It rained on Cairnholm all that Tuesday, in the flat and patient manner of October, and Colonel Cecil Cruikshank gave a birthday dinner regardless. The occasion was Effie Strange, his ward-by-courtesy and heir-presumptive, who was a bright young thing, quick in conversation, and a good deal cleverer than she permitted anyone to notice. There was champagne, a table of presents, and the good candles brought up from the cellar, which the Colonel considered the outward and visible sign of a household in funds.
Lady Lavinia Loveless arrived at seven. She dined, was agreeable to the table at large, and spoke privately to nobody at all except Effie, with whom she was closeted in the small green sitting room off the drawing room for a quarter of an hour before dinner. Fifi, passing through with the flowers, heard Lavinia's voice raised once, and the word Friday. The Friday sitting for the late Mrs Cruikshank was a fixture of the house; this being a Tuesday, none was held, and the séance table stood folded against the wall.
Captain Wat Frew came at eight, because the Colonel liked a rough voice at a birthday, and left at nine o'clock to catch the tide. Mrs Sib Gow, the Colonel's housekeeper, saw him out and bolted the door behind him; he was aboard the Perilous Maid by half past nine, and two of his crew would say so. Xerxes came for the dinner and went from the table directly to the billiard room with Aziz, where the marker's slate accounted for a quarter to ten onward and the two of them accounted for one another. Aziz, who is courteous and watchful and careful of what is said in his hearing, has never approved of sittings on principle, and did not say so.
At ten o'clock the coffee came through from the dining room on a single tray. Zane poured it out and it was handed round by hand. Lavinia did not take hers from the tray. She had gone ahead to the green sitting room, and her cup was carried to her separately, by Effie, who was seen doing it by Mrs Sib Gow from the back stairs with the coal, and who thought it a pretty attention on a girl's own birthday.
Thereafter the house settled into its several attitudes. The Colonel took the card table at ten o'clock, having by then drunk enough champagne to be no use for anything else, and cut for partners with Nan and with Dr Tobias Quill. Nan, the poor relation, who keeps the flowers, the accounts, and her own counsel, did not leave that table. Cousin R had been in the drawing room since nine o'clock, seated by the fire, collecting whatever fell and banking it, in view of the card players and everyone else. Zane and Fifi were belowstairs from ten o'clock washing the dinner service under the eye of Mrs Sib Gow, who did not lose sight of either of them. At half past ten Effie proposed charades, was very gay, and was in full view of the drawing room from that hour until Lavinia was found. Before ten o'clock she had been up and down the house all evening, being the birthday. The Reverend Simeon Gaunt spent the evening at the manse across the town at his devotions, seen at ten by his housekeeper and again at midnight.
At twenty past eleven Lady Lavinia Loveless was found in the green sitting room, upright in the wing chair, hands folded, her coffee cup empty at her elbow. She had stopped breathing some little while before. Quill, who was in the house and was sent for, pronounced her: poisoned by laudanum, taken by mouth, and a great deal of it. She was seated and composed and had simply ceased.
The cup was one of the birthday set, gilt-rimmed. It had held coffee with three lumps of sugar, which was how Lavinia took it, and there was no other cup in the room. The dregs smelt faintly of the poppy under the coffee. Nothing else was disturbed. The lamp was trimmed, the cushion straight, the shawl folded over the chair arm. There was no mark upon her and nothing broken.
On the table by the window lay Lavinia's little clasped memorandum book, open at a fresh page. Lady Lavinia Loveless kept books; her clients paid her by the sitting, and those who could not pay by the sitting paid by arrangement, and she wrote in the book after every private conversation. On the open page, in her hand, stood a short column of figures headed simply E. S., the last line of it 40 pounds, and beneath it the date of the day. Effie Strange had sat privately with Lavinia since the spring, oftener than the weekly sitting for the Colonel's late wife, and always alone, and what passed at those sittings nobody else was told.
Quill's medical case had stood in the hall all evening, unlocked, as it always does at the Manor. He said afterwards that a laudanum bottle in it was lighter than he had left it, though he could not swear to how much lighter. This established very little. Laudanum is common property in Cairnholm: there is a bottle in Effie Strange's own dressing case, one in the Manor stillroom, one in Quill's case, and Wat brings it in by the crate. Possession of it distinguishes nobody.
Certain other small matters were in the air, as they usually are at a birthday. Effie's expectations are large and her present income is not; in September she gave a note of hand to Wat and another to a Cairnholm dealer, though the household knew only that she had asked the Colonel twice for money and been refused twice, and the Colonel had that afternoon refused her a third time. She has taken laudanum herself for some years. Wat had lately been pressing Lavinia, who knew a great many secrets, for a share of them. Lavinia and Zane had an understanding of some standing; Nan discovered it a month ago and told no one, which is her habit, and Fifi keeps her brother's secrets absolutely and would have kept that one. Nan has loved Zane for four years without saying so.
Among the presents on the side table, unwrapped and admired at dinner, were a chased silver vinaigrette from Cousin R, who watched her open it, and a case of preserved fruits from Xerxes. Effie's own reticule lay among them, its cord loosened.
The green sitting room kept its composure after everyone else had lost theirs: the lamp still trimmed and burning, the shawl folded, the gilt-rimmed cup empty; and on the window table the little clasped book open at its column of figures, the ink already dry, while in the drawing room beyond the charades went on some minutes longer before anybody thought to fetch a doctor.