Colonel Cecil Cruikshank came home from a fortnight at the Perth waters on a wet October evening to find his house in better order than he had left it. The chairs in the morning-room stood at angles he had not chosen. The accounts had been gone through, ruled, and totted. His affairs, in short, had been put straight by somebody else, which is a service no man of property enjoys receiving, however much he requires it.
He was pleased nonetheless. At supper he tapped the fair copy Nan Pringle had left on his desk against his return — the whole of the household books, copied out clean — and said she had a head on her. Nan had spent the fortnight at it. She had kept his accounts and his company for eleven years without a wage, being his poor relation, and the arrangement had suited everybody but her.
Then the Colonel laid down his glass and announced that his fortnight away had made his mind up, and that his solicitor would attend on Monday to put his will in its final shape. He did not say which way it had gone. The money is the standing subject of that house and always has been; he has changed his mind about them, out loud, four times in two years, and Effie Strange sat at the far end of the table as heir-presumptive by his most recent word on the matter, being his connection on the other side.
Effie had come at six, in a new bonnet, and was pleasant to everybody. She is a bright young thing, sleepless, and very clever underneath, though she takes pains that it should not show; she admires and imitates the manners of everyone she meets, and does it well enough that one hears one's own turns of phrase come back across the table slightly improved. She sat in the drawing-room through the evening, excusing herself between ten and half past to fetch her shawl from the morning-room, and returning with it.
Her debts at the chemist's and elsewhere are not a secret so much as a subject nobody raises at table. Mr Barrow of the Cowgate had sent his boy up to the Manor twice in the fortnight of the Colonel's absence, asking after Miss Strange, and had been told each time that she was not there. Dr Tobias Quill, who dispenses laudanum to half the parish, had that very week refused her a further bottle and told her to take it up with her guardian.
Nan took hot milk every night at ten o'clock without fail, carried up from the kitchen and left on the morning-room side table for her by whoever passed. Mrs Sib Gow, the Colonel's housekeeper, set it out at 10:00 and swears it was untouched and unclouded when she did.
She was found at twenty past eleven, seated upright in the Colonel's own wing chair, her hands folded in her lap, a sprig of dried heather laid across them, her cap set straight. There was no disorder in the room. Nothing was broken. The lamp burned as it had burned all evening.
Dr Quill examined her where she sat and gave it plainly: laudanum, and a great deal more of it than any physician would pour. The half-drunk cup of hot milk on the side table smelt frankly of it.
The composing of the body was a shade off. Cousin R, the Colonel's unplaceable guest, came in, looked, and remarked without any feeling at all that the heather had been laid across the hands with the cut ends outward, and that the chair had been turned to face the door rather than the window — neither of which is how such a thing is done. He said it as one might correct a misspelling, and did not raise his voice to say it.
The arranging of a body — the folded hands, the flower, the composed sitting — is Cousin R's known manner, and the household has seen it before. He does not deny the taste. He denies only the workmanship. He has been heard to say of Nan, more than once and to her face, that she had achieved a perfect absence and there was nothing further to be done with her; he said the same on the Thursday, in the hall, and went back to his newspaper.
The laudanum bottle from the Colonel's medicine press stood empty on the morning-room mantel, wiped clean and set square upon its own ring of dust. The press is not locked, and everyone in the house knows where it is kept. Under the fender lay a small square of paper, torn from a bill and folded twice: a chemist's tally from Barrow's in the Cowgate, dated that week, made out to no name, for laudanum at a quantity no household orders at once. Nan wore no jewellery and owned nothing; the heather came from the bowl on the mantel, where such sprigs have stood all autumn.
A week since, Nan had told Mrs Gow that she would speak to the Colonel on his return about a matter concerning Miss Strange and the tradesmen's books, and that she had thought better of speaking of it before.
She had held other things longer. She knew of Zane Swain's meetings with Lady Lavinia Loveless, and had told him she knew; she had held it a year and never spoken; and on the Tuesday she told him plainly that she had no intention of ever speaking, and that he was to stop looking at her like a hanged man. Zane is a stickler for the rules of the house and anxious for his character, the Colonel's reference being the whole of his future. He waited at supper until half past nine, was then sent to the Cowgate with the Colonel's boots and a note for the bootmaker, and was back at 11:15, seen going and returning by the lodge-keeper and by Mrs Gow.
His twin sister Fifi, housemaid, quick-tongued and unimpressed by faded gentlewomen, was in the scullery and on the back stair from half past nine until midnight, in Mrs Gow's sight for the whole of it, turning out the plate for the Colonel's homecoming. She is fiercely watchful of anything that might touch her brother's place, and said so freely to anyone who would stand still.
Lavinia, who sits weekly at the Manor for the Colonel's late wife and is at the house often besides, was in the small parlour with the Colonel from ten until eleven, going over the arrangement of the next sitting. The Colonel confirms it. Cousin R and Quill were in the library from nine until the alarm was raised, in the company of two decanters; each vouches for the other without warmth, and Quill had not been upstairs since arriving.
Elsewhere in Cairnholm the evening passed uneventfully. Xerxes Hartfield and Aziz were at Hartfield House, where the household sat up with them. Captain Wat Frew was aboard the Merrilees off Leith and did not come ashore until Sunday. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt kept his own vigil at St Ninian's from nine until dawn, in the sight of two vergers.
And in the morning-room the lamp still burned, and the cup had gone cold on the side table, and Nan Pringle sat straight in a chair turned the wrong way about, with the heather laid across her hands the wrong way round — everything composed by a hand that had studied composure and not quite learned it.