When in Rome

by Ngaio Marsh

  Clinging to him, she appealed to Grant and Alleyn. ‘I know you think me too hopeless and silly,’ she said. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Not at all,’ Alleyn said politely and Grant muttered something that might have been ‘claustrophobia’.

  Mr Mailer said to the Major: ‘There’s a continuation of this stairway that goes up into the basilica. If you’ll take Lady Braceley that way I’ll go back and find Mr Dorne and send him to her.’

  Lady Braceley said, ‘It’s maddening of him. Honestly!’

  Sophy said, ‘Would you like me to come with you, Lady Braceley?’

  ‘Oh no,’ she said. ‘No. Thank you. Too kind but—’ her voice trailed away. She still gazed at Alleyn and Grant. She wants an entourage, Sophy thought.

  ‘Well,’ Major Sweet said crossly. ‘Shall we go?’

  He piloted her towards the upper flight of the spiral stairway. ‘I’ll come back,’ he shouted, ‘as soon as that young fellow presents himself. Hope he’s quick about it.’

  ‘You’ll carry on, won’t you?’ Mr Mailer said to Grant.

  ‘Very well.’

  Grant, Alleyn and Sophy embarked on the downward flight. They could hear Lady Braceley’s heels receding up the iron treads together with the duller clank of Major Sweet’s studded brogues. Behind them the Van der Veghels shouted excitedly to each other.

  ‘It is only,’ roared the Baroness, ‘that I do not wish to miss a word, my darlink, that he may let fall upon us.’

  ‘Then on! Go and I will join you. One more picture of the Mercury. Joost one!’ cried the Baron.

  She assented and immediately fell some distance down the iron stairs. A cry of dismay rose from her husband.

  ‘Mathilde! You are fallen.’

  ‘That is so.’

  ‘You are hurt.’

  ‘Not. I am uninjured. What a joke.’

  ‘On, then.’

  ‘So.’

  The descending spiral made some two or three turns. The sound of running water grew louder. They arrived at a short passage. Grant led them along it into a sort of ante-room.

  ‘This is the insula,’ he said. ‘You might call it a group of flats. It was built for a Roman family or families somewhere about the middle of the first century. They were not, of course, Christians. You will see in a moment how they worshipped their god. Come into the Triclinium. Which is also the Mithraeum.’

  He motioned them into a cave-like chamber. The roof was vaulted and studded with small stones. Massive stone benches ran along the sides and in the centre was an altar.

  Grant said, ‘You know about the Mithraic cult. There’s no need for me—

  ‘Please! But please,’ implored the Baroness. ‘We would like so much! Everythink! Please!’

  Alleyn heard Grant say ‘Oh God!’ under his breath and saw him look, almost as if he asked for her support, at Sophy Jason.

  And, for her part, Sophy received this appeal with a ripple of warmth that bewildered her.

  ‘Only if he wants to,’ she said.

  But Grant, momentarily shutting his eyes, embarked on his task. The Baroness, all eyes and teeth, hung upon his every word. Presently she reached out an imploring hand and whispered, ‘Excuse! Forgive me. But for my husband to miss this is too much. I call for him.’ She did so with a voice that would have done credit to Brunnhilde. He came downstairs punctually and nimbly and in response to her finger on her lips, fell at once into a receptive attitude.

  Grant caught Sophy’s eye, scowled at her, momentarily shut his own eyes, and, in an uneven voice told them about the cult of the god Mithras. It was, he said, a singularly noble religion and persisted, literally underground, after other pagan forms of worship had been abolished in Christian Rome.

  ‘The god Mithras,’ he said, and although at first he used formal, guide-book phrases, he spoke so directly to Sophy that they might have been alone together, ‘the god Mithras was born of a rock. He was worshipped in many parts of the ancient world including England and was, above all, a god of light. Hence his association with Apollo who commanded him to kill the Bull which is the symbol of fertility. In this task he was helped by a Dog and a Snake but a Scorpion double-crossed him and spilled the bull’s blood from which all life was created. And in that way evil was let loose upon mankind.’

  ‘Yet another expulsion from Eden?’ Sophy said.

  ‘Sort of. Strange, isn’t it? As if blind fingers groped about some impenetrable, basic design.’

  ‘Curse of mankind!’ Major Sweet proclaimed.

