"Miss Mudd," Eric acknowledged, dipping his head in a slight bow, "I too am from Virginia. " A statement which might seem suspicious given his slight foreign accent, unless one was familiar with the German communities in Spotsylvania county. " Eric Krieger, at your service. I regret I never made acquaintance with the Mudds. But Virginia is a big place."

"Used to be a whole lot bigger. You are from unoccupied Virginia, I presume?" the young lady asked suspiciously. West Virginia was a nest of traitors as far as she was concerned: for she had suckled the milk of States Rights and the Confederacy at the teat of her rabidly secesh mother. She would have been less than impressed to know that the tall man she was conversing with had enjoyed the dubious distinction of serving in the only Union unit recruited from what remained of the Old Dominion.

Still, politics and patriotism apart, it was good to meet someone from home. And he liked the sound of her advertisment.

His mouth formed a slightly unsettling smile. "Jolly Funeral. I like that. I've always thought funerals should be a celebration of a life, and not just the lament of one lost."

Though he might be in the minority on that score.

He was.

"Really?!" she curled a lip of pity and concern for the man. "Well, at Jolly's we aim to provide the most miserable, saddest, tear-jerking experience possible. I myself am personally responsible for sewing shrouds and coffin linings, prettying up the dead people, playing dirges on the harmonium, and I also hire out as an extra mourner..." All of a sudden, and quite alarmingly, she burst into a howling wail and threw herself bodily onto his desk "NO! NO! DON'T TAKE HIM JESUS, HE WAS ONLY NINTY-FOUR YEARS OLD!!" she wailed, then stood back up and carried on enumerating her services.

"That was just a small sample. I also have a sideline taking memento mori photographs of the sadly deceased. I do not take photographs of alive people, as they are too fidgety. I am training up young Master Matthews to take the plates, as some folk like to have me dressed up as an angel standing next to the dearly departed. I have a very angelic face. I think you will agree, it would be unwise to try and compete with an outfit like Jolly's, Mister Krieger. Just a friendly warning from a fellow citizen of the Commonwealth."

"In any event, I assure you, the Special Services offered here do not extend to the preparation of the dead for burial." He paused, thinking about how he hadn't been a business investor, either... until this morning.

"Currently."

"Well, if you keep it 'currently' Mr. Kreiger, I reckon you and me'll get along just fine." she smiled with innocent looking lips but slightly hard eyes. 

His gaze dipped down to the sandwich he'd taken a bite out of. "I just started my lunch. I'd be happy to share, Miss Mudd, if you wouldn't be appalled at taking the un-bitten half?" He reached under his jacket and un-sheathed a long knife that was harnessed there, preparing to cut his meal in twain. He didn't have the sense that Miss Mudd was the squeamish type. Not in her line of work.

"Mr Keiger, I wouldn't even be appalled at the bitten half" she said, making herself at home by sitting on his desk with a rustle of black crepe - for she was dressed from top to toe in the stuff. "Not with a fellow Virginian."

"I have some lemonade, too. Probably from the last lemons shipped out from California before the cold sets in. The grocer had a special."

Her eyes went round. "Mr K., you just pulled all my levers at once." she almost moaned.

His smile broadened, as though he was confessing a dirty secret, "And I have real granulated sugar."

"Powdered sugar?" she asked. Certain words defied her attempts to start talking more sophisticated-like. But the Spotsylvania man would know what she meant by pah-dud. In fact, even on the very day of her death, 7th December 1941, she confused a nurse at a Hollywood retirement home by pointing to a vase on the window ledge of her room and asking, one last time, to 'smell the flarrs"

The young sixteen year old, at the very beginning of that journey, looked at Mister Eric Krieger like he was a some sort of wonderful magician who had just opened up to her a whole new amazing universe.

"Mister... you just went and found me another lever. I accept your generous offer, but it is only fair to tell you something about myself that you may well find shocking... I like to lick my finger and dip it in. Is that so very terrible, Mr Keriger?"

@[Cuban Writer]

The photography interested him, though. "Are you sure you'd never photograph the living? I find such things fascinating. How much moving is too much to make a picture? Can you photograph a man walking?"

Arabella laughed "Mister, I can't photograph a living man standing still, even in a posin' brace, let alone walkin' - it's the eyes." she explained, pointing to her own in case he didn't know what eyes were. "people blink a lot on a long exposure and their eyes end up looking dead. On the other hand, I've got right good at makin' dead folk look alive."

He made a big fuss about how he mixed up the sugar with the lemonade. Arabella couldn't care less about such refinements; when she was handed the glass, she drank the thing down in one in a series of hard, greedy gulps followed by an enormous burp. "Pardon!" she excused herself. 

