Chapter Twenty
“And the funny thing is,” she told Solomon later, “I think he is, too.”
“Romantic?” he said doubtfully.
They were at last spending time together in their new home, and Solomon had just hung their Venetian portrait above the drawing room fireplace.
The artist Domenico Rossi had finally finished it and shipped it, and it had only been delivered that day.
Constance seemed to need to talk about something else.
The portrait was curiously…overwhelming.
She said, “I think Madly might try to make himself worthier and then contrive to be reintroduced to her.”
“Will she allow it?” Solomon asked.
“I think so.”
Solomon stepped back beside her and dropped his arm around her shoulder as they gazed up at the portrait. “You really are the romantic,” he said, smiling.
She leaned against him. “I am. Do I really look like that?”
“Yes. I thought he would…beautify us, but he hasn’t. He’s caught a moment, several moments, perhaps, and combined them.”
And yet the Constance standing in the frame against the background of the Cannaregio Canal was beautiful, fair and golden beside his darkness.
Rossi seemed to have emphasized their physical differences, and yet he’d painted them leaning together, with Constance casting Solomon a glance that was at once humorous and adoring and completely her.
“It’s me I don’t recognize,” he admitted.
“I do,” Constance said.
Their new maid stuck her head in the door. “Mr. Grey to see you, sir, ma’am.” She vanished again and David strolled into the room. He halted abruptly, staring at the portrait.
“That’s by the same artist,” he blurted. “The one who painted the picture you gave me. I should give up and go back to sea.”
“No, you shouldn’t,” Constance said quickly, and to Solomon’s surprise, David grinned.
“No, and I won’t. I’ve decided to go abroad and learn what I can among the struggling artists, not the established ones. In Paris, maybe Rome. But I won’t give up.”
Solomon clapped him on the back, although his heart already ached for the loss of the brother so recently found.
David met his gaze. “I’ll only be gone a month or so. I will come back. Home is family.”
“It is,” Solomon said. As he gazed at his twin, his mirror image, he realized something else.
Just as Rossi had somehow made Constance and Solomon seem more by emphasizing their differences, so had his depiction of Solomon differentiated him from his brother.
They were not the same, not by nearly a lifetime of experiences, and yet they were still together—all the more so for his sudden insight.
David would come home. And Solomon and Constance would be here.