Linda Farrier

Linda Farrier, also known by her title Lady Linda Farrier, is the female head of the Checquy and one of its most formidable figures. An aristocrat close to the monarch, she can enter and control other people’s dreams; when she meets the amnesiac Myfanwy, she explains why Myfanwy has been permitted to take up her former life but cannot simply depart. Farrier’s measured authority embodies the Checquy’s central contradiction: it protects the country while treating its gifted recruits as assets who cannot leave.

Identity and Authority

Farrier is identified as the Right Honorable Linda Viscountess Farrier and is paired with Conrad Grantchester as one of the heads of the Checquy, based at Apex House. Within the organization, her status rests on more than rank or aristocratic connections. Members regard her nervously because she projects such authority that her gaze seems to expose what they are thinking and what they have done wrong. The force of that impression is part of her power: people feel watched and judged even before she acts.

Her established ability is to enter and control sleeping minds. The Checquy also circulates rumors that she can plant hypnotic suggestions, imprison someone in a dream permanently, or drive a person mad. These possibilities are presented as unconfirmed whispers, not as a settled account of her powers. The difference matters: Farrier’s known capacity is already sufficient to make sleep a vulnerable space, while the rumors extend her influence into a much larger, uncertain threat.

Dreams and the Meeting with Myfanwy

Farrier’s power is introduced through a scene in which she sleeps in a dim, circular room without windows, on a Roman-style couch. Armed men in purple stand motionless around the viewing gallery above her. Even in sleep, her expression shifts uneasily: her eyelids move, she bites her lip in concentration, and, after waking, she yawns before attending to business. The armed surveillance around her contrasts with the inward reach of her own ability. Farrier can cross into another person’s sleeping mind even as she herself rests under watch.

After her secretary reports that the earlier incident with Gestalt has been settled with Dr. Crisp, Farrier asks for her dinner with Rook Thomas to be moved earlier. She then lies back down, intending to see whether anyone interesting is asleep in America. The casualness of this remark makes dream-entry sound like an ordinary extension of her working day. It also gives her power a reach beyond the immediate Checquy setting, though the passage does not establish what she finds in anyone’s dreams.

At Simpson’s, Farrier recognizes Myfanwy as the woman she had encountered in a dream shortly after the new Myfanwy came into being. Their first waking conversation begins with a test of recognition: Farrier asks whether Myfanwy knows who she is, then whether she knows who she herself is. Myfanwy answers correctly that Farrier is the female head of the Checquy. Farrier remarks that, at their previous meeting, Myfanwy had known neither of their identities. The exchange turns a private dream encounter into an assessment of how much of Myfanwy’s former place and knowledge she has recovered.

Recruitment and Assessment of the Former Myfanwy

Farrier recounts the organization’s close scrutiny of Myfanwy as a child. The Checquy regarded the girl’s unusual talent, which had no apparent alarming weakness or deformity, as a coup. Farrier watched her dreams for weeks, recorded their details, and interviewed her in dream settings chosen to test her. The Estate’s records, she observes, could even reveal what the child ate for dinner each night during the three months between the manifestation of her powers and the organization’s acquisition of her. Surveillance and evaluation began before recruitment was complete.

Despite those high expectations, Myfanwy did not respond well to being transferred from her family. Farrier describes a child who withdrew inward and seemed pathologically shy. The Estate was intended to soften that separation by welcoming students quickly, making them feel comfortable and loved, and training them to use their powers effectively. In Myfanwy’s case, however, the effort did not overcome the effects of removal. Her ability was linked exclusively to physical contact, making her social withdrawal especially damaging to the Checquy’s hopes for her.

Farrier calls the former Myfanwy both a tremendous disappointment and a surprisingly valuable asset. That judgment reveals the institution’s double standard: it assesses a child in terms of promise and usefulness, yet interprets the child’s distress chiefly as a failure to fulfill that promise. Myfanwy’s capacity to control other people was paired with what Farrier saw as an impermeable emotional and social shell. The language of talent and asset thus sits beside the evidence of a child who struggled to adapt, without resolving that tension in the organization’s favor.

The Checquy, Secrecy, and the Question of Departure

When Myfanwy appears at the Rookery and starts conducting business on Monday, Farrier treats the decision to remain as an immediate security problem. The former Myfanwy had been privy to state secrets at the highest level; even without her memories, her return to work exposes her to knowledge unavailable outside the organization. Farrier calls her a horrendous security risk and says she had vaguely hoped to arrange some form of sequestered retirement. Her concern is expressed as practical containment, not as a question of whether Myfanwy wants to choose a different life.

Farrier makes the rule explicit: no one leaves the Checquy. In this case, that rule is reinforced by Myfanwy’s unusual position. She cannot simply be treated as an outsider, because she already occupies a senior role and is again conducting the organization’s business; nor can the loss of her memories erase the secrets she may learn by working there. The situation makes institutional secrecy inseparable from control over a member’s future.

Myfanwy challenges Farrier by asking whether she owed her predecessor a debt. Farrier rejects the suggestion that they were friends: the former Myfanwy had opposed her on many issues, though the two remained civil. She says she repaid the debt by keeping the secret of Myfanwy’s memory loss and allowing the new woman to assume this life. Farrier’s account therefore presents her choice as a limited act of discretion within a larger system that offers no ordinary exit. She can permit Myfanwy to continue under her former identity, but cannot make freedom from the Checquy part of that arrangement.

Character and Narrative Significance

Farrier’s composure gives her authority, but her conversation with Myfanwy also exposes the costs hidden inside the Checquy’s administrative vocabulary. A child is acquired, monitored, tested, trained, and measured against institutional expectations; when those expectations collide with distress, the organization’s answer is not release. Farrier is not depicted simply as a monster or a confidante. She can keep Myfanwy’s secret and acknowledge a debt while insisting that no one leaves, and she can describe a child’s isolation while continuing to judge the child as an asset.

Her dream power sharpens this conflict between knowledge and privacy. Farrier’s ability to enter sleeping minds makes hidden thoughts accessible to an authority figure, while the organization’s scrutiny of Myfanwy’s dreams turns even childhood sleep into a record of suitability. At the same time, the most consequential exchange between the women takes place over dinner, awake and face-to-face: Farrier asks what Myfanwy knows, explains what the Checquy knows about her, and defines the narrow terms on which she may remain. In that encounter, intimate knowledge and institutional power become two aspects of the same authority.