65 pages • 2 hours read
Jacqueline WinspearMaisie Dobbs
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2003A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 1, Chapters 5-7Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Spring 1929”
Part 1, Chapter 5 Summary
Maisie has compiled a detailed dossier on Celia Davenham and prepares to interview her personally. Billy comes by to thank Maisie for helping one of their neighbors with a problem. In turn, she asks if he recalls anything about Vincent Weathershaw from his military service. Billy remembers Vincent and agrees to ask friends for more detail.
Maisie walks to a tea shop, Fortnum and Mason’s, hoping to see Celia Davenham. As she does, she reflects that her business has picked up, allowing her to explore her ongoing curiosity about Vincent’s death at her own expense.
Maisie deliberately sits near Celia, and when the other woman recognizes her from the cemetery, they begin to talk. Maisie assumes her mentor’s surname, introducing herself as Maisie Blanche. She gives the same cover story she provided at the cemetery, that she is a distant relative of Donald’s. Celia explains that one of her brothers died in action, while the other, a close friend of Vincent’s, also had a facial injury. Maisie explains that she worked as a combat nurse and in psychiatric care after the war ended. This is not merely a strategic ploy, as “the depth of Maisie Dobbs’s understanding of her situation was greater than Celia Davenham could possibly imagine” (38).
Finally, Maisie asks Celia about Vincent. Celia explains that she had been in love with him from her early youth due to his charisma. Vincent suffered severe facial injuries during combat, a lasting trauma for him. Maisie remembers the ethical obligation her mentor taught her long ago: When clients speak of trauma, one must be mindful of the reopened wounds. To that end, Maisie invites Celia for a walk and takes her fabric shopping, knowing the other woman loves sewing. Celia is comforted.
Part 1, Chapter 6 Summary
After leaving Celia, Maisie returns to her office. She makes small talk with Jack Barker, the newspaper seller, who is now friendly to her and speaks warmly of Billy, especially his relief that Billy has recovered well from his leg injury and survived the war.
Maisie finds Billy waiting for her with news of Vincent. He also informs her that her telephone has been ringing incessantly. Billy explains that he ran telephone lines at the front, so he thought about using his skills to install a line so he could answer her phone from downstairs.
Maisie insists he take tea before returning to the topic of the war. Billy explains that Vincent Weathershaw was deeply traumatized by losing his men in battle and even more so by the treatment of deserters, a status punishable by execution. Billy still finds the practice of executing young and terrified men abhorrent. Vincent was vocally critical of this, and Billy reports there were rumors he was facing official censure before his injury.
Watching Billy lost in memory, Maisie recalls more advice from her mentor to take care with confidences, as “even the messenger is affected by the story he brings” (47). Maisie writes her case notes in front of Billy to further demonstrate that she values his efforts. She then asks him to paint her office, which preoccupies him with a project rather than allowing him to dwell on the past.
Alone in her office, Maisie feels increasingly determined to spend time with Celia and uncover the rest of Vincent’s story.
Part 1, Chapter 7 Summary
Maisie ponders the Davenham case, momentarily wishing she still worked with her mentor. Later that day, she tells Mr. Davenham that she is interested not only in informing him of results but also in his ability to make a “commitment to your wife and to your future” (50). To disarm him and put him at ease, she suggests a walk outside. Maisie explains to Davenham that Celia needs his understanding and emotional support so that her grief for Vincent can truly belong to the past.
Maisie uses a similar strategy with Celia later, taking her to a park. Celia explains Vincent’s rage and disillusionment after his injuries and his insistence on using only his first name because “as far as Britain was concerned, he was just a piece of meat anyway” (56). Maisie lets Celia weep, recalling Maurice Blanche’s advice not to insert herself too soon in a healing process. She recalls seeing such wounds and her connection to Doctor Simon Lynch.
