Summary. It was Cousin R, and he killed her not for money nor for spite but because her ending, arranged on the very day she had announced it in talk, made the finer composition; here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. The physician's own reading gives the method its shape. Dr Quill found no violence upon her, only a measured and tasteless dose in the claret, and his own travelling case stood open on that same sideboard, laudanum and sleeping-draughts among the rest, for any hand passing to help itself. No arrangement was made of her afterward, no tableau left for admiration. That absence of staging is itself a kind of signature, once you know the man: he does not need to compose the room when the woman has already composed herself for him. The dose was ordinary. Anyone who crossed to the sideboard might have added it. Not many had reason to.

Gaunt is cleared by his own abstinence — he drank water throughout, and the servants confirm it without a flicker; a man who never touches the claret cannot poison it. Effie is cleared by Aziz, and Aziz by Effie, the two of them fixed together at the far hamper across the whole interval in which the claret went round and was drunk; neither left the other's sight. Nan crossed to the sideboard once, for her own plate, and by then Lavinia's glass had already gone out on the tray; and in any case her sort of grievance runs to exposure and gossip, not to a measured dose for a woman she held no real quarrel with. Each of them falls away on a plain fact, not on my opinion of their character.

That leaves Cousin R, who had been much in Lavinia's company that week, drawing her out — by every account — upon her fame, her fading custom, and that grand last sitting she meant to give when the moment suited. She told the gallery, that very afternoon, that the moment had very nearly come. He is a man who reads a room the way another reads a ledger, and I have come to think he reads people the same way: collects them, studies the shape of a life, and prefers, where he can arrange it, that the shape be finished properly. A faded grande dame, self-billed for her own last curtain — he did not care to wait for her to give it. He gave it to her instead, at the sideboard, in the crowd of rugs and hampers, with an ordinary dose and no flourish at all, because the flourish was hers already and needed no adding to.

I make it the third this twelvemonth, by my count, and this house no stranger to my visits. He does not deny the claret, only what he did at it; the physician's dose and the servants' word between them leave him nowhere to stand. I have charged him accordingly, and the file may close.

Cousin R crossed the room with practised grace
And Lavinia left no stain upon the place
The rugs went down, the hampers passed along
A little draught made all the silence wrong
The lesson is to watch the cordial poured
Which ought, of course, to be politely ignored