The rain, which had been threatened since breakfast and delivered before eleven, drove the luncheon indoors without in the least dampening it. The hampers were carried up to the long gallery and set gaping along the boards; borrowed rugs were spread the length of the floor; cold fowl, a raised pie, and a quantity of claret were arranged where no weather could reach them. The company sat down upon the rugs in their good clothes with plates balanced upon their knees, which is a thing people do cheerfully once and speak of for years. At the rug's edge, in a low chair drawn up for the purpose, Lady Lavinia Loveless — the celebrated spiritualist medium, born Isolde Marsh — held court, with a glass of claret at her hand.
Lavinia had promised them a sitting after luncheon. The spirits, she said, were very near in weather like this; and she spoke besides, lightly, of a grand farewell performance she meant one day to give, when the moment presented itself properly. Nobody pressed her on the date. Her takings had thinned of late; the fashionable no longer flocked to her rooms, and she had confided to more than one ear that this season had the feel of the closing of a long run.
Xerxes presided from the head of the rugs, his tame cheetah Mabel drowsing across his boots, and did not once leave the party's centre, a fact which the whole gallery could and did attest. At the far end, Aziz kept the last hamper with Effie, the two of them quarrelling agreeably over the pie. The claret had been poured out at the sideboard by the servants into a row of glasses and carried round on trays, and in the shuffle of rugs and hampers and passing plates, any hand that paused a moment by Lavinia's glass went entirely unremarked.
Some while after the claret had gone round, Lavinia was found still in her chair, quite still, the glass empty beside her. There was no mark upon her, and no sign whatever of a struggle — only the neat stillness of a woman who had simply stopped. Dr Tobias Quill, physician and city coroner, happened to be of the party and gave it as his opinion that she had been poisoned: an exact and tasteless dose taken in the claret, enough to be certain and not a grain beyond. Measured, he observed, not flung.
Upon the sideboard, within easy reach of anybody crossing to refill a plate, sat Quill's own small travelling case of tinctures and powders, brought against the damp and standing open, with laudanum and sleeping-draughts among the rest.
Cousin R had crossed to that sideboard more than once — for the claret, he said, and there was no reason on earth to doubt it. He was the sort of guest whom nobody could quite place and nobody had the nerve to ask about, a cool and watchful person who read a drawing-room the way another man reads a ledger. He had arrived only that week, and had spent the days since much in Lavinia's company, drawing her out upon her fame, her decline, and that great last sitting of which she dreamed.
Nan sat near the windows for the better part of the meal, saying next to nothing, which surprised no one; she is a poor relation and has learned the economy of it. She had lately had occasion to notice that Lavinia drew the eye of a certain young man, whom Nan declines to name. She went once to the sideboard to refill her plate.
The Reverend Simeon Gaunt — Lavinia's half-brother, and a flagellant of settled habits — sat stiffly apart from the rugs, abominating the whole business of trading in the dead and the family money spent to sustain it. They had quarrelled over the séances that very week. He declined the claret altogether and drank water, which the servants confirm without hesitation.
Effie was lively throughout and made a good deal of the rain. She is Colonel Cecil Cruikshank's heir-presumptive, perpetually short of funds and perpetually entertained, and she had attended Lavinia's sittings often enough to know that a medium hears a great many secrets not her own. She and Aziz shared the far hamper for the whole of the poured-claret interval and vouch for one another with some spirit.
Of those absent, little need be said. Wat was down at the harbour the entire afternoon, landing a delayed shipment for Xerxes under the eyes of the dockmen. The Colonel had meant to call upon business and was kept at his club by the weather until evening. Fifi and Zane passed the whole day at Cruikshank Manor, abed and about their duties, and that household will swear to it.
The rain went on against the gallery windows. Lavinia sat in her low chair at the rug's edge, glass empty, hands folded, as composed as if she had chosen the moment herself — a last performance no one had asked her to give.