Celia explains that Vincent’s next life stage was marked by a man he had served with. This unnamed man was inspired by retreats for wounded veterans in France, where those with facial wounds would live and socialize together. This man wanted to create a permanent community of the same type on a farm near Kent. Vincent helped give the farm its name, “the Retreat,” which Celia says had “a connection to ‘beating the retreat’ in that they were withdrawing from society, which for many of them had become the enemy” (59-60). Vincent was living there when he died, ostensibly in a drowning accident. Celia explains that the farm is still in operation. Celia gives Maisie the farm’s location, and as they part, happily reports that her husband is taking her to the theater as part of being newly attentive to her interests.
Alone, Maisie reflects, takes in the new information, and considers next steps. She is especially struck by the farm’s name and what it reflects about the mental state of the inhabitants. Maisie calls Lord Julian Compton’s residence, intent on speaking with her mentor, Lady Rowan. She speaks warmly and familiarly with the butler, Carter, who is surprised to hear Maisie knows Lady Rowan has been phoning her regularly in recent days, which Maisie intuited from Billy’s reference to the continually ringing phone.
Lady Rowan urges Maisie to visit. She explains that her son, James, is considering moving to a remote farm to recover from his wartime losses. Maisie feels a “chill” and knows that it is a “threat to the family of the woman she held most dear” (63), as Lady Rowan has made her life as she knows it possible.
Part 1, Chapters 5-7 Analysis
At this stage in the narrative, Winspear establishes Maisie’s unique temperament and detecting methodology. She is focused on details and observation. She is never distant or cold and is deeply attuned to the emotional states of those around her. In a case that centers on the dehumanizing and traumatic effects of war, Maisie deliberately acts as a humanizing counterweight to this force. She is, within this, committed to truth above all else, comfortable with lying to Celia slightly to uncover the mystery of Vincent’s death. Though Maisie and Celia occupy very different social positions due to Celia’s wealth and marital status, the war and its horrors bring them together, underlining the conflict’s lasting effects on the British class system. Maisie’s great care for Billy and her respect for his loyalty to her underlines that she maintains an emotional attachment to those closer to her own class origins. Winspear also uses foreshadowing, as Billy’s skills with telephone wires will prove important as the investigation into Vincent’s death progresses.
Though he is deceased when the story begins, Vincent Weathershaw’s plight unites the novel’s central themes and lays the groundwork for the Retreat, which becomes the central crime scene of the story. Vincent’s disdain for his own origins and family name underlines that the horrors of war obliterated his prior sense of place in the world. While The Personal and Political Importance of Class remains in society at large, for men like Vincent, the debilitating wounds of war have placed them in a new class of men, consisting of rich and poor, aristocrat and laborer, who no longer can function in society and feel forgotten by their homeland. They are visibly marked by War and Its Consequences, abiding in a new no-man’s land of ongoing distress and pain, both physical and psychological. An endless cycle of Grief and Memory is made worse because they cannot reintegrate seamlessly into society. They stand out too much as a reminder of a devastating war that affected everyone in one way or another, so the idea of retreating to be with others who understand them lures them in.
Maisie ponders the meaning of his “retreat” in ways that underscore the deeper psychological battles veterans face upon their return home. Though the world seems to demand the veterans remain unseen, Maisie commits herself to bearing witness. Though she obscures her personal stake in the case from both Billy and Celia, the reader is left curious about her thoughts and feelings, just as Maisie herself is haunted by Vincent’s death. Her continual return to her mentor’s advice, which always asserts the humanity and obligations of the detective and those around them, is its own argument for social leveling and equity. Maisie may be more perceptive than Celia or Billy, but they are no less worthy of dignity and respect.
Maisie’s intuition tells her that her case intersects with that of her former employer and benefactor. Her unease at this realization underlines that her independence, and indeed her work as an investigator, is due to the largesse and generosity of others. The reader can infer but is not told that the “farm” Lady Rowan’s son is dedicating his life to is the same place Vincent died. This increases the narrative stakes of the case and opens up the importance of Maisie’s origin story, allowing Winspear to set the stage for the coming flashback sections to Maisie’s youth and early adulthood. The personal past, then, has as much importance in this narrative as a global war.
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