The valuation had been Xerxes's own notion, and he explained it three times before the soup, each time more firmly. A discreet man had come up from the auction rooms to put figures against the Indian cabinet, the plate, and eleven frames of pressed flowers, and had gone down again on the last train with his figures in his pocket. Nothing, Xerxes said at dinner, was for sale. It was a matter of curiosity only. A gentleman may wish to know the worth of his own primroses without intending to part with them.
It rained all that Monday evening, steadily and without temper, and the dinner was small. Cousin R had come up for the occasion, being the only guest in the county who understands what things are worth — an unplaceable man of no fixed shire, who presses flowers, pins specimens, and keeps a small locked album that nobody has been shown. Lady Lavinia Loveless was resident and disapproving; she dislikes the auction rooms on principle, and said so. Her half-brother, the Reverend Simeon Gaunt, had come to see her and to disapprove of the house generally, which he did with application. Effie Strange had come for the valuation and stayed for the sherry. Dr Tobias Quill had been asked up to look at Xerxes's sleeplessness and to price the surgical cabinet. And Captain Wat Frew was at table, as he often was, because Xerxes employs him for cargo that does not go through the customs house.
Wat talked. He described, at length and with evident relish, the trade he had done at Leith in rotten herring; then a woman at the Ferry; then what he had been paid to say nothing about a drowned excise man. Cousin R set down his fork partway through the herring and did not take it up again. Wat further announced that he was leaving Cairnholm on Thursday's tide for a year's run to the Baltic, and that all accounts would be settled with him before he went. Nobody asked which accounts. It was not necessary. Wat Frew took money from a great many people in Cairnholm for not repeating what he knew, and no one at that table pretended otherwise.
The house emptied early. Effie went out at nine in the trap with Quill, who drove her home to her lodgings in Ferry Street and saw her in at half past nine, and who then went on to a confinement at the fisher-cottages, where he remained until four in the morning with two women in the room. Xerxes retired at half past ten with his sleeping draught, as always; Aziz sat with him until he slept, and did not leave the room between half past ten and morning. Lavinia sat a circle for her half-brother in the blue room from ten o'clock until past one, Gaunt attending throughout; the pair came out together and parted at their doors, he going up to his own room on the floor above. Mabel, Xerxes's cheetah, was shut in the boot-room from ten o'clock, as she is on nights the house has strangers in it, and she made no noise at all.
Cousin R took a glass with Wat in the gallery after dinner, and said he would sit up over the flower-frames. He alone had a bed made up in the gallery wing. No one saw him again until breakfast.
At half past six on Tuesday morning Captain Wat Frew was found in the long gallery, seated upright in the carved chair at the gallery's end. His hands were folded, his chin level, his eyes closed. A length of waxed sail-twine lay coiled on his knees. Quill, who serves as coroner, put the death to strangling by that twine. There was no blood, no disorder, nothing broken.
The arrangement had plainly taken hours. His coat had been brushed. His boots had been wiped and set square. His hair was combed damp and flat. Six pressed primroses from the gallery frames were laid in a fan across his breast, each stem turned the same way. To his lapel a label was pinned, written in a neat hand, giving the date and the words: Captain Wat Frew, of Cairnholm.
The gallery door was locked from within by its own bolt. The key to the outer passage hung in its place in the pantry all night. The single window gives onto the area rail and had been painted shut two winters back. The gallery wing is shut off from the rest of the house by a baize door that squeals, and the household agree that nobody passed it after eleven.
Wat's pocket-book was found on him, untouched. It holds, in his own shorthand, a running column of what he is pleased to call his stock: seven entries, two of them against members of the household, all seven left exactly as written. Both of those two are in hands the household could name, and nobody troubled to pretend they could not.
The gallery floor had been swept clean and the sweepings taken away. On the chair-arm was a bloom of candle-grease, showing that a candle had burned down beside the body and been replaced by a second.
The pressed-flower frames in the long gallery are Cousin R's own work, given to the house over several years. The six primroses laid on the body came from the third frame, whose glass was found unlatched. Cousin R, it should be said, is known never to have asked anyone for money, though he is said to know a great deal; he calls the keeping of a thing its own sufficient return.
Nan Pringle and Colonel Cecil Cruikshank were at Cruikshank Manor all that night, the Colonel abed by ten and Nan reading to him, both vouched for by the manor's staff. Fifi and Zane were likewise at Cruikshank Manor, in service there that week and sleeping in the attics, and neither came into Cairnholm until Wednesday. As for Effie, Wat had for two years been her only source of laudanum, and she is much in debt besides, and she was in Ferry Street.
They carried Captain Wat Frew out through the baize door at seven, the primroses sliding off him one by one onto the boards, and someone went back afterwards and picked them up and put them carefully in a saucer.