Summary. It was the footman Zane, and for no gain of his own but to keep a secret buried — I will set down how I came to it.

The Reckoning. He poured the port that night, as the custom of the house required, and it was in that pour that Dr Quill met his end. Zane drew a lethal measure from the doctor's own cardiac tincture — a bottle familiar to every servant who had ever fetched the man's bag — and carried the single dosed glass in to the wing chair himself. He set it down under Mrs Gow's eye, went through to the séance, and let the tincture do its quiet work. There was no taste in it to warn a man, no mark to trouble the surgeon after. It read, at the first look, as a nervous doctor's own mistake with his own drops, and might have stood as such, had no one asked who alone carried the glass between the sideboard and the chair.

The company clears itself without much trouble, and I set it down briefly, as it deserves. The Colonel sat the whole sitting through at Lavinia's table, hands joined, vouched by every soul at that circle from a little after eight — he never stood at the sideboard, nor touched what killed his own physician. Nan Pringle sat beside him the same hour, and Quill besides was the one friend she had in that house; grief does not commonly poison its own comfort. Cousin R and Effie Strange sat likewise within the ring, hands accounted for throughout. Lavinia held her table without a break, by the sitters' own word, and poured nothing all evening. Aziz and Xerxes kept each other's company in the drawing room, looked in upon twice by Mrs Gow. Captain Frew was in the billiard room over brandy with a groom until gone nine, and never near the library at all. And Fifi — who might, by the loose way this household confuses one twin for the other, have drawn a man's eye first — never touched the glass that was used. It was her brother at the sideboard, Mrs Gow is plain on that, and it is his hand the matter turns upon, not hers.

The why of it sits in a small remark the doctor could not leave alone. He had begun, in his coroner's habit of noticing what others let pass, to unpick that a servant at the Manor was not the person the wages-book named, and he meant, by his own word to the housekeeper, to lay the matter before the Colonel. What he had found, and what it would have cost, is not set down here in the plain terms a drawing-room might use, nor need it be; it is enough to say that Fifi and Zane came into that house as a matched pair for reasons of their own, and that the household's ease in mistaking one for the other was the whole of their protection. Zane is her shield, as she is his, and the two of them a seal that does not leak. Quill's small, persistent curiosity was about to break that seal open before the Colonel himself. There was no quarrel between the two men, no old grievance to sharpen the act — only a threat to the one thing Zane could not let stand exposed, and a decanter that happened, by long custom, to pass through his hands alone.

I had nearly set the file down without the dropper, and it is worth a line before I close it. It lay crooked among the ordered vials in the bag, not fallen as a dying man's hand might leave it, but laid — the mark of someone who measured with care and did not stay to tidy after. A doctor's own accident does not measure itself so neatly. That is the last thing that settles it. Zane is charged; the matter is closed.

Zane mixed the cordial with a practiced hand so sure,
And Quill accepted what the doctor could not quite endure,
The séance guests sat watching in the gaslit gloom,
While heart-drops fell like verdict in that darkened room,
The moral, we are certain, is to guard one's own,
And trust the one who pours—but seldom trust alone.