For one evening Hartfield House set aside the English table entirely. The dishes were those of Aziz's own Morocco; brass lamps stood where the candelabra usually did; the company reclined upon low cushions rather than sitting up straight to their soup. Aziz himself presided at the head of it, and Xerxes — the nabob, the master of the house, ordinarily the sun of every room — for once contented himself with orbiting his companion rather than the reverse.
The dinner ran late and ran loose. Guests drifted between the dining-room, the smoking-room, and the hall, so that afterward no one could say with any certainty who had last gone down the little passage to the garden door.
It was in that passage — the narrow one between the Moorish dining-room and the garden door — that Aziz was found once the company had dispersed. He lay as though he had turned to speak to someone behind him. He had been struck down; the blow that killed him was dealt with a heavy walking-stick, and there was no blood to speak of.
The stick lay across the passage where it had fallen: a blackthorn, plain and heavy, the countryman's kind. It was not Aziz's. He carried no stick.
There was no disorder about him, no sign of a struggle, and nothing taken. His rings remained on his fingers, and the jewel he always wore at his throat — a gift of great price, worn always and never once removed, which the household had long ceased to think of as anything but simply his — lay untouched. No one that evening had moved to take it. Beyond him the garden door stood on the latch, letting in the cold; that passage was the one way from the dining-room to that door. Mabel, Xerxes's cheetah, had lain the whole evening at Aziz's cushion, and was found still there, undisturbed, when the body was discovered.
The company sorted itself readily enough.
Xerxes had been at the head of the guests all evening, save for Aziz himself; he carried the toasts in the dining-room and again in the smoking-room, and the company had him in view without a break until the alarm. The Colonel had been over cards in the smoking-room from the sweets onward, his two partners vouching for him unbroken; one of those partners was Dr Quill, the nervous physician and city coroner, so that the two men were each other's company from the sweets until the body was found. In the drawing-room, Lady Lavinia Loveless — the resident spiritualist — held a small sitting for three of the guests through the late part of the evening, and the sitters kept her in view by candlelight throughout. Two of those three were Effie Strange, the Colonel's bright young heir-presumptive, and the unplaceable Cousin R; both were named by the medium and by one another as present in the circle the whole time.
Captain Wat Frew, the smuggler who runs cargo for Xerxes, was about the house on his master's business — down in the cellar and the yard the back of the evening, checking a consignment landed that day, in the company of two of Xerxes's men who vouched for him across the whole death-window. It is to be noted only in passing that Wat had lately been pressing Xerxes for a larger cut, and hinting he knew things worth paying for; and that Xerxes was a poor sleeper who walked the house by night, and kept off his own chamber a small locked room to which he alone held the key.
Across the city, at Cruikshank Manor, Nan Pringle — the Colonel's poor relation — and the twin servants Fifi and Zane passed the whole night abed and vouched for by that household. None of the three came to Hartfield House at all.
There remained the Reverend Simeon Gaunt. He had been under the roof only these few days, as the guest of his half-sister Lavinia. He is a preacher against the sins of the flesh, a man who imposes correction as a duty and is known to feel no unease in the doing of it. He ate almost nothing at the Moorish table, rose before the sweets, and was not in the smoking-room afterward. He had gone out, he said, to walk and pray in the cold, and had come in by the garden door near the end of the evening.
Earlier that day a servant had shown him the wrong upstairs passage, and Gaunt had been some while alone on the floor of Xerxes's chamber before he was fetched down. He came to dinner altered, silent, and would not look at Aziz across the table.
As for the blackthorn: a heavy stick of just that countryman's sort had stood among the umbrellas in the hall all week. Guests and servants alike had handled it in passing, and no one could say whose hand had had it last.
The brass lamps guttered over the emptied cushions. Mabel had not stirred from the place where Aziz had sat, and in the cold passage the plain blackthorn lay where any hand in the house might have set it down.