"Course, my friend Lorenzo used to take ones of live people. He took scads of me, and I was either a angel in a nightie with wings or some historical lady or other, wearin' a nightie, like Jonah Arc or Cleopatra, but so he could get a quick exposure, he had to get this real strong light on me and poor Lorenzo, he could never get it right: every time he shone that bright light on me, that ol' nightie just went totally see-through. Ruined hundreds o' plates." she told him, munching on the half sandwich, speaking with her mouth full. 

"I got whole books full o' the rejected prints."

As he enjoyed lunch with her, he could not stop thinking about the photographs. The possible scenes which could be captured. The possible uses of such a capability.

"You know, if I was wise to the operation of a camera, I would be tempted to open a studio. But I suppose you are a pretty girl with good prospects for marriage, and will soon have no need of such a career."

"Oh, I ain't never gonna get married." she said matter-of-factly "But I ain't gonna be no photographer neither, I'm an actress. I just can't get a part at the moment, but one day I'm gonna be a famous actress in New York. Still, in the meantime in between time I can show you how to operate a camera, no trouble. In fact, you can do me a favour. We got a customer who wants a picture of her great uncle with a beautiful angel standin' by him. You can take it while I pose." 

"How's that grab you, Mr Krieger?" she asked, taking a swig of his lemonade because she'd finished all hers.

@[Cuban Writer]

She assured him that not only were the photographs safe, but so was her spinsterhood: without alluding to why. And as for her idea about him acting as her assistant in the upcoming, not-overly glamourous photoshoot with an ancient dead man:

"That sounds like a Special Service to me, and it is what we specialize in here." We. As though there were several of him. 

"Well, it ain't that special, you just have to go like this..." she mimed taking the lens cover off, counting to five and then replacing it.

"I would be happy to learn the camera and take a picture for you. But you must agree to do something for me in return. Something of comparable value."

"Mr Kreiger, this is beginning to sound like like a game of 'Do, Dare, Double-Dare, Kiss, Command or Promise'" she chided him, but those bright hard blue eyes were visibly dilating at the challenge. "But do go on, Sir, you intrigue me!" she encouraged him.

There was a gleam in his eye. "Agree on principle, and we have a deal."

She frowned in mock concern. "What, promise to do some unknown, possibly scandalous service for a man I have only just met and who surrounds himself in mystery?!" she asked, and then placed her tiny hand in his enormous mitt. "All right, it's a deal!" she grinned.

Eric had perforce to stand idly by while Arabella, Mister Jolly and the boy Raymond carried the coffin out to the back yard of the undertakers and place it upright against a painted backdrop. It was unscrewed and opened and the pale, ancient face of the late Ebenezer Scragg felt the warmth of the pale September Sun on its skin for one last time. There was one moment of crisis when it looked like he was going to crumple and fall out of the silk-lined box, but Miss Mudd and Mr Jolly gamely held him in place as young Raymond ran for something called 'The #3 Bracer" - a handy piece of scaffolding that held the old gentleman stiffly upright in an attitude of stately repose. 

Arabella disappeared to get changed while Raymond brought the Camera equipment out and Mr Jolly expressed his strong approval of the fact that Mr Krieger's special services were not in the same ball park as his own. Both the boy and old undertaker then went back in as Arabella, or the Angel Gabriel or whatever she was meant to be, came out, holding some fake wings and a few photographic plates. 

She had unplaited her hair and it fell down past her shoulders in a cascade of raven black, curtaining her pale features, bare feet peeped out from below the very decently long nightdress, her skinny white arms were bare to the world and due to the gaping and wide openings for the arms, a good deal of what could only be described as the 'side boob' area flashed itself occasionally, depending upon what her arms happened to be doing at any one time.

The gown itself was not so much transparent as translucent, it revealed the silhouette of the person within, if any strong light got behind it, and any skin which touched its flimsy cloth was filmily visible. Any, ahem, 'dark patches' under its protection could be plainly perceived. Arabella still followed the late Mr Crabbe's dictate that no form of underwear should be worn under such a garment as it tended to "undermine the historical or theological authenticity of the completed portrait." He never explained why she also had to use his razor on her armpits too, before a posing session, but she followed his dictate nonetheless.

That meant that on a slightly nippy day like today, the effect of the cold on a couple of areas of Arabella's anatomy were all to gaze-drawlingly obvious. This was the main reason that Mr Jolly had withdrawn, these photographic sessions were all too much for his nerves. Miss Mudd, though, seemed completely oblivious to all this as she showed Eric how the camera worked. 

