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| ā | No, no... NO! NO! IT IS YOU WHO I SHOULD HAVE DROWNED, YOU FILTHY LITTLE BEAST! IT SHOULD HAVE BEEN YOU! And you never had him, never! I'm the only one he ever wanted! Ever loved! Tell them it isn't so, Michael! Please! PLEEEEEASE! | ā |
| ~ Mrs. Drake's breakdown. |
| ā | I bet you half a crown you can't get that last apple out of the bucket. | ā |
| ~ Mrs. Drake as she prepared to drown Joyce. |
| ā | I couldn't let her (Alicia) go. She was mine. | ā |
| ~ Mrs. Drake's final words in the 2023 film. |
Mrs. Rowena Drake is the secondary antagonist in Agatha Christie's 1969 Hercule Poirot novel Hallowe'en Party and its 2010 adaptation in Agatha Christie's Poirot. She also serves as the main antagonist of Kenneth Branagh's 2023 film adaptation, A Haunting in Venice.
She is the direct killer of its primary victim, Joyce Reynolds. It is revealed that Mrs. Drake is involved with a love affair and a conspiracy to rig her late aunt's will, alongside Michael Garfield, her lover out of marriage. She murdered Joyce for the latter (falsely) proclaiming seeing a murder, in order to ensure her success after her long string of manipulation and serial murder to gain her aunt's house and fortune.
She was portrayed by Deborah Findlay in ITV's Agatha Christie's Poirot, and by Kelly Reilly in A Haunting in Venice.
Biography[]
Mrs. Rowena Drake is the niece of the rich widow, the late Mrs. Llewelyn-Smythe, whom she joined years ago in Woodleigh Common alongside her disabled husband and children.
However, Mrs. Drake is revealed to be a woman with sexual desire and cannot find any comfort upon her disabled husband. That drove her into a love affair with the gardener Michael Garfield, whom she was impressed by his handsome look. Together, Mrs. Drake and Garfield went into a love affair and presumably killed her husband.
Nevertheless, the news of their love affair soon came to Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe, who added a codicil to her last will and testament that she will disinherit her family and leave everything to Olga Seminoff, her au-pair maid that was always kind and honest to her. However, Mrs. Drake worked with Leslie Ferrier to work out another intentionally clumsy piece of forgery that was meant to be obviously fake, before substituting that with the original codicil. They framed Olga to be a gold-digger and secretly killed her.
Mrs. Drake and Michael set out to throw Olga's corpse into her garden's well, but unbeknownst to them, Miranda Butler was in the garden and witnessed everything. Though she was convinced by Michael that it was "sacrifice", Miranda shared the story to her best friend, Joyce Reynolds, though she was never intent to tell Joyce who was the murderer.
Two years later, Joyce appropriated the story and claimed she witnessed a murder once on a Halloween party held on the house of Mrs. Drake. Horrified, Mrs. Drake lured Joyce in her library and drowned her within an apple-bobbing game bucket full of water. However, after murdering Joyce, Mrs. Drake discovered she was soaking wet, and thus she broke a vase intentionally in front of one of her guests to conceal the murder.
However, after investigated about the vase, Poirot immediately deduced that Mrs. Drake was responsible for the death of Joyce since anyone who drowned Joyce must get wet. In the meantime, Mrs. Drake was blackmailed by Joyce's brother, Leopold Reynolds, who saw his sister being killed but chose to blackmail the killer instead. Mrs. Drake and Garfield later killed Leopold to silence him. Soon after, Mrs. Drake visited Poirot to divert suspicions upon Leopold.
By the end of the story, Mrs. Drake was presumably arrested offscreen after Miranda testified against her.
