“Met?” she scoffed. “We’ve known each other for well over a decade.”
“But why is it I feel like I’m only now meeting you?”
Juliet didn’t have a ready answer for him, or, at least, not one that would do. What she did have was a flush of heat suffusing her body, making her shrug off her pelisse.
“Here’s what I want to know,” he continued. “How do you arrive at whatyouwould say?”
Juliet felt on safer ground here. “I start by looking for the essence of the thing. What are the elements that compose it? Then I think about how it makes me feel. What and who I am in relation to it.”
“Show me the waterfall as you see it.”
Like that, the conversation turned from the theoretical into the intimate. These feelings… She was accustomed to expressing them on paper—not aloud to another living soul.
And yet…
It felt safe with Kilmuir.
He wouldn’t make light of what she expressed.
In fact, she wasn’t sure she’d ever felt safer with another person than she did in this moment with him.
Chapter Six
Rory thought MissWindermere might not answer.
It would be her artistic prerogative, after all.
Then she opened her locket and slid out a small pencil and a few scraps of paper. She began writing as she spoke, and her words flowed over him as smoothly as the water over centuries-worn river stone. “A series of impressions will come to me. Sometimes one word or two. No longer than three. Usually adjectives of the senses—sight, smell, hearing, taste, feel. But that is the effect on me. The essence of the thing must also come through. What is it elementally at its core? Not how I feel about it, but what is its intrinsic value? And once I arrive there, then I can begin to form a narrative around it.”
Rory had never heard anyone talk about writing or words or images or feelings the way she did—like she took them to heart.
Here sat a different Miss Juliet Windermere from the one he’d assumed her all these years.
Here was the artist.
And yet she spoke to him as one artist to another, as if they were on an equal plane, though he knew the opposite to be true.
He was a terrible poet.
He’d long known it.
But he loved it.
Yet the poetess before him knew and didn’t care. It was as if they met not in talent, but in a passion of the mind, and that was enough for her.
She turned and fixed her ardent emerald gaze upon him. She’d always shimmered with intensity, Miss Windermere. He’d always assumed her intensity was something he didn’t want to get mixed up in. But now, after coming to know her, he was seeing it from a new angle.
“By coming here and experiencing this place that Miss Dalhousie loves,” she said. “I shall be able to begin forming a narrative about her.”
Miss Dalhousie…Rory hadn’t given the lady a moment’s thought. But that wasn’t what Miss Windermere assumed.
Right.
Perhaps Miss Dalhousie wasn’t the best excuse to spend time with Miss Windermere.
“And you,” she continued.
“Andme?”