Chapter 29: Vordescu Makes the Hardest Choice of Four Centuries

The candles in the portrait gallery burned low at this hour — he had not replaced them, and did not intend to. The gradual extinction of light was, in the abstract, a satisfying formal property of the evening, and Vordescu had always appreciated formal properties, even when they produced conclusions he would have preferred not to reach.

He stood before the third portrait from the left: the Spanish one. Córdoba, 1591, rendered by a journeyman painter whose technical ambitions had somewhat outrun his gifts, which was perhaps why the result had a quality of accidental honesty that more accomplished likenesses tended to lack. The face in it was his face — this required no particular admission, he had made his peace with the fact of the portraits some centuries ago — but the composition of the face was not quite the one he currently wore. The painter had caught something in the set of the jaw, some quality of leaning toward rather than awaiting, that he had not recognised at the sitting and had not permitted himself to examine closely since.

Behind the painted figure, at the right margin of the canvas, the dark-haired woman.