The still-room at Hartfield House had been laid out that morning with the thoroughness of a campaign: baskets of plums and currants, loaves of sugar standing like milestones, and a long rank of empty jars drawn up and awaiting their labels. Guests were pressed into the writing of these labels, as guests are, and the household's dismay at this arrangement was visible to anyone who cared to look at the housekeeper's mouth.
Xerxes Hartfield's marriage is a settled public fact of Cairnholm society, and Nan Pringle, a cousin of the family, has long been understood to keep that household's appearances in order. The appearances, that afternoon, were kept beautifully.
It was in the small morning-room off the still-room that Aziz was found. He was the companion of Xerxes, the nabob and master of the house, and he sat upright in his chair with an emptied glass of fruit cordial at his elbow, and he had not woken. He had been poisoned: a sleeping draught taken in the cordial, after which he did not wake. The room was tidy. Nothing had been disturbed. One might almost have said that he had been left in better order than he was usually found.
The glass smelt faintly of the bitter sleeping draught that Dr Tobias Quill dispenses about the house. Beside it stood a second glass, clean, and unused. Upon Aziz's person, as always, hung a sapphire of great size — the Maharaja's Sapphire — which he wore openly and never removed. It had not been touched.
Among the labelled jars on the still-room table, in the neat rank of damson and greengage and black currant, there lay one label in Aziz's hand which bore no fruit at all. It bore a line of writing, pressed so hard into the paper that the nib had spread, and then scored through twice — begun, it seemed, in some agitation, and abandoned before it could become a sentence anybody else might read.
A tray of cordial had been carried through earlier by a housemaid at the Colonel's asking. The Colonel took none himself. Across the still-room threshold lay Mabel, the master's tame cheetah, who stirred for no one all afternoon.
Of the undercurrents of the house, little was secret and less was discussed. Aziz had of late grown openly possessive of Xerxes's time, and plainly resented the demands of the marriage and of the Eastern venture upon it; more than one guest had heard him, that very week, press Xerxes to let the arrangement be known for what it was. As to the draught, it was common property: Quill leaves it freely, Xerxes takes it nightly, and any guest in the house knew where a bottle stood. And Nan had, that morning, remarked to the housemaid which cordial was Aziz's, and that he always drank it alone after the labelling.
The company was thin and well accounted for. Fenella Swain, maid, her twin brother being otherwise engaged, passed the day at Cruikshank Manor. Cousin R and Effie Strange were in town together; Wat was aboard his vessel in the harbour. Each was placed by others.
Those within the walls arranged themselves as follows. Nan, the poor relation who attends the Colonel everywhere and had come with him for the afternoon, asked the housemaid to take the cordial tray round and then withdrew; from before the tray went round until the discovery she sat in the front parlour at the far end of the house with Lavinia and Gaunt, writing labels, and three people place her there without a gap. Colonel Cecil Cruikshank, Xerxes's partner in the Eastern venture and a loud disapprover of improper households, had called upon matters of the partnership and was in the library with Xerxes over the papers from mid-afternoon until the alarm; Xerxes vouches for him throughout. Quill, physician and coroner, a nervous man whose sleeping draughts are kept in half the rooms of the house, had been called that day to look at Xerxes's insomnia, and came and went between the dispensary and Xerxes's rooms — unaccompanied, for a stretch in the early afternoon, near the still-room. Zane, a footman lent to the preserving at the housekeeper's request, carried sugar and jars between kitchen and still-room across the whole afternoon, and the kitchen staff place him in their sight continuously.
The jars stand labelled in their neat rank, the fruit still bright, and the one scored-through label curling where it was set down.