Death in a huff.
Death sat
gaunt and unloved at the piano in Alice's drawing room. His coattails fell
almost to the floor behind him. Light from candles threw shadows on the walls
as his fingers raced over the keys releasing shivers of Tchaikovsky that transported Alice to some place where she believed love could never touch her.
Leonard came in after midnight. He sat on the recently reupholstered Voltaire
in the corner of the room and watched Alice start to sink into oblivion and
gravitate towards Death's clutches. He
blew blue rings of cigar smoke towards
the dead roses that were looking in at him from the patio on the other side of
the French windows. From the air he grabbed hold of the floating notes of
Tchaikovsky as they passed under his nose. Alice was already starting to
dissolve. Leonard mixed the black notes of Tchaikovsky in the bottle of Chablis
that Death had left to chill on the hearth of the unlit fire. As he poured the
adulterated wine into a pewter goblet the musical notes were rearranged into a
waltz-like version of "Knees up mother Brown". The spell that Alice
had fallen under was disrupted. She swooned; Leonard caught her and laid her
limp, feeble body on Daphne's chaise longue. Death put on his overcoat, wrapped
a white scarf round his scrawny neck and took off in a huff.
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