On Testimony, Ritual, and the Witness Who Cannot Leave the Stand

We met in a room that had once been a chapel. Agatha’s choice — she’d been insistent about it, though when I asked why, she only said, “Because trials were held in churches before they were held in courthouses, and I think you need to remember that.” The building had been deconsecrated and converted into a faculty lounge at some minor college in the Berkshires. It still had the vaulted ceiling, the narrow lancet windows, the stone floor worn smooth by centuries of kneeling. Someone had put a coffee machine on the altar.

Donna Tartt sat in a pew near the front. She’d arrived early and had been reading — I could see the book face-down on the seat beside her, spine cracked, though I couldn’t make out the title. She looked like she belonged in the building. She looked, in fact, like she had always been there, like the room had been designed around her. She was wearing black, which I think was not deliberate.

“I want to talk about the witness stand,” I said.

“Of course you do,” Agatha said. She was standing near the coffee machine, examining it with the wary fascination of someone encountering unfamiliar technology. “Everyone wants to talk about the witness stand. It’s the most theatrical piece of furniture in Western civilization. A chair that faces the audience. A wooden box from which you are not allowed to leave until you have been dismissed. What is that, if not a stage?”

“It’s a trap,” Donna said, without looking up. “A stage implies performance. The witness stand is different. You’re compelled. You can’t choose your material. You can’t shape the narrative. Someone else asks the questions, and you answer them, and the answers accrue into a story you never intended to tell.”

“But you do perform,” Agatha said. She had given up on the coffee machine and settled into a chair across the aisle from Donna. “Every witness performs. The grieving widow performs grief. The reluctant expert performs reluctance. You cannot sit in that box, facing twelve strangers and a judge, and not be aware that you are being watched. Awareness of audience is the beginning of performance.”

“Awareness of audience is the beginning of self-consciousness,” Donna corrected. “Performance is what you do with that self-consciousness. And what I’m interested in — what frightens me — is the witness who cannot perform. The witness who knows what the correct performance would be but is incapable of delivering it. Because the truth has a shape that doesn’t fit the expectations of the room.”

I was scribbling, trying to keep up. The chapel had terrible acoustics — their voices multiplied and overlapped in the vaulted space, so that Donna’s measured cadences and Agatha’s brisk declarations seemed to be coming from several directions at once.

“The professor,” I said. “A law professor, or — no. Classics. A classics professor who also has legal training, or who used to practice, or — ”

“Not a lawyer,” Donna said firmly. “Lawyers understand testimony as a mechanism. I want someone for whom testimony is a moral category. A classicist. Someone who has spent her life with texts where bearing witness is a sacred act. Greek tragedy. The chorus that sees everything and can prevent nothing.”

Agatha’s expression sharpened. “Her? The witness is a woman?”

“I think so. Yes.”

“Good. A woman on the witness stand is different from a man on the witness stand. The jury watches differently. The prosecution asks different questions. There is an assumption — unspoken, but pervasive — that a woman’s testimony is either more emotional or more reliable than a man’s, depending on the prejudices of the listener. That’s useful. That’s a tool.”

“It’s not a tool,” Donna said, and for the first time there was an edge in her voice. “It’s a condition. The woman sitting in that box knows how she’s being perceived. She knows the jury is reading her face, her posture, her clothing. She knows they’re deciding, before she speaks, whether she is sympathetic. And she cannot correct for it without confirming it — the moment she adjusts her performance, she becomes the woman who adjusted her performance, which is to say the woman who is hiding something.”

Agatha folded her hands in her lap. “I didn’t say it wasn’t a condition. I said it was useful. For the story. Every constraint is a tool if you know how to use it.”

The silence that followed had weight. I could hear the wind outside finding the gaps in the old windows. Donna picked up her book, looked at it, set it down again.

“Tell me about the student,” Agatha said. “The one on trial.”

“He was brilliant,” Donna said. “Genuinely brilliant. Not the kind of student who impresses you with diligence — the kind who frightens you with intuition. The kind who reads a text you’ve taught for twenty years and shows you something in it you have never seen. And you are grateful, and then you are unnerved, because what he has shown you changes the text, and therefore changes the twenty years you spent teaching it, and therefore changes you.”

“Was she in love with him?”

Donna didn’t flinch. “Not in the way you mean. But yes. In the way that a teacher can be in love with a student’s mind — which is the most dangerous kind, because you can tell yourself it isn’t love. You can call it intellectual kinship. Scholarly mentorship. You can spend three years in close company with someone and call every meeting a tutorial and believe it, right up until the moment you’re sitting in a courtroom being asked to explain the nature of your relationship, and the word ‘tutorial’ sounds thin even to you.”

