

It is there she sees the men’s wagons deposit heavy cargo into the inn’s locked room. After a few drinks, the men torment one of their own, leaving a disgusted Mary to keep to her room. One day, a group of men described as the dregs of the countryside convene at the inn’s bar. There is a locked room at the inn that Mary must never enter. He warns Mary to shut her eyes and ears to the happenings at Jamaica Inn. When she arrives, the Aunt Patience she remembers as a bright figure lovely and laughing, has turned drab and meek, cowed under the thumb of her husband, the nearly-seven-foot-tall Joss Merlyn.

But Mary is headstrong and has a promise to fulfill, so to Jamaica Inn she goes. No one respected ever goes to Jamaica Inn anymore, Mary is warned. Not only does Mary have to deal with the desolate atmosphere, she is treated with great suspicion and disdain by anyone who learns she is heading to Jamaica Inn. Jamaica Inn may as well open with “It was a dark and stormy night ” so bleak, so gloomy, so rain-and-windswept is Mary’s journey from mild and fertile Helford to the barren Bodwin moors. Following her mother’s dying wish, twenty-three year old Mary Yellan moves to live with her last living relative Aunt Patience at the eponymous Jamaica Inn.
