Summary. It was Lady Lavinia Loveless, and she killed to keep her science hers alone. Dr Quill, sitting up the night before with his own uneasy curiosity, had watched her trance too closely, marked her pupils, and written under it, twice underlined, "not the spirits." He had taken a pinch of the powder from her for the assaying — being coroner as well as physician, a man who puts what puzzles him to the test. He meant to carry that finding to a bench somewhere, in his own time. He did not live to.

The Reckoning. The method wanted no cunning, only proximity. The blue bedroom lay off the east passage, a short turn from her own door; the guest doors stood unlocked through the morning as they always did while the maids worked the round. Quill slept hard on his own draught — his sleeping bottle stood near empty on the washstand, his port glass rinsed dry from hours before. She went in while he slept, took the second pillow, and held it until he was still. There was no mark to find and none to look for; she drew the covers to his chin, squared the pillow, composed his hands, and took back her folded paper from the notebook's spine — but not the page itself, which she either did not think to tear out or dared not, and which named her plainly enough for any man who troubled to read it slowly. That carelessness, or that mercy toward the appearance of a natural death, is what undid her.

The household offered other men first, as households will. The Colonel was under his loader's eye across the far coverts from first light to the noon count — nowhere near the passage. Zane kept the second gun at the butts the same hours, equally away. Xerxes and Aziz were logged at the lodge gate at half past eleven, still walking up when the birds were counted; they had not passed a night in the house at all. Nan kept the still-room and breakfast table under Mrs Gow's eye without a gap; Fifi worked the same passage but never entered the room, and Mrs Gow vouches her too. Cousin R sat the library, seen at intervals crossing the hall, no night business anywhere near the east passage, and the room he might have visited was left plain, not arranged for any purpose of his. Effie rose late, breakfasted at ten, took her tea at eleven in the morning-room — and in any case had no cause to silence the man who supplied her laudanum honestly. Wat's only unaccounted quarter hour came well after the death, out at the near covert, and a smuggler bleeds a live blackmail mark rather than smothering one who has not yet refused him.

What clears them all is the same thing that convicts her: opportunity in the night hours, and the note. It does not accuse a debtor, a frightened heir, or a man with something to hide from the law — it names a trance, and a woman's initials pressed hard enough to underline. Quill was not killed for what he owed or threatened to a fortune. He was killed for what he had seen with his own eyes and meant, in his careful coroner's way, to prove with his own hands. I make it the third this twelvemonth, by my count, and this house no stranger to my visits. Lady Lavinia Loveless will answer for the smothering of Dr Tobias Quill, and the charge is murder.

Lavinia crept through the unlocked hall to make her work complete,
While Quill lay breathing soundly on his draught, now past all heat;
The spare pillow pressed so gently where the lamplight could not reach,
A method leaving nothing — no disorder, no breach;
The powder safely hidden in its spine remained unknown,
And morning found the household with their poor riser gone and prone.