Summary. It was Effie, and for a debt she could not carry into her own good fortune. Dunned across eleven unpaid sittings and holding, over her head, a forged line in a chemist's book, she chose her own birthday — the very night her new income was read aloud at table — to end the woman who priced her silence. Here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. The cause of death was laudanum first and the bolster after, and the household's own habits gave her the means. No one in that house takes the drug nightly but Effie Strange, and Effie was unaccounted for from ten minutes past ten until ten minutes to eleven, a full forty minutes in which everyone else sat locked to somebody else's eye. The Colonel, Dr Quill and Cousin R kept the port together, each vouching for the other two, with Zane in and out of the pantry the whole span and never above stairs — three men and a footman, all inside the one window when the dose went in and the bolster came down, and all cleared by it. Nan was in the still-room with Mrs Gow, heard singing through the only four minutes she was left alone; she could not have climbed to the landing and back in that time, let alone twice. Fifi never left the scullery. Wat did not reach the house until half-past ten, by the kitchen door, and was sitting with Mrs Gow's own eyes on him from that hour — a man, besides, who had already been paid his two guineas on the first of the month and had no cause to press further that night. Each of them falls on the clock alone; I need no character evidence against any of them, only the hour.

Effie has no such lock. She left the table at 10:05 for a shawl she did not fetch, and was next seen by Mrs Gow at 10:40 on the landing outside the sitting-room, a napkin in her hand and some remark ready about a poor fire — the sort of thing said by a person wanting to be found unremarkable. The tray came back from the drawing-room two sweets short of Mrs Gow's count, with only one accounted for, half-eaten, on the napkin in the room where the body lay; the other, I think, went into the fire, which had conveniently gone out. Lady Lavinia's own glass was rinsed and set upside down on the mantel — a small vanity of tidiness that no dying woman performs for herself. The bolster was the room's own, which is why nothing needed to be carried in; the only thing that needed to be carried out was paper, and paper is exactly what went, in that same napkin, torn at the spine of the appointment-book under the entries marked "E.S." Lady Lavinia had learned, and had begun to spend the knowledge, that a signature in a Kirk Wynd chemist's book was not what it claimed to be, and had taken to pricing her silence aloud, smiling, against eleven unpaid half-guineas — a joke at supper that was, in fact, a demand delivered the very night Effie's allowance was announced and her credit, for one evening, looked equal to anything.

I had near forgot the bell. It sat on the table beside the torn book, brass and ready, the medium's own instrument set out as if for a sitting that never opened. Effie does Lady Lavinia's voice for parlour amusement, bell and all; I think she meant only to leave the room as she had found her subject working it, and left instead the one prop that told me whose hand had lately been in that room arranging things to its liking. It is a small thing, but it closes what the pages already showed.

The motive, plainly, was money and the shame of being asked for it in front of the whole table — a young woman shown, on her own birthday, exactly what she was becoming: a clever woman living on other people's belief and other people's purses, told her fortune and told her crime in the same breath. She has been charged. This is the third such closing this twelvemonth, by my count, and I do not expect it to be the last from that house.

When all's said and counted, the deed it was done,
and Effie the answer, when answer was none.
Poor Lavinia lies quiet, a candle, a knife,
the tidiest exit from Cairnholm and life.
The lesson is here, should we trouble to learn —
but the cards, being cards, will be dealt a fresh turn.