Cruikshank Manor kept its customs even on a raw autumn evening, and the chief of these was the Colonel's weekly séance for his late wife. The port was poured, the drawing-room warmed, and the chapel-cold east wing left to go dark early, as it always did. What was not customary was the discovery, later, of Nan Pringle in that same east wing.
She lay in the manor's disused chapel — newly reconsecrated, and colder for it — stretched straight upon the flagstones, her hands folded upon her breast as though some careful attendant had composed her for a wake. Nan had been the Colonel's poor relation, the keeper of his accounts and the watcher of his household, and she had never in life been arranged by anyone. She had been struck once, from behind, low at the back of the head. There was no struggle to remark upon; her dress was unrumpled, nothing was overturned, and the neatness of her repose was plainly the work of a hand that had taken its time. Someone had troubled to fold those hands.
Across them lay a short iron flagellant's discipline — a knotted penance-scourge with a weighted handle. It was not hers.
By her head rested an open pocket-Testament, turned to a marked passage that condemned the covetous and the bearer of false witness against his neighbour; a single line was scored beneath it in pencil. Beside her, fallen open, lay Nan's own memorandum-book. Its final pages held a close, cramped column of dated notes — who owed the Colonel, who had lied to him, who came and went by the servants' stair and at what hour: a private register of the household's failings, kept in a careful clerk's hand.
The chapel candles had burned to their sockets and gone out. The flagstones beneath her were dry, though it had rained hard from ten o'clock; she had not come in from the yard.
It fell to Mrs Gow, the Colonel's housekeeper, to account for the evening, and she did so with the certainty of one who had watched the doors. The séance had been set in the drawing-room from half past eight, and the company sat together there until the parlour clock struck ten, when they dispersed.
Of that company there was no shortage. The Colonel presided at the head of the table, unmoving and querulous; Mrs Gow and Lady Lavinia Loveless — the medium engaged for the sitting — both placed him there the full hour. Xerxes Hartfield, the nabob come on a matter of business, sat at Aziz's side, the pair having arrived together and left together at ten. Cousin R kept his chair across from Lavinia, vouched by the medium and the housekeeper alike. Dr Tobias Quill sat the whole hour and was the first the Colonel sent for once Nan was found. Zane Swain attended the séance-room door and carried the tapers, marked there through the sitting and belowstairs after with his twin, Fifi, who had laid the late supper trays under Mrs Gow's eye from before the séance until well past ten. Captain Wat Frew, who traded in the household's debts and secrets, had come late, kept to the gun-room with a bottle, and did not join the circle; Mrs Gow carried him his drink and marked him there alone. Effie Strange — co-heir with Nan to the Colonel's estate, a fact neither woman had troubled to hide — passed the night in the city on her creditors' business, unsummoned and vouched for at her lodgings.
One guest kept apart. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt, a flagellant cleric, had been three days at the manor to bless and reconsecrate the east-wing chapel, and each night he took his own austere devotions there while the household kept other rooms. He had excused himself from the séance, judging such spiritism profane, and no one sat with him. The scourge upon Nan's folded hands was his own instrument of penance, which he carried always; he had been seen with it at his devotions only the previous evening.
Certain small matters had been remarked. Two nights before, Nan had shown the Colonel her memorandum-book and named, one by one, those who cheated or lied to him; the Colonel had waved her off. She had been seen afterward reading her list aloud to Gaunt in the chapel doorway, as one confides in a fellow keeper of accounts — for the two were of a kind, both watchful, both severe, both given to reckoning up the sins of a house. The household had said, half in jest, that the poor relation and the flagellant priest kept the same ledger. And the pencil that scored the line in the pocket-Testament matched the notes in no hand but the marker's own devotional one.
The chapel stood cold and reconsecrated, its new-blessed flagstones dry beneath the folded hands; the candles guttered out, the little ledger of the household's sins fallen open beside a woman laid out as neatly as a saint on a tomb.