  He had rejoined the party unnoticed and startled them by this eruption. ‘Religions,’ he announced, ‘bally-hoo! The lot of them! Scoundrels!’

  ‘Do you think so?’ Grant asked mildly. ‘Mithras doesn’t seem so bad, on the whole. His was a gentle cult for those days. His worship was Mystery and the initiates passed through seven degrees. It was tough going. They underwent lustral purification, long abstinence and most severe deprivation. Women had no part of it. You wouldn’t have been allowed,’ he told Sophy, ‘to enter this place, still less to touch the altar. Come and look at it.’

  ‘You make me feel I shouldn’t.’

  ‘Ah, no!’ cried the Baroness. ‘We must not be superstitious, Miss Jason. Let us look, because it is very beautiful, see, and most interestink.’

  The altar was half-way down the Mithraeum. The slaughter of the Bull was indeed very beautifully carved on one face and the apotheosis of Mithras assisted by Apollo on another.

  To Grant’s evident dismay Baron Van der Veghel had produced out of his vast canvas satchel, a copy of Simon.

  ‘We must,’ he announced, ‘hear again the wonderful passage. See, Mr Grant, here is the book. Will the author not read it for us? How this English Simon finds in himself some equivalent to the Mithraic powers. Yes?’

  ‘Ah no!’ Grant ejaculated. ‘Please!’ He looked quickly about and beyond the group of six listeners as if to assure himself that there were no more. ‘That’s not in the bargain,’ he said. ‘Really.’ And Alleyn saw him redden. ‘In any case,’ said Grant, ‘I read abominably. Come and look at Mithras himself.’

  And at the far end of the chamber, there was the god in a grotto, being born out of a stony matrix: a sturdy person with a Phrygian cap on his long curls and a plumpish body: neither child nor man.

  Alleyn said, ‘They made sacrifices, didn’t they? In here.’

  ‘Of course. On the altar,’ Grant said quickly. ‘Can you imagine! A torch-lit scene, it would be, and the light would flicker across those stone benches and across the faces of initiates, attenuated and wan from their ordeal. The altar fire raises a quivering column of heat, the sacrificial bull is lugged in: perhaps they hear it bellowing in the passages. There is a passage, you know, running right round the chamber. Probably the bull appears from a doorway behind Mithras. Perhaps it’s garlanded. The acolytes drag it in and the priest receives it. Its head is pulled back, the neck exposed and the knife plunged in. The reek of fresh blood and the stench of the burnt offering fills the Mithraeum. I suppose there are chanted hymns.’

  Sophy said drily, ‘You gave us to understand that the Mithraic cult was a thoroughly nice and, did you say, gentle religion.’

  ‘It was highly moral and comparatively gentle. Loyalty and fidelity were the ultimate virtues. Sacrifice was a necessary ingredient.’

  ‘Same idea,’ Major Sweet predictably announced, ‘behind the whole boiling. Sacrifice. Blood. Flesh. Cannibalism. More refinement in one lot, more brutality in another. Essentially the same.’

  ‘You don’t think,’ Alleyn mildly suggested, ‘that this might indicate pot-shots at some fundamental truth?’

  ‘Only fundamental truth it indicates—humans are carnivores,’ shouted the Major in triumph. ‘Yak-yak-yak,’ he added and was understood to be laughing.

  ‘It is so unfortunate,’ said Baron Van der Veghel, ‘that Lady Braceley and Mr Dorne are missing all this. And where is Mr Mailer?’

  ‘Did you see them?’ Alleyn ask
ed Major Sweet.

  ‘I did not. I put her in the—what d’you call it? Garden? Courtyard?’

  ‘Atrium?’

  ‘Whatever it is. On the bench. She didn’t much like it, but still…Silly woman.’

  ‘What about young Dorne?’ Alleyn said.

  ‘Didn’t see ‘im. Frightful specimen.’

  ‘And Mailer?’

  ‘No. Damn casual treatment, I call it. What do we do now?’

  Grant said with that air of disengagement that clung about him so persistently: ‘I understand it was thought that you might like to look round here under your own steam for a few minutes. We can meet again here, or if you prefer it up above in the atrium. I’ll stay here for ten minutes in case there’s anything you want to ask and then I’ll go and wait in the atrium. We’ll probably meet on the way and in any case you can’t get lost. There are “out” notices everywhere. I’m sure Mailer—’

  He broke off. Somebody was approaching down the iron stairway.

