Death in the Ashes

by Albert A. Bell, Jr.

  “That sounds like being a slave, sir.”

  “You are an impertinent child,” I said.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Over Tacitus’ laughter I said, “That’s not a good thing. Remember that your father was a slave. That makes you a slave. Until we can determine whether your master died in the eruption or is still alive, we cannot know what to do with you. For the time being, you’ll stay here.”

  “But, sir, can’t I go with you?”

  “You can’t go anywhere until we find out what happened to your master.”

  “Sir, I thought—”

  “Would you like to help take care of my horses?” Aurelia asked. “That can be your job.”

  “Oh, that would be wonderful.” When I gave her a hard stare, she said, “I mean, that would be wonderful, my lady.”

  “A chiton is not a suitable garment for working in a stable,” Aurelia said. “You can wear a tunic out there.” The girl beamed. “The only other matter to settle, I think, is what to call you. Philippos doesn’t fit anymore. Did your father call you by any other name, perhaps when it was just the two of you?”

  “No, my lady. I’ve been Philippos as long as I can remember.”

  “Well, then, let’s keep what’s familiar to you and just make it Philippa. Yes, the girl who loves horses.”

  The girl didn’t smile. I wondered how long it would be before she could smile again, but she bowed her head. “Thank you, my lady. I’d like that.”

  †

  When we woke the next morning I was pleased to learn that our servants had already returned from Capua. They had ridden into the evening and arrived during the second watch of the night. We brought them into the atrium to hear their report. Tacitus sat beside me but was not awake enough yet to participate much in the conversation.

  “You made excellent time,” I said.

  “Yes, my lord,” the older man answered. “The moon was full enough that we had no trouble seeing the road, so we just kept riding. My lord Cornelius Tacitus did promise us a bit extra if we got back in a timely fashion.”

  “You’ll certainly have that.” And I would make certain it came out of Tacitus’ money pouch. “Now, what did you learn?”

  “Marcus Jucundus told us that he sold the man Sychaeus four months ago, my lord.”

  That opened Tacitus’ eyes. “Sold him?” he said. “To whom?”

  “To a lady named Arria, my lord. He said she came to his villa and inquired about Sychaeus by name. She told him her husband had sold him several years ago over her objections and she wanted to have him back.”

  “Why would a woman go to that much trouble to track down a former slave?” I said.

  “Perhaps he had a…talent that she particularly valued,” Tacitus suggested.

  “Begging your pardon, my lord,” the servant said, unable to suppress a smile, “but that was what Marcus Jucundus suspected as well. He said she paid a handsome price for him and invited him to sit in the raeda with her as they left. He was surprised because he hadn’t found Sychaeus to be of much use.”

  “I wonder if his wife had,” Tacitus muttered.

  Sometimes it’s better just to ignore Tacitus. “How did he know who the woman was?”

  “He said she arrived in an elegant raeda and she signed this.” He handed me a document, a single sheet of papyrus, which I read quickly. It acknowledged the sale and was signed by Marcus Jucundus and Arria. Jucundus had also affixed his seal.

  “But there’s no seal for this Arria, not even her husband’s ring. Anyone could write a name on a piece of papyrus. What did she look like?”

  He screwed up his face in the manner of a servant who wants to make himself look good but isn’t sure he has done or can do what his master wants. “Jucundus said she was quite refined, my lord, like a noble lady. Never even got out of the raeda. Just told him what she wanted and gave him the money. Didn’t even try to talk him down on the price.”

  “What color was her hair? Did she have any features that might help us recognize her?”

  “I’m sorry, my lord. Jucundus didn’t say and we didn’t think to ask about that.”

  Aurora would have, I thought. She’d never miss such details.

  We dismissed the servants and read over the document again. “I assume this was written by Jucundus’ scribe,” I said. “It was done hurriedly.”

  Tacitus took the document and eyed it from several angles. “I agree. Arria’s name is written in an entirely different hand.”

