The orchids of Hartfield House were at their brief best, and Xerxes had the hothouse kept at a blood heat so that no bloom should be put out by the season. The company took champagne among the ferns from nine o'clock, fanning themselves and admiring, and reading aloud, by way of amusement, the little brass labels set beneath the rarer specimens, which gave their poisons in Latin. Half the room had a turn at the oleander and the monkshood before the ices came. Nothing was cut, and Dr Tobias Quill was afterwards firm that no poison was in the matter at all.
At the west end of the conservatory Mabel, the cheetah, lay the whole evening upon the warm tiles, chained to the fountain rail and admired by a succession of guests who were never once not there.
Lady Lavinia Loveless, the medium of Hartfield House, had lived two years on Xerxes's money and gave sittings to the town's grieving at a guinea a head. She had been a great beauty and was no longer, and dressed as though the matter were still open. From 10:30 she sat in the east alcove, three guests at a time, the curtain drawn. Aziz kept the curtain and sent them in by turns. At about half past ten Cousin R had asked him at what hour the sittings would be finished with. The last sitters left her at 11:00, and at 11:05 Aziz was called away to the champagne table.
Between 11:05 and 11:20 the conservatory's east end was unattended. The band played in the long gallery, and the arrival of the ices drew the company there entire.
She was found at 11:20, seated upright in the wicker chair with her hands folded in her lap and her head tipped a little back, as though she were listening to something at a distance. She had been smothered. There was no mark upon her, and nothing in the alcove was disturbed. Her hair was in its usual careless state, her shawl had slid half from one shoulder, and one glove lay on the tiles where she had dropped it. Quill, who is coroner as well as physician, observed that she had neither struggled nor been tidied: she had simply been held still, and left as she sat.
Beside the chair lay a cushion of green silk, perfectly plumped, its nap brushed the one way. Quill said the cushion would have served, and that death would have taken some minutes of steady quiet. The cushion was Lavinia's own and kept in the alcove. The nap of green silk takes a mark and holds it; whoever had plumped it had brushed the nap the one way, all over, after it was done with.
Of the household's whereabouts the company gave a tidy account. Xerxes had been in the long gallery from 10:50, presiding over the ices in the sight of thirty people until the alarm was raised. Captain Wat Frew, who brings Xerxes his cargoes and knows what everyone in Cairnholm owes, stood at the west end with Mabel and a circle of guests from 10:40 until the alarm; he had sold Lavinia nothing and wanted nothing of her. Effie Strange, a bright young thing much in debt, who had come for the champagne and had twice asked Lavinia to put a question to a dead uncle on her behalf, was dancing in the gallery from 10:55, and the band did not stop until 11:22, and she was on the floor for the whole of it. Zane Swain, footman, lent across from Cruikshank Manor because Hartfield House was four pairs of hands short, was on the gallery stair with the ice-pails from 11:00 under the eye of the butler and two hired men until 11:25; he is a careful young man and a rule-abider. His twin, Fifi, maid, lent across with him, was in the back passage counting linen against the housekeeper's list from 10:40 to 11:40, in company; she and Lavinia had maintained a long cool war of small discourtesies. Aziz, companion to Xerxes Hartfield and resident at the house, kept the alcove curtain from 10:30 and was at the champagne from 11:05 in the sight of the company.
The Reverend Simeon Gaunt, Lavinia's half-brother, disapproves of her trade in the dead and had said so at every opportunity, having quarrelled with her twice that month over money she had of him. On the Tuesday he had demanded it back and been refused, loudly, before the servants' hall; at the gala he told Quill that he had put the matter in the hands of a solicitor that morning. He sat with the second party of sitters at 10:45 and did not leave the long gallery afterward, and three guests and the band's cellist place him there continuously from 11:00.
Cousin R said that he had gone out to the cold air of the terrace at about 11:00, for a quarter of an hour. No one saw him there. No one saw him elsewhere.
He is an unplaceable guest of long standing, who collects things about people and spends them on nothing. He had come up from the town for the gala and intended to go down again in the morning. He had spent much of the week sketching Lavinia — three sittings in the conservatory, he said, for a study of her in the green light. He keeps a portfolio of studies of persons at their last interesting moment; he has never sold one, never exhibited one, and never asked a sitter's leave. At dinner he had told two people that Lavinia's sittings were "finishing," and that he had the last of what he needed.
The sketchbook was in his coat pocket when the body was found, and he showed it without being asked. It held three studies of Lavinia in the wicker chair. In the first two she sits upright and faces out. The third has her head tipped back, her hands folded in her lap, and her shawl slipped from the one shoulder — a pose she had not held during any of her three sittings.
Two absences require no explanation and have been given one regardless. The Colonel and Nan Pringle passed the night at Cruikshank Manor, he abed with gout and she reading to him, both vouched for by the household; and Quill, though he came to Hartfield House at 11:35 when sent for, had been at the infirmary in the town until 11:20 in the sight of two nurses.
There remained some smaller untidiness in the record. Lavinia had told Aziz, in the hearing of two guests, that she heard "a shut door" in this house and would say nothing more of it; Xerxes had laughed, refilled her glass, and remarked that she said as much every month. And Zane had been seen on the back stair with Lavinia a fortnight since, late — a story Lavinia had herself told at a luncheon as an amusement, naming no one.
The orchids went on steaming in their heat, the brass labels declaring their poisons to nobody, and the wicker chair held its shape where she had sat in it. The green silk cushion lay on the tiles, brushed all the one way.