I felt something click — not a plot point, but an emotional architecture. The professor on the stand, being asked to describe a relationship she has never accurately named, even to herself. The courtroom forcing a precision that her entire interior life has been built to avoid.

“Now,” Agatha said, leaning forward. “The murder. The dead student.”

“A woman,” I said, testing it. “Another student. Someone in the same small circle — a seminar group, six or seven students studying classical texts under the professor’s direction.”

“Five,” Agatha said. “Six is too many. Four after the murder.”

“Five, then. And the dead student — she was the one the professor liked least. Not disliked. Just… the one who was present by competence rather than by brilliance. The reliable one. The one who took notes and asked sensible questions and never said anything that rearranged the professor’s understanding of herself.”

Donna was quiet, and I could see I’d gotten something wrong. She was looking at the lancet windows, where the late afternoon light was coming through in pale, dusty columns.

“No,” she said. “The dead student was the one the professor liked best. That’s the thing you’re not seeing. The accused student, the brilliant one — he wasn’t her favorite. She admired him. She was intoxicated by him. But the student who is dead was the one she loved, in the simpler, less dangerous sense. The one who came to office hours and talked about her family. The one who struggled with the Greek and kept at it. The one who reminded the professor of herself at twenty-two, before she became the kind of person who is intoxicated by brilliance.”

My pen had stopped moving. The chapel seemed to contract around the idea.

“So the testimony is an act of grief,” I said.

“The testimony is an act of grief that the courtroom cannot accommodate,” Donna said. “Because the courtroom needs the professor to be a witness to what happened. And what happened — the ritual, the night in the woods, the body found in the creek — all of that has a narrative shape the prosecution can use. But the professor’s grief is for something the courtroom has no category for. She is grieving the student who died, yes. But she is also grieving the version of herself that loved that student, because that version is also dead. The woman on the stand is someone else. Someone who let this happen.”

“Did she let it happen?” Agatha asked.

“That’s the question the trial is asking.”

“No. That’s the question you’re asking. The trial is asking a much narrower question: did the accused student kill the dead student, and if so, was it murder or was it an accident during a ritual that went wrong? The professor’s complicity is not on trial. Her guilt is not a legal category.”

“But it’s the category that matters,” Donna said.

Agatha uncrossed her legs and recrossed them in the other direction, a gesture I was beginning to recognize as her physical expression of concession. “I grant you that the professor’s guilt is the emotional spine. But you can’t build a legal thriller on guilt alone. You need mechanics. You need the question: what actually happened that night? Was it a ritual? Was it a murder staged as a ritual? Was it an accident during something real — something these students genuinely believed in? And the testimony must function as machinery. Each time the professor answers a question, the reader’s understanding of that night shifts. Not because she’s lying. Because the truth, in a courtroom, comes in pieces, and the pieces don’t arrive in the correct order.”

“I agree,” I said, surprised at how much I meant it. “The chapter structure could mirror the cross-examination. Each section begins with a question from the prosecution or the defense, and the professor’s answer — the real answer, the one she gives inside her head — is different from the testimony she delivers aloud.”

“Two tracks,” Agatha said, with visible satisfaction. “The spoken testimony and the interior confession. The reader gets both. The jury gets only one.”

Donna leaned back in the pew, and the wood creaked in the empty chapel. “I don’t object to the dual structure. But I want to be careful about something. The interior monologue cannot be more honest than the testimony. That’s the easy version — the public lie and the private truth. What’s more disturbing is a character who is also lying to herself. The interior voice is not confession. It’s a second performance, more sophisticated than the first, aimed at an audience of one.”

This stopped me. I had been thinking of the interior as the truth-telling space, the place where the professor could finally be honest. But Donna was right — that was too clean. A woman who has spent years mislabeling her feelings is not going to suddenly become transparent just because she’s under oath.

“So neither track is reliable,” I said.

“Neither track is reliable,” Donna confirmed. “And the reader must navigate between them — two unreliable narrations, one legal and one emotional, neither of which quite accounts for what happened in those woods.”

“Then where does the truth live?” Agatha asked, and there was genuine curiosity in her voice, which surprised me. I had expected her to resist the ambiguity.

“In the gap,” Donna said. “In what neither version says. The reader will do the work — not of solving the crime, exactly, but of seeing the shape of the absence. Like negative space in a painting. What the professor cannot say, in either voice, is where the story actually lives.”

