Summary. It was the Reverend Gaunt, and the reckoning he made was not for money but for sin, hers as he judged it — here is how the thing stood.

The Reckoning. The window was narrow and the flagstones fixed it plainer than any witness could. From half past eight to ten the whole household sat the séance in the drawing-room, and every soul in that circle vouches for every other: the Colonel at the table's head, marked there by Mrs Gow and by Lavinia herself; Xerxes and Aziz together, arriving and leaving as a pair; Cousin R across from the medium the full hour; Quill in his chair until sent for; Zane at the door and Fifi below stairs, each under Mrs Gow's eye; Wat alone in the gun-room with his bottle, brought to him by the housekeeper's own hand — a man whose trade is in quiet debts and quiet accidents, and no use at all for a penance-scourge. Effie, the co-heir who stood to gain most plainly by Nan's death, was in the city that night on her creditors' business and vouched for at her lodgings; a rival heir cannot strike a blow from thirty miles off. That leaves one man unaccounted, and he does not need accounting for, since he never claimed to be elsewhere. Gaunt kept the chapel alone, as was his nightly habit, refusing the séance as profane spiritism — and it was to that chapel, and to him, that Nan came.

The instrument settles the question the alibi leaves open. The scourge on her folded hands was his own, carried always at his devotions; the pencil that scored the condemning line was his own devotional pencil, matching no other hand in the house. A killer bent on silencing a ledger removes it or burns it; this ledger was left open beside her, displayed, not hidden — because the killing was never about what she knew. It was about what she was.

The two of them were alike, and the household had said as much in jest — the poor relation and the flagellant priest, each keeping a private register of the house's failings, each severe in the same coin. Two nights before, Nan had read her list to him in the chapel doorway as one reckoner confides in another, and for a night or two he took her for a fellow keeper of accounts, a soul as strict as his own. But her severity, once he weighed it properly, was leverage and not righteousness — a covetous woman using what she knew to press the Colonel and secure her claim, not a conscience keeping watch for its own sake. That is the turn on which the whole matter hinges: he did not kill her to stop her tongue or to clear a path to money that was never his to inherit. He killed her because he had come to see her as exactly the sort of soul his creed exists to correct — covetous, a false witness against her neighbours in all but name — and having once mistaken her for a fellow enforcer, he re-filed her, in his own reckoning, as a penitent overdue for judgment. The blow was struck once, from behind, without struggle, because she never saw cause to fear the man she took for an ally. What followed — the folding of the hands, the scourge laid across them, the Testament opened and scored beneath the verse on covetousness and false witness — was not concealment. It was the sentence, written out in the only language he trusted.

I had near forgotten one small thing, though it seals the matter as well as any confession. The flagstones beneath her were dry, and the rain did not come until ten. She had not been carried in from outside, and she had not lingered in that cold chapel by chance; she had gone to him, in the one room in the house the séance did not require her to sit in, because she believed she went to a man who understood her. She was not wrong about the understanding. She was wrong about what he would do with it.

He is charged, and does not deny the office he took upon himself. The manor's third this twelvemonth, by my count, and I confess I had hoped never to see the east wing again.

Gaunt struck in prayer with a scourge's cold weight,
And Nan lay composed in the chapel so late.
The household sat circled in spirited game,
While penance and ledgers bore witness and blame.
The moral: we ought to keep watch on the just,
Though none shall be watchful—we fail, as we must.