Fortune's Fool

by Albert A. Bell

“Thank you, my lord.”

  I knew she was going to talk to my mother about this, if she hadn’t already. Over the last couple of years my mother has shown an increasing sympathy to Jewish customs. I might as well resign myself to finding some place to store the bones, but I wasn’t going to admit that yet.

  “Have you learned any more about him?” Julia asked.

  “We think he had black hair.” Tacitus pointed to the remains of the rats’ nest lying next to the body.

  “Around here a lot of people have brown or blond hair,” Julia said, running her fingers through her own light brown locks. “The Gallic influence is strong.”

  Both of Julia’s parents were from Gaul on the other side of the Alps. My hair, while a bit darker than hers, would still be called brown, as would my mother’s. Romans—especially our women—seem taken by blond hair. They dye their dark hair or buy wigs made from the hair of captive German and Gallic women.

  “Most Jews have black hair, my lord,” Naomi said as she turned back to the house.

  “Your son’s hair is red,” I reminded her. Like an opponent in court who has been presented with an irrefutable argument, she offered no rejoinder.

  * * *

  We put the box of bones and the bloodstained rocks in my bedroom, which we could lock.

  “You don’t want to use the treasure room?” Tacitus asked.

  “No.” The house did have the traditional “treasure room,” but in this case it was a grandiose term. It was just the smallest of the bedrooms off the garden. Beyond enough money to meet expenses and a few of my father’s most personal documents, there was nothing of particular value in it.

  “This will serve as a private place to talk,” I said, motioning for Tacitus to light the two lamps sitting on my work table. As I started to close the door, Julia, who had been standing just outside it, stepped in and brought Aurora with her.

  I blinked in amazement. “I didn’t think—”

  “That we would be interested?” Julia said. “You know Aurora is, and you won’t get rid of me as easily as closing a door in my face.”

  I looked to Tacitus, but he could do nothing except raise his hands, palms up.

  “Well, it’s a small room,” I said.

  Julia pulled the door shut. “That makes it all the easier to keep our secrets.”

  The room’s only furniture consisted of my work table, two chairs, and the bed. I motioned for the women to take the chairs. Tacitus slipped into one and took a giggling Julia on his lap. He gestured for me to take a seat on the bed. I would much rather Aurora and I had imitated him and Julia, but nothing in Aurora’s face told me that she would react as Julia did—and I didn’t think I could blame the poor light.

  When we were all settled I said, “I think we should begin by summarizing what we know. A person—probably male, slightly taller than I am, with black hair—was killed twenty years ago by a blow to the head and dumped inside the wall being constructed on the other side of the garden. He might have lived long enough to scrawl letters in his own blood. Beyond that, all I can see are questions.”

  “Lots of questions,” Tacitus said. “How could someone have done this without anybody hearing or noticing? Your entire household would have had to be deaf not to hear something.”

  “Or maybe they weren’t here,” Julia said. “You could see if they remember a specific time when most of them were out of the house.”

  “That’s one of the questions I want to ask my mother and the older servants.”

  “How are we ever going to identify him?” Tacitus asked. “Except for the color of his hair, we have no clues at all.”

  “Can we take another look at the bones?” Aurora asked.

  I stood up and opened the box containing the bones. “Certainly, but I don’t see what good that will do.”

  “We were in a hurry earlier, and people were watching. Your wife was making such a scene. We might have missed something.”

  “Is there any particular bone you want to see?”

  “The skull, I think. A person’s face is the most identifiable thing about him.”

  Glad that she had at least dropped the “my lord,” I handed her the skull. The lower jaw had gotten separated from it. “Do you want to see both parts?” I asked.

  “This will do for now.” She held it close to the small lamps, turning it one way and another. “He must have been hit in the face,” she said. “A couple of teeth are broken, on the top on the right side, and one is missing entirely. I think someone hit him in the face, then on the side of the head.”

  As I took the skull from Aurora our hands brushed. She looked up at me and, for the first time in two days, I saw hope of restoring our relationship. “You’re right. I’d say he was hit in the mouth, then, as his head turned, he was struck again. Like this.” I took advantage of the opportunity to touch her cheek and turn her head to the side.

  “No,” she said. “He was struck on his right side. That means the person who hit him was left-handed.” She brought her hand up fast to my cheek, stopping just before she struck me.

  “Probably, but not necessarily,” Tacitus said, holding out a hand to take the skull. “If someone was swinging a weapon, this fellow could have ducked but then got hit by the second effort.” He swung his right arm from right to left, then back in the other direction.

  Julia took the skull in her turn. I was amazed at how matter-of-fact she was. I would have expected a noble woman to react to such a thing the way Livia had, with revulsion. Tacitus once told me that Julia insisted on seeing and holding their stillborn child. In such cases the infant is usually spirited away, to spare the mother’s feelings. Julia must be made of sturdier stuff than I realized. But then her father is Julius Agricola.

  “Let me see,” she said. “His other teeth look pretty good. They’re clean and healthy. He must have come from a household of some standing. We encourage our servants to use a chew stick to clean their teeth. I don’t think people from poorer houses always do that.”

