Lent, in those days, was a somber affair. The observant took only a small collation of bread each morning and a portion of fish and vegetables each evening. Those less so remained subdued by the season as social occasions slowed to a simmer and spirits flowed less freely.

Businesses remained open, but were frequented less often as rainstorms settled into the streets, turning them to mud and keeping the city’s inhabitants indoors. It was as though the entire town were a dripping bucket and its residents forced to sit quietly and watch it leak.

This was especially true for the women. Without the benefit of a profession, the hope of entertainment, or the stimulation of intelligent company, there was nothing more salient to occupy their minds save the monotony of church and the idlings of rumor — which they nurtured most faithfully.

Each morning they trudged through the mud to Mass, and each afternoon they gathered in one another’s salons and attended to their gossip as one would a fledgling fire. They poked and prodded their stories, adding fuel and fodder until at last those embers were nurtured into a raging fire.

Naturally, conversation could not be deterred from the city’s most stimulating of topics: the image of the widow in her white gown, its diamond edges sparkling against her victim’s crusted blood as she held that lost soul in her arms. When those members of society tired of speaking of the murder, they contented themselves to speak of the funeral and this drew the more imaginative sort to the conversation.

The funeral was witnessed by only a select few and those few took great poetic license in recounting the tale for their most captive audience. A private affair attended only be the widow, the child, and a spattering of her employees, the widow was last seen kneeling aside the tomb of the woman she had killed, her veil obscuring her visage as she reached into the grave.

As no members of society were in attendance that day, those despondent souls who witnessed the event from afar could only invent more fanciful fare for the facts they could not know, and so it became a Lenten pastime to guess what had occurred on that day in the cemetery and to be found the most convincing of it.

One woman explained that the widow had reached her lips into the casket to drain the ménagère of her blood. Just as Christ was drained of his blood on the cross with a dagger, she said with a bit of fanfare, so too did the widow take from her victim that eternal life so promised by the Savior.

Not to be outdone by her hostess, a second woman told that the widow had reached into the casket so that she might give the entombed woman a drink from her wrist. As the priest gave Christ’s blood to all who attended mass, so did the widow offer eternal life to the woman who lay in the arms of death. Like Christ, the ménagère would rise, her body cold from the tomb and thirsting for the blood which had been removed of her.

The couturière had the benefit of being privy to such conversations and she smiled as the widow’s tale grew ever more grandiose. The couturière measured the waists of her insatiable clientele, pinned their shoulders and hemmed their skirts, and as she did so she listened to the meanderings of those women’s minds, so desperate for the season of Lent to end that they might at least have some productive task to set their minds to.

Alas, there would be no such reprieve.

In the bible, there is a story about a plague. One in which the sun was blotted out by a swarming infestation of locusts. So pervasive were they, it is told, that the ground became black from their number, the fields became swallowed by their hunger, and none could walk a single step without a wall of insects to stop them.

But even the Egyptians could not have drawn the ire of Providence’s fury as did the pestilent population of la Nouvelle-Orléans. For in their midst was a more fateful omen. One that drained one of one’s life force and suffered one’s pallor bloodless. Even as the sun was still seen, and the fields were still sown, there was a more fearful killer among them, and it was far more vengeful than the locust.

Fear spread though their number as death tore through the city dispassionate of class or cloister. Members of society were quick to blame the widow, believing her to be the cause of their every misfortune. She was death lurking among them, they said, waiting to add more ranks to her number, that she might remain young and beautiful, with the ceaseless youth of one undead.

The couturière watched it unfold as though she were attending a drama at the theater. She heard tell of the widow’s curse — that she sought the blood of the living and that she walked in the night to retrieve it. There was only one way to protect oneself from such a curse, the couturière advised them, and so at night they followed her advice, locking their doors tight against the widow and seasoning them with garlic and holy water.

As the reader may be aware, there was a deadly presence who drank from their veins each evening as they slept. It did not care for the garlic and was even enticed by the holy water. It crept in through the cracks, through the windowpanes and the door jambs, and made its way into the beds of its unsuspecting victims. There it would sink into the flesh, drinking from one individual and then another until every household became poorer by a drop of blood or two.

The creature of whom we speak was not so mysterious as the undead. In fact, it is one quite commonplace to the modern reader. For we speak only of the mosquito. A being so inconsequential it could hardly have been guessed to be the cause of so much distress, and yet, from the blood of its victims it spread the perils of fever and formed a plague among them unlike any they had before seen.

When their victims woke the next morning, shivering in the heat, they would find red welts upon their wrists and at their throats and believe the widow had come for them at last, sinking her teeth into their flesh as they slept and adding them to the ranks of her undead.

As we may well know, death becomes all the more fantastic to those who do not accept their mortality, but rather live for some small hope of eternity. Whether they find that hope in their religion or their superstition, they sleep hoping beyond all hope that it will not be for the last time.

There was one woman most taken by the rumors — in social circles there is always one woman who is. She is perhaps most idle with her time, and therefore most concerned with societal recreation. She spends her days seeking drama and lavashes the attention she garners by fanning the flames of conspiracy and becoming a conspirator in her own right.

We need not concern ourselves with her name — for our intents we shall merely call her the dilettante — what most concerns us about this individual is that one afternoon she simply turned up dead. The reader must know the effect this would have. For one afternoon she was telling a most salacious tale about how the widow had never been seen in the sunlight without the protection of her veil, and the next she was discovered in an alley outside the woman’s cabaret, her blood pouring from her neck into those poorly drained streets.

The widow was the obvious suspect for such an enemy — even if she never concerned herself to listen to the gossip. Even we, who know better than the rest, know that the widow did intend to murder someone once before — though evidently, she refrained from finishing the job.

But then, as we recall, her husband is a rather vengeful sort too. And perhaps there was a third — yes, one other member of our society who hated rumors about the widow most of all.