Ngaio Marsh - Overture to Death

For

The Sunday Morning Party:

G. M. L. Lester

Dundas and Cecil Walker

Norman and Miles Stacpoole-Batchelor

and

MY FATHER

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Jocelyn Jernigham of Pen Cuckoo

Henry Jernigham, his son

Eleanor Prentice, his cousin

Taylor, his butler

Walter Copeland, B.A. Oxon., Rector of Winton St. Giles

Dinah Copeland, his daughter

Idris Campanula, of the Red House, Chipping

Dr. William Templett, of Chippingwood

Selia Ross, of Duck Cottage, Cloudyfold

Superintendent Blandish, of the Great Chipping Constabulary

Sergeant Roper, of the Great Chipping Constabulary

Mrs. Biggins

Georgie Biggins, her son

Gibson, Miss Campanula’s chauffeur

Gladys Wright, of the Y.P.F.C.

Saul Tranter, poacher

Chief Detective-Inspector Alleyn, of the Criminal Investigation Department

Detective-Inspector Fox, his assistant

Detective-Sergeant Bailey, his finger-print expert

Detective-Sergeant Thompson, his camera expert

Nigel Bathgate, journalist, his Watson

i

Jocelyn Jernigham was a good name. The seventh Jocelyn thought so as he stood at his study window and looked down the vale of Pen Cuckoo towards that precise spot where the spire of Salisbury Cathedral could be seen through field-glasses on a clear day.

“Here I stand,” he said, without turning his head, “and here my forebears have stood, generation after generation, and looked over their own tilth and tillage. Seven Jocelyn Jernighams.”

“I’m never quite sure,” said his son Henry Jocelyn, “what tilth and tillage are. What precisely, father, is a tilth?”

“There’s no feeling for that sort of thing,” said Jocelyn, angrily, “among the present generation. Cheap sneers and clever talk that mean nothing.”

“But I assure you I like words to mean something. That is why I ask you to define a tilth. And you say, ‘the present generation.’ You mean my generation, don’t you? But I’m twenty-three. There is a newer generation than mine. If I marry Dinah — ”

“You quibble deliberately in order to lead our conversation back to this absurd suggestion. If I had known — ”

Henry uttered an impatient noise and moved away from the fireplace. He joined his father in the window and he too looked down into the darkling vale of Pen Cuckoo. He saw an austere landscape, adamant beneath drifts of winter mist. The naked trees slept soundly, the fields were dumb with cold; the few stone cottages, with their comfortable signals of blue smoke, were the only waking things in all the valley.

“I too love Pen Cuckoo,” said Henry, and he added, with that tinge of irony which Jocelyn, who did not understand it, found so irritating: “I have all the pride of prospective ownership. But I refuse to be bully-ragged by Pen Cuckoo. I refuse to play the part of a Victorian young gentleman with a touch of Cophetua thrown in. I refuse to allow this conversation to run along the lines of ancient lineage. The proud father and self-willed heir stuff simply doesn’t fit. We are not discussing a possible misalliance. Dinah is not a blushing maid of inferior station. She is part of the country, rooted equally with us. If we are going to talk about her in county terms, I can strike a suitable attitude and say there have been Copelands at the rectory for as many generations as there have been Jernighams at Pen Cuckoo.”

“You are both much too young — ” began Jocelyn.

“No, really, sir, that won’t do. What you mean is that Dinah is too poor. If it had been somebody smarter and richer, you and my dear cousin Eleanor wouldn’t have talked about youth. Don’t let’s pretend.”

“And don’t you talk to me like a damned sententious young puppy, Henry, because I won’t have it.”

“I’m sorry,” said Henry, “I know I’m being tiresome.”

“You’re being extremely tiresome. Very well, I’ll speak as plainly as you like. Pen Cuckoo means more to me and should mean more to you, than anything else is life. You know as well as I do that we’re damned hard up. There are all sorts of things that should be done to the place. Those cottages up at Cloudyfold! Winton! Rumbold tells me that Winton’ll leak like a basket if we don’t fix up the roof. The point is — ”

“I can’t afford to make a poor marriage?”

“If you choose to put it like that”

“How else can one put it?”

“Very well, then.”

“Well, since we must speak in terms of hard cash, which I assure you I don’t enjoy, Dinah won’t always be the poor parson’s one ewe lamb.”

“What d’you mean?” asked Jocelyn, uneasily, but with a certain air of pricking up his ears.

“I thought everybody knew Miss Campanula has left all her filthy lucre, or most of it, to the rector. Don’t pretend, father; you must have heard that piece of gossip. The cook and housemaid witnessed the will and the housemaid overheard Miss C. bawling about it to her lawyer. Dinah doesn’t want the money and nor do I— much — but that’s what’ll happen to it eventually.”

“Servant’s gossip,” muttered the squire. “Most distasteful. Anyway, it may not — she may change her mind. It’s now we’re so damned hard-up.”

“Let me find a job of work,” Henry said.

“Your job of work is here.”

“What! with a perfectly good agent who looks upon me as a sort of impediment in his agricultural speech?”

“Nonsense!”

“Look here, father,” said Henry gently, “how much of this has been inspired by Eleanor?”

“Eleanor is as anxious as I am that you shouldn’t make a bloody fool of yourself. If your mother had been alive — ”

“No, no,” cried Henry, “let us not put ideas into the minds of the dead. That is so grossly unfair. Let’s recognise Eleanor’s hand in this. Eleanor has been too clever by half. I didn’t mean to tell you about Dinah until I was sure that she loved me. I am not sure. The scene, which Eleanor so conveniently overheard yesterday at the rectory, was purely tentative.” He broke off, turned away from his father, and pressed his cheek against the window pane.

“It is intolerable,” said Henry, “that Eleanor should have spoilt the memory of my first — my first approach to Dinah. To stand in the hall, as she must have done, and to listen! To come clucking back to you like a vulgar hen, agog with her news! As if Dinah was a housemaid with a follower. No, it’s too much!”

“You’ve never been fair to Eleanor. She’s done her best to take your mother’s place.”

“For God’s sake,” said Henry violently, “don’t use that detestable phrase! Cousin Eleanor has never taken my mother’s place. She is an aging spinster cousin of the worst type. It was not particularly kind of her to come to Pen Cuckoo. Indeed, it was her golden opportunity. She left the Cromwell Road for the glories of ‘county.’ It was the great moment of her life. She’s a vulgarian.”

“On her mother’s side,” said Jocelyn, “she’s a Jernigham.”

“Oh, my dear father!” said Henry, and burst out laughing.

Jocelyn glared at his son, turned purple in the face, and began to stammer.

“You may laugh, but Eleanor — Eleanor — in bringing this information — unavoidably overheard — no question of eavesdropping — only doing what she believed to be her duty.”