Hartfield House had been hung with lamps the length of the long dining room, and the rain came against the glass all that November night without pause. Xerxes had spent a fortnight upon the menu. The recipes were his old khansaman's, written out from memory and handed to a Scottish kitchen, which attempted them in the spirit of a regiment attempting a foreign hymn. Xerxes read the dish-names aloud himself, slowly, as one does at a christening.
Aziz was seated at the far end, as a guest. Each dish was carried to him and named, and explained, as though he had never in his life met such a thing — which, as it happens, he had not, being Moroccan and eleven years at Cairnholm, the India of the house belonging wholly to Xerxes: the fortune, the recipes, the provenance of the sapphire. Aziz asked for a fork. He was given one. He said nothing else for the length of the fish.
The company thinned according to its several appetites. Colonel Cecil Cruikshank, Nan Pringle and Dr Tobias Quill dined and were gone before ten; the Colonel and Nan drove afterwards to Cruikshank Manor and were abed there by eleven, which the household there will swear to, and Quill went back to his surgery on Kirk Street and was called out at midnight to a broken leg in Fishergate, where he remained till four. Fifi and Zane passed the whole night at Cruikshank Manor, in service and then abed, and did not come to Hartfield House at all. Wat left at ten minutes past ten to catch the tide, and two watermen saw him aboard the Kittiwake at the Lower Quay from half past ten until dawn. Gaunt, who had called the dinner a performance and had been seated at it regardless, walked back to the manse at a quarter past ten, where his housekeeper let him in and sat up with him over the parish accounts until one. Effie sat with Lavinia in the drawing room from ten until half past eleven; they went up to a shared landing and Lavinia bolted the corridor door behind them, as she always does. The Colonel had sat with Xerxes over brandy in the library from half past ten until midnight and said so freely, his coachman having waited in the yard from half past nine and being clear as to the hour of departure. Xerxes thereafter walked the upper corridors until near two and was passed twice by the night-maid on the second floor. Cousin R went up at half past eleven with the rest, into the blue bedroom, which opens directly off the conservatory; he was alone in that wing until morning and nobody vouches for him after the landing.
Aziz sat every evening in the conservatory for an hour after the house went up. This was known to everyone who had ever stayed at Hartfield House.
At seven in the morning he was found there, seated upright in a cane chair, strangled with a length of green silk cord. The cord had been cut from the dining-room curtain ties. The cut end was still knotted about his throat, tidily, the knot turned to the back and out of sight.
The body had been composed with great care. His hands lay open in his lap. His fez had been set straight upon his head. Pressed marigolds — from Cousin R's flower-press, which lives openly on the conservatory table — were laid in a close ring on the floor about the chair, and a single one placed in his breast pocket.
Nothing about the arrangement suggested haste. Fifty-one marigolds were counted on the floor, evenly spaced, the ring closed and true. The chair had been squared to the conservatory doors. A lamp had been moved to stand behind the chair, and had burned dry.
Aziz wore, as he wore every day, a sapphire ring plainly beyond a companion's own means. It had not been touched. His purse, with four sovereigns in it, lay where it had fallen under the chair, also untouched. The ring had been Xerxes's gift, given eleven years ago and worn ever since; Aziz had refused three offers for it, one of them Wat's, and did not take it off, not for washing and not for bed. Effie had admired it aloud at dinner, twice.
The conservatory door to the garden was bolted from the inside. The dining-room door to the conservatory was not locked; but Quill placed the death at about eleven o'clock, and the household had gone up by half past eleven. Mabel, the cheetah, slept the whole night chained by the hall stove, twelve feet from the conservatory door, and did not rise.
The flowers were not garden flowers. They had been pressed some weeks and were flat, and had come from a press and not a bed, and the house has only one press. Cousin R keeps it, together with a pin-board of beetles and four albums of pressed specimens, each labelled in his own hand with the date and the place taken. He has been at Hartfield House nine days and has asked no one for anything. On the previous afternoon he had asked the gardener whether marigolds were a funeral flower in any country he knew of, and had written the answer down. Three weeks before, he had been found in the upstairs passage at one in the morning, doing nothing, looking at the closed door of Xerxes's dressing room; he apologised pleasantly and went to bed.
There were other small commerces that evening, none of them conducted quietly. Effie asked Quill, at dinner, for laudanum, and was refused; she asked Wat afterwards, in the hall, and was not refused. Neither conversation was private.
So the conservatory at seven in the morning: grey light through the wet glass, a burnt-out lamp behind a squared chair, a ring of fifty-one flat marigolds, and a man sitting very straight with his fez put on correctly and a sapphire on his hand that nobody had wanted.