Past this she found a hasty sketch of the view from the top of the hill overlooking her father’s strawberry patch. She almost turned the page before she saw the words, “the Ellsworth woman.”

. . . damned if the Ellsworth woman did not see my Sphère Obscurci and re-create what took me weeks of trial and error with as little thought as climbing the hill. I am angry, but also filled with excitement, as this is the first opportunity I have had to see someone else create an Obscurcie, and it gave me an idea to try for my lointaine vision. When the Ellsworth woman worked the folds, she did it with a slight variation. I believe I can use the same aspect of the light folds’ properties to lift an image from one place to another. My concern at this point is that the folds must be constantly managed, as one would with a recording of music, so it cannot be worked for much more than ten minutes without fatigue. Still, this is more success than I have had on my own.

She is clever, I’ll grant her that. I’ve not seen anyone use a slipknot to change a figure, as she changed her Daphne to a laurel tree. I should thank her, if my pride were not so affronted.

Jane let the book drop for a moment, remembering their confrontation on the hill; his conduct became more accountable in the light cast by his words. She turned the page looking for the next image, and saw one of Melody, with the single word “Nymph” penned under it. No other text marred the page, only her face, tilted slightly back with laughter; and yet, Jane saw the downturned lines in the form, so that though her sister laughed, she seemed unbearably sad.

Compressing her lips, Jane turned the pages, skimming past the tempting instructional text and pausing on sketches of the doves which appeared in Lady FitzCameron’s dining hall, again on an achingly beautiful sketch of the apple tree, and then on herself.

The image of herself lay in the corner of a margin, scribbled as a doodle. He had caught her exactly in a moment of intense concentration. The text around her image dealt with the similarities between the textures of cloth and of blossoms, but she could see no link from them to her image save that she had stood near that apple tree on the day he had drawn it. She lingered there for minutes longer than such a tiny drawing warranted, but her attention was all aroused by curiosity—what had possessed him to draw her?

Had he been drawing her during their conversation on the nature of perfection in art? When had he left off the apple tree and turned to her, even for the brief span it took to draw the tiny image?

Jane turned the page, and her breath left her body.

In unskimping detail, the lines of Mr. Vincent’s pen rendered Jane, faithfully following the path of her overlong nose, not shying from the sharpness of her features, and yet—and yet, through the grace of his lines, the drawing attained a level of beauty, not by altering Jane’s features, but through the caress of the pen itself. Jane trembled in her chair as if his pen traced across her skin.