Other appearances[]
Agatha Christie's Poirot[]
A Haunting in Venice[]
Rowena Drake is a former opera singer who currently lives in a palazzo in Venice, who lived with her daughter Alicia. Rowena was obsessed with keeping her daughter to herself, and became extremely jealous when Alicia became engaged to an American Chef named Maxime Gerard. However, Maxime in actuality had only intended to marry Alicia for her money, and upon finding out the family was not as wealthy as he intended, broke off the engagement, leaving Alicia to run back to her mother. In the meantime, Rowena planted a type of flowers which, when harvested by bees, produced a hallucinogenic in the resulting honey. Rowena, not wanting her daughter to leave her again, secretly began feeding the honey to her daughter, leaving her sick and mentally unstable. Alicia's nightmares were blamed on the history of the palazzo, which was a hospital for children who died after being locked away by the nurses and doctors during the Black Plague. She also shooed away Maxime when he returned to apologize.
One night, while Rowena was sleeping, her housekeeper, Olga Seminoff, fed an abnormal amount of honey to Alicia in an attempt to calm her nightmares. When Rowena awoke, she found her daughter dead from the overdose. In an effort to hide the truth, she marked her daughter with the symbol of the children's ghosts, and tossed her into the canals, for the police to find. She then made the death look like it was a suicide accident from the hallucinations going too far. However, Leopold Ferrier, the son of the family doctor, was able to deduce the true cause of death as poison, and began blackmailing Rowena with the truth, in an effort to gain the money to support his father, a war veteran. Rowena did not know the true identity of the blackmailer, believing it either to be Leopold's father Leslie, or a local medium named Joyce Reynolds.
During a Halloween party, Rowena invited Reynolds to a seance to supposedly commune with her daughter, accompanied by Maxime, Olga, Leslie, Leopold, Reynolds's assistants Nicholas and Desdemona Holland, the policeman who found Alicia's body Vitale Portfoglio, mystery novelist Ariadne Oliver, and world-famous detective Hercule Poirot. During the seance, Poirot discovers Nicholas hiding in the chimney and using a machine to move Reynold's typewriter, only for Reynold's to speak in Alicia's voice, and claim she was thrown to her death. Later, Reynolds puts her cloak and mask on Poirot, who then goes bobbing for apples. Rowena attempts to suffocate Poirot, believing him to be Reynolds, but realizes the truth and leaves, before marking Reynolds and throwing her onto a statue in the courtyard, impaling her.
She also poisons Poirot's drink with the honey, causing him to begin hallucinating. Poirot realizes Vitale, Ariadne, and Reynolds had all collaborated to make him believe in ghosts, while Rowena calls Leslie, who had previously gotten in a fight with Maxine before being put in a soundproof room. She threatens to harm Leopold unless he stabs himself, which he does, causing the guests to believe the existence of the ghost. Despite this, Poirot manages to piece together Rowena's plot, who attempts to defend herself before locking the group in the entrance to the canal. Poirot pursues Rowena to Alica's room, only to be held at knifepoint. Poirot then sees the ghost of Alicia which frighten Rowena, who then falls into the canals below and drowns.
Trivia[]
- The novel ends with a few questions unanswered, including whether Mr. Drake's death was an accident, and if the police took Mrs. Drake to trial.
- In the novel, it is unknown if Mrs. Drake is responsible for the deaths of her husband and aunt, since neither of their deaths are explained. In the TV series adaptation, however, it is explicitly stated that she and Michael Garfield killed them.
- In the novel, it remained unknown how Mrs. Drake's love affair was exposed to Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe, but in the TV series, it was Olga who informed Mrs. Llewellyn-Smythe about the news. It was also Mrs. Drake who directly killed Olga as shown in TV series.
- In the TV series, Mrs. Drake is shown by the end of the Hallowe'en Party episode that she was arrested alongside Michael Garfield.
- Although Mrs. Drake is the direct murderer of Joyce and thus the kick-starter of the plot, Michael Garfield should be considered as the main antagonist since he has much bigger plans and his actions had influenced many other people besides Mrs. Drake.
- Mrs. Drake took over the role as the main antagonist in the 2023 film from Michael Garfield, who didnāt appear in the film for undisclosed reasons. She also committed crimes by self-defense in efforts to defend herself against her accidental murder she caused on her own daughter.
