Colonel Cecil Cruikshank gave a farewell supper on a wet Tuesday night in the autumn of 1884, for Captain Wat Frew, who sailed on the morning tide. The dining room was warm, the corridors were not, and the east wing — where Nan Pringle kept her two small rooms — was colder still. The Colonel would not have the gas lit in the east passage after nine o'clock, calling it waste, so that anyone going from the morning-room to the east sitting-room walked it in the dark, and passed the door of the blue drawing-room on the way.
A little after eleven o'clock, Mrs Sib Gow went along that passage and found the east sitting-room door unlocked and standing an inch ajar, though the room had a lock and Nan had the key. Within, Nan Pringle sat upright in a chair drawn to the round card-table, strangled with a length of black silk cord. The cord was still about her throat, knotted once at the back.
The room had been arranged. Six chairs stood ringed about the table, correctly ranged, though only one of them was occupied. A cloth of dark stuff had been laid over the table, and upon it a single candle, burnt down perhaps an inch, and a small brass handbell. The gas had been turned off entirely at the bracket. Nan's hands lay palm-down on the cloth, one to either side, the fingers spread. Her sleeves were unrumpled. Nothing in the room was overturned, and the fire-irons stood as the maid had left them. Chalked across the dark cloth, in a neat hand, were the words THE SPIRITS ASKED, and the chalk-stub lay beside the bell.
The chalked letters ran across the grain of the cloth rather than along it, and the words sat off-centre, crowded to the left, as though set down in haste or in poor light. The black silk cord proved to be a curtain-tie from the blue drawing-room, one of a pair; its fellow still hung on its hook. Under the card-table lay a man's linen handkerchief, laundered and unmarked, of the sort the Manor keeps in quantity for the footmen. There was no other mark on Nan but the cord. Her chair was not scraped back, and the rug beneath it lay flat and true.
Dr Quill, who is coroner as well as the Colonel's port-drinking friend, put the death between half past nine and half past ten, and would not be moved narrower than that.
There is a lady who conducts sittings at the Manor for the late Mrs Cruikshank, and she conducts them on Fridays and no other day. Lady Lavinia Loveless keeps her sitting-things in a japanned box in the morning-room between Fridays; the box is kept locked, and she carries the key upon her chatelaine. The box was found unlocked, and the chalk-stub gone from it. No sitting had been convened that Tuesday; the box should have stayed shut until Friday. At a sitting proper, the medium sets the ring of chairs herself, and lays the hands of the company palm-up on the cloth, so that the spirits may find them. Nan had never in eleven years attended one. She thought them silly, and had said so to the Colonel's face.
Eleven years she had been at the Manor as the poor relation, with her two rooms and no money of her own; and yet she was one of the two names in the Colonel's will, the other being Effie Strange. Nan had a habit of knowing things and a habit of telling them. Twice in three years a servant had been turned off after she spoke quietly to the Colonel, and the household understood this about her. The Colonel had lately informed the company at large that he could not abide a scandal in the house, and that anyone who brought one under his roof would go out of it that same hour.
Between the fish and the game, Nan remarked across the table, in a light voice and to nobody in particular, that she had lately taken to keeping a little book of Fridays, and thought she should shortly show it to the Colonel. She was looking at no one when she said it. The Colonel said he was sure it would be very dull. Afterwards no little book was found in her rooms, though her writing-desk stood open and her papers were disarranged, and a pen had been left uncapped on the blotter.
Of Fridays there was this to be said, though nobody said it that night. On the three Fridays before the supper, Zane was absent from his post between ten o'clock and eleven o'clock, and on each of those nights Lady Lavinia Loveless stayed at the Manor after her sitting rather than driving home. Mrs Sib Gow noticed the first absence. Nan noticed all three, and wrote them down. It should also be recorded that Nan had loved Zane, in her own dry and unspoken way, for two years, and had never said so to him. Mrs Sib Gow knew it, as she knows most things.
The company that evening accounted for itself thus.
Lavinia — soft-voiced, close-standing, a hand always upon somebody's wrist — sat at table until the company rose about half past nine. She then went up alone to the morning-room, she says, to fetch a shawl, and was next seen by the fire in the long gallery. She cannot name the hour at which she came down again, and no one names it for her. She had asked the Colonel twice that autumn whether he might not sit twice a week instead of once, and had been refused. She is paid by the sitting.
Zane, footman and twin to the housemaid, correct to a fault and in terror of losing the Colonel's reference, served in the dining room and pantry through the whole of the supper. Mrs Sib Gow had him under her eye at the plate-cupboard from nine o'clock until the covers were cleared at ten o'clock, and counted the silver with him.
Fifi, housemaid and twin to the footman, brisk and unimpressed by faded gentlewomen, was belowstairs the whole evening with Mrs Sib Gow, who set her to the supper trays and had her within call from nine o'clock until well after ten o'clock. Asked about her brother's evenings, Fifi would say nothing whatever, and said so pleasantly, three times.
Wat, the guest of honour, remained at table and afterwards at the Colonel's decanter. Cousin R and Dr Quill sat with him from the rising of the table until near eleven o'clock; the port went round three times, and Wat did not leave the room. He had twice tried to buy something from Nan and been refused, and told the table cheerfully that the poor relation was the best-informed and worst-paying woman in Cairnholm, and that he had given her up as a bad venture a year since.
Cousin R, of no ascertainable family, blank-eyed and exact and never in a hurry, was likewise in the dining room over the port from the rising of the table until near eleven. The three of them vouch for one another.
Aziz, courteous and watchful, left the table with Xerxes at about half past nine and went out to the stable-yard, where the two of them stood over a lame carriage-horse with the Colonel's groom until a quarter past ten. The groom vouches for both. At the fish course Aziz had been told that Xerxes intends to marry in the spring; he set down his fork, said that it was excellent news, and did not eat again.
Effie, bright and hungry, sat at table and afterwards in the music-room with the Colonel, who wanted a tune. He sat with her from half past nine until a quarter to eleven, and says she never left the piano-stool for longer than it takes to turn a page. Her debts were being pressed; her creditor's man had called at the Manor twice that month and been shown out. She had not asked the Colonel for money.
The Reverend Simeon Gaunt was not at the Manor at all that night, keeping a penitential vigil in the vestry of St Mungo's from Vespers until dawn, with two churchwardens sitting in the porch.
The candle had gone out of itself, having nothing more to burn. Mrs Sib Gow drew the cloth off the table, folded it with the chalked words inward, and set the six chairs back against the wall where they belonged, one after another, until the little room was only a little room again.