1812, thought Rachel, recalling the date penned on the papers over her head as she read. 1812. The device in the James MacDonald Tower was almost a quarter of a century older than the oldest working camera obscura in existence.

She read that the device in Dumfries was only operated in good weather in order to preserve the lens and mirror mechanism. At first Rachel was afraid to open the aperture at the top of the tower at all, worried that she might be responsible for damaging it, or that someone from below would spot something different about the lighthouse’s roof. Gradually, though, she found herself drawn into the architect’s plans, fascinated by the device itself and the new perspective it gave on the place in which she had coasted to a stop five years before.

Watching the village from above gave her a unique point of view. In some ways it was more intimate, yet in others more removed. The distance of the eye through which Rachel viewed her home’s surroundings was fixed. She could rotate the mirror the lens reflected against, which meant a 360-degree field of vision. She could raise and drop the table to get a clearer focus, but she was still seeing everything from the top of a tower at the peak of a hill on the periphery of a village. She couldn’t get closer to pick out more detail. She could watch as a person walked down the village’s main street, going first into the Co-op, and then perhaps popping into the pub – but she couldn’t zoom in to see if it was someone she knew. She could see the shapes of gardens and whether they had been laid to lawn, but not what flowers edged them. Through all these discoveries floated the shadows of clouds, seen whole from Rachel’s vantage point, caught as she was in mid-air, neither on the ground nor fully sky borne.

I was here, and not here. That described perfectly how it felt to see the view the camera obscura provided.

Rachel tried to imagine what the view she looked at now would have been in 1812, or more accurately in 1815, when the tower had been completed. Newton Dunbar would have already been there – Cullen had once showed her a reproduction of the first map ever made of Scotland, back in the 1600s, in which the village, though minuscule, was clearly marked. In 1812, Rachel imagined there would have been horse-drawn carts on dirt roads that passed between fewer houses. The bakery might have been there, and the pub. Perhaps the Co-op too, though in a different guise. The gatehouse would have had a gatekeeper, the path up the hill would have had gates to keep. Edie and Ezra’s cottages would have been inhabited by workers on the estate. The great house would still have been standing, its grounds carefully kept.

From her lofty perch, Rachel searched out the ruins of the once stately home. She had tried to find them before, in fact, though on foot. Rachel had enjoyed exploring the woods. Once or twice she thought she had located what might be a fallen wall, but the site was so overgrown that it had been impossible to tell for sure. The ruins had proved elusive then, but they were clearer to see from the air. From her vantage point, Rachel could make out the intermittent shape of the walls, a vast, broken outline left where the stone had tumbled in upon itself in the midst of the conflagration that had destroyed the place. It had burned early in 1816, according to Cullen, who, for all his love of history, had always seemed reluctant to talk about his family’s past, particularly where it had to do with its demise, which she supposed was understandable.