Page 47 of Vengeance in Venice
Constance’s eyelids drooped again, then suddenly opened again. She was looking at Elena.
“Is she real?” she asked her husband.
“Yes.”
“I came to help,” Elena said, “if I can. You have no family here, after all.”
“Neither do you.”
From nowhere, tears crowded into Elena’s throat.
The Englishwoman’s eyes closed. “I am so tired. Look after Solomon…”
*
Solomon had neverspent such a night of fear and anguish. Not even in childhood when his brother David had vanished, for that had been a much more gradual understanding. This sudden, visceral knowledge that he was losing Constance, when he had only just found her, devastated him. He could only bathe her hands and face in the hope of comforting her fevered body. He would have given everything to take her pain himself.
Despite her suffering, she had wept only once, when the doctor first arrived and asked if she could be with child. It was Solomon who had told him it was possible, but Dr. Donati had quickly ruled out the possibility. He told Solomon it wasfood poisoning and went very quiet as Solomon explained that Constance had eaten nothing since midday.
Urgently mixing potions, the doctor had asked questions about where they had been and what they had drunk, and somehow Solomon had absorbed the knowledge that Constance had been deliberately poisoned. The importance was very much secondary, however. None of it mattered if she did not live.
Until Elena Savelli arrived, and abruptly every nerve seemed to scream with alarm.
Yet it was her questions that aroused him from his torpor:“Where? When? Who was there?”More importantly, they seemed to waken Constance from hers. Although appallingly weak, she was still his Constance, flooding him with hope. And the fact that she did not object to Elena’s presence made him think.
Elena was right. Constance’s death in her presence would see Elena arrested, rightly or wrongly.
Struggling over his own exhausted fears, he recognized finally that the doctor would not have left the house if he truly feared still for his patient’s life.
“Her heart is still strong. She can’t have ingested much, and much of what she did take must have been expelled. She needs sleep…”
Solomon had barely taken in the words at the time. He was too busy willing her to live.
Leaving his hand in Constance’s relaxed fingers, he turned his head slowly to regard the widow. “Where? When? Who was there?” he repeated. “We were at a reception at the British consulate, and the poison must have been in the wine.”
“Youwere not ill. Neither was anyone else, or Donati would have told me. The poison was inherwine. Why?”
“Because we are asking questions about your husband’s murder,” he said. “Someone is trying to scare us away before we reach the truth… Should they not be poisoning the police also?”
She shrugged. “The police have an agenda that is not necessarily yours. Who was at the consulate?”
More to the point, who was close enough to put poison in Constance’s glass? “Kellar. Premarin. Giusti.”
Her eyes flickered. “And the staff?”
He almost groaned. Then the memory flashed through his mind—the girl in the white apron and the slightly crooked cap, flitting around collecting used glasses. “Rossi’s girl… Adriana.”
Elena frowned. “Why would Rossi’s model poison your wife?”
“For Rossi. If he killed your husband.” Perhaps he had accepted Solomon’s commission only to get close enough to hurt them…then got cold feet and left it to the girl instead.
“Rossi is a drunk. But a talented one. He would rather paint your wife than kill her.”
Solomon turned back to Constance. Was he imagining the hint of color in her cheek, the peace of her sleep? “It didn’t kill her. Perhaps it was never intended to. Just to frighten.”
“I hope you are frightened.”
“Oh, I am.”
