In the waning light of a late-October afternoon—one of those pale, chastened hours in which the sun appears too ashamed to cast a proper beam—Miss Arabella Gray reclined upon her tragic chaise longue, a creature carved entirely of porcelain fragility and the sort of delicate despair that doctors in side-whiskers found professionally irresistible.
Her nightgown, spun from the palest cambric and embroidered with lilies (for lilies were the only flower pure enough to adorn a girl so doomed), clung to her with a devotional fervor. Her hair, long as a lament and dark as a widow’s veil, had been arranged by her maid in such a way as to emphasize the exquisite gauntness of her cheeks.
Indeed, Arabella was so pale that the doctor—summoned daily, hourly, and sometimes merely for the aesthetics of concern—liked to remark that she was “as white as the Host and half as earthly.” He invariably adjusted his spectacles as he said it, for the drama of the gesture improved his prognosis by a full degree of solemnity.
“Another cough, Miss Gray?” he murmured.
Arabella lifted a hand so thin one could have sworn it had been sketched by a distracted angel. “I fear… yes…”
And with that, she released a cough so tender, so maidenly, so operatic, that the very curtains wept condensation.
It was, naturally, attended by blood.
Not a practical amount of blood—no, nothing so banal. A perfect streak, like a calligraphic flourish from Death’s own quill, adorned her handkerchief. The maid, upon seeing it, collapsed to her knees in reverent horror. The doctor looked heavenward, beseeching divine intervention or, failing that, a more robust constitution.
Arabella smiled faintly, as though the wretched business of dying were merely an unexpected inconvenience that she preferred not to dwell upon. “Do not fret, Doctor,” she breathed, “I should hate to disturb anyone… least of all myself.”
Her suitor, Lord Percival Thatch—tall, dashing, and cursed with the emotional resilience of soft cheese—burst into the room with the thunderous desperation of a man late to a melodrama he had personally commissioned.
“Arabella! I came as soon as I received your last letter! The one written in trembling script! On stationery perfumed with despair!”
She blinked at him with doe-like resignation. “Percival… you mustn’t excite yourself.”
“I am already excited!” he declared, tearing off his gloves with the violence of a man who has never met a quiet emotion. “They told me you coughed blood again!”
“Yes,” she replied delicately, “though I do hope it was not terribly inconvenient.”
At this, he fell to her bedside as though shot by Cupid wielding a cannon rather than a bow. “My darling! My dove! My fragile, fading wisp of moonlight! Must you die?”
“I shall endeavor not to,” she said, ever the gracious hostess, “but I fear the odds are strongly in favor of tragedy.”
The household gathered at sunset. The priest, the doctor, three maids, two housemaids, the cook (for sentiment outweighed kitchen duty), and even the stable boy crowded in as Arabella issued a sigh that could only be described as evocatively terminal.
“Percival…” she whispered, lifting her hand with the sluggish grace of a dying saint. “Promise me something.”
“Anything!”
“When I am gone, do not wear black.”
He gasped. The chorus of servants gasped. The doctor swooned onto his own stethoscope.
“But—Arabella—why?”
“It clashes with your complexion,” she sighed. “You should wear lavender. It… brings out your eyes…”
The selflessness of it nearly killed Percival on the spot.
As the final candle guttered and the room sank into devotional gloom, Arabella exhaled a tragic breath. A delicate crimson pearl rolled from her lips. Her eyelashes fluttered like death’s daintiest moths.
“She is passing!” cried the priest.
“She is gone!” sobbed the cook.
“She is still breathing,” said the maid, bending close.
“Not for long!” insisted the doctor, who hated being contradicted.
Arabella let her head fall back, lips parting in a perfect tragic ‘O,’ the eternal vowel of every too-young heroine destined for the grave.
And then—
Just as Death stretched forth his skeletal hand in aesthetic appreciation—
Arabella sat bolt upright.
“Well,” she declared crisply, “that was dramatic. I think I shall have a cup of chocolate.”
Pandemonium ensued.
Percival fainted against the chaise.
The doctor made a strangled noise like an accordion stepped on by a duchess.
The priest dropped his rosary and swore in Latin.
Arabella rose, radiant as resurrection, tugging her nightgown into civilized order.
“Honestly,” she sniffed, “one cannot even die properly in this house without attracting a crowd. Percival, be a dear and fetch my slippers. I intend to go into town. I feel quite refreshed.”
“B-but—Arabella—you were dying!”
“Of course I was. But it grows so tedious.”
And with that, she swept from the room with all the vigor of a woman who had never once coughed blood upon anything more delicate than a lace-edged metaphor.
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