As my guardian, father, brother, counselor, as in fact my whole world, he was forever testing me. Ambrose must have taken me there for a purpose, perhaps to test my nerve, to see if I would run away, or laugh, or cry. Somehow, at seven years old, that seemed to me the final outrage, but I said nothing. It was winter, and some passing joker had placed a sprig of holly in the torn vest for celebration. The rain had rotted his breeches, if not his body, and strips of worsted drooped from his swollen limbs like pulpy paper. I can see it now, moving with the wind like a weather vane on a rusty pivot, a poor scarecrow of what had been a man. Ambrose prodded at the body with his stick. Heaven he would never achieve, and the hell that he had known was lost to him. He swung between earth and sky upon his gibbet, or, as my cousin Ambrose told me, betwixt heaven and hell. He hung there for five weeks before they cut him down, and it was the fourth week that I saw him. His face and body were blackened with tar for preservation.

I can remember as a little lad seeing a fellow hang in chains where the four roads meet. And the body has decent burial, though a nameless grave. That is, if the law convicts him, before his own conscience kills him. Now, when a murderer pays the penalty for his crime, he does so up at Bodmin, after fair trial at the Assizes. They used to hang men at Four Turnings in the old days. Beautiful, sophisticated, and magnetic, Philip cannot help but feel drawn to Rachel.Īnd yet, questions still linger: might she have had a hand in Ambrose’s death? And how, exactly, did Ambrose die? As Philip pursues the answers to these questions, he realizes that his own fate could hang in the balance. But when she arrives at the estate, Rachel seems to be a different woman from the one described in Ambrose’s letters.

Jealous of his marriage, racked by suspicion at the hints in Ambrose’s letters, and grief-stricken by his death, Philip prepares to meet his cousin’s widow with hatred in his heart. There he falls in love and marries a mysterious distant cousin named Rachel - and there he dies suddenly. But the cozy world the two construct is shattered when Ambrose sets off on a trip to Florence. Resolutely single, Ambrose delights in Philip as his heir, and Philip grows to love Ambrose’s grand estate as much as he does.

Orphaned at an early age, Philip Ashley is raised by his benevolent older cousin, Ambrose. Daphne du Maurier’s classic novel of lust, suspicion, and obsession that inspired major motion picture starring Rachel Weisz and Sam Claflin.

Story of my cousin rachel