The annual reckoning of the Cruikshank plate is a solemn and rather tedious institution, and it had brought the strong-room chest up out of the cellars and into the breakfast room, where the light was better and the table longer. The felt-lined compartments stood open like the pews of a small chapel. Spoons lay weighed in their slots; tally-sheets multiplied; a small brass balance held the middle of the table with the composure of a magistrate. The Colonel presided over his lists, and Mrs Gow attended him, and neither left the table from the first spoon to the alarm.
The drawing-room, meanwhile, kept its own company. Cousin R, that unplaceable person who orbits the Colonel as a moon orbits a planet it has never been introduced to, sat with Xerxes and Aziz the whole evening, the three of them in unbroken view of one another and of Mrs Gow, who came and went with the port. Quill had come for that port, as is his invariable habit, and was served there, and was there still when the house was called. Belowstairs, Nan and Fifi sat at their needle under Mrs Gow's eye for the entire interval, a fact the household was later pleased to vouch in chorus. Effie and Wat had both meant to call and had both, for reasons of their own, stayed away; Gaunt was at his parish. Lavinia was in her sitting-room off the breakfast-room passage, alone, from the reckoning's beginning to its interruption, and for that stretch no one at all can speak.
The breakfast room, being open and lit and quite apart from the drawing-room, was an easy place in which to be alone.
A little after eleven, Zane was found there.
He was the Colonel's footman, twin brother to Fifi the lady's-maid, and held by his master to be the model of his calling. He lay upon the hearthrug among the open compartments, smothered. There was no wound upon him and no disorder whatever to his dress; his collar sat as a footman's collar ought.
He had been arranged. That is the word the household settled upon, and no better one has presented itself. His hands were folded upon his breast. A coin had been laid upon each eye. At his head a candle-end had burnt itself out and gone dark, and about him lay a scatter of salt. Beneath the folded hands someone had tucked a tally-sheet from the reckoning, folded once, as one might tuck a hymn-card into the hands of a man going respectably to his rest.
The window was fast. The room was otherwise wholly undisturbed. The weighed spoons kept their felt slots, the brass balance stood true, and Mrs Gow's later count found nothing of the plate missing.
On the mantel lay a note, folded, in Lavinia's hand, the ink not long dry. It named the breakfast room and it named the hour of the reckoning, and it closed: I shall not ask a fourth time.
Two small matters were remarked upon by those who attend Lavinia's weekly table, where she calls upon the Colonel's late wife with a regularity the late wife has never been observed to resent. At that table the salt-ring is closed and unbroken, always, and the coins upon a sitter's eyes are laid heads-up, always; the house knows her for both. Here the salt lay in a broken, hesitant ring, a thing begun and abandoned. And the coins were laid heads-down.
By the hearth there hung a faint sweetness of laudanum. One felt compartment bore a small ring-stain, where a phial had lately stood and been taken up again.
Of Lavinia herself it may be said that she was born Isolde Marsh, that she keeps her séances weekly, and that she and Zane had an attachment which was on again and off again and, being both secret and across the grain of class, left each of them holding the other's ruin in a closed hand.
The brass balance stood true over the weighed spoons, the salt broken in its ring, and Zane laid out under two heads-down coins as if the house itself had held a sitting for him.