A party of the dead Everyone who was someone was at the party tonight, and the crush of people made it hard to see anything. The air was heavy with perfume and flowers, a hundred candles and lamps made the room very bright and very hot. It was just the way Ophelia loved it.
Tonight she was wearing her new gown, the one in dazzling peacock greens and blues. It was a delight of many parts: the way the silk felt under her fingers, the sounds it made as she moved and danced, the brightness of the colours, the way eyes slipped warmly over her while she wore it. Such a gown would have been enough to make her feel very alive, when Jonathan was with her, but his death had turned her into a serious, boring person, and even bright colours and warm eyes wasn't quite enough to distract Ophelia tonight.
It had begun before she even entered the house, the spirit of a beggar child holding out its hands at the entrance, white cheeks hollow with cold and starvation. Inside a silvery footman offered to take her coat, his face half blown off by a bullet. A short, plump woman with blood pooling in her old-fashioned skirts walked towards the ballroom. The dead had come to the party, and Ophelia sorely wished they weren't invited. Every room she entered, every gentleman she laughed and flirted with, at the corner of her eye there seemed to be a flickering presence. Perhaps she was simply out of practice, perhaps the death of her husband had...changed her somehow. The thought was troubling. Ophelia didn't want to change. She just wanted to feel alive. So she danced, and flirted, and laughed and made merry with frenzied focus the whole evening.
It was after midnight when she suddenly realised that the flickering had stopped. Turning her head, absent-mindedly enjoying the skip and dance of her curled hair, Ophelia just barely caught the plump, bloody little lady in her curious dress gliding out of the room. It made her frown, and the gentleman who had been using a great many words in an attempt to flirt and be charming, blanched. Patting his hand, Ophelia drifted after the ghost, hardly knowing why her feet were moving. No ghosts - no death! - was a good thing. Yet it niggled at her, the way the spirit had suddenly lost interest in her.
The ghostly footman joined them in the hallway, and Ophelia glided after the ghosts, nodding at friends and acquaintances. Entering a new room, she paused in the door, shocked to see the plump little lady making eyes and fanning herself as if in the presence of someone handsome and exciting. The spirit seemed to be focused at one person, and slowly Ophelia walked closer, feeling a little lost, a little irritated and very confused.