Vera Claythorne lasts the longest in the not-so-fun game that Justice Wargrave has laid out for his guests, but it’s not because she’s a levelheaded girl who knows how to keep calm in a difficult situation. (Well, it might be partly that). But more, it’s because her sordid secret is the ugliest in a whole mansion full of ugly secrets: she let a little boy drown so that his uncle slash her lover could inherit all the money.
Fun fact: “Vera” means “faith” or “constancy.” We’re sensing just a little irony here, so let’s take a closer look at this not-so-faithful lady.
When Philip Lombard first sees Vera in the train, he’s pretty impressed: “A cool customer, he should imagine—and one who could hold her own—in love or war. He’d rather like to take her on” (1.25). Yeah, good luck with that, Phil.
As smarmy as the guy is, he’s right: Vera is a very cool customer. Sure, the murders rattle her, but she stays levelheaded and doesn’t act stupidly. Even when the piece of seaweed hits her in the face, her first response is to ask Lombard to open a new bottle of brandy for her. Okay, that may not sound too smart, but hear us out: the point is that she won’t trust an already opened bottle.
Vera is also smart enough to make some serious deductions about her fellow guests. Maybe this stems from her usual calculating nature—after all, she was cold and calculating enough to let Cyril drown in order for Hugo to inherit money—but it comes in handy while she’s on Soldier Island. When she tells Lombard that she thinks Dr. Armstrong is behind everything, she even takes into account that he can lie to them about the bodies and causes of death because he’s the only medical professional. She’s wrong, but it’s still solid reasoning.
Despite her too cool for school attitude, Vera has a dark past. Here’s the story: she once worked as a governess for a young boy named Cyril. This kid had a hot uncle named Hugo (guess the family has stock in the Uptight British Names Company). Naturally, Vera is in love with Hugo, and also naturally Hugo is broke as a joke—unless Cyril dies, in which case Hugo will inherit all the money.
Now, Vera doesn’t exactly hold Cyril’s head under water, but she definitely does let him swim out too far and drown. No one suspects—in fact, it’s just the opposite:
He [the Coroner] had even complimented her on her presence of mind and courage, she remembered. For an inquest it couldn’t have gone better. And Mrs. Hamilton had been kindness itself to her—only Hugo—but she wouldn’t think of Hugo. (1.16)
Thing is, Vera is lying to herself here. She thinks about this day all the time—in fact, her inability to stop thinking it leads to her death. Unlike the other characters, she doesn’t technically die at the hands of Mr. Justice Wargrave. She dies of her own volition, thinking that Hugo would have wanted it.
Overview[]
Vera Elizabeth Claythorne is the ninth to die, in the manner laid out in the poem. In 1935, she left a child, Cyril Hamilton, to drown on the Devon coast. Before hanging herself, she shoots Philip Lombard out of panic, all according to Justice Wargraves plans.
She was responsible for the death of Cyril Hamilton, a child in her care while she was a governess. Vera let him drown because, in the event of Cyril s death, her lover Hugo Hamilton (Cyril’s uncle) would inherit the estate and been able to marry her. However, when Hugo intuitively discerned what she had done, he was appalled and broke up with her.
Vera was invited to Soldier Island along with nine other people, and became increasingly distraught as each of them were murdered. After shooting Philip Lombard out of panic, she hung herself, as stated in the poem — “One little soldier boy, left all alone / He went and hung himself and then there were none”.
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Vera Claythorne is a former governess who is working as a “games mistress at a third-class school” when the novel begins. She takes a summer job on Indian Island, believing that she has been hired to serve as a secretary to a Mrs. Una Owen. Like the other characters, Vera has a dark secret. At her last job, she was governess to a spoiled little rich boy named Cyril Hamilton. She let Cyril drown so that his relative, Hugo, would inherit his money and then be rich enough to marry her. An inquest cleared her of any wrongdoing, but Hugo, certain that Vera had let Cyril die, would have nothing more to do with her. Throughout the novel, Vera’s guilty memories of her crime plague her. She often thinks of Hugo and feels as if he is watching her.
In some ways, Vera is one of the most intelligent and capable characters in the novel, which explains why she is one of the last people left standing. She outwits the resourceful Philip Lombard, who thinks she is a murderer, by stealing his gun and then summoning up the courage to shoot him when he leaps at her. Despite her strength, however, Vera is not emotionally stable. In addition to her recurrent bouts of guilt over Cyril’s death, she is strongly affected by the almost supernatural nature of the events on the island and prone to attacks of nervous hysteria. More than anyone else, she fixates on the “Ten Little Indians” poem that lends an air of eerie inevitability to the murders. The confluence of these factors—her guilt, her tendency toward hysteria, and her fascination with the nursery rhyme—enables Wargrave to create a suggestive environment complete with a noose and the smell of the sea, which inspires Vera to hang herself and fulfill the last line of the poem.
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