Summary. It was the Reverend Simeon Gaunt, and he did it not for gain nor for fear of exposure but as a judgment he had appointed to himself — the punishment of a man he believed guilty of a plain and grievous abomination, the making of a corpse into a subject for art. Here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. The physician's twenty minutes held from the first: the house went dark for the lantern at nine and stayed dark until twenty past, and Cousin R died somewhere inside that stretch. The question was never when, only who could be spared from a lit room or a witnessed corridor to do it. Nan was in the still-room the whole while, passed twice by Mrs Gow and twice called on by Fifi for sugar; she never left it. Wat sat the full twenty minutes beside Dr Quill, who had to shift his own knees twice to make room for the man, and vouches for him entire. Aziz sat gripped at the arm by Xerxes throughout, who says plainly he did not stir — and in any case R had made no move against him, held nothing over him, threatened him with nothing; there was no cause for Aziz to pre-empt a blow that was never coming. Effie had quit the drawing-room before the lamps went down and was in the billiard-room with Lavinia the whole time, the two vouching for each other and Mrs Gow hearing the balls run through the wall; nor could it have been her hand at the Testament, for the verse was marked in pencil, and Effie marks her verses in ink, always. Mrs Gow, posted in the corridor the whole twenty minutes to keep the draught out, saw one man pass toward the chapel stair, and only one. It was Gaunt.

He had fetched his own scourge from the vestry that afternoon, the vestry door being unlocked as it always is, and carried it under his coat to a house he had never before consented to dine in, on an invitation the Colonel had pressed twice in writing. He heard R announce, over the soup and again over the joint, his wish to study the grave-clothes of the late Mrs Cruikshank, and he had already had a fortnight of R following him about the parish with a pencil, asking at what point in a scourging pain becomes composition. When the lamps went down for the slides he was gone from his chair within the minute, down the darkened corridor and up the chapel stair, where he emptied the censer into his handkerchief before he ever reached the morning-room. What followed was not a struggle — nothing overturned, the collar and cuffs undisturbed — because R never raised a hand against it. It was a penance imposed on a man who did not resist his penance-giver, which is a different thing again from a killing done in panic or in self-defence. Gaunt beat him to death with the five-knotted cord, folded his hands upon his breast, dressed him in the ash he had carried from the chapel, and laid his own Testament open at the wages of sin, the verse marked in his own pencil. He set the scourge across the fender for anyone to find, went back down by the chapel stair trailing a little of what ash remained, and was in his seat, at his prayers as he says, before the lamps came up.

The house's first thought — that R's collecting had finally caught somebody out, and that whoever it caught had dressed the scene in Gaunt's manner to hang it on the obvious flagellant — falls on a plain fact nobody disputed: R never traded on what he held. His japanned box of tags and relics was a cabinet, not a ledger; he collected the dead, he did not threaten the living with them. There was nothing in his possession to silence. What there was, was a man who tagged a lock of hair and a milk tooth as specimens, who sketched a laid-out corpse with notes in the margin on the arrangement of the hands, who asked a clergyman over the soup when pain stops being pain and starts being composition. To Gaunt this was not a harmless oddity of a harmless guest. It was the treatment of the dead, and by extension of death itself, as material — a use of God's ground that he took to be an offense against it, and no rank of the house nor obscurity of the man's connections excused it in his eyes. He killed as sentence, not as silencing, and he dressed the body afterward in the very idiom R had praised at dinner — composed, arranged, a still-life — so that the desecrator became, in the end, the specimen.

I had nearly set aside one small thing, and it is the thing that closes the file rather than merely furnishing it: the ash on the body did not come from the cold grate in the morning-room, which had not held a fire in a week, but from the chapel censer, found empty that evening and matched by the thin trail on the stair. A man improvising with what lay to hand would have found none there to use. A man who meant to dress a corpse in consecrated ash had thought of it beforehand, and brought his implements to a house he had never before agreed to enter as a guest.

He does not deny it, nor does he ask for mercy in the telling; he says only that he expects his Testament to be read out at the trial, and seems to want it. This makes the third this twelvemonth, by my count, and I do not look forward to being called back to Cruikshank Manor a fourth time. The charge is laid, and the file may close.

They'll whisper a fortnight the hand it was cold,
that Gaunt was in it, the whole of it told.
And Cousin R, 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.