It was upon Ben Grief that Marcella looked when she went to bed at night
and when she wakened in the morning in her little stark room at the back
of the house. There was another window in the room from which she could
have seen the sea, but Aunt Janet had had a great mahogany wardrobe
placed right across it, and only the sound of the sea, creeping
sometimes, lashing most often, came to her as she lay in bed, reminding
her that the sea was there all the time.
In front of the house rose Lashnagar, the home of desolation, a
billowing waste of sand rising to about a thousand feet at the crest.
Curlews called and sea-gulls screamed over Lashnagar; heather grew upon
it, purple and olive-green; fennel and cooch and henbane sprang side by
side with dwarfed stink-nettles, stunted by the salt sand in which they
were rooted. But the soil was not deep enough for trees or bushes to
take root.
In Marcella's lifetime men had been lost on Lashnagar, and sheep and
dogs, adventuring too far, had never come back. Legend had it that
hundreds of years ago Lashnagar had been a quiet little village nestling
round Castle Lashcairn, the home of Marcella's folks. That was in the
year before Flodden Field, a hot, dry time that began with Lady Day and
lasted till the Feast of All Souls without rain or storm. In that hot
summer a witch-woman, very beautiful, had come to Lashnagar to win the
soul of Andrew Lashcairn, winning with his soul his bed and his board.
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