The Ending In One Minute
Today it’s the ending of The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, and fair warning, this one is full of spoilers.
Here is the short version. Aunt Lydia, the most feared woman in Gilead, has secretly been Mayday’s source for years. Her plan is to smuggle a cache of damning evidence out of Gilead inside a girl’s tattoo. The girl is Daisy, who is really Baby Nicole. It works, Gilead collapses, and a historian explains how we know in the epilogue. If you want to stay unspoiled, stop here.
The Setup
A quick recap so we’re on the same page. The book has three narrators. Aunt Lydia writes a hidden manuscript, called the Ardua Hall Holograph. Agnes, who becomes Aunt Victoria, and Daisy, a teenager in Toronto, give witness testimonies.
Lydia has a statue, a huge power base, and a secret. Agnes is a Commander’s stepdaughter who escapes a forced marriage by joining the Aunts. Daisy is the girl whose life changes on her sixteenth birthday, when a car bomb kills the couple she thought were her parents. All three stories are heading to one place.
Why Lydia Turns On Gilead
To understand the plan, you need Lydia’s past. Before Gilead she was a judge. When the regime took over, she was dragged to a stadium with other women, held for days, and watched women be shot. Then she was locked in a cell called the Thank Tank and beaten.
Commander Judd then forced her to prove loyalty by shooting blindfolded women, one of whom was her colleague Anita. Years later, Judd tells her her rifle held a blank. She calls it a bargain, made not with the Devil but with Judd. And from that day, she says, she promised herself she would get him back.
The Source
Lydia becomes the Aunt in charge, and she quietly builds a weapon out of secrets. For years she photographs the top secret crime files of the regime, which prove that Commanders murder wives, rig trials and lie in the name of God.
She sends information to Mayday on microdots, tiny photographs stuck to the Pearl Girls’ recruiting brochures. Those brochures pass through a used clothing shop in Toronto called The Clothes Hound, run by Neil and Melanie. So when Judd’s agents discover the leak and blow up the shop, Lydia loses her channel. That is why she needs a courier.
Why It Has To Be Daisy
Here’s the reveal, and it’s the book’s biggest. Daisy is Baby Nicole, the infant smuggled out of Gilead whose face is on every propaganda poster. Lydia learns it from a Pearl Girl who suspects the girl at The Clothes Hound, and she keeps it from the Eyes.
Then she realizes that Baby Nicole is the perfect courier. Gilead cannot kill her, because she is a symbol. Mayday cannot easily lose her, because she is the one person Lydia will trust. And the Pearl Girls will bring her to Ardua Hall, if they know what to look for. That is why Lydia demands a tattoo on her left forearm that reads God and Love, in the shape of a cross.
Agnes, Becka and The Folders
While Daisy is trained in Canada, Lydia is preparing a second pair of hands inside Gilead. That is Agnes. Lydia helps her escape marriage to Judd, and quietly offers him Shunammite instead.
She then sends Agnes and Becka folders of secret crime files, and she has Becka’s abuser, Dr. Grove, framed and torn apart by Handmaids. Lydia admits she wanted these girls hardened, grateful and loyal. In the end it works, but that puts her in a very dark place: she manipulates the two young women she says she wants to protect.
The Tattoo and The Sisters
When Daisy arrives in Gilead as a Pearl Girl convert named Jade, Lydia asks to see her arm. She makes a small cut in the tattoo and slides a microdot into the letter O of God. Daisy is now the message.
Lydia then calls in Agnes and Becka and tells them the truth. Jade is Baby Nicole, and she is Agnes’s half-sister, because the girls share a mother. They have a choice, but there is no real choice, because Lydia warns that anyone who knows and stays silent can be hanged. The two agree.
Judd Closes In
Then comes the crisis. Judd raids the Ardua Hall printing press looking for the microdot channel, finds nothing, but learns that Jade is Baby Nicole. He wants to announce an engagement to her and broadcast the wedding.
That forces Lydia to move early. She gives Agnes and Daisy new Pearl Girl papers, bus tickets and the route to Canada. She tells Daisy to write a note saying she eloped with a plumber. And she gives Becka a special mission: hide for forty-eight hours so nobody realizes there are three girls missing.
