Marcia felt nostalgic, recalled encounters from the past. Loch Leil’s widow must now be long since dead. She had opened a door into the past and vanished, leaving behind a recurring memory connecting the then with the now. The Scottish landscape of the highlands with the castles rising grey and towering on the banks of lochs, ruined castles with battlements, spires and crumbling walls that rose from wooded acres. Macbeth. Battlements. Hundreds of acres of forest where deer still bounded. Crags. Fields of heather. And the castle of Culquhound, one of its wings jutting out over the azure waters of the North Sea. She had visited that castle once. It had been so strange, walking from room to room with the silver-backed mirrors and the hairbrushes of unseen occupants lying on the dressing table. Yet another room had its walls covered with swords. Returning from that journey she had written these lines:

Death is not a decoration
Swords slash walls not flesh
Polished blood burns metal The blade blunts not on
Bone but brick
Time has no hands
To hold these weapons
So they are put away
Are soon forgotten
But death will stay
And we surmise that ghosts
Do battle.

But life was moving on—people going away or remaining with you. There was loneliness here, muted voices, soft, subdued, except on Friday nights when the silence of the grey streets was shattered by noise, loud voices, laughter, screams from the pubs and the tinkling of broken glass on the pavements. Disembodied voices. Footsteps clicking on the hard flagstones. Journeys. Destination. Marcia’s journeys. Beginnings. Loneliness too.