  “A better hand, I would say.” I took the papyrus back. Even when women do write, they seldom develop as fine a hand as the one I was looking at. “The Ar is oddly made, though. I’ve never seen it done quite like this, the way the r comes right out of the cross-bar for the A.”

  “Looks like an affectation,” Tacitus said. “Who could this woman be? Why would she have been asking for Sychaeus by name? Who goes shopping for a particular slave by name?”

  “Someone who knows him and knows where he is. That’s the only possible answer.”

  “But he’d been sold just a couple of months before this woman bought him. Why didn’t she come looking for him when he was in Calpurnius’ house? He’d been there for six years.”

  I gave that some thought. “I suspect it’s because she didn’t want Calpurnius to know that she was interested in this particular slave. But we can’t answer those questions until we find out who this ­Arria is. Let’s take this document with us. Maybe Fabia can tell us who she is. Sychaeus was her husband’s slave. She might know something about him.”

  †

  Accompanied by four servants—three of ours and Calpurnius’ man Thamyras—we set off on horseback for Naples. On the north side of town we would turn east on the road to Nola. Fabia’s villa, we’d been told, was three miles up that road. As we rode into Naples Thamyras said, “My lord, you mentioned that you’d like to visit the book shop which my lord Calpurnius…frequented.”

  “Yes, that would be interesting,” I said. “We should have plenty of time to get to Fabia’s villa and back.” We had agreed not to spread the word of Calpurnius’ true difficulty among his servants. They knew he was accused of killing one of them. I was confident now that we could disprove that accusation. If we could find out more about Sychaeus, I hoped we could identify the real killer. Once accused, a man is never completely exonerated until the guilty party is found. Last night we had told Aurelia that her husband was being blackmailed and that we didn’t know any more details than that. It was easier to do without Bastet in the room.

  “The shop is just ahead, my lord. Turn left at the next corner.”

  After the turn Thamyras directed us one more block. “That’s it, my lord.”

  We stopped in front of the shop where Calpurnius had dropped off the blackmail payments. A wooden sign hung beside the door with the Latin and Greek words for Books painted on it.

  The building in which the shop was located stood three stories high, with living quarters on the top two floors. It appeared to have suffered some damage in the earthquake which had enabled Calpurnius to escape. A crack in the wall above the door looked new to me, with no dirt accumulated in it and the edges of the crack still sharp. We left our servants to mind the horses and moved far enough away from them so we could talk as we surveyed the surrounding buildings.

  “It would be difficult to keep an eye on this place without someone spotting you,” Tacitus said. “There aren’t many places nearby to conceal yourself. I wonder if there’s a rear door.”

  “Or maybe a door that connects to one of the upper floors. Whoever picked up the money might never have left the building.” I took one more look around. “Well, we can’t barge in and start making accusations.”

  “Maybe there’ll be a box with a sign that says, ‘Deposit blackmail payments here.’ ”

  “Ever the optimist, aren’t you? There’s a lot we still don’t know. If we move too soon, we could alert anyone who might be connected to the blackmail. Th
ey could go to ground, like a hunted animal, and we would never find them.”

  “So we’re just going to look?”

  “For now, yes, just look.”

  The shop was larger than I expected, with two good-sized rooms. The owner must have bought a neighboring shop and knocked a door through the wall at some point. Shelves laden with scrolls covered three walls of the first room and as far as I could see into the second. It was the largest book shop I’d ever seen outside of Rome. I’m never more comfortable than when I’m surrounded by books. That was the one deficiency in Aurelia’s otherwise charming house: the library was quite small. Aurelia herself was not broadly educated, and most of Calpurnius’ library was entombed in his villa.

  A heavyset man, mostly bald with a white fringe around his head, sat at a table in one corner, with scrolls, pens, and inks surrounding him. He appeared to be putting the finishing touches on a scroll, making the last corrections and erasing any extraneous marks. The pumice stone whispered as he rubbed it back and forth over the papyrus. One of the first Greek words I learned described that smoothing action: psao. I found it easy to remember because it sounds so much like what it means.

