A Bombay silk merchant having sent his samples up on approval, Xerxes kept open house at Hartfield House to see them, on a wet evening in the autumn of 1884. The bolts were unrolled the length of the billiard table; swatches were pinned to numbered cards; and the borrowed scissors and both measuring tapes went missing before the soup, which everyone agreed was very like a silk-viewing. The champagne stood iced in the long gallery, and a dish of candied violets and marzipan went round with it.
At twenty past eleven the Reverend Simeon Gaunt was found in the billiard room, seated upright in the chair at the head of the table, his hands folded in his lap as though waiting for a hymn to be given out. Across his knees lay a folded square of the heaviest sample silk — the mulberry, card seventeen. He had been smothered.
Dr Tobias Quill, who as coroner was obliged to say so twice and did so with the patience of a man reading a timetable aloud, reported that Gaunt had taken laudanum shortly beforehand, enough to put a temperate man past objecting, and that he had not struggled.
At Gaunt's right hand stood a champagne coupe, a third drunk. This was noted, because Gaunt had taken no wine in nineteen years and had said so at dinner, loudly, to the table. The glass smelled faintly of orange-flower water. The kitchen puts orange-flower water in the marzipan and in nothing else served that evening; the candied violets are flavoured with nothing at all.
The dish of candied violets and marzipan had been carried through the gallery and set on the billiard-room mantel at ten o'clock. By the discovery three marzipan pieces were gone from it and the violets untouched.
Card seventeen, the mulberry, had been unpinned, and the pin set back through the empty card, straight, as a tidy person does. The other nine cards were still mounted. Mabel, Xerxes's cheetah, was chained at the gallery's hearth end from dinner until midnight and did not care for the scissors, the footman keeping near her the whole while. The scissors and the tapes were still missing at the discovery and were never found; they had nothing to do with it.
The billiard-room door stands at the end of the long gallery. Between ten o'clock and the discovery the gallery was occupied by the silk-viewing party, with people coming and going from it in ones and twos; nobody could cross from the drawing room to the billiard room without passing the gallery's length.
In Gaunt's breast pocket was a pencilled list in his own hand, headed "Persons to be spoken to, in order." Four names were struck through. One, "E.S.", was not.
Gaunt took nothing stronger than water, ate once a day, and had preached in June against the laudanum trade by name; Quill has remarked since that the sermon cost him patients. In the fortnight before, Gaunt had called twice on the chemist in Barrack Street and once on Captain Wat Frew's landlord, and had told Lavinia at tea that he meant "to go to the root of the supply, person by person, beginning with those nearest me." It was his unvarying habit at any gathering to withdraw at ten o'clock to the quietest room he could find and sit an hour with his list and his pencil, and the household knew it and let him be. He was named trustee of Lavinia's savings under their mother's will; the trust ends not at his death but on Lavinia's fortieth birthday, which falls in two years, at which death a stranger is appointed by the court in his place.
Effie Strange's quarterly allowance comes to her through Colonel Cecil Cruikshank's man of business. Three weeks ago that man of business received a letter from Gaunt, and since that letter the allowance has been paid against vouched bills only, with no cash in hand. Effie had been in debt to a Cairnholm money-lender since the spring, and had told two people at dinner, gaily, that she expected to be perfectly solvent by Martinmas.
Three persons in the house keep laudanum: Quill in his bag, Xerxes in his dressing-room for sleeplessness, and Effie, who makes no secret of a bottle in her reticule and had it filled on Tuesday.
Effie herself was the brightest thing in the gallery: heir-presumptive to the Colonel, invited for the silks, arrived in a hired brougham she had not paid for. She chose and discarded six swatches in ten minutes, pronounced the mulberry the only honest colour in the room, and ate marzipan steadily all evening because, she said, she did not care for violets. At a quarter past ten she went through to the billiard room to measure the mulberry against her glove, and was back among the party some while after, nobody fixing the interval.
Xerxes, the nabob, whose fortune and whose taste are the reason the merchant troubled to send at all, was in good humour throughout and had no quarrel with any clergyman he could name. From ten o'clock he was in the gallery settling terms with a clerk from the counting-house; the clerk, the merchant's man and three guests had him continuously in view until the alarm. Aziz, who had the ordering of the gallery and the champagne and wore his fez all evening, moved between the gallery and the butler's pantry, fetching and sending; the butler and two footmen can place him at every quarter hour. He and Gaunt had exchanged nothing but civilities in four years.
Lavinia had quarrelled audibly with her half-brother before dinner about her allowance, and then, from a few minutes past ten until the cry went up, sat at the far end of the gallery giving a sitting for three guests, a hand held on either side. Wat had come up from the harbour to see what silk had been landed without him, and spent from before ten until half past eleven in the yard disputing a bill of lading with the merchant's carter, the carter and two grooms with him throughout; Gaunt had refused him at the mission door three times and had never once been ashamed of it. Quill was at cards in the drawing room from dinner until the alarm, in view of four players, and came through the gallery only at the cry.
The Colonel and Nan were at Cruikshank Manor the whole evening, at accounts and then abed, vouched for by the household; Cousin R was at Inverkeith with the Dalrymples and did not return until Thursday; Fifi and Zane were in service at Cruikshank Manor, both seen at the servants' supper and after.
The mulberry silk lay folded square across the dead man's knees; the pin stood straight back through the empty card; and in the gallery beyond, the bolts were still unrolled the length of the billiard table, the champagne gone flat in its ice.