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| 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 | Of the Criminal |
| Alleyn | 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 |
CHAPTER 1 The Meet at Pen Cuckoo
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 toward 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 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 country 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 in 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 everyone 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