  “Good day, gentlemen,” the man said in Greek, looking up but not rising from his work. “Is there anything I can help you find?”

  I hadn’t actually thought of what reason I would give for visiting the shop. We had none, except to get a feel for the place. Then inspiration struck. “A friend of ours, Calpurnius Fabatus, suggested we stop by here while we were in Naples.”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Do you share the old gentleman’s enthusiasm for Egypt then?”

  “He has…other enthusiasms,” Tacitus said, “that appeal more to me.”

  “Indeed he does,” the man said, rolling up the scroll and inserting it into a red bag. “Indeed he does. You need to look in the other room, sir, on the wall to your left, on the top two shelves.”

  While Tacitus browsed in the other room, I asked the shopkeeper, “How are your books arranged?”

  “Poetry, philosophy, and more exotic books, such as your friend is interested in, are in the other room, sir. Anything else is in here. Latin on that wall, and Greek over there.”

  I looked at the tituli, the tags hanging from some of the scrolls. My uncle’s history, continuing the work of Aufidius Bassus, occupied a prominent place. I wondered if I would ever see my name in a book shop or library. Having one’s work published amounts to achieving immortality—the only kind of immortality there is, to my way of thinking. My uncle has been dead for five years now, and yet people can still know what he thought, almost as though they were talking with him. I picked up one of the scrolls and unrolled a few pages. As I read the words I could hear his voice. A wave of sadness swept over me and I lowered my head.

  “Do you fancy history, sir?” the shopkeeper asked from behind me.

  I put the scroll back on the shelf and took a deep breath before I turned around. “My taste runs more to oratory.”

  The shopkeeper pointed to a spot to my right. “We have some nice copies of Cicero. We finished a copy of his speech on behalf of Archias just the other day.”

  “That is one of his best,” I said. And we’re still reading it over a hundred years after his death. If that’s not immortality, I don’t know what is.

  “Gaius Pliny!” Tacitus called. “Come here. You have to see this.”

  The shopkeeper’s eyes widened as he looked at me. “Gaius Pliny?”

  I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve had to explain to people. “He was my uncle. He adopted me in his will.”

  “This is an honor, sir,” the man said, standing and bowing his head slightly. “I never had the privilege of meeting your uncle, but everyone around here speaks highly of him. It was a brave thing he did, trying to rescue people from Vesuvius.”

  “Thank you—”

  “Gaius Pliny,” Tacitus repeated. “Get in here.”

  “Excuse me,” I told the shopkeeper and stepped into the other room.

  “What is so important?” I asked Tacitus, not masking the irritation in my voice. “You know that I have no interest in looking at pictures of—”

  “Forget that. Look at this.” He laid a partially unrolled book on the table in the center of the room and pointed to the top of the first page.

  The scroll contained a copy of the last book of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, the frankest and most explicit of the three books which make up the work. I could see from the illustrations why Tacitus’ attention had been drawn to it.

  Tacitus tapped the page. “Do you see that?”

  “How can I not?”

  “Not the picture, the script.”

  I let my eyes follow his finger. The poem begins Arma dedi Danais. The Ar was formed in the same way as on the bill of sale for Sychaeus, with the r running out of the cross-bar of the A.

  Tacitus had trouble keeping his voice down. “The person who wrote that also signed that bill of sale.”

  “Yes, I see that.” I picked up the scroll and started to the other room of the shop.

  “What are you going to do?” Tacitus asked.

  “I’m going to buy a book. And find out who copied it.”

  The shopkeeper stood up when we came back into the main room. “Did you find something you liked, sir?”

  “This is an exquisite copy of the Ars Amatoria,” I said, drawing my money bag from under my tunic. “Did you do it?”

  “No, sir. I can’t take the credit. I don’t do much copying anymore. My hand’s a bit unsteady.” He held out his right, still ink-stained, and I could see the slight tremor. “I supervise the men that work for us, put the finishing touches on—that sort of thing.”

