53 pages • 1 hour read
Daphne du MaurierJamaica Inn
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1935A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 15-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 15 Summary
Mary stands frozen, staring at Joss’s body as a spider crawls along his arm. Mary cannot handle the silence; she flees in terror back to Richards, unable to search for Aunt Patience. Richards tries to comfort her. In her heart, Mary knows that Aunt Patience is dead. She suddenly remembers Harry and assumes that he must be the murderer.
Squire Bassat and his men arrive. Mary and Richards explain the situation. Bassat searches the house and confirms Mary’s fear: Patience is dead, stabbed in the back like Joss. The men find Harry, who had been locked in the storeroom the whole time—there is no way he could be the murderer. To Mary’s dismay, she can only think of one other possible suspect: Jem.
Francis Davey arrives. He received Mary’s note and came to help her.
Chapter 16 Summary
The vicar took Mary in. At his house, he administered a sedative, and Mary slept for 14 hours, which helped dull her grief and bitterness. When she wakes, she is still wracked with regret. She is conflicted about whether or not to turn Jem in. To distract herself from cynicism or sentimentality, she examines the vicar’s paintings. They are skillfully done, but each one has an indefinable, uncanny quality. She snoops around the sparsely decorated room and even opens a drawer in the vicar’s desk. It is empty, except for the paper liner. Mary turns the liner over and sees that it contains a sketch depicting Francis Davey as a laughing wolf preaching to a congregation of sheep. Shocked, she puts the picture back and moves to the other side of the room, hearing the vicar’s approaching footsteps.
Davey asks Mary if she is recovered enough to prepare the supper the housekeeper left; wanting to feel useful, Mary agrees. She is glad to have a few more minutes to collect her thoughts after seeing the blasphemous sketch. When she goes to fetch him, she sees that he has been burning letters in the fireplace. His paintings are nowhere to be found.
The vicar mockingly asks why she has not inquired about his day, making Mary feel ashamed. He explains that he has been meddling with Mary’s affairs all day. He had lunch with Squire Bassat and his men, and the journey to North Hill took a long time because his horse was lame. He asks Mary about the pedlar and guesses that Harry attacked Mary. The vicar muses that killing the pedlar would have made things smoother for the murderer—and the murderer would have had double the motive to kill Harry had he known that he attacked Mary. Mary is confused by this. The vicar explains that interrogating Harry has revealed the extent of the smuggling network and that Joss may have been working for someone. Mary is nervous. The vicar’s line of questioning seems to be leading to Jem.
Francis Davey tells her that he met Jem today. Jem told him to tell Mary that he is so sorry, presumably about Aunt Patience. Unexpectedly, the vicar reveals that it was Jem who informed against Joss in exchange for clemency. He had been reluctant to cooperate until hearing of the deadly wreck that Joss caused.
The vicar had seen Jem at North Hill; Jem’s last remarks sent Davey home. Jem is on his way to see a blacksmith, Tom Jorry, to identify the purchaser of a new nail, fallen from a horseshoe, that Jem found near Jamaica Inn. Since yesterday was Sunday, Tom Jorry would only have shod a horse if he greatly respected the client. Only once such traveler came by his shop with an injured horse: the Vicar of Altarnun.
Chapter 17 Summary
Mary feigns ignorance to try to buy her some time. It was Francis Davey who killed Joss and Patience, and Mary had built a case against Jem in her mind. The vicar knows that she saw his sketch and that it scared her. He calmly explains his role in Mary’s misadventures at Jamaica Inn. He and Joss had a good run of theft and plunder. Joss feared the vicar, even as he relied on him. Mary’s inquisitiveness and courage threw a wrench into Francis Davey’s plans.
Francis Davey explains that he does not feel at home in the present time; he longs for the silence of the “pagan” times. He respects Mary and wants her to flee with him. Despite the danger, Mary wants to overcome him. She has justice on her side. She warns the vicar that she will bring him down. Francis Davey welcomes the challenge and says that he will like her even more for it.
He tells her that they will go to the moors and live like people 4000 years ago. Time is running out for him—Jem must have reached the blacksmith hours ago. She is filled with the spirit of adventure, knowing that she is free to love Jem without guilt and that he will be looking for her.
They set off on horseback for the moors, Mary riding Restless, the horse whose nail Jem found near the inn. The vicar warns Mary not to call for help, or he will have to kill her. As they pass his church, he tells her about the “pagan” foundations of the land. He plans to take them to the north coast and leave Cornwall on a ship; he will let her choose the destination. He tells Mary that he knows women’s desires better than she does because of all of the confessions he has heard as a vicar. He is confident that Mary will forget her animosity toward him.
The terrain becomes boggier and more treacherous until they are forced to stop by a wall of fog. They take refuge on Roughter Tor above the fog. They pass the night, Mary trying in vain to ward off sleep, falling in and out of strange, nightmarish dreams about Francis Davey.
