Agnes Jemima and Nicole (half-sisters)

Agnes Jemima and Nicole are the half-sisters whose parallel testimonies form the narrative backbone of The Testaments. Raised in radically different worlds—Agnes inside Gilead as the adopted daughter of a Commander’s Wife, Nicole in Canada as the secretly protected fugitive Baby Nicole—they are brought together by Aunt Lydia’s plan to smuggle a microdot of incriminating evidence out of Gilead. Their escape from Ardua Hall, harrowing journey to Canada, and reunion with their mother provide the narrative engine that triggers the regime’s collapse.

Separate Upbringings

Agnes Jemima grew up believing she was the biological daughter of Commander Kyle and his Wife Tabitha. Tabitha told her a fairy tale about rescuing her from a castle of wicked witches, a story Agnes cherished until she learned the truth: Tabitha was not her mother, and she had been taken from a Handmaid who tried to flee Gilead with her. After Tabitha’s death, Agnes’s stepmother Paula married Commander Kyle and brought a Handmaid, Ofkyle, into the household. Ofkyle died giving birth to a son, Mark, and Agnes later discovered that Ofkyle’s original name was Crystal. The revelation that her own mother was a Handmaid—and that she herself was a stolen child—shattered Agnes’s sense of identity. Nicole, meanwhile, was raised in Toronto by Neil and Melanie, who ran a used clothing store called The Clothes Hound. She knew nothing of her origins until the day of her sixteenth birthday, when a car bomb killed Neil and Melanie. Ada, a Mayday operative, took her to a safe house and told her the truth: she was Baby Nicole, the infant smuggled out of Gilead by her Handmaid mother and hidden by Mayday. Nicole’s adoptive parents had been Mayday agents, and their murder was part of a Gileadean operation.

Discovery of the Sisterhood

Agnes, now a Supplicant Aunt named Aunt Victoria at Ardua Hall, discovered her Bloodlines file in the Hildegard Library. The file contained a picture of her mother—a Handmaid who had escaped to Canada—and a notation that this mother had a second child, Nicole, who had been smuggled out as an infant. A handwritten line added in blue ink read: “Top Secret. Baby Nicole is here in Gilead.” Agnes realized that the new convert named Jade, who had arrived at Ardua Hall as a Pearl, was her half-sister. She slipped the two pages from the file and hid them under her mattress. Later, when Aunt Lydia revealed Jade’s true identity to both Agnes and Becka, the three women were bound together by a shared secret and a dangerous mission.

The Escape and Journey

When Commander Judd discovered that Jade was Baby Nicole and planned to marry her, Aunt Lydia accelerated the escape. Agnes and Nicole, disguised as Pearl Girls, left Ardua Hall at dawn. They encountered Aunt Vidala near Aunt Lydia’s statue; Nicole struck her with a heartstopper punch, and they dragged her behind the statue. They passed through the gate with forged passes and were driven to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where they took a bus. At a prearranged stop, they changed into civilian clothes and were driven to a dock on the Penobscot River. A motorboat took them to the schooner Nellie J. Banks, which carried them toward Canada. Engine trouble and a coast guard inspection nearly derailed the plan, but they were eventually put into an inflatable boat and rowed through fog and high tides to the shore of Nova Scotia. Nicole’s left arm, where Aunt Lydia had embedded a microdot inside the GOD/LOVE tattoo, became infected, and she was delirious by the time they landed.

Reunion and Aftermath

They were airlifted to the Campobello Refugee Medical Centre, where Nicole received antibiotics. Ada, Elijah, and Garth were waiting. The microdot, once extracted, revealed a cache of documents that exposed the crimes of Gilead’s elite, triggering the Ba’al Purge and the regime’s collapse. Their mother, the fugitive Handmaid who had worked for Mayday, came to the hospital. She embraced both daughters, and Nicole, though she could not remember her, said, “It’s okay.” The Thirteenth Symposium on Gileadean Studies confirms that the two sisters lived to have children and grandchildren, and that a statue on the Boston Common commemorates Becka, Aunt Immortelle, with an inscription that reads: “A bird of the air shall carry the voice, and that which hath wings shall tell the matter. Love is as strong as Death.”