The packet from abroad had been three weeks at sea, delayed by weather in the way that weather delays things, and when it came at last on a wet Thursday in November the writing room at Hartfield House was given over entirely to it. Wrappers were smoothed and saved. Stamps were admired by persons who knew nothing of stamps. Letters went out through the house on trays to their proper recipients, and those that stayed were made into heaps, because Xerxes liked heaps.
He was found at 9:20, seated at the sorting table, shot. The foreign letters lay squared before him in three tidy heaps, every edge brought true, and a fourth heap had been knocked to the carpet and lay there scattered in a fan, which was the untidiest thing in the room.
Beside the chair lay a sandalwood letter-box. Its lid had been snapped clean from the hinges and the brass lock sprung, and it had been done with vigour. The box had held the Hartfield-Cruikshank venture books. The books themselves were on the table, open, and quite unharmed.
The shot had been heard at 9:04, and the household placed it with unusual confidence, the evening having been marked out like a tide-table: the dinner gong at 8:00, the table rising at 9:00, and the shot a few minutes after the rising. Those in the morning room, which lies at the far end of the house through two doors and a corridor, heard it as a distant flat sound and argued for a full minute about whether it had been a door.
Dr Tobias Quill, who is also the coroner and sees no reason to be two men about it, examined the body and reported one shot from a duelling pistol of an older pattern, fired from some six feet, from the doorway side of the room. No pistol was found. Hartfield House keeps no firearms at all; Xerxes disliked them and said so often, and at length. The Colonel, it may be observed without malice, owns a cased pair of duelling pistols which he calls his Sunday pistols, and has for years carried one in a coat pocket when travelling at night — a habit the household has remarked upon so long that it has stopped being remarkable.
The hearth had been lit at 7:00 and had burned low. In the ash lay a solitary scrap of a foreign wrapper, gummed and browned, which had not taken the flame: it bore part of a Bombay postmark and a fragment of a scrawled hand in ink.
On the sorting table, addressed to the Colonel in care of Hartfield House, lay an opened letter from a Glasgow firm of accountants. The covering sheet spoke of "the enclosed particulars." The enclosure, a folded schedule, was gone.
The venture books lay open at the ledger of the past quarter. Two pages had been unpinned from the binding and laid flat, as though compared side by side, and someone had set a wine glass down upon them and left a ring. A window was found unlatched; the sill below it is soft mud under the rain, unmarked, and the drop to it is eleven feet. Mabel, the cheetah, lay the whole evening across the warm flags of the kitchen passage, where the cook and two maids stepped over her between 8:00 and 9:30. She did not stir. The passage is the only route from the back stair to the writing room.
The Hartfield-Cruikshank venture is the weather in which all these people live. Xerxes found the money and the India trade; the Colonel found the old Cairnholm name, the insurers, and the harbour board; and each has said publicly, and often, that the other is indispensable. On Tuesday the Colonel had instructed a Glasgow firm of accountants to value the venture entire, and to report what the Cairnholm end of it stood at alone. He told the household he was tidying his affairs against old age. He is sixty-one.
The delayed packet carried, among the rest, the venture's Bombay correspondence for October, including the factor's quarterly letter, which the Colonel had been asking after since the first of the month. He carried the Bombay letters in to Xerxes at 8:45, between the fish and the sweet, and the two of them read them at table. The Colonel's face went the colour of his collar and he said nothing for the remainder of dinner, which Nan wrote down in her small book as unusual. That book has recorded his appointments for eleven years without a gap; she and the Colonel each hold something of the other's, and both know it, and neither has ever spent it.
Xerxes had that week told Aziz, and no one else, that the Cairnholm end of the trade had been carried for three years by the Bombay end, and that he meant to say so plainly to his partner before the month was out. He had also, for a month, been writing to a Liverpool house about an agency there; Wat carried two of the letters and read them, as he reads everything, and observed at table on Thursday that the Captain who could not read a Liverpool address would end in the workhouse. Wat's living is the venture's cargo and nothing besides — no trade of his own, no ship of his own — and he has said in drink that he would follow Xerxes Hartfield into a furnace if there were freight at the far end of it. Xerxes slept badly and had done for years, and kept a sleeping draught of Dr Quill's beside his bed. He had not gone up.
Of those in the house: the Colonel was at dinner until the table rose at 9:00, and says he then went out to the carriage sweep for air, and to see whether his man had brought the trap round, and came in again at the noise. No one accompanied him. It is his fixed habit at Hartfield House not to go out to the sweep after dinner, because the sweep is where the gravel is and he holds gravel to be bad for a man's knees; he rings for his trap from the hall. His man drove him home at 10:40, and deposed that the Colonel had not come out to the sweep at any time that evening, and that he himself had waited by the horses from 8:00.
Nan rose with the rest at 9:00 and went directly to the morning room, where Lavinia and Gaunt joined her within the minute — Lavinia from the table, Gaunt a minute behind her, disapproving of the wine he had drunk — and the three did not separate until the alarm at 9:20. Wat left the table at 9:00 and went down to the kitchen passage to beg a brandy of the cook, who poured it for him and did not like doing so, and he was there, stepping round Mabel, until the shot. Aziz had gone up at 8:40, before the table rose, to fetch the Moroccan letters that Xerxes wanted sorted last, and was on the upper landing with the housemaid Duff at 9:04, the two of them counting heaps.
The others were elsewhere and comprehensively so. Fifi and her twin brother Zane passed the whole of Thursday at Cruikshank Manor, where the household had them at the linen from morning till midnight and vouched for both. Effie was at the Assembly Rooms in Cairnholm from 8:00 until after midnight, in a great deal of company. Cousin R was at the Cairnholm station hotel, where the night porter knows him.
The rain went on at the writing-room window. The three tidy heaps of foreign letters lay squared upon the sorting table, and the fourth lay scattered on the carpet; and beside the chair the sandalwood box lay with its lid off its hinges, while the venture books lay open, and quite unharmed, upon the table.