It rained on Cairnholm all that Tuesday, the eighth month of 1884, and Cruikshank Manor answered the weather with lilies forced out of season and eleven covers laid for the birthday of Effie Strange, who was twenty-three and the Colonel's heir-presumptive. From the confectioner in Kirk Wynd there had come a tray of iced marzipan sweets, ordered specially. It was not a Friday, and so no sitting was convened; Lady Lavinia Loveless came simply as a guest, though she came in her professional black, as she came everywhere.
The absent should be disposed of first, for tidiness. Xerxes and Aziz were at Hartfield House across the town, where the household places them from nine o'clock. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt was at the manse at Kirkbraes, sixteen miles distant, and did not come in to Cairnholm until the Thursday.
The presents were opened at 9:30 in the drawing-room. Among them, from the Colonel, a signed conveyance settling four hundred pounds a year upon Effie from Michaelmas, which was read aloud to the table with some ceremony. It was during this reading that Lady Lavinia leaned toward Effie and said, at a pitch that three people afterwards agreed they had heard, that she hoped the settlement would put the little accounts straight at last. Effie laughed and asked her which little accounts. Lady Lavinia only smiled, which is a thing that can be done at table without anybody calling it rude.
At 10:00 the champagne went round and the tray of sweets was passed. At 10:05 Effie left the drawing-room, saying she was going up for her shawl. Nobody remarked upon it. At 10:10 Lady Lavinia rose in her turn, saying she wanted a quarter of an hour's quiet before the port, and carried her champagne glass away with her.
The remainder of the household settled into that arrangement of rooms which afterwards proved so obliging to the arithmetic. The Colonel sat in the dining-room over the port with Dr Quill and Cousin R from 10:00 to 11:15, the three of them vouching for one another and vouched for besides by Zane, who served them and was in and out of the pantry and never once above stairs. Nan was in the still-room with Mrs Sib Gow, the housekeeper, from 9:50 until 11:00, decanting cordial; Mrs Gow is positive she did not leave, save for the four minutes Mrs Gow herself was on the back stair at 10:40, during which Nan was heard singing at her work. Fifi was belowstairs in the scullery with two kitchen girls from 9:45 until the bell went. Wat arrived at 10:35 by the kitchen door with a second case of champagne and sat in the kitchen with Mrs Gow and the girls until 11:20.
At 10:40, coming up the back stair with the coffee, Mrs Gow met Effie on the landing outside the small green sitting-room. Effie had her shawl over one arm and a napkin in her hand, and observed that the fire in there was very poor. Mrs Gow agreed that it was a poor grate and went on with the coffee. Effie rejoined the company at 10:50, bright and unhurried, and remained in the drawing-room thereafter.
At 11:20 Lady Lavinia Loveless was found in the small green sitting-room off the landing. She lay upon the chaise, laid out quite neatly, her hands folded one upon the other; a velvet bolster cushion had been set aside on the floor beside her. She had been smothered. There was no blood and no disorder of the room whatever — not a chair pushed, not a fold of the carpet disturbed.
Dr Quill, who is the city's coroner as well as the Colonel's port-drinking friend, examined her within the hour and stated flatly that she had been insensible with laudanum before she was smothered, that the dose had been a large one, and that it had been taken by mouth some time between 10:00 and 10:45.
The bolster was the sitting-room's own, off its own chaise. Nothing had been brought into the room and nothing carried out of it: no weapon, no cord, no draught-glass. Lady Lavinia's champagne glass was found rinsed and standing upside down upon the mantel. The fire had gone out.
On the table lay a napkin, and on the napkin a single iced marzipan sweet, half eaten. Mrs Gow had counted the tray out of the kitchen and counted it back again, being a woman who counts, and the tray came home two sweets short of the count, with only the one accounted for on the napkin.
Beside the napkin stood a small brass hand-bell of the kind Lady Lavinia rings at a sitting, and her appointment-book, lying open and held flat with a paperweight. Two pages had been torn out at the spine.
That book was her method and her memory. In it she entered every private sitting, the client's initials, and the fee. A client entered as "E.S." had sat with her privately eleven times since the spring, at half a guinea the sitting, all of it unpaid and carried forward.
There is more of Lady Lavinia's professional life that bears setting down. At a private sitting in July, in her own rooms, she told a client that the spirits saw a paper signed in a chemist's shop and a name that was not the client's own. She repeated the remark a week later at supper, laughing, to the Colonel, and would not say whose it was. The chemist in Kirk Wynd keeps a laudanum book; it was signed for in June and again in July by a person who wrote the name of a Cruikshank Manor servant. The servant does not write.
Laudanum itself is common property at the Manor. There is a bottle in the housekeeper's cupboard for the maids' toothache, a bottle in the Colonel's dressing-room, and Dr Quill carries his own. None of the three was locked, and none can be shown to be short. Nobody in the house takes it but Effie Strange, who takes it nightly.
Effie owes one hundred and forty pounds about the town, chiefly to a chemist and to a woman in Fife Street, and the Michaelmas settlement does not begin until Michaelmas. She has, besides, a mimic's ear, and has at parties done Lady Lavinia's séance voice to great applause, bell and all.
Others in the house had their own small commerce with the deceased. The Colonel had been paying her three guineas a week these two years to speak with his late wife, and had been visibly out of temper with her for a fortnight, ever since the Reverend Simeon Gaunt wrote calling her practice a fraud upon a bereaved man. Nan has known for two years that Zane goes up to Lady Lavinia's rooms at Hartfield House on his Thursdays; she has told no one, and Zane knows she knows. Wat had a standing arrangement of two guineas a month against his silence upon that tryst, and she paid him on the first of August, eleven days before. Cousin R had asked her three times this summer to sit for a photograph in her professional black, and had been three times refused; he asked again at dinner, and was refused again.
The green sitting-room, then: the fire quite out, the bolster set tidily on the floor, and on the table a half-eaten marzipan sweet, a small brass bell, and an appointment-book with two pages torn from the spine.