Tuesday, December 14, 1926
Harrogate Hydro, Harrogate, England
“A table for two, please,” I hear Archie say to the maître d’hôtel, who glances at me quizzically. The little man in his fastidious evening attire, who reminds me of my fictional Hercule Poirot in some ways, has grown quite used to me dining alone over the past week with a book or a crossword puzzle for company and seems confused by this change in my habits. Only after dinner do I typically join other guests for a congenial turn at the piano or billiards.
I nod to indicate my assent.
“Right this way, Mrs. Neele,” he says, and I watch as Archie’s back stiffens at the name.
We don’t get very far. Just as we cross the threshold into the dining room—a formal cream-and-sage-green affair with a lovely glass ceiling—I feel a hand on my arm. “Mrs. Neele, you have a dinner guest. How very nice for you.”
It is Mrs. Robson, always nosy about the comings and goings of the hotel guests. Before I can answer or explain, she asks, “Does this mean you won’t be joining us for billiards?” I’d discussed a round of billiards with her and Mr. Wollesley for this evening.
“I’m afraid I won’t be able to play with you tonight,” I say and begin following the maître d’hôtel again. But she doesn’t leave.
“Is your guest visiting from South Africa as well?” she persists.
Archie glances at me as I answer, “No, I’m afraid not. Enjoy your evening, Mrs. Robson.” She finally accepts this signal of farewell and departs for her own dinner.
The maître d’hôtel leads us to a small table in the back corner, flanked by columns. It is discrete, and I couldn’t have chosen it better myself. From a distance, I see that Kenward and Goddard have positioned themselves in lobby chairs that have a view of the restaurant’s entrance. Are they watching to collect evidence or to ensure that neither of us escapes? I wonder.
As I sit in the upholstered dining chair that the maître d’hôtel pulls out for me, he asks, “Shall I bring you and your guest glasses of the red wine you’ve been enjoying, Mrs. Neele?”
“Yes, please,” I answer, watching Archie wince at the name.
We don’t speak as the waiter arrives and pours us each a glass of garnet-colored wine in the crystal glasses already set out on the table. As he busies himself at our table, I glance at the diners around us, well-heeled men and women here for the spa waters and treatments who are engrossed in themselves and each other. I must take care that they stay preoccupied and do not become drawn up in the exchange Archie and I are about to have.
When the waiter finally leaves, I take a long sip, and just as I’m about to launch into my prepared speech, I suddenly feel bashful, even wistful. A deep surge of longing for my daughter surfaces in Archie’s familiar company. “How’s Rosalind?” I ask.
“She doesn’t know anything about what’s happened, aside from a few snarky remarks by classmates, so she is fine,” he answers with surprising warmth. But then, I suppose he’s always cared more about Rosalind than me, even though he forbade me from feeling that way.
“Thank God.”
“Well, it’s certainly no thanks to you.” The warmth disappears from his voice, and bitter coldness takes hold again.
I catch myself about to apologize and launch into a long rationale for my behavior, and I stop. I mustn’t backslide into sentiment and old patterns of behavior with Archie. Instead, I allow the same iciness I hear in his tone to pervade my heart and voice. And I begin.
“Let’s return to the why of my disappearance before we turn to the how, shall we? Although in truth, the two are inextricably intertwined,” I say.
When he doesn’t speak but only glowers at me, I continue with my speech, one I’ve practiced over and over in the solitude of my hotel room. I’ve been building to this moment for much, much longer than the eleven days I’ve been missing, but now that it’s here, I must steel myself against my feelings and my years of pliability and softness for Archie.
“Why did I disappear, Archie? I told you earlier because it was the necessary consequence of your murder of me. This must sound confusing to you, because here I sit across from you, alive and in person. But the murder of which I speak is the murder of my authentic self—that vivacious, creative spirit you first met at Ugbrooke House all those years ago. You killed her bit by bit, over days and weeks and months and years of tiny injuries, until she’d grown so small and weak as to almost vanish. That person clung to life, however, in some far cavernous reach within me until you delivered your final savage blow on Rosalind’s birthday at Ashfield.”
“You’re not making a bit of sense, Agatha. Maybe your sanity went missing along with you,” he says with a rueful laugh.
I ignore his snide remark. “The story of that murder lies in the manuscript I sent you. Did you read it?”
He gives me a begrudging nod. “I had no choice. Your letter threatened dire consequences if I didn’t familiarize myself with those pages. And if I didn’t follow your instructions about how to handle your disappearance—which I did.”
“Good. I won’t ask if you enjoyed it, as I know it’s hard to read about oneself, if you are even self-aware enough to see yourself in those pages. I suppose some might call that manuscript an autobiography, although you and I know there’s a bit of fiction in there. Not in the way you are depicted, of course. No, not there. Although I suppose you fought against your portrayal when you read it; none of us like to see our unflattering truths laid bare.”
