It rained all that Tuesday, and the Colonel, having nothing better to do with a wet autumn, gave over the long drawing-room at Cruikshank Manor to amateur theatricals. A farce was to be read through behind folding screens; prompt copies were distributed and marked in pencil; a hamper of wigs and ordinary clothes stood open on the window-seat with its contents thoroughly muddled. The Colonel read the colonel's part, which he held to be a slander upon the regiment, and said so between speeches. Supper was to be served on trays between the acts, each plate carried in and set at its reader's chair.
The screens were arranged in a three-quarter ring, with the consequence that a reader behind the third screen could be heard perfectly well and seen by nobody at all. Effie read her cue at the end of the first act, and said nothing after it, which at the time was taken for discretion.
She was found in the second interval, seated upright in the reader's chair behind the third screen, her prompt copy open on her knee and her hands quite composed upon it. Dr Tobias Quill, who had been reading the uncle's part four chairs along, came when he was called, looked at her for rather less than a minute, and pronounced her dead of laudanum — said so plainly to the room, as a man states the hour. There was no mark upon her. Nothing about her had been disarranged. It was generally agreed afterwards that she had taken the news better than the company had.
The supper trays had gone in at eight o'clock. Each plate was set at a named chair, and Effie's was the devilled kidneys, which she alone had asked for. Her plate had been cleared to the pantry before she was found; but the remains of it were still sitting in the scullery, and in the sauce Quill found laudanum, and enough of it to kill. Her own bottle was in her reticule beneath the chair, stoppered, and three parts full. Quill observed that the dose in the kidneys lay far beyond anything she had ever poured for herself, and that under the mustard she would have tasted nothing whatever.
The plates had been made up in the servery, one by one, Fifi having begun upon them at a quarter to eight, and were carried in by Fifi and Zane together. Mrs Sib Gow stood at the servery door the whole while and is positive that each plate went out in its order, named, and that from the dish to the tray the kidneys were handled by Fifi and by no one else.
Effie's prompt copy, open on her knee, had been marked all through in pencil in a hand that was not her own, the cues for the maid's part struck out and written over. Loose among the leaves lay a torn half-page of household accounts in Effie's own writing. On the floor behind the screen were a man's hat from the costume hamper and a wig beside it; nobody in the room would say whose hat it was, it having come out of the hamper with everything else.
The company, considered as a company, was unremarkable. The Colonel had sat in the first chair behind the first screen from before eight until the body was found, reading loudly and continuously, and heard by everyone. Nan was at the little table by the window, working the prompt bell and the page-turns, under the eyes of Cousin R and the Colonel throughout, and had not gone near the servery. Cousin R stood at the chimneypiece in full view of both of them from before the trays came in until the end. Quill answered his cues through both acts without a gap and did not leave his chair until he was summoned to Effie. Lavinia, behind the fourth screen and next but one to the dead girl, had gone to the dining-room to find her spectacles and was there with Mrs Gow at eight when the trays went in, returning with the first cue. Zane, having carried in beside his sister, stood at the drawing-room door for the whole of the first act and the interval following, in the Colonel's sight and Mrs Gow's. Fifi went back and forth to the scullery through both intervals. Captain Wat Frew arrived at half past eight, after the trays had gone in, was pressed into reading the sailor, and spent the time until the first act ended in the study with the Colonel's man.
Three members of the household were elsewhere entirely. Xerxes and Aziz were at Hartfield House, where Xerxes was kept awake as usual and Aziz sat up with him; Gaunt was at the manse with a penitent, and the manse household vouches for the whole of the evening.
Certain matters belonging to the previous fortnight were recalled. The Colonel's Venetian decanter had been found in pieces upon the stairs, and Effie Strange had told the Colonel, pleasantly and at breakfast, that she had seen Fifi carry it up. Fifi was stopped a month's wages and informed that one more such thing would see her turned off without a character. Zane was in the pantry that same afternoon and knew his sister had not been upstairs at all; he said nothing then, and says nothing now beyond the hour of his own standing at the door.
Effie Strange was deep in debt. She had been going through the Manor's household books with a pencil and putting sharp questions to Nan about the linen and the servants' wages — Nan having kept those accounts for eleven years. Effie had told the drawing-room, laughing, that she meant to find out where the money went, and that it was generally the maid. It was also true that she had asked for devilled kidneys that very afternoon, in the kitchen passage, where Fifi and Mrs Gow both heard her, and that no one else was given them. Laudanum stands in three places in that house: Quill's bag, Effie's reticule, and the stillroom cupboard belowstairs, which is unlocked and which every servant uses for toothache and for the Colonel's knee. Quill supplied Effie her laudanum by the bottle and had lately told her he would supply no more; Captain Frew had sold her opium for two years, and she owed him for it. As for the Colonel's will, it leaves the bulk to Effie Strange, and he had said so at table often enough that the servants could recite it.
The screens were folded away one by one, and the hamper of wigs shut; and the prompt copy was left open on the chair, its pencil marks crossing out a maid's lines in a hand that was not the dead girl's.