  Most upper-class households follow Julia’s advice. I certainly do. A toothache can develop into more than a minor nuisance, disabling a servant as much as an injury to a limb and much more difficult to treat. Some of the cures suggested for a toothache in my uncle’s Natural History—such as rubbing it with a hippopotamus tooth—make it clear why people have to finally have a sore tooth pulled. But my uncle’s accumulated wisdom isn’t as bad as the folk tale which says that a person with a toothache should, by the light of the full moon, catch a frog, spit in its mouth, and tell it to take the pain away.

  “It’s curious,” Julia said, as though she were addressing the skull, “that just last night we were talking about the disappearance of Livia’s father, and now this.”

  “How could one have anything to do with the other?” I asked. “Livius drowned when his boat capsized in a storm. His body was never found.”

  “I’m not suggesting that this is Livius,” Julia said. “I’m just saying his disappearance at the time this person was killed is one of those coincidences you dislike so much, and a remarkable one at that.”

  “Well, that’s all it is.”

  “But this wall was built about the time Livius disappeared, wasn’t it?” Julia asked tenaciously.

  “I believe so.”

  “So this man must have been killed right before the wall was finished, therefore, at the time Livius drowned. Another coincidence?”

  “Those are two unrelated facts,” I said. “If we’re going to make any sense of this”—I pointed to the skeleton—“we need to focus on what’s relevant to this.” I was beginning to doubt the wisdom of involving Julia in this inquiry, if she was going to distract us.

  “Gaius is right, dear,” Tacitus said. “I’m sure somebody else died around here the night Livius drowned. Somebody dies around here just about every night. They don’t have anything to do with one another or with this man.”

  Julia wouldn’t quite give up. “This man didn’t just die.
He was killed.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Killed by a blow to the head, not by drowning.”

  “How can you ever know any more about him?” Her voice echoed the sadness lining her face.

  I took the skull from her and placed it back in the box. “When we had the bones laid out on the ground, they looked straight, so he wasn’t a person who did a lot of heavy work. Both legs were the same length, so he didn’t walk with a limp or have any injuries of that sort.”

  “Do you think he might have come from a wealthy house?” Julia asked.

  “There’s no way to tell,” I said. “As you said, though, the good condition of his teeth makes me think he wasn’t a poor man. Even if he was a servant, he could have come from a wealthy house.”

  “Rich man, poor man, or slave,” Tacitus said, “it makes no sense that somebody could have killed him and disposed of his body this way without someone in this house being aware of it.”

  “Are you suggesting that someone in my family was involved?” I was thinking the same thing but hated to hear it said aloud.

  “I didn’t say that,” Tacitus replied quickly.

  “You all but said it, dear,” Julia put in.

  “Well, I don’t mean to impugn your family, Gaius Pliny, but—”

  “It’s a possibility we can’t dismiss out of hand,” I said. “I know that. But, if something did happen, the secret has been well kept. I never heard even a whisper of anything like this while I was growing up.”

  “I’ve never heard any talk among the servants,” Aurora said.

  I wondered how much other servants talked to Aurora, or talked when they were around her. Everyone knew she enjoyed a special status in the house, even if they didn’t know how much more special that status had recently become.

  “We’ll need to ask my mother. And I want to talk to a friend of mine, Romatius Firmus.”

  “Who’s he?” Tacitus asked.

  “Our fathers were friends. He and I went to school together during the periods when I was in Comum as a child.” After my father’s death my mother and I lived at times with my uncle and—when he was away—with a family friend, Verginius Rufus, whom I still revere as a teacher. “Romatius and I have remained friends. He stayed here and has held a couple of minor offices in town.”

  “He hasn’t tried for office in Rome?”

  “I don’t think his family has the money to do that. I know he’s never qualified for the equestrian stripe.”

  “But if he’s your age,” Tacitus said, “how would he know any more about what happened twenty years ago than you do?”

  “He might have heard something over the years, just because he’s been here all this time, and he’s always been fond of gossip. If he doesn’t know anything, he might point us to someone who does. He’s the only person outside my household I can think of to start asking questions, and his family did have business dealings with my father.”

  “How soon can we see him?” Tacitus asked.

  “It will take us the rest of the day to get to Comum, but we should be able to talk to him tomorrow. There are also a couple of other things I want to check on.”

  “This sounds like a trip for the men only,” Julia said, getting up off Tacitus’ lap with a final wriggle and straightening her gown. Tacitus remained seated with his hands folded demurely across his lap.

  “It will be. I’d like for you and Aurora to talk to my mother and some of the older servants. See if they recall anything about that summer. Try to do it when Livia and her mother aren’t around.”

  “And I want to take another look at those rocks later,” Julia said. “I’m sure those are letters, not just random smears of blood.”

  V

  Jewels are the gift of fortune; character comes from within.

  —Plautus

  The ride into Comum, ten miles away, would take the rest of the day. We took only three servants with us—one of mine and one of Tacitus’ to attend us in the bath, and another of mine to stay with our horses when we had to leave them on the edge of town. I chose one of the older servants in the house, a man named Nereus, as my attendant so I could question him in relative privacy.