I see from his countenance precisely how distasteful he found my manuscript, but I note that he’s not arguing about his characterization. Not yet at least. “In those pages, I revealed myself—from the girl I’d been to the woman I changed into, as well as the wife and mother I became—and I demonstrated how that woman grew increasingly unpleasant to you. How you shrank from my emotions, how you flinched at my animated conversations, how your eyes glazed over in boredom over my books, how you recoiled at my touch. And I showed you how the parts you found distasteful were killed off, one by one, until there was almost nothing of me left. I sacrificed my relationship with Rosalind most of all, because you couldn’t stand to have any competition for your attention. Not that I blame you entirely, mind. Mummy always told me that you and your needs came first—before those of my child and before my own. And for a long time, I believed her.
“Imagine my surprise when the ideal wife I’d molded myself into—what you told me was ideal, anyway—wasn’t good enough. Imagine my astonishment when, even though I’d shed every real part of myself and transformed into your perfect woman—except the weight you tortured me about shedding, as I couldn’t—I was still intolerable to you. Then imagine the deadly shock you delivered when you informed me that, in fact, there was an idyllic companion for you out there, and it wasn’t me but a younger, prettier, meeker, more ‘appropriate’ woman named Nancy Neele.
“So you see, you murdered that pure Agatha, just as many people out there believed that you murdered the physical Agatha. Your affair was just the final blow in a murder that took place over a long, long time.”
“This is madness, Agatha. Pure fiction. Just like one of your silly books.” His voice is quiet, but his face reveals a thunderous rage.
“Is it, Archie? As you changed, you wanted someone who suited the newly confident and successful you. When it became clear that I couldn’t be that person—I was too familiar with your failings, your dark disappointments, and your history—you were drawn to Nancy. You wanted to become your own unreliable narrator, rewriting your past and your present history to suit the story you told yourself and Nancy. But I couldn’t let you do that.”
Archie doesn’t move, doesn’t argue, barely even blinks. Are my words resonating with him in a way that my manuscript didn’t? “Why?” he suddenly blurts out. “Why did you have to do this? Why couldn’t you just let me quietly divorce you?”
Anger begins to replace my calm resignation. “Have you been listening to me at all, Archie? Did you listen that Friday morning you announced you were leaving? Didn’t you read about this in the pages of my manuscript? If I let you do what you wanted—write me out of your story altogether after altering me and my relationships to such a vast extent, without any accountability to the truth about your actions and your affair with Nancy—I never could have arisen from my deathbed into the new, stronger person I’ve become these past months. You would have taken not only my truest self, but you would have taken my reputation and, most importantly, my daughter from me.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Agatha? I never insisted on taking Rosalind from you in the divorce, and anyway, the tender years doctrine favors maternal custody until a child is sixteen. I don’t think I could get custody if I tried.” He sounds exasperated and confused.
It is my turn to laugh. Is he being intentionally obtuse to thwart me, or is he really this thick? How had I ever thought the world of this selfish, literal-minded man? Without him weighing me down like an anchor, my mind and my pen will be free to soar. But first, I must slice the anchor rope, and there is only one way to do it.
“You don’t understand anything, Archie, no matter my efforts at illumination. I’m not talking about the legal loss of my daughter. I’m talking about the emotional loss, beyond the estrangement you’ve already wreaked by insisting that she come second in my life and by my idiocy in listening. If I had allowed you to divorce me without naming Nancy as your adulteress—and we both know that the Matrimonial Causes Act requires some form of adultery to be cited—then Rosalind, and the world, would have forever thought I was to blame. And given how she currently favors you, I would lose her forever. I’ve already lost so much to you; I will not lose Rosalind. In order to avoid that, I needed everyone to know that you are the cause of our problems and that I did everything I could to save our marriage and our family.”
“That’s why you staged this charade of a disappearance?”
