Summary. It was Cousin R, and for no better reason than a bottle of chloroform, wanted so he might have one quiet night's sleep; here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. The cause was plain enough — a single wound from the doctor's own scalpel, quick and clean — but the room told the rest of the tale better than any witness. Nothing was disturbed save the bag, and from the bag only one thing was gone: the chloroform. A man does not commit murder and take a single bottle from a well-stocked case unless the bottle is the whole of his want. That narrowed the question from who hated the doctor to who needed the drug, and the household gave the answer without meaning to. Nan had been snoring through her cold since the rain began, loud enough to carry down the stair to the room below, which happens to be Cousin R's. He said himself he had retired early, troubled by the noise. I did not think much of that sentence the first time I read it. I thought a good deal of it the second.

The composed body wanted explaining too, and here the household's habits served me better than any confession. R is a collector, and a fussy one — his specimens are pinned and set upon boards, never gassed, for he keeps no killing-agent of any kind and never has. That put the chloroform outside his usual trade entirely; it was not wanted for his cases. But a man who spends his evenings arranging dead moths under glass does not stop arranging when the specimen is larger. The lily, the folded hands, the scalpel laid just so — that was not calculation meant to mislead. It was habit, indulged on the wrong subject, by a man who could not leave a body as he found it.

The others fell away easily enough, and none of them took long. The Colonel and Xerxes had the port and each other's word for the whole of the window. Lady Lavinia, Effie, and Mrs Gow sat together in the drawing-room from the séance's end until the discovery, each vouching the others. Nan was abed and dosed, looked in upon twice, and in any case Quill was the one friendship she had left standing — she had nothing to gain and everything to lose in his death. Wat Frew had the quarrel and the opportunity of proximity, and I confess he looked well for it at first — a smuggler with a grudge, seen near the room at the hour. But Wat carries his own stock of everything a man in his trade might want, chloroform included, and has no need to steal a physician's bottle; and his way, when he does harm, is the rigged accident or the blow from behind, not an hour spent composing a corpse like a still life. The scene itself spoke against him.

I had thought, briefly, that the arrangement might point to some larger design — a madman's tableau, meant to be admired, or a stage set to throw suspicion onto Wat and his known quarrel. But a man building a false trail does not waste his one theft on a bottle of chloroform that leads nowhere useful to the deception; he takes something that damns his enemy, or nothing at all. R took only what he came for. The tableau was not a message. It was manners, misapplied to a dead man, by someone who could no more leave him untidy than he could leave a beetle unset upon its pin.

So the doctor died for a night's quiet, and nothing grander than that. Cousin R has been charged accordingly. The Manor's third this twelvemonth, by my count, and I find I am no longer surprised by how little is sometimes wanted, in this house, to justify the taking of a life.

When Cousin R arranged his scene
Young Quill upon the chaise serene
The lily placed with careful hand
The scalpel set as if he'd planned
A madman's work, or so it'd seem
But mercy's bottle was the dream