei in tow, dragged him dangling and desperate across the lawn as their slippered feet punched craters through the top crust of snow. Pyotr reached them in one bound from behind and scooped them up in two. The house growled heat at their backs, burped great gouts of flame to the tune of conservatory, drawing room, Elizabeth’s bedroom. Elizabeth felt them go.
    “Where’s your mother?” Pyotr roared. Behind the statuary, they were safe. Incomplete they.
    “Papa, I’m scared!”
    “Your mother, Alexei! Where is she? Elizabeth!”
    My God, but it was beautiful. How could anyone doubt? How could anyone not know, faced with this, greeted with such certainty? Catharsis, proof, Elizabeth had never been so sure of herself. She had ash in her hair. It was falling like snow. It was dancing.
The chamomile bushes. The larder. The Rolls Royce exploded. Alexei’s tears painting his cheeks tiger-striped. An eruption: the guest rooms. A lightning strike through the gallery. Old, dry things are more brittle, more fragile, burn faster. They would have to start over. They would have to, again. They would start.
    “Look, Elizabeth sees!” said the house.
    “Alexei?”
    “There, papa!”
    A small finger, a lodestone. Elizabeth pointed towards the infernal mouth where mortal doors once granted entry to the grand devouring place. A lean silhouette framed black against the gold.
    “My God,” Pyotr managed. The Countess stepped slowly from the blaze, still in her evening dress, at home. In one hand, a bottle, a book, an overabundance of killing time. In the other, a flint.          Elizabeth choked back a feral shriek.
    She knew.
    She knew.
    She knew.