“If you’d been listening to me, you would see that’s only part of the reason. But yes, I had to very carefully arrange my disappearance so that my whereabouts would be mysterious and the reason behind my departure ominous, but also so that you would eventually be implicated and your affair revealed as part of the investigation. Because you wouldn’t come clean on your own. In the months before I vanished, I made certain our estrangement wasn’t a secret; friends, family, and staff all knew you’d been staying in the city, away from Styles, because of a rift between us. The few times we reconnected at Styles were awkward at best. I went missing the evening after our biggest fight—one in which you refused to go away with me for the weekend, opting instead for a house party at the Jameses with Nancy—an argument witnessed by several people. My car was found in the early hours of the dawn, the morning after that terrible fight; the headlights shone out of an otherwise desolate area onto passersby as they went to work. When the police located my Morris Cowley, it rested on the edge of a precipice, stopped from crashing to the ground below by a fortuitous tangle of bushes. My car, which was packed with items for the Yorkshire trip I’d hoped to take with you, had been abandoned there, near the Silent Pool, a notorious place for suicides. But I was nowhere to be found, and the clues I left behind for you and the police—my heavy coat in the Morris Cowley’s back seat despite the coldness of the night, my weekend bag despite the cancelled plans, the car teetering on the edge of a cliff but no body to be found, the strange letter to your brother that raised the specter of some nebulous illness, the late-night call that seemingly precipitated my departure although it was only a check-in call from Charlotte—were open to multiple interpretations, all of them ominous and most of them pointing to you. How long did you think it would take for the police to connect the dots that led to you? And from you to Nancy? And from that time forward, how long did you think it would take for the authorities to shade in the blank areas of that image with my murder or suicide, prompted by you in either case?”
He crosses his arms and leans back in his chair, a self-satisfied smile spreading across his face. “You think you’re so smart, Agatha, but you’ve forgotten something important. You’ve lost your leverage against me. You’ve reappeared.”
For a brief, inexplicable moment, the image of Reggie Lucy flashes through my mind. How different my life would have been had I married that kindly man instead of Archie. Never would my life have devolved in this way. But I may never have transformed into the strong, talented woman I’ve had to become.
I can’t afford any weakness, so I banish the thought of Reggie from my mind. Instead, I harden myself and smile right back at Archie. “You’ve forgotten that I am gifted in the complex plotting of mysteries. Did you think that the little manuscript I sent you was simply for your edification? To elicit some sympathy for me? No, Archie, that’s not its primary purpose at all. It’s a copy of a document that will be sent to Kenward and Goddard if you do not follow my instructions to the letter. In that case, it will become evidence in a different crime.”
“You’re bluffing, Agatha. The only crime at issue here was your suspected murder, and that’s been solved by your very alive presence here at the Harrogate Hydro. So if you’ll excuse me—” He pushes himself up as if to leave.
“Think about it, Archie. Think about the story my manuscript tells. Think about the picture it paints of you.”
Reluctantly, he sits back down. He knows he must listen, but he still has a spark of defiance in his eyes. I hope to snuff out that spark forever.
I continue, “The coldness over my mother’s death. The affair and the businesslike announcement of your abandonment. The debilitating affect it had on me. The threatening behavior on the terrace in the Pyrenees. The violence over breakfast on that last day.”
“None of that’s true, Agatha,” he seethes.
“Really, Archie? I’ll admit to a certain amount of fiction in the manuscript, but only exaggeration in the area of your threatening behavior in the Pyrenees and at breakfast—and in the ongoing desire I felt to remain your wife and in the emotional demeanor with which I faced that final meal on Friday night. Otherwise, the fiction came in elsewhere, primarily in the form of omission. Obviously, I omitted all the planning I undertook in the months before my disappearance. It took patience and time to lay the groundwork—and a certain amount of dramatic skill when I was with you, admittedly—but I couldn’t share that in my manuscript, could I?” I say with a little chuckle.
“I also omitted certain feelings I had about motherhood, an ambivalence that grew from the distance you imposed between me and Rosalind and the irritation I occasionally felt when her needs overlapped with my work demands. I needed to depict myself favorably in the manuscript so I left that out, of course. The same rubric applied to my ambitions for my writing. I describe my writing as primarily undertaken for the benefit of our family, and that’s true only in part. I mostly write because I adore creating worlds and puzzles, and I want to succeed at it wildly. But ambition is a dirty word when it’s used by women; it’s decidedly unladylike, in fact. Consequently, I had to jettison that piece of information as well.”
The light of understanding begins to illuminate Archie’s eyes as the flicker of resistance starts to die out. Does he finally understand? I pause to give him space to comment, but he doesn’t speak. I need to ensure that he comprehends my meaning, so I must speak more plainly than I’d like.
“For all intents and purposes, the manuscript is the story of my life, and it’s one I’ll share with the police if necessary. In their hands, it will become evidence of your attempted murder that night near the Silent Pool, an attempt that I barely escaped after you called me to lure me there. An attempt that forced me into hiding at the Harrogate Hydro.”
“What? Attempted murder? Hiding? I won’t stand for this, Agatha. You’ll give me the divorce I want, and I’ll expose you to the world in the process,” Archie announces, standing up. His sudden motion causes his chair to clatter to the floor. The diners around us look over in alarm, and I see Kenward and Goddard rise from their carefully positioned seats and approach the entrance to the restaurant. Are they planning on protecting me from Archie—or vice versa?