“Unfortunately, as a result of his crime, we’ve been shut down,” Callie said. “Pais rescinded our permit. Through some incomprehensible loophole, the property is going to revert to the previous owner—the man who runs the Hôtel Suisse. I am hoping to persuade him to continue our work, but at the moment he does not have the funds to do so.”
“What a loss,” I said. “Is there nothing else that can be done?”
“Not at present,” she said. “We are going to rebury what we’ve already excavated, so that it’s protected from the elements and give him copies of all of our records so that when, eventually, work recommences, he won’t start with nothing.”
“And what will you do in the meantime?” Kat asked.
“Perhaps you should find a wealthy aristocrat in possession of more money than sense who could fund a dig of his own,” Jeremy said.
“I appreciate the gesture, but must refuse,” Callie said. “I’ll find another position on my own merits. I don’t deserve more than that.”
Benjamin, who had sat quietly through all this, finally spoke. “I’m afraid I don’t share Callie’s scruples. I’m accepting the duke’s patronage.”
“He wasn’t easy to convince,” Jeremy said, “but you know how relentless I can be. Won’t it be a jolly good lark, my being a patron of the arts? Carter can traipse about the Continent painting whatever he wants and I will happily foot the bill—no matter how expensive it proves to be—showing myself, once again, utterly profligate.”
“I’m not convinced profligate is the correct word,” Colin said. “Regardless, I suspect your association with Carter will prove fruitful. If nothing else, you could announce that you plan to get rid of all those Old Masters covering the walls of Bainbridge House in favor of controversial modern landscapes.”
“Now, that, Hargreaves would make a pretty scandal,” Jeremy said. “I’m indebted to you for the suggestion.”
* * *
Before we said good-bye to Pompeii, I made one more trip to the tunnels beneath Herculaneum. With Colin by my side, I returned to that fateful room in the Villa dei Papiri. He cleaned the bloodstains from the mosaic while I wrapped the skeletal remains in a simple silk shroud before transferring them to an archival box. Someday, I hoped, we would be able to read the contents of the scroll she had died holding, but for now, I slipped into the box a new one, on which I had written the story of how I came to find her, how the dagger she had possessed nearly two thousand years ago had saved my life, and where her scrolls and jewelry could now be found. Perhaps, someday, far in the future, new excavators will come to Herculaneum and uncover the city buried deep beneath solid volcanic rock. No doubt they will despise us for having taken the jewelry and the scrolls from their original resting place, but sometimes, the human connection transcends the quest for information. The Kings of Naples likely justified their own thefts in a similar manner.
The next morning, Kat asked to speak with me privately.
“I should thank you for not telling anyone that I lied about being attacked,” she said.
“Your father ought to know the truth, but it needs to come from you.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have lied, but I am grateful that you did not feed me to the wolves. Thank you. I’ve done nothing to deserve your kindness.”
“Part of belonging to a family is being treated with love even when we’re at our worst,” I said. “Sometimes that takes the form of kindness.”
“Oh, Lady Emily, I can be much, much worse.” Her tone revealed a mixture of pride and just a bit of shame.
“I hope I never see it.”
Soon thereafter, she decided to stop pouting and asked if we might take a short pleasure cruise on the bay. Colin agreed so readily it was obvious to me that she would soon realize she could manipulate him into almost anything. But she did confess to her lie and he showed no leniency in his reaction. Nonetheless, by the time the sun was setting and our boat approached the shore, she had agreed to come to England.
“I know it won’t be easy,” Colin said, after we’d retired to our room that evening. “Don’t think, Emily, that I’m unaware of how she’s treated you. It won’t be tolerated at home.”
“Why was it tolerated at all?” I asked.
He was pacing while I sat on the bed, propped up against a mountain of pillows. “Guilt, cowardice, general incompetence.”
“None of those words could ever apply to you.”
He stopped pacing and leaned against the wall, crossing his arms. “I’ve behaved abominably. She took me by surprise and disturbed emotions I’d thought buried forever. I didn’t want to drive her away. Can you forgive me?”
“You might be able to persuade me. Cleopatra forgave Antony of worse, but, then, he did have that Roman general’s kit. Irresistible, I imagine.”
“If I have to don leather skirts and a cuirass and grovel before you, I shall.”
“Is that so?” A delicious tingling warmth made its way from the tips of my toes to the top of my head. “I just happen to have a costume of that description ready and waiting for you. I had it made in Naples before Ivy’s banquet. I never much liked the idea of a synthesis. Shall I fetch it?”
“Not now. If you’re to be my Cleopatra, I’m going to fill our room with rose petals and get you an obscenely large pearl that I won’t allow you to dissolve in wine. Tonight, you’ll have to content yourself with a disappointing Englishman rather than a Roman general.”
“That Englishman has never disappointed me.” I held my hand out to him and he came to me, kissing it, relief relaxing his handsome features. Forgiving him was never difficult, but even as he lowered himself on top of me, whispering words of love, I felt the tug of distraction. I heard footsteps. Was someone outside our room?
“Father?” Kat was knocking and called through the door. “I’m having trouble fitting all my photography supplies in my trunks. Could you help?”
“I’m asleep, Katarina,” Colin said. “Tomorrow. We will sort it out tomorrow.”
“If you could just come now—”
“Tomorrow.”
