It was a spring afternoon, but it felt nothing like spring. Dense, grey clouds hung low in the sky, as if the very atmosphere was mourning the unholy matrimony taking place beneath it.
The antiquated synagogue, shrouded in withered vines and dead foliage, stood like an empty husk—its stained glass windows a tapestry of shadows and sorrows, as if cursed by some malevolent force.
The guest list was scant: Kit Snicket and the Duchess of Winnipeg, Josephine and Ike, and Windershins and his wife. Among these few, they alone knew the wretched secret—the bride, Beatrice, was pregnant with another man's child. Lemony Snicket, a man believed to be dead, a ghost whose unquiet soul haunted the ceremony.
The guests, dressed in dark, almost funereal attire, resembled phantoms—murmuring prayers that sounded more like dirges than blessings. In the case of those named, their mutterings were indeed lamentations, weighted with an air of impending doom.
Beatrice, the bride, made her slow, somber march down the aisle. Her dress, a dingy, off-white garment, seemed to encapsulate the palpable disgust some felt but dared not express. Each step she took was like the tolling of a death knell, each glance exchanged a foreboding omen, making everyone privy to the terrible undercurrent that pervaded the room.
The air grew thick, almost suffocating, as if the walls themselves were closing in, anticipating a Hermedy too horrific to name.
Bertrand watched her with a complex tapestry of emotions woven into his gaze. The bridal veil, traditionally a symbol of purity, now seemed more like a shroud of impending doom, an omen of a loveless future.
He knew that under the huppah, the wedding canopy, he would not be in search of love, but rather fulfilling a mere duty, an obligation that gripped him like an unrelenting vice.
Bertrand had been trained to control his facial expressions by the secret organization known as VFD. To the onlooker, he appeared as impassive as a gravestone, returning their scrutiny with a dark gaze that concealed any semblance of emotion.
But his hands betrayed him. They nervously twisted the fringes of his talit, his prayer shawl, in a repetitive motion that could only be interpreted as anxiety—a dead-on assessment.
Flashbacks of his history with Beatrice flickered through his mind, each carrying a sharp stab of pain that pierced his heart.
"I like someone else, Bertrand," she had told him when he was just 13.
"I don't believe you, Bertrand!" she had exclaimed at 14, when he showed her evidence that Lemony had fallen for another girl, a certain Ellington Feint.
"If you bring this up again, we can't be friends," she had warned him when he had confessed his feelings yet again at 17.
"I'm marrying Lemony," he had read in the letter delivered by a solitary carrier pigeon when he was 18.
"Leave, Bertrand. And find yourself a good therapist," she had told him, shutting the door in his face, her eyes awash with tears.
But fate had twisted their lives into an intricate knot of irony and despair, a detail Bertrand clung to so as not to succumb to utter hopelessness.
"Lemony had to flee on the wedding day. Count Olaf plans to kill him and Beatrice. Can you keep her safe, Bertrand?" Jacques Snicket, Lemony's brother, had once implored him.
Two years had passed since that ominous request, and one fateful evening, he overheard Beatrice in conversation with the Duchess of Winnipeg during her visit to their mansion:
"As long as I'm engaged to him, he'll never be safe. And how long can I continue to be a burden on Bertrand? I know he loves me. Imagine the agony he must feel sharing a home with me when I can't return even an ounce of his affection."
Then one day, over breakfast, she said:
"Bertrand, I want to tell you that I've ended things with Lemony. I've sent him a letter explaining everything."
Just as Bertrand began to hope that she was gradually opening up to the possibility of loving him, Lemony returned from his exile.
And the timing could not have been worse.
VFD, the secret organization they were all a part of, was disintegrating. A weapon of mass destruction was in development. To many, Olaf was seen as a necessary evil to counteract an even greater malice.
There was simply no time for the indulgence of love and romance in that fraught moment. Kit Snicket, Bertrand, and Widdershins were deeply embroiled in a desperate mission to save the world. After all, the biological weapon was a deadly fungus that would annihilate its host within an hour.
And yet, despite the inopportune circumstances, despite the impending doom and life-or-death struggles, Beatrice and Lemony found a way to reignite their illicit romance.
