Summary. It was Fifi, the tirewoman, and not for money nor malice but to save her brother — here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. She meant only to dose Zane's glass, to make him harmlessly ill and put him safely to bed and out of Wat Frew's reach for the night; she misjudged the dose, and worse, she misjudged the hat. The gardener's Nerium bottle behind its brass label stood unstoppered that evening though he swears, and I believe him, that he stoppers it at six without fail; someone drew from it during the evening's traffic, and Fifi, who carried two glasses from the door tray at 9:55, is the only person proved to have carried any glass at all that hour. She set the dosed glass on the ledge beneath the coat she took for her brother's — Zane's house hat and Wat's borrowed servant's hat hanging twin and indistinguishable on the same peg — and set the clean glass beside the chair. Zane, in fact, had been sent upstairs at 9:50 on an errand for a lady's shawl, and it was Wat who sat that night in the dark corner in the servant's hat he'd taken to wearing for concealment. He drank the glass from the ledge, not the one beside him, and was dead within the hour. The full, untouched glass under the coat is the clean one; the fallen glass by the chair is the one he emptied. Wrong man, wrong hat, wrong glass — that is the whole of the method, and there was no cleverness in it at all, only a woman working fast in a dim room to save someone she loved.

The household's first thought, understandably, was that a blackmailer had been paid at last in the coin he dealt in, and there were candidates enough for that reading. Gaunt had called him a catalogue of sin at his own dinner table and prayed for his correction, which is a strange sort of alibi but a true one — he sat at cards from half nine with three witnesses and never left the table before the alarm, and the man died at ten. Quill had refused him money twice and said so aloud before the body was even found, which is not the behavior of a guilty man economizing on his lies; he too never left that card table. Effie owed Wat her comfort and her next delivery of laudanum, motive enough on paper, but she was on Lavinia's arm at the orchid bench through the whole dark quarter-hour and carried no glass from the tray, which is the only road the poison traveled. Each of them falls on the same plain fact: they were not near the tray, or not near the ledge, in the fifteen minutes that matter.

The true grain of it is smaller and sadder than blackmail generally is. Wat had traced the twins' baptisms — three weeks at the parish register, the clerk remembers him well — and meant to press Zane over the name behind it and the old business tied to it, a matter the household never discussed and I see no cause to discuss here either; what the boy was born to is his own affair, and none of mine to print. Wat had for years taken small sums from Fifi to hold his tongue, and she had paid them without complaint, being a leaking sort of woman in most things and sealed tight in exactly one place. When he stopped drawing from her and turned instead to squeeze her brother direct, the arrangement he had lived on for years came to its natural end. She heard him name his price that very morning in the passage — "the boy, and not the girl," his own pocketbook says, in his own hand, the same day — and told him plainly he'd not touch her brother. That evening she set about proving it, and killed the wrong man doing so.

I ought to mention, since it very nearly slipped my notes, that the fallen glass by the chair was found quite dry inside, wrung clean by the fall, while the full glass under the coat stood exactly as poured — which is the small physical fact that fixes which glass went where, and settles that the ledge, not the dark, is where the mistake was made. It is the third such matter I have closed this twelvemonth, by my count, and I confess I am tired of orchid houses. Fifi Swain is charged with the death of Wat Frew, the intent having fallen on the wrong head entirely, and the file may close.

It fell out, in the end, as the cruellest of fate,
with Fifi the reason, and reason came late.
Now Wat 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.