Summary. It was Lady Lavinia Loveless who put the cord about Nan Pringle's throat, and she did it not for money, nor to silence a threat to another's purse, but to keep a young man and a paid place in one stroke; here is how the matter closed.

The Reckoning. The cause is plain enough: throttled with a length of black silk cord, one of a pair of curtain-ties from the blue drawing-room, its fellow undisturbed on its hook. Dr Quill puts the death between half past nine and half past ten. The room was got up to look like a sitting — six chairs ranged correctly, a dark cloth, a candle, a bell, the gas off, THE SPIRITS ASKED chalked across the cloth — and got up by a hand that knew the business, since Lady Lavinia keeps such things in a locked box in the morning-room and carries the key on her own chatelaine. That box stood open on the night, and the chalk-stub was gone from it.

Zane the footman could not have done it: Mrs Sib Gow had him at the plate-cupboard counting silver from nine until the covers were cleared at ten, and in the dining room after, and a believed witness places a man across the whole of a death window as surely as a locked door places him out of a room. Fifi his sister is covered the same way, by the same woman, over the supper trays. Captain Wat Frew sat at the port with Cousin R and Dr Quill from the rising of the table until near eleven, three men vouching for one another; and in any case he had given Nan up as a bad venture a twelvemonth since — nothing she carried was live to him that night. Cousin R sat at the same decanter and had the same alibi, and whatever he wanted of Nan's knowledge he had already got without paying for it, so her death bought him nothing. Aziz stood in the stable-yard over a lame horse with Xerxes Hartfield and the Colonel's groom from half past nine to a quarter past ten, the groom vouching for both, and the woman he grieves for is a bride promised to Xerxes in the spring, not a poor relation against whom he had no quarrel at all. Effie Strange, pressed by creditors and named with Nan in the will, sat at the piano the whole evening with the Colonel himself at her elbow, and the Colonel is not a witness the household doubts.

That left the medium. She went up alone when the company rose, she says for a shawl, and cannot say when she came down; no one says it for her. She had asked twice to sit two nights a week instead of one, and been refused, and she is paid by the sitting — the professional peril in Nan's little book was real enough. But under the professional peril sat the plainer one. Lady Lavinia wanted Zane, and had had him, on three Fridays running while he ought to have been at his post and she ought to have been driven home; and it was Nan who noticed the footman gone from his place each time, and Nan who wrote it down, and Nan who announced across the fish and the game that she meant to show the Colonel her book of Fridays. She was looking at no one when she said it. She did not need to. A word from that book would have cost Lady Lavinia both the young man she wanted and the roof that let her keep wanting him, for the Colonel had already said what a scandal under his roof would earn.

She let herself into the east sitting-room as any familiar of the house might, unfeared, and stood behind the seated woman with a hand at her shoulder as though beginning a sitting, and finished it with the cord instead. She took the little book from the writing-desk after, and left the door standing open an inch, and dressed the room to read as some clumsy imitation of her own Friday trade — which very nearly answered.

I had nearly closed the file on that reading before I set the two small wrongnesses beside each other. Nan's hands lay palm-down on the cloth; at a true sitting the medium lays them palm-up, so the spirits may find them. And the chalk asked its question on a Tuesday, when Lady Lavinia sits, by her own long habit, on Fridays and no other day. A stranger copying her trade might get the ring of chairs

They'll whisper a fortnight the hand it was cold,
that Lavinia was in it, the whole of it told.
And Nan, the colder, is carried the door,
and Cairnholm's acquaintance the fewer by four.
We'll vow to be watchful, we'll counsel more care —
and mean not a syllable, ever, we swear.