Agatha sat with this for a while. The coffee machine made a small, self-important noise, as if clearing its throat.

“I can live with the gap,” she said finally, “if the mechanics are sound. If the ritual — the night itself — is constructed with enough specificity that the reader could, in principle, reconstruct what happened. The pieces must all be present, even if the professor’s narration scrambles them. A fair puzzle, even if the puzzle-solver is the reader and not a detective.”

“There is no detective,” I said, realizing it as I said it. “The professor is the closest thing to one, and she’s compromised.”

“Every witness is compromised,” Agatha said. “That’s why we have cross-examination. The defense attorney and the prosecutor are doing the detective’s work — pulling the truth from a witness who cannot or will not deliver it whole. The trial is the investigation.”

“But the investigation is contaminated by its own theater,” Donna said. “The prosecutor is not looking for truth. She’s constructing a narrative that leads to conviction. The defense attorney is constructing a narrative that leads to acquittal. And the professor is caught between two fictions, neither of which matches the third fiction she has been telling herself for — how long? A year? Two years?”

“Since the night it happened,” I said. “She has been telling herself one story about that night since the moment she heard the scream. And everything since — the investigation, the arrest, the trial preparation — has been organized around protecting that story. Not the student. Not her career. The story.”

Nobody spoke for a moment. The light through the lancet windows had shifted, going amber, and Donna’s face was half in shadow. I thought about what it meant to write a character whose deepest loyalty was to a version of events — not to a person, not to a principle, but to a narrative she had constructed in the first minutes after the worst thing that ever happened to her.

“The ritual,” Agatha said. “I want to know what it was.”

“Does it matter?” Donna asked.

“Of course it matters. If the students were performing a genuine ritual — a Bacchic ceremony, a mystery rite, something they had studied in the professor’s seminar and believed in, even partially — then the death has one moral weight. If the ritual was theater, a dress-up game that got out of hand, the moral weight is different. And if the ritual was invented by the accused student as cover for a premeditated murder, the moral weight is different again. The jury needs to decide, and so does the reader.”

“What if the professor doesn’t know which it was?”

Agatha opened her mouth, then closed it. I watched her work through the implications. A woman on the witness stand who genuinely does not know whether what she witnessed was sacred, stupid, or staged. Who has spent two years trying to decide and cannot.

“That’s quite cruel,” Agatha said.

“Yes,” Donna said. She didn’t smile, but something in her expression suggested she was not displeased.

I looked down at my notes. The napkin — I’d found a napkin somewhere, out of habit — was full. The room was getting cold. Outside, the bare trees of the Berkshires campus were going dark against a sky that couldn’t decide between grey and violet.

“There’s something else,” I said. “The accused student. The brilliant one. He’s going to testify, too. Or his lawyer is going to decide he shouldn’t testify, and that decision — the absence of his testimony — will be its own kind of presence in the courtroom. The professor will be on the stand, answering questions about a night she shared with someone who is sitting twenty feet away in silence.”

“Looking at her,” Donna said.

“Looking at her. And she’ll know that he knows what she’s about to say before she says it. Because they were both there. He is the only other living person who knows what her testimony is leaving out.”

Agatha stood up. She walked to one of the lancet windows and looked out at the campus. Her silhouette was sharp against the dying light.

“The courtroom as a locked room,” she said, almost to herself. “Both witnesses sealed inside the same night. The jury as the detective, working with incomplete tools. The verdict as the solution — except the solution, this time, might be wrong.”

I wanted to ask her what she meant by that — whether she thought the verdict should be wrong, or whether the wrongness was the point — but she had already turned from the window and was reaching for her coat. Donna was still sitting in the pew, her book in her lap, looking at something I couldn’t see. The chapel was nearly dark. The coffee machine had gone to sleep.

“One more thing,” Donna said, and her voice in the dark chapel had a resonance I hadn’t heard before, as if the room had decided to give her its acoustics. “The professor is going to lie on the stand. Not about the facts. About what she felt. And the lie is going to be so close to the truth that she won’t know, herself, the moment she crosses from one into the other.”

Agatha paused with one arm in her coat. “Will the reader know?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said, honestly.

“Good,” Agatha said. “Don’t decide too early. The story will tell you.”

She left. I sat with Donna in the darkening chapel for another few minutes, neither of us speaking. The wind had picked up, and the old windows were rattling in their frames, and somewhere on the floor above us a door was banging, rhythmically, like someone knocking to be let in.