Summary. It was Lady Lavinia who put the draught in the wine, and did it for want of any other way out of a debt and a deadline she could not meet by honest means; here is how the matter stood.

The Reckoning. The cause of death was Quill's own sleeping draught, taken in wine, in a measure no man wakes from. It was Xerxes's habit to take it himself at midnight, in that room, counted aloud; on this occasion he took it at nine, in company, from a glass he did not pour and did not finish alone. There was one glass under the cloth and two mouths had been at it — a tidemark showing twice, and on the far rim a smear of rouge that belongs to one woman in that house. She had asked to be left behind for a solo plate; she was alone with him for the whole twenty minutes the photographer stood shut in his pantry with his chemicals; and the fifth plate, which ought to show an empty room but for the chair, shows instead the blurred edge of a woman's skirt, the one thing in six exposures that did not hold still. I make that four particulars pointing one direction, and I have learned not to want a fifth.

The rest of the house falls away on plain ground, and I will not linger over any of it. Wat was in the gun-room with the Colonel from ten past eight, each in the other's sight, and never near the drawing-room in the dark interval; there is no rouge on him besides. Gaunt walked the terrace in the rain the whole time, watched throughout by the photographer's boy at his flash-lamp, and had in any case no want of Xerxes dead — the man paid his half-sister's debts, which is rather more than Gaunt was managing to do himself. Effie and Cousin R held each other's alibi in the conservatory, checked twice over by the Colonel passing through, and what Effie wanted was still at the dead man's throat when they found him — the Sapphire untouched, nothing taken. Aziz was setting coffee in the passage with two maids about him and raised the alarm himself. Quill sat with his library door standing open the whole while, and had no cause to be rid of a patient who paid his bills, nor any need to empty his own bottle into a shared glass when a private dose would have done as well and left no glass to speak of it. The Colonel wanted Xerxes's signature on a venture, which a dead man does not give. The three from Cruikshank Manor were abed there by ten, vouched for by that whole household, and never at Hartfield House at all that night.

What drove her to it was plain enough once laid out in its order. Wat had called in ninety pounds on the Tuesday. Gaunt had given her until Sunday to settle honestly or be exposed before the parish. And on the Thursday, in front of Aziz, Xerxes had refused her money a third time — kindly, as he always did, and on the same ground: he would pay her bills, but he would not put coin in her hand. A woman cornered that way looks about her for anything that can be turned to cash, and she had one thing left that was hers to sell — a secret she had sensed for a year through the wall of that locked closet next her room, candle lit on the landing at three in the morning, twice, and always called there, she said. On the Friday she wrote to a Glasgow house asking terms for the purchase of a private history belonging to a Cairnholm family. The letter went unsent, because the secret was not hers to sell while its owner drew breath and kept the closet key on his own chain. What she was to him, and what she believed she knew of him, is not a matter I mean to set out in this file beyond saying that it was of a kind the household did not discuss, and that it gave her the only leverage she had. She removed the one obstacle to selling it, using a bottle every soul in the house knew to find on that sideboard, in a room gone dark for twenty minutes by nobody's arrangement but the photographer's chemicals.

I have charged Lady Lavinia accordingly. The third this twelvemonth, by my count, and I confess I had rather it were the last.

It fell out, in the end, as the cruellest of fate,
with Lavinia the reason, and reason came late.
Now Xerxes is gathered, a held, careful breath,
one more of the twelve to the ledger of death.
The moral, we're certain, is worth the whole cost —
then shrug, and forget it, and reckon naught lost.