Colonel Cecil Cruikshank, master of Cruikshank Manor, was found upon the garden path after dinner, laid out beneath the marble figure of a Roman general — a stout gentleman in stone who had, for many contented years, presided upon his plinth beside the yew walk. On the evening in question he had come down. The Colonel, standing where the path was narrowest, had been crushed where he stood, and the general now lay across him in the dusk.
That the general had not toppled of his own accord was plain to anyone who cared to look, and several did. The plinth had not so much crumbled as been persuaded. The earth at its base had been dug out on one side and packed back loose; and half-buried in the soil lay a length of stout cord, running off in a businesslike manner toward the shrubbery. The general, in short, had been assisted.
There was, besides, a curiosity in the Colonel's coat pocket: a small clasped ledger, bound in salt-stained leather, that had no business being there at all, for it was not his. Its brass clasp was still latched. Its marker-ribbon lay flat and wholly undisturbed between the same two pages, as though no hand had ever parted them.
The book belonged to Captain Wat Frew. When it was lifted from the pocket it fell open of itself to a page that bore, in an ornate and confident hand, the words: 'Captain Wat Frew, Master of the Seas, whom no tempest hath humbled...' At dinner the Colonel had remarked of the little volume that he had picked it up off the floor and 'meant to look it over later.' He had not looked it over. Later had proved inconvenient.
The path, it should be said, lies out of sight of the house; and whoever stood at the shrubbery end of the cord need never have come within speaking distance of the Colonel at all.
The book's earlier travels were more sociable. Earlier that evening Fifi, the housemaid — a great and untiring collector of the household's business — had been discovered at Wat's ledger, meaning to read it, certain it held the secrets of the house. Zane, the footman, came upon her to put his port question; and Fifi, flustered, dropped the ledger and fled it, leaving the thing on the floor of the passage. The Colonel came by, pocketed it as an idle curiosity, and thought no more of it. Zane's own errand was a small and dutiful one: he wished Fifi's opinion whether the 10-year port from the last shipment would serve for Dr Quill, or whether he ought to fetch the 30-year from the cellar against the doctor's coming birthday, the doctor being fond of his Porto.
As to what the book held: those few who have ever got a look inside Wat's ledger report it is no register of secrets whatever, but page upon page of grandiose memoir in his own hand, glorifying his own exploits — a thing openly laughed at by those who have read it. His real dealings, it is said, he keeps written nowhere at all, but only in his head. Wat, for his part, bears his tall tales in deadly earnest and colors at the least mockery; and it is quietly held among the company that he half wishes he were Xerxes, and cannot abide being laughed at.
The household that evening had assembled, as it did each week, for the séance held on behalf of the late Mrs Cruikshank. The Colonel had lately been drawing Nan and Xerxes toward a marriage that would settle the succession; his will, however, was not yet altered, and Nan's allowance stood exactly as before. Effie, the Colonel's bright young heir-presumptive, was expected, but sent word she was kept in town, and did not come. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt, Lavinia's half-brother, was not at the Manor at all; he kept to his own parish through the night and was seen there, disapproving of the séance from a proper distance.
Of those present, the accounts arranged themselves tidily. Nan sat in the drawing room with Lavinia and the séance party through the whole interval after dinner, vouched for by the company and by Mrs Gow. Lady Lavinia Loveless, the medium whom the Colonel paid to summon his late wife each week, kept her place at the séance table the entire while. Cousin R, that unplaceable guest who orbits the household and observes it, was in the conservatory adjoining the drawing room, within sight of the séance party throughout. Xerxes Hartfield, the nabob — the Colonel's partner and rival in a shipping venture — sat in the study over the venture papers with Aziz; the two vouched for one another and were brought coffee there by Mrs Gow. Dr Quill, the physician and coroner, a nervous man made uneasy by the Colonel's loud temper and his Sunday pistols, remained in the dining room over the decanter, part of the time in Zane's company and seen by Mrs Gow. Zane himself moved between cellar, dining room, and pantry on service, vouched for throughout. Fifi's own comings and goings belowstairs were likewise accounted for by Mrs Gow — including the spell when she was startled at the Captain's ledger and left it upon the floor.
Only Captain Wat Frew, at the Manor that evening upon business conducted through Xerxes, was about the grounds and the terrace through the evening, and was not vouched for during the interval after dinner, when the household had scattered to its several rooms.
The marble general lies face-down across the path in the dusk, one hand still gesturing at the sky; and in the dead Colonel's pocket, a little salt-stained book sits clasped and unread, its ribbon flat between two pages of somebody's boundless praise of himself.