  ‘Here he is,’ Grant said.

  But it was only Kenneth Dorne.

  He had sounded to be in a hurry and made a precipitate entry but when he came out of the shadows and saw the others he halted and slouched towards them. His camera dangled from his hand. It struck Sophy that he was, in some unsatisfactory way, assuaged and comforted.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Where’s my aunt?’

  Grant informed him. He said ‘Oh dear!’ and giggled.

  ‘Hadn’t you better take a look at her?’ Major Sweet asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your aunt. She’s up top. In the garden.’

  ‘May she flourish,’ Kenneth said, ‘like the Green Bay Tree. Dear Major.’

  Major Sweet contemplated him for one or two seconds. ‘Words,’ he then said, ‘fail me.’

  ‘Well,’ Kenneth rejoined, ‘thank God for that.’

  This produced a kind of verbal stalemate.

  It was broken by the Van der Veghels. They had, they excitedly explained, hoped so much (ah, so much, interpolated the Baroness), that Mr Grant would be persuaded to read aloud the Mithraic passage from Simon in its inspirational environment. As everybody saw, they had brought their copy—was it too much, even, to ask for a signature?—to that end. They understood, none better, the celebrated Anglo-Saxon reticence. But after all, the terms of the brochure, not of course to be insisted upon au pied de la lettre, had encouraged them to believe…

  They went on along these lines with a sort of antiphonal reproachfulness and Grant’s face, even in that dim light, could be seen to grow redder and redder. At last he turned helplessly to Sophy, who muttered, ‘Hadn’t you better?’ and was strangely gratified when he said at once and at large, ‘If you really want it, of course. I didn’t mean to be disobliging. It’s only that I’ll feel such an ass.’

  The Van der Veghels broke into delighted laughter and the Baron developed a more extravagant flight of fancy. They would take a photograph; a group at the centre of which would be Grant, reading aloud. In the background, the god Mithras himself would preside over the work he had inspired. This extraordinary variant on Victorian group-photography was put into operation after a playful argument between the Van der Veghels about their active and passive roles. Finally they agreed that the Baroness would take the first picture and she went excitedly into action. The wretched Grant, with open book, was placed upon an obscure stone protrusion to the left of Mithras. Alleyn on his one hand and Sophy, who was beginning to get the giggles, on the other. Behind Sophy posed Major Sweet and behind Alleyn, Kenneth Dorne.

  ‘And you, Gerrit, my darlink,’ the Baroness instructed her husband, ‘because you are so big, yes? at the rear.’

  ‘Afterwards we exchange,’ he urged.

  ‘So.’

  ‘And all to concentrate upon the open page.’

  ‘Ach. So.’

  Major Sweet, always unpredictable, took a serious view of this business. ‘How,’ he objected, ‘are we to concentrate on something we can scarcely see?’

  And indeed, it was well-urged. The head of the little god, like the altar and all the other effigies in these regions, was cleverly lit from a concealed niche but his surroundings were deep in shadow, none more so than the area in which the group was deployed. The Van der Veghels explained that all would be revealed by the flashlamp. Their great desire was that the god should be incorporated in the group and to this end a little make-believe was to be excused. Grant’s discomfiture had become so evident that Alleyn and Sophy Jason, simultaneously but without consultation, decided upon a note of high comedy.

  ‘I see,’ Alleyn suddenly offered. ‘Even if we can’t see it, we’re all to gaze upon the book? Fair enough. And I expect Mr Grant knows the passage by heart. Perhaps he could recite it for us in the dark.’

  ‘I can do nothing of the sort, damn you,’ Grant said warmly. The Baroness explained. Afterwards they would move into a more luminous spot and Grant would then, without subterfuge, read the appropriate passage.

  In the meantime, the Baroness reiterated, would they all concentrate upon the almost imperceptible page.

  After a good deal of falling about in the dark the group assembled. ‘Would it be pretty,’ Alleyn suggested, ‘if Miss Jason were to point out a passage in the book and I were to place my arm about the author’s shoulders, eagerly seeking to read it?’

  ‘What a good suggestion,’ Sophy cried. ‘And Major Sweet could perhaps bend over on the other side.’

  ‘Delighted, I’m sure,’ said the Major with alacrity and did bend very closely over Sophy. ‘Damn good idea, what,’ he whistled into her ear.

