"I have always acted in accordance with the dictates of my conscience. I have nothing with which to reproach myself."
Emily Caroline Brent was one of ten guests invited to Nigger Island. She was the fifth to die, in the manner laid out in the poem.
Emily Brent was an elderly, religiously rigid, socially respectable spinster who accepted the vacation on Nigger Island largely due to financial constraints. Years earlier, she had dismissed her teenage maid, Beatrice Taylor, for becoming pregnant out of wedlock. Beatrice, who had already been rejected by her parents for the same reason, drowned herself, which Miss Brent considered an even worse sin.
Charge
"Emily Caroline Brent, that upon the 5th November, 1931, you were responsible for the death of Beatrice Taylor."
She dismissed her maid, Beatrice Taylor after discovering she was pregnant out of wedlock. The girl later threw herself into a river and drowned. It is also implied that Brent told the girl's parents, who then disowned her, adding to her responsibility. Despite this she feels no guilt.
Death
"A bumble bee stung one and then there were Five."
Brent dies from an injection of potassium cyanide administered with a hypodermic syringe — the injection mark on her neck is an allusion to a bee sting. A bumble bee is also left in the room, a reference to the poem.