Captain Wat Frew had been lodged in the guest quarters of Hartfield House against an urgent shipping matter to be settled with Xerxes the following morning; and there, on a cool spring evening, he was found at rest in his chair, the rum bottle set companionably at his elbow. There was no wound upon him. He had simply declined to continue, which — for a man of his trade — was thought a trifle abrupt.
The rum accounted for it. Into that single bottle had gone laudanum in a quantity no habit, however seasoned, could withstand — weeks of any doctor's dispensing, poured down into one night's measure. The Captain had been poisoned; and if he objected, he did so silently.
Upon the table lay several things worth the noticing. A packet of money sat untouched — a courtesy the Captain had, on this occasion, not lived to pocket. His private stock-book lay open beside it, and here the arithmetic grew interesting: against a withdrawal of a month's supply of opium, no payment was entered. The strongbox in the guest quarters was short by exactly that quantity. What the ledger recorded as sold, some hand had removed and no coin had answered for. And the sum in the untouched packet agreed, to the figure, with the amount entered against Lady Lavinia's account in the Captain's book.
The house at Hartfield is honestly kept. The porter held the front door and the bell-board the whole evening through, and his account is a tidy one. Dr Quill was admitted shortly after four o'clock and gone within the half-hour. The Captain's rum was carried up at six o'clock, at which hour Wat was demonstrably alive and uncivil about the lateness of it. The Reverend Gaunt was admitted at half past seven. No other caller came to the front all evening. But the guest quarters may also be reached from the garden by the service stair, which runs up past no one's notice and lies quite outside the porter's view.
Of those who might have wished the Captain a shorter voyage, the company was various.
Dr Tobias Quill, physician and coroner, is reckoned the ablest compounder in Cairnholm — a distinction that in the present matter did him no comfort. By the porter's book he came and went in the afternoon. He had lately asked Wat to bring back a large shipment of port-wine from the Douro on his next run, the commission duly entered in the sailing-book. His dispensing log enters laudanum against several of the company — Miss Strange, Mr Hartfield, and Lady Lavinia among them — and his cabinet, when counted against the book, agreed to the drachm.
Lady Lavinia Loveless, medium and resident of the house, passed the evening in her rooms. Through the door she was heard reproaching her late husband, Mr George Marsh, with how ill he had used her in life, and professing herself well satisfied to have him in an early grave — an occasional custom of hers, and unremarkable to any who knew the man. Her bell rang for tea at seven o'clock. Her cordial is a drop-vial of Dr Quill's dispensing.
The Reverend Simeon Gaunt, a flagellant cleric and Lavinia's half-brother, was admitted at the front at half past seven. He gives out that he came to return an accidental overpayment of tithe — an account which asks the household to imagine Wat in a pew.
Effie Strange, the bright young thing and heir-presumptive to Colonel Cruikshank, had given her afternoon to the dressmaker's, an errand so usual that nobody thought to question it. The dressmaker's, however, stood shut that day for a funeral; told so, Effie replied that she had found it shut herself — what a waste of an afternoon. She had lately settled a small debt with a friend, in kind.
Xerxes Hartfield, the nabob and the Captain's employer, played badminton through the afternoon with Aziz and whist at the club into the evening; Wat was his man, and lodged in the house against their business of the morning. Aziz, his companion and a resident of the house, kept him company at both diversions.
As for the party at Cruikshank Manor: Nan, Fifi, Zane, and Cousin R passed the day there with the Colonel, and Cousin R and the Colonel were heard disputing Home Rule — Cousin R against it with relish, the Colonel moderately against. The whole party is vouched for by the household.
And so the Captain sat at his ease in his chair, the rum at his elbow; a packet of money untouched upon the table, and beside it the stock-book open at a withdrawal no one had paid for.