Let this be a lesson to you: avoid wasps

Religious novels are famous for their deathbed speeches, of course, but occasionally novelists found it in themselves to come up with more...creative...ways of dispatching characters.  William Sewell, a High Church novelist, decided to kill off Hawkstone's villain by turning him into a living dinner for the local rat population.  (Quite frankly, that's the only memorable thing about Hawkstone.)  This evening, I came across a one-two punch sort of death in a Catholic novel, the Rev. Langton George Vere's For Better, Not For Worse (1882).  Early on, the novel's two female protagonists nearly tumble into a quarry; much Flashing Neon Foreshadowing ensues.  At the end, the Honorable Laura Mapleson shoots Lizzie, the younger of the two female protagonists, then chucks the body into the nearest "rippling stream" (231).   (Ah, how idyllic.)   Righteous smiting soon follows.  Laura, who apparently failed to look where she was going, stumbles into a nest of wasps, and is quickly beset by "infuriated insects" (231).  While trying to rid herself of the aforementioned insects, the Flashing Neon Foreshadowing kicks in, and Laura "lay a bruised and bleeding mass of humanity in the darksome depth of the old disused quarry, where her victim, the palefaced girl, had stood and shuddered, as she thought of the horror of a fall into that dreadful darkness!" (231)    The shooting victim survives, which suggests that the Hon. Laura was both a klutz and a lousy shot.