"Dessert" seems like the right word for what's going on right now.
I was surprised that Judith didn't remember Tim better. That scene in the drawing room a few months ago when Tim announced that Judith had killed Rachel should have been indelibly etched on Judith's mind. On the other hand, maybe she did remember but was a better dissembler than her dear Gregory. If she did, then she knows better than Evan that Tim hates Trask.
If Garth Blackwood were killed, would he disappear like the last man that Tate created? But of course Aristede isn't thinking that way, because he equates this Blackwood with the Blackwood who was chasing him when Petofi found him, and that Blackwood was a ghostly apparition, not a Tately one.
Evan likes to be on the winning side, but he should have seen that the chain-bearing stranger wouldn't take no for an answer. Evan is morally pusillanimous but apparently physically courageous. George Armstrong Custer was brave too, I've read.