Captain Wat Frew, the smuggler who ran Xerxes Hartfield's cargo, was found after midnight in the disused chapel-room off the east passage, laid out upon the cold flags before the little altar. He had left the supper-room shortly after ten o'clock, remarking that he had an appointment to keep, and he had kept it, after a fashion.
He had been beaten with a knotted cord — a flagellant's scourge — which lay coiled beside him, its knots dark. There was no other weapon in the room. Nothing had been taken; his heavy purse and his notebook, the two documents of his whole existence, lay untouched upon him, which for a man in his line of work was very nearly an insult.
Some hand had attended to him afterward. His own were folded upon his breast, his coat drawn straight, so that he lay as decently as any gentleman at his lying-in. A stub of candle burned at the altar. Chalked faintly on the flagstone above his head was a single word: PENITENT.
Dr Tobias Quill, physician to the living and coroner to the rest, was summoned to say what he could. He set the death between eleven o'clock and midnight, and he was particular that the marks upon Wat were those of a flogging, and neither of a fall nor of a blade. This was not, he observed, a room the household used. It was cold, long shut, and lay at the far end of the east passage, past the linen-room, a good distance from the supper-room and further still from the séance parlour. One did not wander there by accident.
The scourge itself deserved a word. It was of the plaited, weighted kind a flagellant carries for the discipline of his own flesh — not a length of rope from the house stores, nor any of the tarred cord a sailor keeps about him. And whoever had done the laying-out — the folded hands, the smoothed coat, the lit candle, the careful chalked word — had done it after death, unhurried, and quite without the anxiety of a person expecting to be caught at it.
It is only fair to note that a great many people in Cairnholm might have wished Captain Frew a poorer supper. He made his living twice over: once from Xerxes Hartfield's cargo, and once from the private papers, debts, and secrets of half the town, which he sold back to their owners at his own figure. He was owed money or silence by nearly everyone beneath that roof.
Effie Strange, for one, bought her comfort from Wat and from no other; his was the only supply, and he had lately been withholding a delivery to raise his price, so that she had been heard begging him for it, sharp and frightened. Colonel Cruikshank had been paying Wat to keep quiet about a private grief and certain payments he would not have named at table; he had of late called the Captain a rat to his face and spoken of the law. And Lady Lavinia had her own reasons to fear his tongue, for Wat held some knowledge touching her stage career and her sittings alike.
Nor had the theme gone unremarked over the soup. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt — a cleric who scourges his own flesh in penance, and Lavinia's half-brother besides — had at supper laid out Wat's whole manner of living as a catalogue of sin, lending and squeezing and supplying to the weak by design, and had asked the assembled table who among them would answer for such a man's soul. It was thought rather a heavy question for the fish course.
The accounting of persons, when it came, was tidy. Xerxes sat at the head of his own table until the party rose near eleven, and thereafter kept the smoking-room with his cheetah, Mabel, at his feet, his man serving him there without a break until the alarm. Aziz, who keeps the house, directed the late supper and then attended Xerxes from eleven onward, in and out with the tray, vouched for by his host and the footman. The Colonel sat with them, brandy in hand, from eleven till the discovery.
In the séance parlour, Lady Lavinia held a sitting from a little after eleven, three guests joined hands with her in a closed circle until the alarm. Dr Quill was one of them; Effie was another, restless and unwell but, the sitters agree, never once loosing her neighbours' hands. Gaunt alone kept no company: he had declined the sitting and withdrawn to pray by himself, and no other person set eyes on him between the party's rising and the discovery.
Those who might have completed the table were elsewhere entirely. Nan Pringle and Cousin R were expected but sent word they would not come; Fifi and Zane, the twins, passed the whole night across the water at Cruikshank Manor, abed and vouched for by that household. None of the four set foot in Hartfield House that night.
And so the chapel-room, cold and orderly: a spent candle, a coiled cord, a man laid out with folded hands beneath a single chalked word — everything set right except the fact of the death itself.