  “ ‘Us’? Does someone own the shop with you?”

  “Oh, I don’t own the place, sir. I work for my lady Plautia. She’s the owner. Owns this whole building, in fact.”

  I couldn’t imagine that the owner of this much property would dirty her hands to copy books. “Is there by chance a woman among your copyists?”

  “No, sir, but my lady Plautia keeps a close eye on the men. She writes a fine hand herself, and she expects them to come up to her standards. You’re holding the result, sir.”

  I didn’t feel I could ask any more questions about this Plautia without arousing the man’s suspicions. “How much is the book?”

  “Don’t you want the others, sir? I’d hate to break up a set.”

  It made sense to get on his good side. I might want more information from him at some point. “All right, I’ll buy all three.”

  “Very well, sir.” He told me the price and I counted out the money.

  †

  When we rejoined our servants on the street I handed the scrolls in their bag to Tacitus. “An early Saturnalia gift,” I said.

  “And much appreciated.”

  “I do want to compare that writing to the bill of sale,” I reminded him.

  We retrieved the document from the servant who was carrying it and held it next to the third book of Ovid. “There’s no question,” I said. “The same person wrote these.”

  “So the shopkeeper must have been lying,” Tacitus said. “They must have a woman among their copyists.”

  “Or a woman taught this scribe. The shopkeeper said this Plautia keeps a close eye on the men.”

  “But her name’s Plautia, not Arria.”

  Even though he’s older than I am and more experienced in many ways, Tacitus can still be exasperatingly simple. “You’re assuming that the woman who purchased Sychaeus was scrupulously honest. She could have signed any name she pleased as long as she paid the price Jucundus was asking. Your servant said she didn’t haggle, just paid the first sum Jucundus mentioned. I wish we had a description of Arria, even just her hair color. Then, if we saw Plautia, we would know if they could be the same person.”

  “Women can wear wigs,” Tacitus reminded me. “When I saw your Aurora in her blond one, I didn’t recognize her.”


  “All right, I’ll grant you that. I don’t think we can accomplish any more here. Let’s get out to Fabia’s place so we can get back before dark.”

  †

  The road to Nola was level, skirting the north side of the range of hills that rise to their summit in Vesuvius. The eruption had not affected this area at all. Seeing green, living things and trees as tall as trees should be restored my spirits. We rode the two miles at a quick pace. At a crossroads we found a taberna where we could get a drink and directions to Fabia’s house.

  “It’s not much more than a stone’s throw up that road,” the innkeeper promised. His lack of education and his lack of teeth made him difficult to understand. “But you’ll find nary welcome there.”

  “We have some connection with her family,” I said.

  The innkeeper shook his head. “Won’t matter. She ain’t let nobody in the house in over two year. Keeps it sealed up.”

  “Why?” Tacitus asked.

  “Says she and the women of the house are devotin’ themselfs to some god. To let a man in the place would cause ’em to lose their purity.”

  “But how do they keep themselves alive? How do they feed themselves?”

  “One of my lads goes up there now and then and finds out what they needs. We bring it to ’em and leave it outside the door. They won’t open up until we’re outta sight.”

  “If they won’t open the door,” I said, “how do they tell your man what they need?”

  “They cut a little hole in the door and put bars over it. They talks to him through that.”

  We paid for our drinks, thanked the man for the directions and the warning, and set off up the road he indicated.

  As we brought our horses to a halt in front of the house Tacitus shook his head and said, “It’s a bit shabbier than I expected. Aelius’ family was quite prosperous.”

  “Domitian wouldn’t let her keep the nicest of her husband’s properties, I’m sure.”

  “No, but she’s not even taking care of this one.”

  Tacitus’ criticism was true. The lane leading from the road to the front of the house was overgrown with trees in need of pruning and brush that should have been cleared entirely. I had the feeling Fabia was trying to discourage visitors by letting the house be hidden behind all the vegetation. In a few more years the house would disappear from view. We dismounted and found plenty of places to tie our horses.