Summary. It was Effie, and for money she did not have. Lady Lavinia Loveless had for months been drawing more than confidences out of the girl at their private sittings, and that Tuesday afternoon she named her price plainly: forty pounds, owing Friday. Effie had asked the Colonel three times for such a sum and been refused three times, the last that same day. She had no way to meet the debt and no further use for the woman who had set it. So she carried Lavinia's coffee through to the green sitting room herself, having dosed it on the way with laudanum out of Dr Quill's case, and left her sitting upright and quiet with the cup at her elbow. It is the third such matter I have written up this twelvemonth, and I set it down now with no more relish than the last two.

The Reckoning. The cause of death gave no trouble: laudanum, taken by mouth, in a quantity no accident would explain, in a cup that had held nobody's coffee but hers. The manner of it gave less trouble than the household supposed. There was no struggle, no mark, nothing disturbed — a woman poisoned gently, by someone she trusted enough to let pour for her, on an evening when the whole house was occupied elsewhere and nobody thought to watch the one journey that mattered, a cup carried alone from the tray to the room where Lavinia waited.

I put aside first what the house wished me to look at. Nan never left the card table from ten o'clock, cutting for partners with the Colonel and Quill himself, and the cup went to Lavinia before that table was even made up; she could not have carried what she never touched. Wat Frew was gone an hour before the coffee was poured, bolted out by Mrs Gow's own hand and aboard his ship with two of his crew for company; whatever he owed Lavinia, he did not pay it that night. Aziz was in the billiard room with Xerxes from a quarter to ten, the two of them vouching for each other and neither of them near the dining room when the tray came through. Quill's case supplied the laudanum, which looked badly for him until one recalled he reported the shortfall himself and was, in any case, at the same card table as Nan from ten o'clock onward. And Cousin R, who watches and collects and says little, was fixed by the fire in plain view of the card players from nine o'clock, nowhere near the tray at ten. Every one of them had a place, and none of the places was the short walk between the dining room and the green sitting room at the one hour that counted.

That walk belonged to Effie alone, and Mrs Gow saw her make it, and took it for a kindness on the girl's own birthday. The laudanum did not come from Effie's own bottle, which would have been missed and traced back to her dressing case; it came from Quill's, left unlocked in the hall as it always is, and she wanted enough to be certain. Three lumps of sugar, which was how Lavinia liked it, covers the bitterness well enough. Having done it, she went back to the drawing room and proposed charades, and was gay and visible from half past ten until the body was found, which is a longer alibi than most murderers trouble to arrange, and a better one than most manage by accident.

The book on the window table did the rest of my work for me. Lavinia kept her accounts as carefully as any tradesman, and the last entry she ever made was headed E. S., with a sum of forty pounds and that day's date beneath it. She had been turning what Effie let fall in private sittings into a standing charge, the way she likely did with others less watched than a Colonel's ward; and she had that afternoon named a term Effie could not meet, having been refused money three times over, the last time only hours before. Effie did not think to take the book away, because she did not know it had been written that same hour. It is the sort of oversight that closes a file rather than complicating one.

What Effie owed to habits she could not govern, and what Lavinia made of the knowing of it, are matters the drawing room may speculate on as it pleases; my concern is narrower. She killed the woman who had priced her, on the evening meant to celebrate what she was becoming, because the reckoning had come due and she had no means to pay it honestly. I have charged her accordingly, and the file may close.

The method was quiet, the motive was plain,
and Effie shall never be spoken again.
Here Lavinia lies still, in a house full of eyes,
and none of them fancied a soul would be wise.
The whole sorry business we'll shelve with a shrug —
and sleep, and forget it, and think it no tug.