The long gallery at Cruikshank Manor had been cleared for the charity tableaux vivants, which is to say emptied of everything that made it habitable and filled with borrowed plinths, a hired stock of drapery, and a quantity of rope and tarred twine fetched up from the harbour for the rigging of the curtain and the bracing of the poses. It rained all that Monday, as October in Cairnholm requires. The company was to stand very still for long minutes together, which is the whole art of the thing, and the Reverend Simeon Gaunt was to have supervised the poses; in his absence the Colonel did it, badly and at volume.
The twine had come that afternoon in a coil and was left where it lay, for the rigging. Anyone in the house might have cut a length from it, and three persons certainly handled it during the setting-up: the Colonel, Zane, and Cousin R. Wat had come up from the quay with the hired rope himself and stayed to help with the curtain, being a man who likes to see his property employed.
Rehearsal broke for tea at 8:00. The company scattered through the house, and the gallery stood empty and unlit, for a brass candle-lamp had been carried out and set down in the corridor, where it was afterwards found still warm. Mrs Gow rang the gallery bell at 9:00 to call the company back.
She found the room dark, the curtain rigging slack, and Fifi lying behind the third plinth in her costume drapery. A length of tarred twine was drawn about her throat and finished at the nape in a seaman's knot; she had been strangled with it. There was no disorder otherwise. The drapery had been smoothed straight, as though somebody had thought the fall of it untidy and could not leave it so.
The knot itself was much admired, in the restrained way of a household that does not care to seem excitable. It was a running hitch of the sort used to lash cargo on a deck — tidy, doubled, pulled through the standing part in the manner of the sea. The Colonel put his lamp to it and observed that he had seen the same knot on the mooring lines at the Cairnholm quay, and then observed it again, louder.
In the pocket of Fifi's apron, laid aside upon the plinth, was a folded paper. It bore a list of five sets of initials, each with a sum in shillings written beside it, and two of the sums were struck through. The hand was Fifi's own. The initials were W.F., L.L., T.Q., C.C., and X.H.; the struck-through sums stood against W.F. and L.L. Zane, when it was shown to him, said only that he had seen his sister at such a paper before and had told her to burn it.
For Fifi could not keep a thing to herself, and never had. What was said above stairs was belowstairs within the hour, and what was said belowstairs travelled further still, generally to the fish-market. The household had long since ceased to tell her anything it minded losing. There was, however, one matter of which she never spoke, and the household knew it: anything of her brother Zane's. Lavinia's Friday-night walks in the shrubbery had likewise never been mentioned by Fifi to anyone, and Lavinia knew it.
On the Friday before, Fifi had told Mrs Gow, cheerfully and unasked, that she had lately learned a thing about the harbour worth more than a place in service, and that she did not intend to share it with the gentleman who usually collected such things.
That gentleman's living is made of what other people would rather not have known, and paid for in small regular sums; three separate persons in Cairnholm are known to pay Wat by the quarter. In the first week of the month two of his payers stopped. Both had told the Colonel, in confidence and separately, that they had had a second visitor with the same information and a cheaper price. It should be added, for the completeness of the record, that Wat's boat is the only vessel at the quay permitted to lie inside the harbour wall at night — an arrangement of long standing and considerable value to him, depending entirely upon nobody speaking of what is carried up from it.
Mrs Gow saw Wat in the gallery doorway at 8:30 and took him to be waiting on the Colonel. Wat says he was at the stable door from 8:15 until the bell. Nobody vouches for him there.
The others place themselves comfortably enough. Lavinia — Lady Lavinia Loveless upon the playbill, Isolde Marsh upon her baptismal register — was cast as Patience and spent the whole hour in the small drawing-room being pinned into her drapery, from 8:00 until the bell at 9:00, with the Colonel and Mrs Gow both willing to swear her there; and the Colonel with her, loud throughout. Zane was belowstairs from 8:00, carrying tea things up and down under Mrs Gow's eye without interruption. Cousin R, who had arranged the plinths and the drapery and who collects other people's secrets without ever spending them, was in the library with Effie from 8:05 until the bell; she places him there, and he her. Dr Quill, who had been asked to stand as the Good Samaritan and had been tolerably pleased to be asked, was called away at 7:40 to a confinement at the fisher-cottages and was not back until after 9:00, the midwife and two of the family placing him there the whole evening. It may be mentioned without emphasis that Quill had for some months arrived at the Manor at hours when Fifi would be about the hall, and had left his hat where she would have to bring it to him. He had said nothing to her, and had been refused nothing.
The remainder of the parish was elsewhere and may be dismissed with courtesy. Xerxes and Aziz were at Hartfield House with a table of guests who sat until midnight. Nan had gone to her aunt at Leith on the morning train and did not return until Wednesday. The Reverend was at the mission hall in the harbour parish, supervising the packing of the charity boxes, in the sight of eleven parishioners until past ten. Effie came late to the Manor at 8:05 and sat with Cousin R in the library until the bell.
The gallery was relit. The plinths stood empty, the drapery was folded away, and the hired twine was coiled neatly again by the door, one length short.