Cruikshank Manor keeps a cellar of some pretension, and in the autumn of 1884, on a wet evening in which the boots of the county came in streaming, the Colonel had it opened for the laying down of a vintage brought up that afternoon from the harbour. The company were to come down by candle and judge it. The stair to the cellar is stone, steep, and turns once at a half-landing, so that a person descending is invisible from the cellar floor until the turn is passed — an arrangement the Colonel had always thought handsome and had never once thought about.
The party assembled below at 9:00. The Colonel himself conducted matters, loud in the bin-aisle and choleric on the subject of the second bin. Cousin R, a guest of no stated county, sat on the bin-ledge saying nothing and gathering everything. Lavinia had come down at 9:02 upon Cousin R's arm, having arrived early for Friday and stayed for the port. Effie sat on the cellar steps below the turn, where she was in everybody's sight for the whole of it. Wat, who had brought the vintage up himself, stood by to see it judged. Quill was there also, and drank nothing.
Above stairs the house was otherwise disposed. Xerxes was in the Colonel's business room upon a matter of a venture, with Aziz beside him holding himself apart from the tasting, and the Colonel's clerk with them both from 8:50 onward. Fifi was in the linen-room from 8:40, sorting the week's wash with a second maid. Zane carried bottles between the cellar door and the cellar table without pause from 9:05. Mrs Gow, the Colonel's housekeeper, stood at the cellar door from 9:05 until the noise came, sending down bottles as they were called for, and she is a woman who names every person who passed her, and the times: Zane at 9:12, at 9:15, and at 9:18.
At 9:12 Nan went up alone to fetch the Colonel's tasting book from the gun-room. She was heard upon the stair. The gun-room opens off the passage at the head of the cellar stair, and that passage is otherwise blind: a person standing in it is out of sight of the cellar and out of sight of the hall. At 9:14 Wat went out through the harbour hatch to his cart, where the Colonel's groom had him in view until after the noise. At 9:14 also, Quill went up the stair, remarking that he had left his spectacle-case above.
Then the noise.
Nan was found at the foot of the cellar stair at 9:20. She lay tidily on her side, as though she had been set down rather than dropped, her neck broken and her candle gone out beside her. There was no other mark upon her. Her key-ring lay four steps above her, and the cellar door at the top stood open. She had carried the household keys these thirty years as a matter of course; nobody went to the cellar without her or Mrs Gow.
Quill came down again at 9:22, being the nearest thing to a coroner Cairnholm keeps, and examined her where she lay, and pronounced a fall. His hands shook so that he could not hold the candle steady, and Mrs Gow held it for him while he did it.
The decanted vintage stood untouched upon the cellar table with eight glasses set out and none poured. The company had been still choosing the second bin when the noise came.
At the head of the stair, upon the flagstone, lay a small screw of paper, empty, of the sort a chemist folds a powder into. It was dry, though the passage floor was damp from the boots of the evening.
Quill's spectacle-case was afterwards found in his own coat pocket, where it had been all evening. Quill had drunk nothing at all, and had refused the tasting, though the Colonel keeps that port expressly for his visits and it was his own standing invitation being honoured that night.
In Nan's pocket was a folded chemist's account from Mr Baillie of Kirk Wynd, made out to Dr Tobias Quill, dated the eleventh, itemising quantities of laudanum and of morphia. Against three of the lines she had written in pencil the words: not in the ledger.
Nan Pringle was the Colonel's poor relation, thirty years in the house, keeper of the keys, the ledgers, and the household accounts. Nothing was bought or dispensed in Cruikshank Manor that did not pass through her book. On the ninth she had written to Mr Baillie in her own hand, upon the Colonel's paper, asking for a copy of Dr Quill's account for the quarter, as she was entitled to do for the house; Baillie's boy brought it on the twelfth. On the morning of the eleventh she told Mrs Gow that she had a thing to put to Dr Quill, and would put it to him this week, and that it would be kinder done quietly than left.
She and Quill had known one another since childhood in Kirk Wynd, before either was what they became. He called upon her every week, sat an hour, and asked after nobody. The household treated it as the one gentleness either of them had. He is coroner for Cairnholm and signs the certificates; two of his patients died in the spring and he signed for both; Effie's laudanum is prescribed by him and entered in the house ledger under Nan's hand. For eleven years he has been a man who does not raise his voice, does not carry a stick, and has never in the household's memory struck or shoved anything. What he does when frightened, the household have never had occasion to learn.
Others had their small grievances, tidily filed. Effie's debts at the chemist and at cards were called in on the tenth, and the Colonel refused her, loudly, at luncheon on the eleventh, in front of Nan and Cousin R. Zane's understanding with Lavinia was known to Nan, who had never spoken of it; Lavinia suspected that she knew and had no proof. Wat had twice in the past month asked Nan for a sight of the household ledgers and been twice refused, whereupon he shrugged and said she was not worth the boat-fare. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt was at Kirkwall upon the parish's business from the eighth and did not return until the fifteenth, the mail-packet and his hosts accounting for him throughout. And a month since, the Colonel's marriage settlement had been drawn, naming Nan Pringle as the Colonel's intended and the Manor's future mistress; Xerxes stood witness to it.
The eight glasses stood dry on the cellar table, the vintage decanted and never poured, and at the foot of the stair a candle-end cold in its own small pool of wax. Above, in the blind passage, the empty screw of paper lay dry on a wet flagstone, and the gun-room door stood open on the tasting book, still on its shelf.