My Cousin Rachel: Chapter 18 Summary & Analysis

Philip and Rachel spend a pleasant Christmas Day together—but Philip is still angry with Nick Kendall over the matter of the pearl collar. As a way to spite his godfather, Philip decides to spend the New Year making home improvements. The thought of Kendall receiving the bills for the house work—which includes building a terraced walk over the fields—gives Philip “the greatest satisfaction.”

Philip uses the home improvements as an excuse to suspend the regular Sunday dinner that Ambrose traditionally held for the Pascoes and Kendalls. Philip and Rachel take to spending their evenings together in Rachel’s bedroom, and Philip is at once pleased and tortured by the “new gentleness” he has observed in Rachel since the pearl collar incident. “Those hands,” he thinks, “resting for a moment on my shoulder, or touching my head in a caress, as she passed by the chair where I was sitting […] would set my heart beating so that it would not be stilled.”

Early spring arrives. One morning, Philip is summoned to the home of a tenant, who is sick in bed. This tenant is one of those to whom Philip donated Ambrose’s old clothes at Christmastime. The tenant, having just donned the coat for the first time, has found a letter addressed to Philip in Ambrose’s hand wedged between the coat and its lining. Philip takes the letter, and asks his tenant not to mention the matter to anyone.

Philip wanders through the grounds, up to a path that overlooks the estate. There, a granite stone that Ambrose often jokingly referred to as his tombstone stands. Ambrose inscribed the stone with a record of his travels and “a line of doggerel at the end to make us laugh.” Philip often visited the stone while Ambrose was abroad in his last winter, and he sits there now, debating whether or not to read the letter.

Philip thinks: “Back in the house, my loyalty was with her.” Here near the granite stone, however, Philip feels Ambrose’s “power [is] strongest.” He decides to open the letter, and finds it is dated three months before Ambrose died. In the letter, Ambrose writes that he is suffering from increasingly bad headaches. He reveals that, at four months, Rachel miscarried the child she had conceived with him, and that ever since she has shown increased “recklessness with money” and “a tendency to evasion, [and] to lies.” Ambrose even suspects that Rachel is having an affair with Signor Rainaldi.

Ambrose is particularly disturbed by recent inquiries Rainaldi has been making about Ambrose’s will. Ambrose reveals in the letter that he has drawn up an alternate will that bequeaths the Ashley house and estate to Rachel during her lifetime, with the caveat that Philip be in control of running the state, and that possession pass to him upon Rachel’s death. Ambrose has left this will unsigned because he is worried about Rachel’s spending habits. However, he cannot shake the feeling that Rainaldi and Rachel have been discussing the will behind his back.

Ambrose concludes the letter by describing the symptoms of his headaches, which are many, and which he does not recall his father (who died of a brain tumor) experiencing. Ambrose is obsessed by a single thought: “Are they [Rachel and Rainaldi] trying to poison me?”

Philip refolds Ambrose’s letter, places it in his pocketbook, and buries the book in a hole under the granite slab. Philip returns to the house, where he is immediately confronted by terrible news from Seecombe. Don, the retriever, has been injured; a large slab fell on him from the construction on the roof, and he is now paralyzed.

Rachel is in the library tending to Don. She is distraught, and Philip finds he is not thinking of “the letter buried deep beneath the granite slab, nor of poor Don so soon to die.” All he can think is that this is the first time Rachel has shown sorrow “not for Ambrose,” but for him.