The rivals of Sherlock Holmes : early detective stories by Unknown Author

prepared to endure remoteness, but here he was surprised seeing no human trace, no sign of habitation except lights so distant and small they were like an answer to the mist-shrouded sky with its meager scattering of stars. There was no moon or wind, only that pattering on the pillows of leaves and a rich vegetable smell.
    He looked back and saw the windows of the cottage, shining yellow, lighting their own peeling sills and rhomboids on the road and patches of hedge. He smelled the acrid coal-smoke but couldn’t make out the chimneys. Apart from the owl squeezing out those clear hooting notes, and the falling drops from the tree branches, everything was still—a stillness he was unused to. He had forgotten that; had it always been like that? He heard his feet and his sigh, and anxiety gripped him by the throat. He was aware of having looked for someone and found no one, only the hiding dark and the sea-mist at the windows and the stillness, all suggesting their opposites: the bright clamor of a surprise, like a phantom huntsman waiting on a horse in the hills that lay in that blackness, who chose not to show himself. He had come back for that.
    He tried to tell Emma his fear. As he spoke he felt it all retreating on his tongue.
    “Oh, I once heard an owl,” she said. She was tasting the soup. “I once heard an owl in London.”
    6
    There was no relief the next day. They woke to the muffled pinking of the electric heater, to a motorbike passing under the window like a dying bee slowly losing its buzz, and they were in darkness so complete the bedknobs at their feet were impossible to see. Emma was up first, as always; she cooked breakfast, which they ate together, but it was still so dark at the windows they ate hurriedly, as if it were an extra undeserved meal. Dawn came soundlessly, more quickly than they expected and without warning, suddenly silvering the windows, clarifying and giving shadows to the layered twists in the mass of low clouds and showing the wet road and the shining slates of the shed. Some of the trees were full of trembling leaves, a copper beech near the shed, the laurel at the edge of the courtyard, the holly tree out back. The rest were bare, or nearly so, and leafless their branches seemed especially crooked; but their high trunks were thick with bushy bandages of ivy. Emma saw them and said, “They look as if they’re wearing green jerseys.”
    Far off, mist dimmed the landscape and made the woods in the depressions of the rolling hflls into level rows, flat cutouts of trees, one behind the other, lighter and lighter, and at the greatest distance, white on the white horizon. Munday went from window to window, cursing the shadowy rooms and low ceilings; he stoked the fires and chewed the unfamiliar air and he muttered for sun. But it continued overcast, they ate their lunch of beef stew and bread in a flecked twilight that strained their eyes. In this poor light all their clocks seemed wrong—“What’s the right time?” Munday asked continually, sighing at Emma’s replies— and the lamps of the house burned orange throughout the day.
    Unpacking the crates became a strenuous routine, but they welcomed the activity for the fatigue it gave them, and were calm with their regulated days. They noticed how the African artifacts lent their odor to the study, a dusty pungency of tropical grass and leaves, a slight spice of wood, and even a hint of the bitter smell of Africans—the sweat they had left on their tools. It consoled Munday and then it saddened him. He said little to Emma. She was always cooking or sweeping or leaning at the sink. “Playing house again?” he said; she didn’t reply. He had never seen her so occupied. The African kitchen had always been the province of the cook. Munday had felt uncomfortable in it; the order of things was the cook’s, who stood and worked in his tom laceless sneakers. Emma had left the cook alone. But here, Munday saw, their meals were like a ritual