  ‘It recalls,’ Alleyn said, ‘Tchekov reading aloud to Stanislavsky and the Moscow Arts players.’

  This observation was received with loud applause from the Baroness. Sophy and Alleyn crowded up to Grant.

  ‘You shall suffer for this,’ Grant said between his teeth. ‘Both of you.’

  ‘On the book, on the book, all on the book!’ gaily chanted the Baroness. ‘Nobody to move. Gerrit, you must step a little back and Mr Dorne, are you there, please?’

  ‘Oh God, yes, I’m here.’

  ‘Good. Good. And so, all are ready? Freeze, please. I shoot.’

  The camera clicked but the darkness was uninterrupted. The Baroness who had uttered what was no doubt a strong expletive in her own language now followed it up with a reproach to her husband. ‘What did I tell you, my darlink! They are useless these local bulps. No! Do not answer. Do not move. I have another in my pocket. Not to move anybody, please, or speak. I find it.’

  Sophy giggled. Major Sweet immediately groped for her waist.

  ‘Serve you bloody well right,’ whispered Grant to Sophy. He had detected this manoeuvre. From somewhere not far away but beyond the Mithraeum there came the sound, distorted as all sounds were in that region, by echoes, as of a high-pitched voice.

  There followed a seemingly interminable interval broken after a time by a distant thud as of a heavy door being shut. The Baroness fiddled and muttered. Kenneth detached himself from the group and took a flashlight shot of the god. He was urged back into position and at last the Baroness was ready.

  ‘Please. Please. Attention. Freeze, please. Again, I shoot.’

  This time the light flashed, they were all blinded and the Baroness gave out loud cries of satisfaction and insisted upon taking two more. Against mounting impatience the group was then re-formed with the Baroness replacing her husband and over-hanging Major Sweet like some primitive earth-mother. The Baron had better luck with his flashlamp and all was accomplished.

  ‘Although,’ he said, ‘it would have been nicer to have included our cicerone, would it not?’

  ‘Must say he’s taking his time,’ Major Sweet grumbled. ‘Damned odd sort of behaviour if you ask me.’

  But Kenneth pointed out that Sebastian Mailer was probably keeping his aunt company in the atrium. ‘After all,’ he said to Grant, ‘he handed over to you, didn’t he?’

&n
bsp; Grant, under pressure from the Van der Veghels, now moved into the area of light and with every sign of extreme reluctance read the Mithraic passage from Simon to this most strangely assorted audience. He read rapidly and badly in an uninflected voice but something of the character of his writing survived the treatment.

  ‘—Nothing had changed. The dumpy god with Phrygian cap, icing-sugar ringlets, broken arms and phallus rose from his matrix of stony female breasts. A rather plebeian god one might have said, but in his presence fat little Simon’s ears heaved with the soundless roar of a sacrificial bull, his throat and the back of his nose were stung by blood that nineteen centuries ago had boiled over white-hot stone, and his eyes watered in the reek of burning entrails. He trembled and was immeasurably gratified.’

  The reading continued in jerks to the end of the appropriate passage. Grant shut the book with a clap, passed it like a hot potato to the Baroness and hitched his shoulders against obligatory murmurs from his audience. These evaporated into an uneasy silence.

  Sophy felt oppressed. For the first time claustrophobia threatened her. The roof seemed lower, the walls closer, the regions beyond them very much quieter as if the group had been deserted, imprisoned almost so many fathoms deep in the ground. For tuppence, she thought, I could do a bolt like Lady Braceley.

  Grant repeated his suggestion that the others might like to explore and that he himself would remain for ten minutes in the Mithraeum in case anyone preferred to rejoin him there before returning to the upper world. He reminded them that there were side openings and an end one, leading into surrounding passages, and the insula.

  Kenneth Dorne said he would go up and take a look at his aunt. He seemed to be more relaxed and showed a tendency to laugh at nothing in particular. ‘Your reading was m-a-a-r-vellous,’ he said to Grant and smiled from ear to ear. ‘I adore your Simon.’ He laughed immoderately and left by the main entrance. Major Sweet said he would take a look-see round and rejoin them above. ‘I have,’ he threatened ‘a bone to pick with Mailer. Extraordinary behaviour.’ He stared at Sophy. ‘Thinking of looking round at all?’ he invited.