Chapter 2 - Something New

The young runaway picked up her long trailing skirt and made her way into the wild wood, veil fluttering behind her. Winter-bare thorny stickers pricked at her ankles, and branches pulled at her tangled hair, azure blue in the after-midnight moonlight. Her white stockings and gloves made her thin arms and legs eerily resemble bones. But she knew the way to the graveyard by heart.

The old oak tree was an easily recognizable landmark for one her age, the largest and most twisted tree in the wood, on the edge of the cemetery. Snow lay over the ground, matching her dress in color. She stood beneath the leafless deciduous tree and waited for her beloved, hands chilled to the bone but clutching her frosted, withering bouquet.

"Emily," a voice called behind her, but to her dismay it was too deep to be a boy her age, but could only be an unwanted adult figure. She spun around to see her great-uncle Lord Barkis. He had always called her by her middle name Emily, as it was shorter than her first Victoria, or for sentimental reasons perhaps.

"Playing outside in the snow?" he asked concernedly. "You shouldn't be out here so late at night, and alone."

Emily sighed because that's what she felt she was, alone. Victor must surely be on his way as he had promised, but it was too late, as she had been discovered by an adult.

"Uncle Barkis, you need not be concerned," she piped up. "I'm meeting my friend."

"Oh, a friend?" The elderly man glanced around but saw none. He approached her slowly through the dark. "I followed your footprints here through the snow, after I had noticed you were not in your room at home. I'm afraid, Emily, that this has gone far enough. You will return home with me immediately."

With that he grabbed her by her bony wrist, holding fast and firm. Emily gasped and tried to pull away, but the adult's strength was too much for her to fight. Yet fight she did, wriggling and writhing like a fish caught on a hook. "No!" she cried in unhappy despair. "My friend will be waiting for me! He'll die waiting out in the cold, if I'm not there!"

"You will come with me this instant!" Lord Barkis replied. "If I have to pull you kicking and screaming all the way home! Ah - a spider!" he cried and stopped to swat at the air in front of him.

Emily used the moment to pull free of his deathly grasp and escape. She sprinted as fast as she could, heart beating, holding up her skirt around her ankles as the trail of her dress and her veil flew behind her. She ran in a loop about the graveyard, heading back toward the wood until she had lost him. At last she reached the old oak tree again, doubting her uncle could find the same tree in the wood over again, when she slipped on a patch of ice and fell backward into a mound of snow.

Her head hit on a tree root and she gasped one last time, an eery sigh.

Her eyes closed and all went black, but only for a brief moment. Now I've died, she thought. I'm dead for sure.

The cold no longer bothered her as she lay in the snow pile at the base of the tree, now her unmarked grave. She decided to keep her eyes closed and rest a while, the pleasurable sleep of the dead. But it was not for long.

A young man, rather a boy, came wandering through the wild wood. He put his ring on her finger and said his marriage vows.

Her blue eyes fluttered open once more, but knowing she was dead. This was finally a new experience to her, though not what she had expected.

The boy was kind enough to take her by the hand and try to pull her up out of the snow, helping her up to her feet.

Locked up in her room in her childhood, she had read in a book that if she walked around a graveyard, she was sure to see the ghost of her husband-to-be. She stood before him now, the ghost of his future wife-to-be. She lifted her veil from her beautiful but deathly pale face. "I do," she said breathlessly.