Summary. The scandal in it is a small one, and it will not need dressing up: it was Lavinia, and she did it for the oldest reason there is, that a woman loved a man who kept leaving her, and could not bear to be left a third time. Here is how I came to it.

The Reckoning. There was no wound on the footman Zane and no struggle in the room, which told me a good deal by itself. A man does not lie still and undisturbed while a stranger smothers him. He lies still for someone he has let come close — an embrace, not an attack. That narrows the field considerably, and it narrows it further when you set the household's own accounting against the hour. The Colonel never left his tally-sheets; Mrs Gow, who watched him the whole evening over the plate, will swear to it, and in any case he had neither reason nor opportunity to be alone with a footman he thought the model of his calling. Aziz sat the entire interval in the drawing-room with Xerxes and Cousin R, the three of them never out of one another's sight, and Zane threatened nothing of Xerxes's affairs that might have moved him to harm. Quill was at his port in the same room the same hour, served there by Mrs Gow's own hand, and had nothing in him to fear from a footman who troubled no one. Each of them is accounted for by a servant with no reason to lie, and each of them, besides, lacked any quarrel with the dead man worth the name.

That left the breakfast room itself, and the one person the household could not vouch for: Lavinia, alone in her sitting-room the whole of the interval, with a door onto that very passage. The note on the mantel was hers and made no pretence otherwise — I shall not ask a fourth time — which is not the sentence of a woman surprised by a stranger's crime. And the arranging of the body, which the house first took for a genuine manifestation, or else some outsider's cruel imitation of her trade to see her hanged for it, was in fact her own hand, and a clumsy one. She keeps, at her weekly table, a salt-ring closed without a gap and coins laid heads-up; every regular sitter will tell you so. Here the ring was broken and abandoned half-drawn, and the coins were laid heads-down. That is not a rival's forgery, done cool and careful to damn her. That is Lavinia's own ritual, performed by Lavinia herself, in the dark, in haste, with her hands not quite steady — which is to say, in grief, not in craft. The laudanum by the hearth, and the phial lifted and set down again on the felt, want no more explanation than a woman needing her nerve returned to her before or after the thing was done.

The attachment between them was of long standing and had survived, on and off, matters of class and secrecy that would have ruined them both had it come to light; I will not set out its particulars, as they are nobody's business but the two who kept it. What matters is only this: Zane was the one man in that house who wanted her for herself, and who kept leaving her all the same, and she had built the whole of what she was — a woman past her best years, living on being desired — upon not being able to bear that a third time. He came to end it once more. She let him come close, as a woman lets a man come close who she still loves, and she smothered him in that closeness, and then, because it was the only ceremony she knew, she tried to send him off as she sends off the dead at her own table, and got the ritual wrong because her hands were shaking and her heart was not in the craft, only in the loss. It is the third such reckoning I have written this twelvemonth, by my count, and I confess I had nearly set aside the coins as a trifle before I saw what they meant. She is charged, and the file is closed.

Lavinia arranged the poor fellow with care,
And Zane was left sitting quite still in his chair.
The candle-end fluttered beside him all night,
While spirits were blamed for the terrible sight.
We ought to be watchful, and never draw near,
But fondness, of course, is a duty, my dear.