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was the same reassuring manner that she had seen Trevor use so many times. Felix led the way
through the door. Doors, she should better say, for there were two of them: a heavy wooden one
meant to lock out trouble, just as any house in London might have, and, behind it, a lighter door with a
mesh panel in the front. Designed to allow a cooling breeze to pass through, she noted upon closer
inspection, but to stop any flies or bugs from entering with it.
“Felix?” she said. “What do you call this thing? This door with a screen in it?”
“It is a screened door, Memsahib.”
“Ah,” Emma said. “Just so. Well, it is ingenious.”
The five of them moved through the foyer and formal sitting room toward the back of the
house, where a broad kitchen seemed to serve as the buffer between the large airy bedrooms of the
Weavers and the small, darkened rooms of their servants.
“Tell them to show us everything that was done on the morning Mrs. Weaver died,”
Emma instructed, while Geraldine sat down upon a stool placed at a small work table and prepared
to make notes. “Start with the moment they heard signs that the Secretary-General was awake.”
Felix chattered something and the two women promptly moved into action, doing a most
effective pantomime of the events of a typical morning in the Weaver household. Evidently Anthony
Weaver had been telling the truth about not breakfasting at home for Emma saw no evidence that
either woman was preparing anything for him although Felix, entering into the action, quite
dramatically acted out the eating of his own curry and then pretended to leave via a side door,
presumably to prepare the carriage.
“So Mr. Weaver required nothing from the kitchen, am I reading that right?” Emma said
to Felix, who hovered at the door. “Yet his departure was the signal to begin preparing a tray for his
wife?”
“Yes, Memsahib,” Felix said. “See, they lay out tray and boil the water…”
“For morning tea?”
“For medicine.”
“Ah,” said Emma. “And how is that done?”
A few words from Felix and the women sprang back into action. A small rectangular
silver tray was produced and a singular cup without a saucer was placed on it.
“Nurse lays out tray and cup the afternoon before, when she leaves,” Felix said to Emma
and Geraldine. “Powder already in cup. In morning, cook heats the water and pours over top.”
“The laudanum lies exposed in the cup from late afternoon until the next morning?”
Emma asked with dismay. Anyone within the household would have the chance to tamper with it.
“Where was the medication stored?”
Felix pointed at a small drawer, evidentially the same one Davy had fingerprinted.
“And what was the purpose of the dropper?” Emma asked.
The boy frowned in uncertainty and she made the same pinching motion with her fingers
that Trevor had demonstrated the day before. “Go on tray with cup,” he said. Now he did the
pinching motion himself. “Lady put in tea.”
“What do you make of this?” Emma asked Geraldine, who was keenly observing the
tableau from across the kitchen. “Say it back to me as you see it, so that we might help each other
think.”
“The biggest revelation seems to be that the murder of Rose Weaver and Pulkit Sang
might have been set in motion the night before their death,” Geraldine said. “If so, we have been
focusing on the wrong time frame. Adelaide would set out the mixture before she left for the day. A