Becka’s Sacrifice
Becka hides in the water cistern on the roof of the residence. She drains it first and is waiting inside when the others leave. At the gate, Aunt Vidala spots them, and Daisy punches her in the chest. Vidala collapses with a stroke.
The Works Department later finds Becka dead in the cistern, her clothes folded on the ladder. The book never says exactly how she died. Lydia calls it a willing sacrifice and covers it up as an accident. Agnes has already said her goodbyes, and Daisy later hears Becka’s voice on the beach.
The Escape
The journey north is a chase. A fake Guardian drives them out. They take a bus and pass checkpoints. They meet a smuggler in a shop, then a pickup truck and a motorboat on the Penobscot River, and finally a fishing schooner called the Nellie J. Banks.
When the ship breaks down, Daisy, sick with an infected arm, and Agnes are put into an inflatable boat and told to row for the shore through fog and tide. They make it ashore in Nova Scotia, and Mayday agents Ada and Garth find them. They are airlifted to a refugee centre on Campobello Island, where their mother finally holds them.
Lydia’s Last Days
Meanwhile Lydia is tying up loose ends. Vidala wakes from her coma and accuses her, so Lydia tells Aunt Elizabeth that Vidala is coming for her. She then leaves Elizabeth alone with Vidala, with a hint about the pillow. She also sends Shunammite, whom Judd has been poisoning, to a clinic for safety.
Her last entry is calm. She expects to die soon. She says that a needleful of morphine would be quick, and that she would hate to be tortured into confession. The final lines: footsteps approach, and between one breath and the next the knock will come.
Clues You May Have Missed
Once you know the plan, Lydia’s chapters are full of hints. In her very first pages she says she has a list of who to take down with her. She says that if she is toppled, she will pull down the temple.
She hides her manuscript inside a hollowed out book. She claims she wants to hunt the leak in Gilead, while she is the leak. And when Daisy slips and asks, are you the source, Lydia answers, the what. She never confirms it, and you only realize later why the questions were so careful.
What The Evidence Does
The cache arrives in Canada, and the news breaks it all over the world. Judd’s crimes, the plots between Commanders, and the lies of the elite are laid out. In the epilogue we learn this set off the so-called Ba’al Purge, which thinned the ruling class.
That led to a military coup, a popular uprising, and sabotage by Mayday and several parts of the old United States, including Texas and the West Coast. In other words, one girl’s tattoo is credited with starting the final collapse of the regime.
The Epilogue in Twenty One Ninety-Seven
The book ends with Historical Notes from a symposium in the year twenty-one ninety-seven. Professor Pieixoto, the same historian from The Handmaid’s Tale, presents Lydia’s manuscript and the two testimonies. He debates whether they are authentic, since a rival Aunt could have forged the holograph to frame her.
But he concludes they are real, mainly because of a statue in Boston with an inscription. It remembers Becka, Aunt Immortelle, from her sisters Agnes and Nicole, their mother, their fathers and their children, and thanks the services of A.L.
What It Means
So what is the ending saying? To me, it says change comes from compromised people. Lydia is cruel, manipulative and responsible for terrible things. She is also the reason Gilead falls. Atwood doesn’t let you resolve that.
And the second message is about the cost. Becka, Neil, Melanie, Anita and many more die for the plan. Lydia sees herself as a Recording Angel, but she admits she is also a dealer in sordid gossip. The ending gives you the victory, but never the comfort.
What We Never Learn
There are real unanswered questions. We never see Lydia’s death. We never learn what happens to Judd, or Elizabeth. We don’t learn the mother’s name, or whether Daisy and Garth ever become a couple.
Pieixoto warns that even his own conclusions might be wrong. I like that. It leaves just enough doubt to keep you thinking after the last page.
Your Turn
Was Lydia a hero, a villain or both? Tell me in the comments, because I really want to know. And if you want the book against the Hulu series, that video is on the channel too.
Subscribe for more endings explained, and thanks for watching.
