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

thatched cottages; a dog barked, three yaps, and there was a tractor whine, a laborious noise drifting up from where the vehicle was turning, at the border of a brown oval of earth in a large field. Miles away there was a short flash, the sun catching a shiny object; they saw the flash but not the man who held it. Around them were their trees, beech and oak, the ones that moaned at night and sang in the day; their limbs were bare, the leaves that had not been knocked off by the rain had been tom off by the gusts of wind. There was no mistaking them for African trees, which were only bare in swampland; these were stripped, and as tall and dark as a row of black-armed gallows.
    This landscape had been subdued by the season and by men; it was settled and ordered, there were signs
    of farming to the horizon, and even those far islands of trees with the graceful shapes seemed deliberately planned. But it was frozen, the hedgerows broke the fields, and the green looked infertile, threatening to die and discolor for the winter. The mystery of the landscape was this apparent order, for which Munday, who saw signs of habitation but no people apart from the tractor driver—and he was tiny—could not discern a purpose. This emptiness seemed unlikely, and it was unexpected; not an England he had ever known, so green and new to his eye, it was a rural scene he had always suspected was spoken about because it did not exist, a willfully inaccurate nostalgia duplicating the Bwamba’s inability to describe their own swampy homeland because they did not see it. He wanted to deny it. But there it was before him, like an illustration in a child’s book of ambiguously menacing rhymes. Emma said, “I told you. It’s lovely. I knew it would be like this—you see?” The colors were right, the air pure, and the enclosing valley so shaped at their feet it invited them to wander down to explore it.
    They descended the slope to a hedge fence of brambles and immediately lost the view. The high hedge hid coils of rusting barbed wire in long thorny whips of untrimmed raspberry bushes with some withered berries still blackening on them. They had a new view, the rise of Lewesdon Hill, a thickly wooded portion with its spine sliced by a field, and beyond it the green fortress of Pilsdon Pen. Munday helped Emma over a gate that was held fast with hoops of knotted wire, and they made their way down the uneven field of tough grass clumps and dried crinkled cow turds to a muddy section by a stone watering trough in the corner. The bark had been chewed from some saplings there. In the mud were large hoof-prints of cows and small precise ones of heifers, like two parallel texts of a translated poem. The cows were grazing in the next field; they raised their heads and, champing slowly, observed the man and wife.
    “God, how healthy they look—what fat beasts! Do you remember—?”
    Emma was reminding him of the skinny humped African cattle, switching their crooked tails at the flies on their sores and nosing at the dusty grass. But Munday had looked back at the brow of the hill they had just descended and seen the upper part of the house, and understood the name, the Black House. Stuck in that greenery, surrounded by bare trees and one high holly bush and a dense yew, it seemed a place blighted by age, stained dark like the nightmare house with no windows or doors he had seen in his dream at this exact angle—his dream spectacle of conventional grief had been the creepiest of foreshadowings, and he was glad the house was not his: he could discard it and leave, simply go away. He turned from it, glad to be free of all those rooms, which were colder than the thicket at the edge of the field they were now passing through. The walking tired him, and when he replied to Emma about the cows his throat was dry, his voice strained. He gasped, his breathlessness causing in him a confusing annoyance. He saw thorns and dead berries and \vhat had seemed so green was