Summary. It was Miss Effie, and for the plainest of reasons: her supply. Dr Quill was one of two men in her life who kept her in laudanum, and the more respectable of the two, and that week he had told the table he meant to cut her ration and put her on a stricter rein. He knew her habit and her tolerance to the grain. He was, in short, both her tap and her witness, and she stopped up both with the same glass of port.

The Reckoning. The cause of death was never in question. Quill's glass alone carried the residue; the rest of the evening's port ran clean. His own bag supplied the means and, near enough, the story — a bottle of his laudanum left conveniently low, as though the physician had dosed himself past bearing. Whoever measured that overdose knew exactly how much a man of his tolerance could take and still read, to a coroner's eye, as his own excess. That is not common knowledge. It is a lover's knowledge, or an addict's, of a man who has watched her measure her own drops for years. Effie had both.

The tableau very nearly did its work. The chrysanthemum, the folded hands, the spectacles squared like a man laid down to rest — that is Cousin R's habit of mind, and the house knows it. But R composes cold; there is no sentiment in his arranging, only order. This composition had feeling in it, a tenderness misapplied, and that is the tell that undoes the mimicry. Someone had dressed a death to look like his work who did not share his temperament — someone who could not resist a last, foolish kindness to the man she'd killed.

The circle clears the rest without much labour. The Colonel sat at its head from before ten to the discovery, held there by two independent accounts; he never reached the library. Nan's hands were joined throughout, and she had grief for Quill, not grievance. Lavinia conducted the sitting from the centre, hands joined the whole while, and nothing shows Quill had ever threatened her particular arrangements. Wat came late, was watched from the door by Mrs Gow, and in any case a frightened, paying mark is worth a good deal more to him alive than dead. Cousin R kept the circle's edge until he raised the alarm, and his signature, examined closely, was not truly his. Only Effie left her chair, more than once, "for air" — time enough, and reason enough, to pour what she poured.

As for R's part in the affair — what the two of them were to one another need not trouble this file; what matters here is that she borrowed his hand to hide her own. The taper Quill proposed would have cost her the last respectable door to her medicine, and left her, besides, exposed to any man who cared to speak of her habit at table. She removed the throttle and the witness together, and dressed the result as a kindness. I have charged her accordingly. The Manor's third this twelvemonth, by my count, and I do not expect it to be the last.

Effie had mastered all the subtle arts of doubt,
Poor Quill was found when consciousness had flickered out,
She'd mixed the laudanum with sentimental care,
And left the chrysanthemums arranged upon his hair,
The law, we trust, shall teach us caution in our draughts,
Though none who knew them both shall heed such learned crafts.