The pick clanged against the hollow tomb as Orson battered and chipped flake after tiny flake off the polished crystalline surface. He had made a considerable, if rough, crater in the rock from which the tomb had been carved; his determined work meant that the inscription had nearly been obliterated.
It had read “Lucretia, July 1880 to June 1899” before he’d started desecrating the place. The din of him tapping away echoed in the otherwise silent mausoleum. Her father was interred her on right and her mother, Beautrice, on her left. A fall had been the end of one and heart failure of the other, yet it was the death of their child that the would-be defiler wanted to know.
He placed his chisel, cold in comparison to the pick’s handle, which had grown hot and sweat slicked in his hand, into the deepest part of the indentation and swung his hammer up high. When he brought it down hard, he cried out loudly, for a large crack had finally appeared on either side of the ragged crater. Through it, he could see little but a black void. There was not even a bad smell wafting up and he feared that her cousin had gone as far as to not bury her in the family crypt.
The marble was glassily smooth where he had not been banging away at it for half the night. His grip was slippy with sweat as he struggled pull the upper fragment of the heavy capstone back. He slid a hand into the crack and heaved. It was cool inside the tomb and he leapt back rapidly as the half he was dragging crumbled without warning and fell to the floor in pieces. The polished floor marble was ruined, chipped and scratched, but he did not care.
It was not without some nerves that he raised his lantern and peered into her final resting place. He squinted, and then his gasp echoed as much as his hammering had done.
He found himself looking at the corpse of a slender, and even skeletal, young woman who had not undergone corruption in the decade since her Aunt Nicolette had buried her. She still had her translucent skin and rather cylindrical waist; his attention though was drawn to her head.
The cause of death was immediately obvious. Lucretia had been cleanly decapitated by her cousin Dante. He had used an antique sword on the young woman who had bullied him since their childhood; this much was known because the murder weapon was missing from the collection his father had in the study. It was still missing, even after the constable brought in a prototype metal detector and searched the field next door.
It was well known that Dante had prided himself on looking uncommonly handsome with his fair hair and pale skin. His only physical flaw was that he was a little on the thin side, whereas the ideal was athletic. He was older than Lucretia by five years and yet she had the stronger personality-far stronger-to the extent that she dominated her arranged fiancé. He was too spineless to speak out against her until she insulted his mother.
It was not known why she did-all the family agreed that she and Aunt Nicolette were genial to each other, but the damage was done.
Dante was slashed across the face by Lucretia with a letter-opener when he made to defend his retiring mother’s honour. The wound became a scar from his hairless chin to high cheekbone and it maddened him. There was a girl in the village that he liked much more than his aggressive cousin whom he did away with in the dead of night.
He told everyone that it was self-defence, and they met in the parlour to discuss the ruinous incident following the discovery of Lucretia, dead, on the landing the next morning.
The spray of arterial blood had dried to a maroon colour on the green wallpaper as her headless body lay slumped against the banister. It was the chamber-maid who found Lucretia. Her screams awoke the family and she ran to alert the local constable before she could be stopped. Beautrice died of a grief related death the following year. It was her sister Nicolette who got Dante acquitted; everybody knew how volatile Lucretia could be. Her father followed her mother before long, utterly indifferent to the whole bloody affair.
It was her head Orson chose to stare at. It too was uncorrupted, although nowhere as pristine as her body. Her cheeks had a blackish tinge not unlike her long hair. Dante’s one sword swipe had severed her well known tresses as neatly as her neck; somebody had placed the hank in her elegant hand, which rested on her bosom.
He exhaled slowly. He had seen what all that he wanted to. He now knew that Dante had definitely chopped her head off and not just slit her swan throat with the same letter-opener with which she had marked him. A kindly person, or maybe someone who had been paid well, had wiped the blood off her chest and dressed her in a new black gown with a plunging neckline. It was almost a mockery of the gown she was supposed to wear when the time came for her to marry her murderer.
Dante had killed her for marring him and then wed the other girl, the one who simpered and flattered him. He was still married to her and they had a son.
Lucretia though lay cold in her tomb, as headless in death as those in life had claimed her to be.
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