It had rained since noon at Cairnholm, and by evening the wet had got into the house itself, so that the long gallery at Cruikshank Manor smelled of damp wool and lamp-oil in equal measure. The Colonel had been persuaded — not without a good deal of noise, for he is a gouty man and commands even his concessions — to lend the parish the gallery, the boards, and half the costume for the rehearsal of the charity tableaux. A platform of borrowed planks had been laid at the north end. A painted backdrop of Grecian columns stood behind it. Hampers of costume sat about in the manner of hampers, and along the platform edge a lamp-stand carried five oil lamps in a row.
The scheme was simple. The company held a pose for two minutes at a time while the changes were called. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt was to have called them, but at 6:00 he was summoned to a deathbed at Kirkmuir and did not come back that night; the Kirkmuir household will say where he was every hour of it. The curate read the changes in his place, and read them rather well.
Above the platform runs the gallery's upper landing. It is reached by a short service stair that rises from the passage behind the gallery — not visible from the platform, not visible from the gallery door, and carpeted upon every tread.
At 8:50 the company complained of the glare of the lamps. Nobody attended to it. Each of the five is turned down by a screw at the base, and each takes a moment and a hand.
At 9:00 the curate called "Charity Attended," which requires six figures on the platform and holds for two minutes. The six stood. Xerxes was among them, quite still, and Mrs Gow and the Reverend had both counted the six on the paper beforehand. Cousin R was among them also. So was Aziz, who wore over his own dress a borrowed Grecian mantle with no sleeves and no pockets, which is the sort of garment that keeps nothing at all. When the pose broke at 9:02 Aziz stepped off the boards. A second pose was called at 9:05. Xerxes left the platform at 9:07 and went to the card-room.
Nan had gone up to the landing to fetch down the hamper of Roman drapery.
At 9:10 she was found on the gallery floor beneath the upper landing, lying in the narrow space between the platform and the wall. Her neck was broken. There was no blood. She was forty-one, a poor relation, and had come down some fourteen feet in the dark.
For the gallery was dark. All five lamps along the platform edge had been turned down to a glimmer at some point before the fall, so that from the platform to the wall there was very little to see and nothing much to see it by. Mrs Gow turned them up again at 9:12 when she came at the noise, and the light showed the company a great deal at once.
It showed, first, the balustrade of the upper landing, which is a low affair — waist-high on a tall person, and hip-high on Nan, who was not tall. That afternoon the carpenters had unpegged a three-foot section of it so that a painted swag might be hung, and had gone away without pegging it back. The gap looked down precisely upon the place where she lay.
It showed, on the landing, the hamper of Roman drapery standing open, with two lengths of white cloth lifted out and laid neatly across its lid, as a woman lays cloth she means to come back for.
It showed, on the landing floor, close by the gap in the balustrade, a man's kid glove of the left hand, dark, of a size too large for any woman in the house. Its fellow was not found, then or afterwards.
And it showed Nan's right hand, which was closed upon a scrap of torn paper — the corner of a printed circular. Two things were legible on it. The words "NOTICE OF MARRIAGE," and beneath them part of a name: "HARTF". She was wearing, as she had worn all that autumn, the plain garnet ring given her by the Colonel's late wife.
The circulars had been printed that week. The notices of an intended marriage between Xerxes Hartfield and Miss Nan Pringle were to be read at the parish church on Sunday, and a bundle of them lay in the gallery among the rehearsal papers, where anybody might have taken one up. The engagement was ten days old and had astonished the town, Nan being a woman of forty-one with no expectations whatever, and Xerxes having never before given the smallest sign of wishing to marry anybody.
Quill examined her at 9:14 and gave the cause as the fall.
The company were sorted out with commendable order, Mrs Gow having her belowstairs book open on the table that evening and being able to say to the minute who came up the kitchen stair and who did not.
The Colonel had sat in his armchair in the gallery from 8:40, calling corrections at the poses in a voice that carried; Quill sat at his elbow the whole while, and the two of them were in view of everybody from 8:40 to 9:10. Quill made no secret of having been fond of Nan. Zane stood at the gallery door from 8:50, admitting and announcing, in continuous sight of the Colonel and the doctor; he had not gone up the service stair that evening, and he said so twice, being a young man correct in every particular and much afraid of losing his character. Fifi was belowstairs in the still-room with Mrs Gow from 8:45 until the noise, pressing borrowed costume; Mrs Gow vouches for her without a gap, and Fifi, who notices a man's hat left where it should not be, had unfortunately been looking at a flat-iron.
Wat had not come into the house at all. He was at the kitchen door from 8:55 to 9:30, haggling with Mrs Gow over the hire of three hampers of Levantine cloth, and she was with him throughout. Lavinia had been in the ante-room from 8:55, being pinned into the costume of Faith by two parish ladies who did not leave her; she came out at 9:11 with the pins still in her. Cousin R had stood in the 9:00 pose and again in the pose called at 9:05, and did not step off the boards until Mrs Gow turned the lamps up. Effie arrived at 9:15, wet to the knees, having walked in from the Cairnholm road; the coachman who set her down and Mrs Gow at the door both place her outside the house until that minute.
Xerxes was in the card-room when the cry went up. Aziz rejoined the company at 9:12 by the gallery door, and said that he had gone for a glass of water. At 9:20 he was seen buttoning his coat, and one hand was bare.
Aziz wears kid gloves at dinner, as he does always, being cold-fingered ever since the passage from Bombay; Xerxes had teased him about it that very week. He has lived under Xerxes's roof for eleven years, having come with him from India. No wages of his appear in any book at Hartfield House. He takes his meals with Xerxes. He is not a servant, and he holds no post that anybody in Cairnholm can name; the household supposes him a secretary of some kind, chiefly because it must suppose something. For eleven years he has stood at Xerxes's side at every public occasion and has never once been introduced by any title, and that evening, when the Reverend read the parts aloud, he was listed as "the servant of Mr Hartfield's." Xerxes did not correct it.
At luncheon that same day the Colonel had asked, in his carrying way, what was to become of the arrangements at Hartfield House once there was a mistress there. Nan had answered that a wife has the ordering of her own house. Aziz was at the table. He did not eat afterwards.
Nan, it should be said, was the only person at the Manor who had ever been inside the locked closet of Xerxes's dressing-room at Hartfield House. She had mentioned it once, at table, and Xerxes had turned the conversation to the weather.
She was also the keeper of the Colonel's household accounts, and it was understood that small irregularities reached his ear by way of hers. Lavinia had twice asked her, quite lightly, what she did with what she knew. Zane avoided being alone with her. Wat had offered her money for talk, and had been refused, and had not offered twice.
By half past nine the gallery was orderly again. The lamps were up and burning full; the painted Grecian columns had been carried off the platform and leaned against the wall; and on the platform boards there remained the six chalk marks where the figures had stood, one of them empty.