"Mother, there is a letter from Aunt Mary for you.", Catherine called out as she stepped into the cool shade of their house. The sun had been beating down all week, with nary a light breeze to lift the stifling heat. It was just as well that Mother stayed home on days like this, her heart might not be able to take it. She was still young -just recently turned two and twenty - and she herself was hardly able to withstand the heat. Tugging the front of her dress away from her sticky collarbone, Catherine left her mother's letters on the small table in the hallway before climbing the stairs up to her own room. Standing at the foot of the rickety wooden steps she briefly paused and considered. Of course she wanted to know what news their relations had, but she also knew better than to try and open post that wasn't addressed to her. The soft crinkle of paper in her hands reminded her that she also had her own letters to attend to. That thought brought a soft smile to her lips and she resumed her climb. The mysteries of her mother's correspondence were better left alone.

Upstairs she fell into the chair she left by the window, where the closed blinds allowed just a sliver of light to fall across the off-white paper in her hands. Practiced fingers cut away the wax seal and slipped out the sheets within. The first one was a beautiful watercolour of a flower. Catherine traced the soft lines of an African Lily, keeping her finger hovering just over the paper. She didn't want to smudge anything. Like all the others it was neither signed nor labeled. Sutton kept sending her pictures of flowers, ostensibly to test her botanical knowledge. Had Graham never told him that she had said to prefer ladybugs?

She laid the picture to the side unto her bed, making a note to herself to replace the one from his last letter with it as soon as she was done reading.

"Dear Miss Vale, I hope this letter finds you well or rather that it finds you at all. The newspapers have written of terrible downpours in Hertfordshire and I will not be surprised if your small house has been swept away in the torrents."

Ah, so he had written this about three weeks ago. He never dated his letters -maybe so she wouldn't be able to pinpoint just how quickly he responded to her post - but she sometimes managed to find small clues. She made a point of putting a date on all of hers.

"Well done for recognizing the Queen Anne's Lace. I have returned to my estate to take care of some issues regarding the water rights on some of my holdings. Boring work, but it must be done. I have also entertained some of my less than delightful relations. Cousin Richard has apparently made some bad investments in the East and now intends to drag me into the bottomless pit that is his finances. That man has no sense for business."

She could almost see him rolling his eyes at his cousin's antics. Sutton knew that she kept their correspondence private and so took the opportunity to vent whenever something bothered him. She wondered if Graham received similar letters or if Sutton refused to burden him with the less than savory aspects of his life and work. With her, he seemed to talk very freely, maybe because he felt she knew his shortcomings too well anyway. Behind the polite facade he offered his peers he was an acerbic man with a mean streak a mile wide that had little patience for those he considered a waste of his time. They were not dissimilar in that regard.

But through their correspondence she also discovered new sides of him. He worked very hard to be what he wanted to be - educated and artistic - and most of all he laboured hard to make it all seem effortless.

"It is good to hear that you have been expanding your repertoire. I myself relish the challenge of mastering a new piece. There is no greater feeling than finally playing fluently after long hours of practice."

She remembered how well he had played at the Colonel Watson's dinner. Back then she had easily believed that he might just be perfect at everything without ever needing to hone his skills. That was surely the way he acted, with the arrogance of someone who had never failed at anything in his life. Thinking of him glaring at an uncooperative pianoforte was oddly charming.

"In regards to the query in your last letter (...)"

Ah, there it was. She felt her face heat up. He was picking up a thread of conversation that had spanned several letters since his birthday, when he had written her this:

"Graham commissioned a painting of myself, and asked the artist to place my likeness in a compromising situation. The result is rather unsuitable for public display, though I must admit the painting rather accurately depicts my enviable assets."

Embarrassed and rather lost for words she had responded as carefully neutral as possible:

"How did he manage to paint a nude likeness of you without you knowing? Wouldn't you have to pose for such a thing?"

Now he was answering her question.

"In regards to the query in your last letter about how he did it, I can only say this: An expert artist simply needs to observe a subject closely enough and commit all the relevant details to memory. I could pick up a pencil right now and draw you, simply by recalling you in perfect clarity."

Oh, he could, could he now? She felt her lips tug into an embarrassed smile, before reading the rest of the letter, which contained some rather interesting musings on the current fashions in London.

Afterwards she re-read the whole missive again and checked one of her books on botany, before sitting down to compose her reply. Following the tradition of her first letter to him, she kept the greeting short.

"Sutton, African Lily or Agapanthus. I will admit to having had to look up the Greek. Let me assuage your worries: My house has not been swept away and neither have I. For the last week Hertfordshire has been bone-dry with an almost unbearable glaring sun. If this continues, I might just have to go for a swim one night, scandal be damned."

She continued her letter in the same casual way, offering him her sympathies for the situation with his cousin and making her own observations on the current trends, before writing:

"I wish to remind you that you have never seen me nude and therefore whatever you conjured up in your mind is surely inferior to reality."

She signed the letter and was sure she had won that round. Slipping her reply into a new envelope she stood up to take down the picture frame containing the Queen Anne's Lace. She carefully put the drawing into the slowly expanding folder in her drawer where she kept the rest of his missives, before replacing it with the watercolour. Afterwards she left her room to go about the rest of her days and was soon joined by her mother in the drawing room.

Catherine should have known that even when it came to conversations of a frankly lewd nature, Sutton would insist on getting in the last word, as his next letter would prove:

"Feel free to send me a detailed description so that I might correct my estimate."

Mrs Vale would barely look up from her stitching when she would hear her daughter mutter softly under her breath from across the hall. The young lord must have written again. If they continued their correspondence at this rate, there might be hope for a marriage yet.