Adele Fairley’s suspected drinking problem

Adele Fairley’s suspected drinking problem emerges through fragments of household testimony rather than a direct confession or a settled explanation. Annie Stead notices what she believes is the smell of whisky; later, after Adele’s death, she recounts finding Adele near a broken wine goblet and says she believes Adele had been going to the library for a drink. Emma initially protects Adele by rejecting the suspicion, then recognizes the later account as plausible and orders Annie to keep it secret. The episode makes possible drinking a concealed vulnerability within the household, while leaving its extent and its relation to Adele’s death unconfirmed.

The First Suspicion

Annie first raises her concern after helping Adele to bed. She reports to Emma that Adele smelled of whisky, qualifying her observation: she thinks that was the smell, rather than claiming certainty. The uncertainty matters. Annie offers a sensory impression, not proof that she saw Adele drink, and the scene supplies no independent confirmation at this point.

Emma responds by challenging Annie’s authority to identify whisky, pointing out that Annie’s father drinks beer. She then supplies an alternative explanation: Adele takes a special medicine, which Emma says Annie must have smelled. Emma’s answer therefore does more than dispute a detail; it closes down the possibility that the smell indicates drinking. Her firm, protective tone makes Annie retreat, although Annie maintains that Adele had been talking to herself.

Emma also offers an ordinary explanation for that second observation, suggesting that Adele may have been reading aloud without Annie noticing a book. The paired explanations—medicine for the smell, reading for the speech—keep Annie’s account from becoming a public accusation. The text does not establish whether Emma believes either explanation. What it does show is that, in this first exchange, she chooses to defend Adele and discourage further speculation.

The Goblet and the Revised Account

After Adele’s death, Annie returns to what she observed. She tells Emma and Mrs Turner that Adele’s expression before her fall seemed to her as if she had seen something terrible. Mrs Turner rejects the supernatural interpretation and warns against village talk about spirits. Emma, meanwhile, focuses on a practical question: why Adele had been downstairs in the middle of the night, when Murgatroyd said she had already been dead for hours.

Annie says she knows what Adele had been doing because she was the one who found her. According to Annie, broken glass lay around Adele, and she recognized the remains as those of one of the best wine goblets. Adele was still holding part of its stem, and Annie noticed that she had cut her hand. These details give the earlier suspicion a more concrete context: the possibility of drinking is now associated with a particular household object and Adele’s nighttime presence downstairs. They still do not establish how much she drank, how often she drank, or whether drinking contributed to her death.

Annie adds that she believes Adele was on her way to the library to get herself a drink, beginning to connect that inference with the smell she had noticed before. Her explanation remains an inference, not something she says she witnessed. Murgatroyd, Annie reports, had swept up the broken goblet quickly, apparently believing she had not seen him do so. His action had kept an important detail from Emma’s initial account of the death, but Annie’s observation brings it back into view.

Secrecy and the Limits of What Is Known

Emma recognizes the plausibility of Annie’s account, but her response is not to investigate further or announce a conclusion. She tells Annie not to repeat it to anyone, not even the Squire, and says that the less said, the better. Mrs Turner agrees that the household should avoid village gossip and let Adele rest in peace. Thus the goblet does not lead to an open inquiry; it becomes knowledge held within a small circle and deliberately withheld from wider circulation.

The sequence leaves Adele’s suspected drinking unresolved. Annie’s initial report, the later evidence of the broken wine goblet, and Emma’s changed assessment support the possibility that Adele sought alcohol privately. Yet the narrative does not confirm Annie’s proposed destination or motive, quantify any drinking, or identify it as the cause of death. Emma’s first defence and later silence also shape what can be known: she moves from supplying benign explanations to accepting a more troubling possibility, then makes concealment the household’s chosen response.

Narrative Significance

Adele’s possible drinking is presented indirectly, through what servants notice, infer, and choose to disclose. The reader receives the clues in stages: a smell first explained away as medicine, then a broken goblet whose removal Murgatroyd had attempted to conceal. This delayed account changes the interpretation of the earlier suspicion without transforming it into certainty.

The episode also distinguishes private recognition from public knowledge. Emma can acknowledge to herself that Annie’s account fits the circumstances while still preventing it from becoming village gossip. That tension leaves Adele’s behavior neither fully explained nor openly discussed. The subject remains a suspected problem, defined by traces and testimony, and by the household’s decision to keep those traces from wider view.