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brief visits to their rooms, where they had freshened up. Molly, whom the Contessa hadn’t assigned a room yet, had refrained from making any more pronouncements, and now sat on the sofa with her gin. She was listening, with many smiles and few words, to Sebastian, who was giving the women his impressions of their circuitous gondola ride from the railway station. On the other side of the room Urbino, at Robert’s insistence, had resumed his account of his first murder case involving the relic of Santa Teodora, but was half-listening to Sebastian’s account and watching Viola.
    â€œThe great laundry room of Venice!” Sebastian was saying. “Everywhere we looked, it was plastered against buildings, strung across streets, and crisscrossing from window to window. It was even draped over wellheads and benches, with a couple of cats squatting on it for clothes pegs—which was a good thing, considering the wind that’s kicking up. Really, Gemma, you should take your easel out into the wonderful world of Venice and capture the scene. You could be to laundry what Van Gogh was to chrysanthemums!”
    â€œSunflowers, you mean,” Gemma said.
    â€œHe knows very well. One of Sebastian’s sly tricks,” Viola said with a laugh before sauntering over to Urbino and Robert. She was wearing a dark green wool-velvet dress with long sleeves. Her crisp auburn hair was massed at her temples. Tall and lithe, she had an exotic air and seemed meant to be hung with amulets and to read poems of her own fashioning in overfurnished rooms.
    She had done very little since arriving, but, without any effort, she had captured Urbino’s imagination, and not least of all because of her striking physical resemblance to her brother.
    â€œAnd God was back in his place and all was right with the world,” she said when Urbino came to the end of his story about Santa Teodora. Her thick eyebrows hovered above eyes that were melancholy and emerald. “That’s a literary reference, in case you missed it! You don’t know how valuable it is in social situations to have read English at Cambridge.”
    â€œBarbara said you did a special project on Rossetti, but she didn’t know if it was the brother or the sister,” Urbino said.
    â€œChristina, of course! No sister should ever be in her brother’s shadow—especially when he’s her twin, as in my case.”
    All three of them looked over at Sebastian, whose thick auburn hair, strong features, and green eyes somehow served to feminize him whereas they had the opposite effect with his sister.
    â€œYou’re rather Pre-Raphaelite yourself,” Urbino said.
    â€œI’ve been told that.” She said it as if she didn’t do everything to enhance it, like wearing the kind of dress she had on or the pendant patterned after stained glass around her longish neck. “My tutor found it amusing—and also a little distracting, just as you seem to.”
    Robert, who had been feeling increasingly left out of the conversation, said, “So your parents named you after the twins in Twelfth Night. ”
    â€œMummy’s doing! She’s wild about Shakespeare. Sometimes I think it’s condemned us to a life of mistaken identity, role-reversal, and cross-dressing—but maybe also the triumph of true love, who knows?” she said, addressing this last more to Urbino than Robert. “Oh, our twinship is the bane of our existence! That’s why I envy you, Urbino. Molly knew what she was talking about with you, didn’t she? You are an only child. I could tell by your reaction. And your parents were killed in a car crash?”
    â€œA few years before I moved here.”
    â€œI seem to remember that Barbara wrote and told Mummy that you inherited your palazzo through your mother. But what’s this about fire and sugar?”
    â€œPerhaps he wants to keep it to himself,” Robert said, but his blue