Lady Lavinia Loveless came weekly to Cruikshank Manor to reach the Colonel's late wife, and this afternoon was to have been one such visit. The household had assembled, taken tea, and settled to wait upon the Colonel before the sitting could begin. It was in this interval — the tray between them, the room composed — that Lavinia was found in her chair by the tea-table, a half-drunk cup at her elbow. She had died where she sat.
Dr Tobias Quill, physician and coroner, was on hand, having taken his own port that afternoon rather than tea, as was his custom on his visits to the Manor. He set down the glass, examined the cup and the woman, and gave it plainly: poison, put into the tea by a deliberate hand. Not her nerve-tonic. Not any mishap of the sitting.
The cup Lavinia drank from was plain — unsugared. This was afterward remarked upon, for she never took it so; she took sugar as a rule. But before the tea she had announced that the spirits counselled against sugar that day, sugar being exactly wrong for Mercury in retrograde, and so she had asked, against her own habit, for a plain cup.
The sugared cup, then, was left over — and it fell to the Reverend Simeon Gaunt, Lavinia's half-brother, who drank it and made a plain face of distaste. It was well known of him that he takes his tea plain and never sugars it. His being present at all was unlooked-for; he had come only trailing his half-sister to the necromancy he deplores, and he does not, as a habit, take tea at Cruikshank Manor.
Nan Pringle, the poor relation who lives at the Manor, had poured and passed the tea, seated as she always is nearest the tea-service. The Colonel had not come to the table. He had been cornered in the hall and delayed by Effie Strange, who would not leave off talking, so the company sat waiting with the tray between them.
Of the others, an accounting was quickly made. Fifi and Zane, the Manor's maid and footman, were belowstairs together at their duties, vouched for the whole afternoon by Mrs Gow; Aziz had not come that day, having stayed at Hartfield House. Xerxes Hartfield, the nabob, was in the Colonel's study over papers with the door open, attended by Mrs Gow and her ledgers, and joined the room only at the outcry. Captain Wat Frew arrived late and was shown to the morning-room to wait, not admitted to the tea until after; Mrs Gow marked his coming in at the side door. Cousin R sat at the far end of the room by the window, taking no tea, watching as he does. Effie kept to the hall throughout, holding the Colonel away from the tray and its cups. Several of the company took no tea at all.
There was, for those who care to weigh such things, no shortage of matter about the table. Lavinia was reckoned secret-rich — she was told everyone's confidences — and consulted the spirits, in earnest, upon every matter great and small. Gaunt holds his half-sister's purse-strings and deplores her trade with the dead; he had said as much again that day. He had also, of late, been pressing Nan over and again to make her match with Xerxes and marry him — a harping she was plainly weary of.
The half-drunk plain cup stood at Lavinia's elbow. Across the table the Reverend was still sour at the sweetness of a cup he would never have chosen. And by the tray, uncounted, the poor relation gathered the things.