Captain Wat Frew sailed on the morning tide, and so on a wet October night in 1884 the long dining room at Hartfield House was laid in his honour, with a good deal of civility and a great deal of wine. It is the custom of such evenings that the company should scatter afterwards, and scatter it duly did — to the smoking room, to the conservatory, to the card table — leaving the dining room empty from half past eleven, and the rain going quietly on at every pane in the house.
At ten minutes past midnight Aziz was found in the small conservatory off the dining room. He lay on the wicker settee as a man lies who has been laid there, and a velvet cushion had been set neatly across his face — set, one must say, rather than dropped, the corners square to his shoulders. He was quite dead. There was no blood. Nothing had been overturned. The pot of ferns at his elbow stood exactly as the gardener had left it that afternoon, not a frond bent, not a grain of earth upon the tiles.
Dr Tobias Quill was fetched from the card table and gave his opinion within the quarter hour: laudanum in quantity, taken perhaps an hour before, and then the cushion. A man so dosed, he said, could not have lifted a hand. He said it twice, being nervous of the house, and then sat down.
At Aziz's throat, as at his throat every day for four years, hung a large sapphire on a plain gold chain — the Maharaja's Sapphire, as Xerxes calls it. Xerxes had given it to him on their return from Bombay, and Aziz, who has no fortune of his own and owns nothing else worth a tenth of it, had never once offered to sell. It was still at his throat when he was found. The chain was unbroken.
In the pocket of his coat, however, was a velvet slip-case, empty, of the kind made to hold a single stone. It was not the case the sapphire is kept in. That one lies in Xerxes's dressing room; it was found there, and it was likewise empty. Aziz kept the household keys, that dressing-room key among them, and was by everybody's account the only person besides Xerxes who might go into the room at will.
His champagne glass stood on the conservatory sill, drained to a smear. The dregs were sweetish and clouded; no other glass in the room showed anything of the sort. Beside it lay a dish of marrons glacés from the sweets tray, three of them uneaten. Aziz had taken no wine at table all evening. He took only sweets, and it was Effie who carried the tray round after the toast at ten o'clock.
The conservatory door to the garden was bolted from within. The only other way in is through the dining room, where Mabel, Xerxes's cheetah, lay chained at the hearth the whole night through. Xerxes had fed her himself at eleven o'clock, before the household in the smoking room. She had not moved, nor made any sound, all evening. Half under the settee lay a single bead of jet from a woman's evening beading; Effie, Lavinia and Nan all wore jet that night, as does half of Cairnholm in October.
Twice this year a gentleman jeweller in Argyle Street had made discreet enquiry, on behalf of a client, whether the Maharaja's Sapphire might be had. Aziz refused both times and did not trouble Xerxes about it. He mentioned the second refusal at supper, lightly, and laughed.
At half past eleven the butler saw Aziz crossing the hall toward the conservatory, alone, carrying a glass. He was entirely steady and bid the butler goodnight.
Of the company, Effie Strange had been in tremendous form; three separate people said so without being asked. She is heir-presumptive to Colonel Cecil Cruikshank and a great favourite of the house. She carried the sweets tray, she sang twice, and she was at the drawing-room piano until about half past eleven, after which nobody saw her at all until she came into the card room at five and twenty past midnight, saying she had been lying down with her head. Her affairs are known to be embarrassed: a note of hand for four hundred pounds falls due on the first of November, and the Colonel has said plainly, before witnesses at Cruikshank Manor, that he will not meet it a third time.
The Colonel himself had come up on shipping business — he holds the partnership with Xerxes — and disapproved of the whole occasion from the soup onward. He spoke to Aziz twice, both times about freight. From twenty past eleven until the alarm he sat at the card table in the smoking room with Quill, Cousin R and Xerxes; four hands of whist were played and the score kept in his own hand. The sheet survives, the four players named at its head, begun at twenty past eleven and set down at the alarm.
Nan Pringle, poor relation to the Colonel and generally not remarked upon, had spent the evening fetching things for other people, and from a little after eleven sat by the smoking-room fire with her needlework, in full sight of the card table. Cousin R and Quill both placed her there without being asked. Cousin R had come for the supper and stayed for the whist, and observed afterwards that the evening had been an unusually well-composed one. Nobody asked him what he meant.
In the drawing room, Lady Lavinia Loveless — resident at Hartfield House this season — had conducted a short sitting for the Captain's safe passage from ten o'clock to a quarter past eleven, with Wat, Gaunt and Effie present. Aziz would not sit for her and had said so pleasantly. Afterwards Lavinia remained in the drawing room with Wat and Gaunt until the alarm. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt, her half-brother, had eaten nothing at supper and drunk water, and passed from his half-sister's sitting directly into an argument with Wat about the Barbary trade; both of them place him there continuously.
Wat had been drinking to the tide since seven. He is owed money by nearly everybody at that table, and had lately dunned Aziz for eleven pounds, which Aziz paid in coin out of the household purse rather than trouble Xerxes. Quill's dispensary, it should be said, supplies laudanum to half the households in Cairnholm, Hartfield House among them: a bottle in the still-room, a bottle in Xerxes's dressing room against his sleeplessness, and Effie with a standing prescription of her own. Fifi and Zane Swain were not there at all; the twins were kept back at Cruikshank Manor by the Colonel's absence, to close the house, and the housekeeper had them both abed by ten and vouches for them.
The company stood about the conservatory in their evening clothes while the rain went on at the glass. Xerxes lifted the chain from Aziz's throat, looked at the sapphire a long moment, and put it back exactly where it had been. Mabel, at the hearth beyond the door, did not raise her head.