  “What do you remember about the building of the wall in the garden?” I asked as soon as we were well away from the house. “How old were you when it was done?”

  “I was fifteen at the time, my lord. I helped carry some of the stone off the wagons, but your father hired masons to do the work. No one in our house was skilled in stonework and he said he wanted that new section to look like it had always been part of the house. He didn’t want people’s attention to be drawn to it.”

  I glanced at Tacitus and could see that he grasped the contradictory implications of Nereus’ statement—someone from outside my household could have been involved in the murder, but my father went to some lengths to disguise the work he’d had done. He’d succeeded.

  “I know the wall was built in the summer, but do you recall more precisely when it was finished?”

  “The middle of the summer, my lord. Somewhere close to your birthday, I believe.”

  “Which birthday?” Tacitus asked.

  “Let me think, my lord.” He appeared to be counting in his head. “It would have been his fourth.”

  “I’ll bet he was a cute little tyke,” Tacitus said, with the corners of his mouth turning up in a smile that he could barely keep off his face.

  “That he was, my lord. And into everything. That’s one reason why his father built the wall—to keep him from roaming all over the place.”

  “We’ve heard all that from my mother.” I could feel my face reddening.

  “Sorry, my lord.”

  “You know a body was found inside the wall.” I could tell my voice was taking on too somber a tone. “Can you remember any time when someone could have placed that body there?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that, my lord. The men hadn’t torn down much of the wall when they found him, had they?”

  “No. They had barely gotten started.”

  “Wouldn’t that mean he was placed in there close to the end of the work, my lord?”

  I nodded. “Tell me what you remember about the day it was finished.”

  “Well, not much, my lord. You see, I was very interested in one of the girls in the house at that time, so I didn’t pay much attention to anything else.” He shrugged. “I was fifteen. That’s the only excuse I can give.”

  “Oh, we were all fifteen at one time,” Tacitus said.

  “Yes, my lord. We all enjoy that blessing from the gods, but it’s one I’d want to enjoy only once.” Nereus’ smile seemed directed to himself.

  “What happened to the girl?” Tacitus asked.

  “We’ve been man and wife till this day, my lord.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Leucippe, my lord.”

  “Well, I hope your happiness continues.”

  “I didn’t say we were happy, my lord, just that we’ve been man and wife for all that time.” He sighed. “But, as for the wall, the main thing I remember about it is that my lord Caecilius seemed in a hurry to have it finished. He hadn’t been in any particular hurry until then, but he couldn’t seem to get it finished fast enough.”

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “On the last two days, my lord, he paid the mason’s crew double to work all day, instead of stopping at noon. There was a storm that kept them from working one day, so your father wanted to make up that time. On the last day, they worked until almost dark, just to finish it.”

  “Do you know why he did that?”

  “No, my lord. I do know that your mother wasn’t happy with him spending the extra money. They had a…well, a discussion about it in the garden. Quite a few of us saw them, and heard them.”

  Suddenly an image flashed into my mind, as clear as a bolt of lightning and just as unsettling. I could see my mother and my father standing in the garden of the house, arguing. As a very young chil
d, I was frightened by the anger in their voices and was hiding behind some bushes. I didn’t understand what they were arguing about, but it was one of the earliest memories I had, and one of the few vivid memories of my father.

  “It sounds,” Tacitus said, “like your mother was just as miserly with your father as she is with you.”

  I nodded. I sometimes thought my mother could grasp a denarius tightly enough to strangle the princeps depicted on it. Hardly a day went by that she did not object to the amount of the morning dole I gave my clients. Since she had never known poverty and never would, I found her stinginess difficult to understand.

  “Do you remember what reason my father gave for his haste?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t, my lord. I wasn’t close enough to hear what they were saying, just to know that they were both…well, animated.”

  * * *

  I was about to enter the latrina when another servant woman came out. “You might want to wait,” she said. “The lady Plinia and the lady Pompeia are in there.”

  There’s room for four in this latrina, but I did decide to wait. I didn’t want to see Pompeia any more than she wanted me to be around her. While Gaius and his mother are gracious in their treatment of servants, camaraderie between servant and mistress has its limits, in my opinion. There was no door on the latrina, just an entryway about three paces long that made a sharp left turn, preserving privacy but also allowing circulation of air. I leaned against the wall, pondering the poor condition of the plaster and paint and wondering how much longer I should carry my grudge against Gaius for the way he had handled my “marriage.”

  “I thought that girl would never leave.” I recognized the voice as Pompeia’s. I could tell she thought she was talking softly, but, like everything else about the woman, her voice was outsized. I could hear her easily over the flow of water under my feet. When this villa was built they diverted a nearby stream to supply water. From the bath it ran under the latrina with a soothing babble and out to the lake.

  “This is unnerving,” Pompeia continued. “Imagine! Last night I slept in a room with a skeleton only a few feet away in the wall. And it was put there twenty years ago.”