The Colonel had kept up his late wife's weekly séance faithfully, and this wet evening was no exception; the storm sat on the drive like an uninvited guest, and the household gathered in the drawing-room where the candles behaved. Lady Lavinia Loveless took her place at the head of the table, and from nine until past ten the company sat linked hand to hand, Mrs Gow attending the door.
Fifi — Fenella Swain, the Colonel's parlourmaid — was found afterward in the small linen-room off the back stair. She was seated upright in a caned chair, her hands folded in her lap, a candle burnt to its very socket before her. She had not fallen. She had been placed. On the little table at her elbow stood a cup of cocoa, gone cold and barely touched, and beside it a folded man's felt hat, set square, as though laid out for a caller who never came.
There was no mark of violence upon her and no disorder in the room; the linen was stacked as neatly as she had left it. Dr Quill, summoned from the port he had been promised, examined her and gave the plain cause: a sleeping draught, taken in the cocoa. A small blue bottle, the kind a chemist sends such a draught in, was found on the linen-room sill — rinsed, dried, empty, and wiped of any hand.
The arrangement was deliberate and pretty. The candle centred, the hat squared, the cup set just so; whoever left her there had taken time over the tableau. Mrs Gow said Fifi had carried up the séance tray at nine and was to have taken her own cocoa after — the kitchen cocoa-jug having served the whole company that evening.
Two small notes in the composition were wrong. The candle had been placed, certainly, but never watched low by a sitter's patience; it had guttered out untended. And the hat, squared as if by a practised hand, was set backward — its band to the front. The house medicine cupboard, off the same back stair, held a chemist's sleeping draught sent up for the Colonel's own poor nights; Mrs Gow found it lighter than it should have been the next morning. A man's felt hat, too, had gone missing from the front hall stand earlier that week — the Colonel had complained of it — and the hat set by Fifi matched the missing one.
The parlourmaid, it was known through the household, heard everything and repeated much; the family and its guests were wary of what she might carry from one room to another. Effie's calls of late had been dogged by chemist's chits and small debts, and she had been seen more than once at the back stair, where the medicine cupboard and the linen-room both stand.
The company accounted for itself with the ease of long habit. The Colonel presided at the séance table the whole evening under Lavinia's hand. Nan Pringle sat between him and Cousin R, her hands joined in the circle from nine until it broke; Cousin R sat on her far side — a man the household teases for his cold exactness, who cannot leave a mantel un-arranged. Lavinia led the sitting unbroken, and the linked hands vouched for her throughout. Xerxes Hartfield, the nabob, had arrived at half past eight and shut himself in the Colonel's study over papers, Mrs Gow bringing coffee twice; he joined the circle only near its close. Aziz, his companion, waited in the small parlour through that business, in Mrs Gow's sight when she passed, and came to the table at its end.
Captain Wat Frew came in from the storm near ten, dripping, and was given hot rum in the kitchen; he did not go above stairs until the alarm. Zane Swain — footman, and Fifi's twin, the two sharing one face — passed the evening below at the Colonel's plate, in Mrs Gow's company or on her errand from nine onward. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt was not at the Manor at all, keeping a penitential vigil at his own chapel across the city, his verger beside him, and did not stir before morning. Effie, alone, came and went between the drawing-room and the back of the house; she said she had stepped out for air more than once, and was not always at the table.
So the linen-room stood by its guttered candle: the parlourmaid upright in her chair, hands folded, the cold cocoa at her elbow and the backward hat squared beside it — a scene made to be looked at, and just slightly wrong.