Post Mortem

Prologue

That black dress hung in Janes wardrobe, taunting her very existence. It was on days like this that she tried to avoid it, tried to act as if she wouldn't have to lace it on within a week and shroud her face. As if she wouldn't have to become a widow at twenty years old; watch her husband rot away in their bed from that dreadful disease that had stricken half the neighborhood.
"It was in the water" they said. "Just don't drink the water and you'll be fine".
Lies. Every single one of them, lies. It was in the air; that thick London fog that covered them like a blanket of disease. They didn't know what it was called. Doctors didn't know what it was, and didn't know how to prevent it, though they insisted it wasn't contagious. It started with a cough, not even a harsh one though. A soft scratch that Carlton insisted was just from the new tobacco his cousin had sent him from America. Then came the heaving, the blood on his handkerchief. The shaking, the seizing. The color draining from his face. An agonizing month it took, watching him slowly become a shell of the young thirty eight year old he once was, no longer a tall, energetic man with his deep, comforting voice and firm tone. No, he was thin, wasting away in the guest room, hands at his sides, wheezing. Eyes sunken in, handsome chiseled face turned to bone, blood splattered on Janes white sheets. He wasn't her husband anymore; he was a prisoner of death.
It's a horrible thing, to watch your husband die and know there's nothing you can do about it. Nothing you can do to stop the seizing, or cease the pain in his chest. All you can do is sit next to the bed, hold his hand as it becomes weaker and weaker with every day until his fingers sit limp in your palm, lightly twitching.
You know he won't make it through the night. You know that by morning, you'll be pulling on that ugly black shroud and retiring to your bedroom to mourn the loss. But you're a good girl though. You won't cry in front of anyone, you won't yell or cause a scene- that's improper and not how a woman of your background should act. Your mother raised you better than that.