Pregnant and bereft of a husband, that was how Beatrice found herself when she came seeking Bertrand.
"I can't promise to love you, but if you'll have me as your wife, Bertrand, I promise to be yours. Just as you've always wanted," she declared, her eyes devoid of the warmth they once held.
The Rabbi, an elderly man with a long, graying beard, commenced the ceremony. His voice was a raspy echo, as if every word drained him of life. When it came time to drink the wine, Beatrice hesitated. She shouldn't drink; not while carrying a child. It was unloving, irresponsible.
The cup appeared to be filled with blood in the eerie, dim candlelight, a cruel reminder of another life, another love, that had been wrenched away from her so savagely. Asking for forgiveness from God and from her unborn child, she took a reluctant sip.
Bertrand then reached into his left pocket and drew out an object of wonder: The Ring of the Winnipeg Dynasty. It was priceless, a treasure in and of itself. He had no illusions of buying Beatrice's love, but he wanted to please her. She simply deserved the best. Kit Snicket had arranged for him to have it that very morning.
"The Duchess wishes you to place this ring on Beatrice's finger. She wants to be a part of your story," Kit had said.
Yes, that was a small blessing on this tragic day. Engraved into the ring was an 'R,' a constant reminder of the ring's noble origin.
Beatrice extended her right index finger, and Bertrand felt her hand turn ice-cold upon contact.
Her heart rate spiked, her blood pressure plummeted. A dark red streak of blood flowed down her leg, staining her dress a shocking scarlet.
"Where did you get this?" She exclaimed, her eyes a cocktail of rage, horror, and pain. A sudden, searing cramp overtook her, and she collapsed clutching her abdomen, blood gushing from within her.
Kit Snicket abruptly rose and retreated to the restroom, while the others rushed to the stricken bride's side.
The room filled with an air so thick with dread that it could be sliced through. Faces turned ashen, eyes widened in a medley of disbelief and horror.
As Bertrand paced anxiously, waiting for the wail of ambulance sirens to pierce the oppressive silence, his eyes were awash in tears. Beatrice had regained consciousness but remained in a fragile state, her eyes sealed shut as if to block out the horror of reality. The other guests urged her to lie still, their faces pale masks of disbelief and anguish. Bertrand clutched her still-chilled hand. The bleeding hadn't ceased. The air was thick, almost suffocating, saturated with an impending sense of doom.
And then he heard it, a whisper low and almost inaudible amid the palpable tension—Kit Snicket's voice, trembling in his ear. Her eyes too were wet, seemingly brimming with tears.
"I'm so sorry, Bertrand," she murmured, her voice breaking. "I promise, I will bring you 15 years of happiness to make up for this horror."
Confused and disoriented, Bertrand stared at his stricken wife, trying to make sense of Kit's cryptic words. He didn't want to turn and face Kit; her presence now felt like a haunting specter.
"The ring... did it do this to her?" he finally stammered, his voice tinged with both desperation and accusation.
"It might have reminded her of the first wedding that was never meant to be, and the emotional weight was too much for her to bear," Kit replied, her voice laden with sorrow yet oddly detached.
"There was no way for you to know this would happen, right?" he asked, seeking some form of absolution, some fragment of reassurance.
"Just remember, Bertrand, I'm in the same fight as you," Kit answered, her words layered with cryptic subtext.
"Kit, what does 'our fight' have to do with this unspeakable Trage.dy?"
But before he could extract any clarity from her, Kit turned her back and walked away, vanishing into the shadows like an apparition, leaving him with nothing but unanswered questions and a gaping void of dread. At that very moment, the paramedics arrived, rushing toward Beatrice with urgent intensity.
Bertrand was left standing there, in a room turned mausoleum, pondering Kit's ominous words and contemplating the battle they were both supposedly fighting. But as he looked at Beatrice, her face twisted in agony, her life hanging by the thinnest of threads, he couldn't help but wonder: What kind of war were they waging that could justify such monstrous collateral damage? And as that question echoed in his mind, the walls of the synagogue seemed to close in around him, suffocating him with the dark and unbearable weight of regret, dread, and horror.
