The Complete Uncle Silas Stories (2016) - Plot & Excerpts
It was soft autumn weather; the sunlight as mellow and still as Silas’s cowslip wine. As I went up the lane to the house I looked for the old sign of things: smoke rising from the chimney; the old summer bird-scares, age-green hats on sticks and inside-out umbrellas and twirling shuttlecocks; scarecrows made up of odd legs of Silas’s pants and bell-bottomed trousers and the housekeeper’s ancient hat and chemises; the ladder in the late apple trees; the bonfire filling the garden and the spinney and the fields with smoke that hung in sweet-smelling clouds under the pines and the golden cherry leaves. I listened for the cluck of Silas’s hens and the grunting and rooting of the solitary sow he had always kept in the black sty under the elderberries at the garden end. But it was very quiet, oddly silent everywhere. I could hear nothing. And then, coming to the garden gate, I saw that the gate and the fence, rain-green and patterned with prints of orange fungus for as long as I could remember, had been neatly repaired and painted white.
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