They emerged into a square room that must have been meant as a cell of some sort. It featured only a single narrow window.
He turned to have a look around, then started in alarm. A stuffed owl sat perched on a shelf, not a foot from his face.
The rest of the chamber wasn’t much better. The room was lined with shelves and tables displaying all manner of seashells, coral, bird nests, shed snakeskins, insects and butterflies pinned to boards, and—worst of all—strange mysteries sealed up in murky jars.
“It’s ice-cold up here,” he said.
“Yes. It needs to be for Rex and Fluffy.”
“Rex? And Fluffy?”
“The lobsters. I thought I mentioned them last night.”
“You have lobsters named Rex and Fluffy.”
“Just because I lack any normal pets like cats or dogs doesn’t mean the pets I have can’t have proper names.” She smiled. “I do enjoy the way you say ‘Fluffy.’ It sounds like ‘Floofy.’ They’re in here.”
She waved him toward a tank in one corner of the room. The water within it smelled of the sea.
“Are they for dinner?”
“No! They’re for observation. I’ve been commissioned to illustrate the full life cycle. The only problem is, I keep waiting on them to mate. According to the naturalist who hired me, the female—that’s Fluffy—first needs to molt. And then the male will impregnate her with his seed. The only question remaining is what, exactly, that will look like. I’ve drawn up several possibilities.”
She moved to a wide, cluttered worktable and rifled through a stack of papers. On each page was a sketch of lobsters coupling in a different position. Logan had never seen anything like it. She’d created a lobster pillow book.
He looked around at her desk—the piles of paper, bottles of ink, rows of pencils at the ready. Here and there a drawing of a thrush’s nest or a locust’s wing.
Logan lifted a sketch of a damselfly and held it so that the light would shine through, illuminating every inked contour.
She’d been deft with sketching ever since she’d begun writing him. But he’d never seen her produce anything like this in all the margins of her scores of letters.
It was beautiful.
When he lowered the paper, he noticed that she’d been studying him just as closely as he’d been studying the page. Staring, with dark-eyed intensity. He was struck by a sudden feeling of self-consciousness.
“That’s only a preliminary sketch,” she said, biting her lip. “It needs work yet.”
“Looks damn near perfect to me,” he said. “Ready to fly off the page.”
“You truly think so?”
Her face was so serious and pale. As though she were worried about his opinion. Surely with work of this quality and friends like Lord Varleigh, she didn’t need a Highland soldier to tell her she had skill. Nevertheless, the vulnerability in her eyes made him want to try.
He wished he knew something clever to say about art. How to compliment the lines or the shading. But he didn’t, so he just said what came to mind.
“It’s lovely,” he said.
She exhaled, and color rushed back to her cheeks. A small smile curved her mouth.
Logan knew a small, quiet sense of triumph. After years of destruction on the battlefield, it felt good to build something up.
“How do you do it?” he asked, genuinely curious to know. “How do you draw a creature so faithfully?”
“Oddly enough, the trick isn’t to draw the creature itself. It’s to draw the space around it. The hollows and shadows and empty places. How does it bend the light? What does it displace? When I start to draw an animal—or anything, really—I look carefully and ask myself what’s missing.”
He thought of her a few moments ago, studying him intently. As though she were wondering about his missing elements. “Is that what you’re doing, then? When I catch you staring at me?”
“Perhaps.”
“I suggest you not waste your time, mo chridhe.”
She crossed her arms and cocked her head, gazing at him. “I’ve spent years studying all sorts of creatures. Do you know what I’ve noticed? The ones that build themselves the toughest, strongest shells for protection . . . inside, they’re nothing but squish.”
“Squish?”
“Goo. Jelly. Squish.”
“You think I’m squish inside.”
“Perhaps.”
He shook his head, dismissing the notion. “Perhaps there’s nothing inside me at all.”