Cruikshank Manor had come home from church that Sunday evening in good order, and the great dining room stood laid, lit, and at its fullest, the company assembling before dinner. It was a little before that hour, and short of the ringing of the bell, that Colonel Cecil Cruikshank was found at the foot of the main staircase, his neck broken by the fall. He lay as a man lies who has gone down the whole flight — straight, and finished, and quite without ceremony.
There was no blood, only a graze at the temple consistent with the fall, and no other mark upon him. At the top of the stair the carpet showed a rucked edge, where a heel might catch; a walking-stick lay two steps down, arrested in its own descent.
The Colonel's dinner pistols — which he kept loaded and to hand at every Sunday meal, and without which he never sat to eat — were still in their case on the sideboard, untouched.
Mrs Sib Gow, the housekeeper, set the times with her usual economy. The Colonel had gone up alone to change after church and was expected down at eight o'clock. The fall was heard, and the body found, at ten minutes before eight.
In the dust of the upper landing there lay a single set of gentleman's prints, crossing to the head of the stair beside the Colonel's own. The upper hall gives onto the Colonel's dressing-room and the back way down; a person might reach it from below without ever crossing the drawing-room. There was nothing arranged in the scene, no posed or penitent air, no token laid by, no seaman's knot, no draught nor glass overset — only a man at the bottom of his own stair.
The affairs of the house furnish the usual furniture. The Colonel and Xerxes Hartfield held the shipping venture jointly: the Colonel supplied the standing and the old name, Xerxes the capital and the trade — the one to be thought sound, the other to be thought respectable, and each in want of the other. That very week a syndicate had offered to buy out the Colonel's share outright, papers drawn and ready, needing only the parties' hands; the offer, once taken, would have left Xerxes holding the trade without the Colonel. The Colonel had for weeks pressed a match between Nan Pringle and Xerxes, urging old blood upon new money, and the banns had been spoken of as all but settled. He had lately grumbled, too, of changing his will, though nothing was signed; Nan's allowance stood as it was, and Effie Strange remained heir-presumptive.
Of the household's wider connections, a tidy accounting may be had. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt, Lavinia's half-brother, kept his own parish across the water that Sunday; Effie Strange lay abed at her lodgings in town; neither came near Cairnholm that night. Fifi Swain and Zane Swain, the twins in the Colonel's service, were belowstairs the length of the evening, laying and serving under Mrs Gow's eye and vouched by her throughout. For the back stair from the kitchen passage lets a person up to the Colonel's landing unseen from the drawing-room, and Mrs Gow keeps a plain account of who passed her below and who did not.
As to the company itself. Nan Pringle, the Colonel's poor relation, kept at the Manor on a humiliating allowance, had been in the drawing-room from a quarter past seven, in full view of Lavinia and Cousin R when the fall was heard. Cousin R, an unplaceable guest who orbits the household, sat there with her the whole while. Lady Lavinia Loveless, the medium the Colonel retained to sit for his late wife, made the third of that party from a quarter past seven, and was there when the sound came.
Xerxes Hartfield, the nabob, had arrived before church-end and said he was about the house upon the venture's papers before dinner; he was not in the drawing-room when the fall was heard. Aziz, his companion, who had come out with him, was below in the kitchen passage with Mrs Gow, asking after the port from half past seven to the alarm, and vouched by her throughout. Captain Wat Frew, a smuggling seaman, had called upon the Colonel that afternoon, but was seen off the premises and down at the harbour by Mrs Gow's kitchen girl well before seven, gone from the house before the hour. And Dr Tobias Quill, physician and coroner, who dined at the Manor by long habit, stood in the dining-room decanting the Colonel's port with a footman at his elbow from half past seven to the alarm.
So the Colonel lies straight at the foot of his own stair, the pistols he never dined without still cased and cold on the sideboard, and the dinner bell not yet rung.