She awakens around dawn to the vicar’s hand on her mouth. He binds her with his belt and stuffs a handkerchief in her mouth. He tells her to listen: In the distance, they can hear the baying of Squire Bassat’s bloodhounds. The vicar chases off the horses. He and Mary are equally in danger from the hounds.
Mary and the vicar flee up the tor as the hounds close in. Francis Davey tells her to save herself if she can. The fog clears, and they see men far below them, Jem among them. Jem shoots at them, then recognizes Mary. He takes aim again and shoots the vicar.
Chapter 18 Summary
On a freezing day in January, Mary walks alone along Twelve Men Moor. Kilmar Tor has lost its sense of menace. Free to go where she pleases, she longs for the familiarity of Helford. She has made up her mind to go back to the simple, honest life of farming. She has been staying with the Bassat family, who welcomed her in and even offered her employment. Mary is tired of being presented as a curiosity to the inquisitive townspeople. She is sick of the words “Jamaica” and “Altarnun.”
A carriage approaches Mary. There are no cottages in that direction except for Jem’s at Trewatha; Mary has not seen Jem since he shot the vicar. She watches the wagon, laden with household goods. It is Jem. She tries to greet him with indifference. She explains her plan of returning to Helford. Jem disapproves; he is disgusted with village life. He is leaving too, however; he is tired of the moorlands where he grew up. He wants to wander the roads.
Jem’s road will take him north, while Helford lies to the south. He kisses Mary’s hand and jokes that she will remember that kiss when she is an “old maid” and that her pride got in the way of love. Mary hesitates, then gets in the carriage with Jem, turning her back on Helford for a life on the road with the man she loves.
Chapters 15-18 Analysis
Du Maurier’s technique of laying red herrings throughout the text comes to fruition in these chapters. Du Maurier has thrown suspicion on Jem—using Mary as a proxy for the reader—through him being unable to tell Mary why he had abandoned her on Christmas Eve, his threat to kill Joss when he found out what he put Mary through, and the fortune teller’s prediction that Jem will have blood on his hands. The vicar’s confession clears up Jem’s questionable actions in a denouement speech that ties together the threads of the plot. Jem had no loyalty to Joss as a brother—but he was even less inclined to help the law bring him down. When Mary realizes her mistake, “[s]he stared before her into space, her whole mind split, as it were, by his information, the evidence she had so fearfully and so painfully built against the man she loved collapsing into nothing like a pack of cards” (222). The revelation is almost physically painful, and du Maurier uses the term “the man she loved” rather than Jem’s name to highlight the fact that Mary’s reaction relates more to her internal romantic conflict than the external criminal conflict. The vicar’s information overturns not only her case against Jem, but also her case against love in general. She can no longer convince herself that romance is a bad idea. She realizes that she could have let herself be happy.
Mary realizes too late that she put her faith in the wrong person. The denouement speech resolves the many signs throughout the novel that Frances Davey was not to be trusted. The confessions she made to him during their first two meetings were born of Mary wanting to disburden herself of the weight of the events she witnessed, yet each time, the vicar’s responses did not align with what one expects from a person in a position of religious authority. The Vicar of Altarnun is an accomplished artist, and his paintings have a peculiar quality that makes them uncanny to behold that foreshadows the fact that he is not to be trusted. Examining a painting of the vicar’s own church at Altarnun, Mary feels a strange sensation “as though some spirit, having no knowledge of the church itself, had groped its way into the interior and breathed an alien atmosphere upon the shadowed nave,” and she sees that his other paintings are “all tainted in the same manner” (214). This uncanny, “alien atmosphere” reflects Francis Davey’s interpretation of the “pagan” era that still “haunts” the present. He claims that his parishioners are ignorant that “beneath the foundation-stone [of the church] lie the bones of their pagan ancestors, and the old granite altars where sacrifice was held long before Christ died upon His cross” (228). These blasphemous views are echoed by his drawing of himself as a wolf preaching to a flock of sheep. It is ultimately his misplaced faith in the moors that betrays him, highlighting the dichotomy of Christianity and “paganism” in the novel: The fog that forms as he flees with Mary makes the moors just as treacherous for him to cross as it would someone completely unfamiliar with the region.
Social class is not often discussed in Jamaica Inn. When Mary recuperates from her ordeals, she is taken in by the Bassat family, all of whom take a liking to her. While Mary is grateful for their hospitality, “she was never at her ease among them. They were not her kind. They were another race, another class. She had respect for them, and liking, and goodwill, but she could not love them” (29). Instead, she is determined to go back to Helston, to be among her own “race” and “class.” Mary’s observations draw attention to the fact that class difference has been largely implicit throughout the novel; du Maurier thus draws subtle attention to the socioeconomic factors that led many people to criminality in the region. Mary’s plan, however, proves to be tenuously constructed as it is derailed when she runs into Jem. Jem wants to leave the shadow of Kilmar Tor; he prefers a life on the road and wants to shake off the negative associations he has with the area. The novel hence ends with an appeal to Mary’s sense of adventure which leaves a reader with a sense of a story about to unfold.
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