Perhaps the lot of us ensconced en famille wouldn’t be so bad as I had feared.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Pompeii and Herculaneum have fascinated me since I read an article about the city in National Geographic when I was a child. There’s no better window into the daily life of ancient Romans than the ruins at these sites. As I researched the history and the archaeology of the site—a process that took years, and would merit a lifetime—I was surprised by how much our understanding of the eruption has changed over the centuries. Until groups of skeletons were discovered in Herculaneum in the 1980s, very few human remains had been found there. These people, who sought shelter in boat chambers near the port, gave us a significant insight into how different the impact of Vesuvius’s eruption was on the two cities. While Pompeii was buried in pumice and ash, Herculaneum was destroyed by pyroclastic flow (a fast-moving mass of ash, rock particles, and gas), after a long day during which ash—but very little pumice—fell. Hot gas, reaching temperatures above 900 degrees Fahrenheit, instantly killed the population. Examination of their skeletons showed that they did not even have time to pull themselves into protective postures. Until these discoveries, the common belief was that most of the people in Herculaneum had fled in time to escape death. Now, however, we know better.
Pliny the Younger (nephew of Pliny the Elder, admiral and naturalist, who died on that fateful day in AD 79—some say in the process of trying to rescue people from the beaches) left an astonishing account of the eruption, which he watched from a villa in Misenum, across the Bay of Naples from Vesuvius. He wrote two letters to his friend Tacitus, the historian, describing the events so vividly that scientists named that type of eruption after him: Plinian. When Mt. St. Helens in Washington State erupted in 1980, witnesses saw a Plinian eruption that confirmed how accurate Pliny’s description had been nearly two thousand years earlier. Before then, most had assumed the
account was not precise.
Pliny’s letters also gave us a date for the eruption: 24 August AD 79. Recent research suggests this is a mistake, not on Pliny’s part, but on that of later scribes making copies of his work. While some manuscripts include the August date, printed fifteenth-century editions say November, and some mention no date at all. The historian Dio Cassius, writing a hundred years after Pliny, says it occurred “at the end of autumn.”
Archaeologists in 2006 presented key evidence to support Dio Cassius. Grete Stefani and Michele Borgongino analyzed the food found in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Oplontis. The cities were full of newly harvested autumn and late summer fruits (pomegranates and walnuts) and what summer produce remained had been dried (figs, dates, and prunes). In Boscoreale, Stefani found wine fermenting—a process that could not have started before the grape harvest, typically in September.
Controversy abounds, with no clear agreement as to the precise date, but most scholars now believe it occurred in October AD 79. Emily, however, wouldn’t have known any of this. In the early twentieth century, the August date was accepted as fact.
The locations in my novel are all taken from specific places in the ruins. Plautus’s house is the Villa of the Mysteries, outside the city walls. Although the site was not excavated until 1909, I gave it to Balthazar Taylor before then. His staff, unfortunately, did not make much progress.
Silvanus’s house is modeled on the elegant, luxurious, and immense House of the Dioscuri in Region VI, first excavated in 1826. Kassandra’s house is based on that of Fabius Amandius, an example of a small, middle-class dwelling. Located in Region I, its atrium was originally part of the much larger House of Paquius Proculus. It was excavated beginning in 1911.
Galen’s thermopolium is borrowed from the Thermopolium of Asellina, across the street from the House of Fabius Amandius. The election graffito Kassandra reads is what still remains on the walls there. We don’t know whether Maria was, in fact, politically active. Lots of political graffiti in Pompeii was sponsored by women, despite the fact that they could not vote.
The graffito Emily finds in the basilica is not fictional.
The astonishingly well-preserved caupona that Emily and Colin visit with Mr. Stirling in Herculaneum stands next to the House of Neptune and Amphitrite. In fact, neither it nor the house was excavated until the early 1930s, but I couldn’t bear for them not to see it. Thank goodness for fiction.
I have depicted the tunnels in Herculaneum as more accessible than they actually are. The Bourbon excavators filled many of them in after they’d finished plundering their treasure. Today, visitors to the site don’t have to navigate tunnels at all, but most of the ruins still lie undisturbed beneath the modern city of Ercolano. Excavation there is difficult, because the residents do not want their homes impacted. The mayor made the unpopular decision to have the town purchase several buildings on the edge of the site, beneath which archaeologists found a section of the Forum, untouched since antiquity. Even the promise of treasure has not changed the current population’s feelings about the work, and it is unlikely that much new ground will be broken in the immediate future. The Camorra, still a force to be reckoned with in Campania, isn’t eager for more excavation either. A few weeks before I visited, archaeologists uncovered a cache of weapons the Camorra had buried within the ruins.
There is, however, new hope for the contents of the library at Herculaneum’s Villa dei Papyri. American researcher Brent Seales has recently developed a technique that uses medical imaging technology to reconstruct the text of the scrolls without unrolling them. He’s proved the concept, and in 2019 after receiving grants from the National Endowment for the Humanties and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, now has the funding to continue his work. He’s managed to gain access to the scrolls, and we may, at last, be able to read a treasure trove of previously lost ancient works.
Region V, largely unexcavated in Emily’s day, is the site of new work at Pompeii today. Current digging has revealed extraordinary frescoes, skeletons that offer new glimpses into the human reaction to the eruption, an inscription that supports the theory that the event took place in the autumn, and stunning mosaics. The area is not yet open to the public, but the photographs released offer a tantalizing glimpse of what’s been found.
I could not have written this book without the abundance of scholarly work done on Pompeii. My story is fiction, but I wanted to get the historical details correct. I particularly relied on Mary Beard’s keen insights into Roman life found in Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town. Jeremy Hartnett’s phenomenal The Roman Street: Urban Life and Society in Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Rome made the cities come alive—how they looked, how they sounded, and how it would have felt to live in them. Robert Knapp’s Invisible Romans, an enormously important book about ordinary Romans, gives an unparalleled analysis of slaves. Robert Fagles’s excellent translation of Virgil’s Aeneid was never far from my side while I was writing. All errors are my own.
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