"All right, Mr Krieger, now see here: This is your plate, that bit there slides out onct you got it under the cover inside the camera... no, don't touch it yet!... now, you don't wanna slide that out until you're good and ready to shoot, see. All righty. Now, don't worry about the focus, I already got that all set up for the right distance. When your head's under the cover, you'll be able to see through to make sure the setup looks right, then bob back out bein' careful not to shake the apparatus. Onct you're ready, slide out the plate cover, not right out or you'll never get the darn thing back on again in time. Then you need to uncover the cap..." she mimed it again "... and on again. Five seconds like this 1... 2... 3... 4... 5." 

"I'll take one of Mr Scragg on his own first, just kinda doin' his own thing, so you get the gist of it, then you can do one of me, sorta beckoning him up to Heaven."

She bent over to put the spare plates on a chair, her pert little peach of a bottom showing clearly beneath the fabric of the gauzy gown, and then went through the operation of taking the photograph with all the steady speed of an expert, talking through exactly what she was doing one step at a time until she finished with a "Cap on. Slide back on the plate... that's firm... slide out into the bag. I put 'em in this here little sack just to stop any more light getting on 'em. I'll develop these later; we got a little chemical laboratory set up in back of the second floor. Now, your turn. You ready??"

Arabella's posing for the picture was stagey, as it was required to be: standing to the left of the corpse in its coffin her right hand pointing up to heaven her left beckoning the old man, a look of love riveted on her angelic face as she stared into his grim, wrinkled, lifeless visage, and the general geography of her body pretty much speaking for itself. The worst part was stopping herself counting the timing out loud for him, or swivelling her stock-still head and eyes to see if he was doing it right. 

Once he was done, she skipped back to Eric.

"Hope you didn't leave the cap off too long" she fussed "You wouldn't want me to be over-exposed" she said, tucking an errant boob back into the loose fitting sleeveless nightgown.

She looked down. They should really use that last plate for a back up shot, in case the other was a fail, but on a whim she said. "Hey, why don't you take one of me on my own, just for fun? It can be a souvenir of the time I learned ya how to use a camera!" She grinned wolfishly and held her hands out flat at her side "How d'ya want me?"

@[Cuban Writer]

For her part, Miss Mudd only had one memory of the great war; it was also her first memory: standing near the dusty road near the family shack with aunt Rosie and her little black 'pickaninny' children, Arabella's dirty face almost as black as theirs. Her parents and 'Uncle Ned', who was terrified of being taken by the Yankee sojers as contraband, were hiding in the trees. The idea was that the sight of all of these 'darkies' would act as a charm against the bluebellies ransacking and burning their property (there was nothing to loot. of course). The Soldiers never came, but she remembered distinctly the slight smell of burning wood in the air, her tiny white hand in Rosie's brown, not much bigger than her own, really, and, the thing that made it stick in her memory so vividly: a balloon, a distant Union observation balloon floating in the sky. Alien. Unreal. Cemented there in her mind's eye. 

Now, twelve years later, she was standing in a backyard in Montana with a corpse in a coffin and a complete stranger taking photographs of her in her déshabillé. This was the new normal.

"Miss Mudd, I suspect your tutor had some misunderstanding about light and fabric, and the dance played between the pair," he opined. Or rather, he'd understood it too well and was a scoundrel.

"Yeah, Lorenzo had lots of misunderstandings about things like that." she agreed.

"Perchance I can have you in Sunday clothes, smiling, and contented with your Special Service? I could use you in an advertisement, I think. Who could see that contented face and not crave a service of their own?"

She laughed. "Miss Arabella Sumter Mudd says 'Mr Kreiger put a smile on my face with his Special Service'!" She pulled a ridiculous rictus grin and crossed her eyes.

"Newspaper can't print photygraphs anyway" she educated him "I know that because I went to Mr McVey onct and I showed him this print I done of these three sweet little girls. Two twins and their little sis. I said 'Mr McVey, you can run this photograph as a competition in the Union: whoever guesses which is the dead one wins a prize. You just try and guess yourself.' And he guessed and he was wrong everytime. And he says 'OK which one of 'em is dead and I says 'All of 'em!'" She looked very pleased with this story, as she always liked to get one over the man who had refused her offer to write an advice column for the paper. 

"Anyway, he thought that idea was just dandy, except they can't run photographs, they have to turn them in to 'gravings first." she told him. “Still, if’n you’re willing’ to do that, I reckon I should be flattered you chose me to be your model... even if you do prefer to see me with ma duds on instead of off!!”