I strode up the valley and headed left towards Stack Mor. Ever since learning of how William had died, I had a curiosity to see where he had fallen. As I walked, the landscape grew wilder, the land cropped close with gorse and boulders. Occasionally, I came across the crumbling remains of a sheep fold and patches of bog. Soon, the activity of the village grew distant and the air was filled with the scream of gulls and the fiercer, icier pull from the sea. As I climbed, it grew overcast. I was unsure as to whether to go on or return, but in those few moments of contemplation the first drizzle began to fall.

Disappointed, I made my way back along the ridge towards the main path. Before reaching the church, I passed the graveyard and curiosity made me open the gate and enter. I walked slowly between the stones, reading names where they existed, but so many were difficult to decipher, being overgrown with moss. Finally, I came to Evangeline’s in a square of flattened sea grass. She lay beside her husband beneath a marble ledger. The roses that had been etched around her name were gathering lichen spores and sand. ‘Beloved wife and mother to William and Mary.’ Beneath that were faded names I could not read, and next to them lay several older, smaller graves showing the infant deaths of other children. I was aware of a silence that fell deeper than the lack of sound – a primordial hush.

Iskar was in my eyeline, its gabled roofs and casement windows cast to grey. Mary would be somewhere inside, lost in the weave of corridors, and suddenly, for no reason I could fathom, I was afraid for her. The wind was chillier then. The land beneath my boots, frozen hard above cold bones.

Clouds drew together, sending out another spit of rain, and I shivered. Huddling deeper into my coat, I came to William’s plot but I barely read the stone; it was what lay below it that drew my attention. On the patch of soil, beside a posy of long-dead flowers, lay the remains of a hooded crow, strung from the ornamental angel on a piece of twine. For a moment I had to convince myself that what I saw was real. It had clearly been there for some time – reduced to a macabre arrangement of bone and feather. This was no unfortunate animal come to grief by accident. This was an act of deliberate insult. Shock and disgust dripped into me and I recalled Ailsa’s words: ‘All is not well at Iskar.’ Iskar, where there remained the strange absence of anything that might remind his family that he once existed. Everything that I had learned gathered into a knot.