Doctor Thabstatcherton came by today, preceded by three things: his monogrammed leather satchel, earned by years of smoking cigars and drinking sherry with the right men in the right clubs, his gut, earned by the same as the last, and the impression of his muttonchops, which shuffled their way up the stairs, past the landing, and to my boudoir like a pair of bright-red simians playing some game of sack race in a pair of trousers.
"It's Infernius Caprici Splendiforous Immolation Fever!" he pronounced, wagging his finger while his chins wagged. "Bed-rest for you, and two valiums to be taken morning, noon, and night alongside a snifter of absinthe and a pinch of cocaine."
"It sounds terribly exotic." I observed.
"Probably caught the little devil playing hidey-goose on the rim of a tin, shipped '[cross the seas from somewhere in need of a good dose of englishifying! Worry not though, it's perilous only to the natives, whom as we know are all of far weaker constitution than those of us with good, english blood!"
I pondered what precisely english blood meant to Thabstatcherton, whether he might be one of the New Avalon underground in secret, or if he proudly flew the Normand banner. It seemed in poor taste in either case to mention that I was english only by shrewd negotiation between my adoptive father, a scotsman who had the boats, and my mother, an upper-north-eastern member of Istanbul, who had the money that nailed, glued, and sealed those boats together, and who nailed, glued, and sealed me into London high society by the same medium. Instead I said only "Well thank goodness for that then."

Yet, by day three of my confinement, I have found myself wanting of even the doctor's tiresome company. Vast is my late husband's estate, and yet I have managed to drift, wan and full of ennui through every room, passing by the curtains in the hope that some soot-nosed guttersnipe with carrot peelings 'neath their fingernails might catch glimpse of me and run shrieking to their fellows crying "A spirit haunts the manor there upon the hill! A spirit haunts the manor, and I've seen it! Lovely as a maid dying of consumption, yet frightening as a work-house governess!"
I am forbidden anything more stimulating than this droll activity, for after all I am to be at rest, and needs must not excite myself. The only other sanctuary I find is in studying the patterns of the wallpaper, all a lovely yellow and green, a legacy of my late husband's I was told, outliving him, his four simple sisters and three sharp ones, his two brothers who never made it to the wars they were meant to die in, and three other generations that preceded him. "It's bad luck it is!" the blind beggar cackled on the day I took up residence. "Tear it all down, and rid yourself of death's shadow!"
I did not of course, because who would take the advice of one who gibbered so? And after all, it must be lucky for myself, the paper taking the blame for my late husband's death so easily as a grimm dancing and laughing before superstitious Thabstatcherton, when there was an all too easier explanation. Why oh why, a few asked themselves, did the good sir descend those oh-so-perilous servant's steps that cold, dark winter day?
Let them gossip, and let them ask. The fortune is mine now, and if I must use it to build a guilded tomb for myself that I shall make a funeral pyre when this foreign fever takes me, then so be it.

Day six has come, gone, and I am cured! Aye, I still reel, I still sweat like a butcher accustomed to sampling his own trade too often and too prematurely, and I still cough, chest tightening into solid oak as twisted as the tree without under which my late husband is buried. Yet cured I am, not of the body, but in the mind! The answer was not in defeating this affliction, but embracing it! For I have counted all the boons this plague has brought to me; clarity, to know myself, the world, and my place in it more acutely than any other, to sup of mankind's well of suffering, a deep dark vintage passed around from hand to hand and quaffed with every passing by the teeming masses of London that live within the lower streets and the lower alleys. With this clarity I am glad to pass before those dreaded four scores of age, when the last branch of beauty and vitality withers from the vine and drops to the ground, never to bloom again.
I no longer deny myself excitement, for excited I already am. Bring them to me, my 'friends', who cast eyes at my late husband when they thought surely I was not able to see them do so, unaware of the little secret born by the painting of 'Pan' within the sitting room. Bring them to me, all those 'well wishers', cousins of cousins of cousins who pawed at my late husband's coat-tails with the same subtlety of the gophers that nibble and gnaw upon the roots of the oak in the garden without. Bring them to me, the doctors who could not save me, the priests who thought they had, and the moneylenders who hoped I had not been. Bring them all to my fabulous party to-morrow, where we shall dine upon the slaughtered machinery of my late husband's empire, from the gold that flowed as lubrication between the cogs, the men who were the gears and pistons, and the servants and beasts that stoked the boilers with the corpse-stuff of the earth. We shall feast, and we shall dance, and to every guest I shall give a gift: I will approach them in masque, beneath a veil and powder to hide the glistening of my skin. I will approach them, take them sweetly, lift my mask for each one and kiss them deeply.
"Is your night not now splendiferous?" I shall ask.
Then to the bowels of the manor we will parade, as liquor - laced with even-more dream-weaving chemicals from my late husband's secret cabinet - casts its mad spell upon us. We shall descdend the stairs that spiral, the stairs that slope and the stairs that wind, before passing the ones that drip and slip. Then at their final bottom we shall dance to the foot of a door, behind which lies a great basalt cavern. It is a lone door, the only door, made of thick dark wood, and sealed by a single key. To, and through this door we shall dance. And once I have sealed the gate and disposed of the key within mine own gullet, we shall dance again. It will be the very dance I learned these past days. A dance of clarity, of truth, of madness and revelry, in honor to the reaper which asks his due of the choicest cream from time to time, ready to take his scythe to the barrel's uppermost, and skim it thick.




...is kind of what I mean when I say this flu has me feeling 'victorian'.