Great poetry had been written by men who were accounted the contemporary masters of their craft upon the subject of the wild and untamed expanses which formed the countryside and captured the imagination of those who dwelled within the limits of the ever expanding cities. Volumes had been filled with odes to unforgiving mountains and verses which attempted to capture the majesty of almost primeval moorlands. They had graced the pages of books which were consumed with eager regularity and filled the imaginations of people who would never see their subjects with the impressions of the poet while he wandered the heath and took in the inspiring vistas before him.
Isobel Wortley was no stranger to such verse, indeed there were few passages that she had not at one time or another passed her eye over. But to her own mind there was always something missing from what she read on the page, a certain element that was left lacking and never truly captured no matter how talented the writer might have been.
The closest she had been able to come in defining her issue with the writings of such poets was to conclude that while they were awed and moved by what they chose to set down in verse, they nevertheless remained somehow outside that which they portrayed. Each was a man who had come upon a natural landscape which moved him to write with varying degrees of success about the experience and emotions he recalled while he passed through it. But to her mind he would never be more than an interloper who was straining to create an image of a thing he did not truly understand.
Isobel allowed herself the distinction of being a part of the landscape in which she lived, thinking that she was no less so than the birds which wheeled in the wind overhead or the rugged grasses that grew underfoot. When she moved through the coastal moorlands and between the jutting stones that lined the edges of the cliffs by the sea, she did so not as an observer of nature, but rather as simply another creature native to the terrain.
But even moving as she now did, with her head down and her bonnet tied tightly against the wind she was still aware of almost exactly where her feet fell. The rain did nothing to make the pace at which she made her way between the sparse trees and amongst the rocky paths, recalling the lay of the land more through the familiar sensation of the ground through the soles of her boots than what she could have made out in the fading light. Wrapped in a waxed shawl and not in the least daunted by the foul nature of the weather them seemed to have blown in off the sea for the night, she did not pause for a moment and instead pressed on through the building storm.
The truth was that to Isobel the severity of the weather was inconsequential, failing to properly count in her own mind as an obstacle of any kind and certainly not something that would come between her and where she was going. This was the time of day that she was in the habit of taking her walk and this was the path upon which she had decided she would go; the gusts of wind and sheets of rain just happened to be out as well. If the path would still there despite the storm, then so to would she and to her there was simply no difference worth considering.
It would not have been an unfair observation to say that in as much as she thought of herself as a natural part of the landscape in which she lived, Isobel was perhaps most akin in character to the tendency of the terrain to endure and refuse to yield no matter how savagely it was battered by the elements. But if one was not so fond of taking so many words to make a point, it would have sufficed to say that Isobel was markedly stubborn and determined in nature.
The only child of a minister who had spent the majority of his years in the cloth as a rural parson, Isobel had been set in her ways at a young age on account of the habits exhibited by her father. Not in the slightest concerned for what was seen as the proper education befitting a girl of her position, the Parson Wortley had been happy to leave his daughter to run wild while he pursued his own interests in happy ignorance. Deprived of her mother when the girl had been young, the studious clergyman had spoiled his child and indulged her independent spirit on account of it both making his own life simpler and reminding him in a small way of his departed wife.
