I married Red Death to save my father.
He approached us in the inn where we had escaped the snow-storm. His face was covered by red mask which was shape of the skull; he was dressed in crimson velvet; he gave me a sumptuous blood-coloured rose and made a proposal with his beautiful voice. He told us, that he had seen us in the village; that he had seen my father playing violin when I sang. If I marry him, he said, my father will live with us in his castle and his hacking cough - he does not use the word "tuberculosis" - will be treated by the best physicians of the land.
"Yes," I said before my father managed to decline. "I will."
I am sure he smiled behind his mask.
Persian - so he called the exotic dark man who was waiting us him with the carriage - opened the lacquered black door to us. During the trip that beautiful voice behind red mask told us about his two earlier wives. First one, who had died in the honey-moon, had been Spanish opera-singer; her celebrated Carmen, dressed in black lace-mantilla and red roses, still decorates the sumptuous painting at his living-room. Suicide by laudanum, although official reason was heart-attack. Second wife had been Persian, young girl named delightfully after jasmines; she and her son had died in child-birth.
Now he has me, 21-year old daughter of Swedish violinist.
"My living wife", he said, and I wondered would I find her ex-wives in sumptuous glass-coffins of carved roses, preserved as fresh and painted after death.