“When was this deposited here?” she called down to Cornelia. “Pompey’s will?”
“Toward the end of last year, I think,” replied the Vestal, who was peering nervously through the slat of the door into the temple. “When he came back from the Spanish campaign.”
Very carefully, Hortensia tucked her fingers inside the perfect cylinder of pliably soft, honey-colored papyrus, bound by no fewer than seven crimson wax seals, and withdrew it. Turning it over in her hands and holding it up close to her face, Hortensia noted that the edges of the red seals were sharp and neat, neither cracked nor abraded from attrition with their neighbors. She bent her head and much to the bewilderment of the Vestal watching her from below, sniffed deeply as though she were inhaling perfume. Then she shook her head and turned to Cornelia with a triumphant beam.
“This can’t be more than one or two months old,” she announced, holding out the roll for Cornelia’s inspection. “See how flat the edges are? My papa receives all the newest publications for his library. After a few months, the seams always start to fray and turn darker, it’s something to do with the air. That’s why Papa keeps all his finest pieces in closed cabinets. Also, I can smell the lamp black, can’t you?” She waved it slightly in Cornelia’s direction. “It’s still got that fragrance, like Papa’s study when he receives something new from his copyist Pollio. That must be what caught my attention in the first place.” Holding the roll up to the dappled light, Hortensia squinted at the finely-etched insignia of the topmost wax seal. She was just able to make out the outline of a griffin but this revealed nothing to her. Without thinking, she started to glide one fingernail under the seal’s edge.
“Do not break the seal!”
Hortensia almost fell backwards off the ladder, so startled was she by the powerful echo of the Vestal’s impassioned command. Cornelia was white and shaking.
“That is a sacred document and you have looked at it long enough, you must put it back at once.”
Clutching tight to both sides of the ladder and steadying her breath, Hortensia tried to adopt a manner of reassuring confidence, as though she were speaking to a frightened child.
“But it’s so important we know what it says if we are to understand what has been going on. I promise we can re-seal it afterwards.”
Cornelia shook her head vigorously, clearly horrified at the suggestion.
“You cannot re-seal it. Each seal is unique to the seven people who witnessed the will, it will be clear to anyone that it has been tampered with.”
“But if we explain our suspicions, then I’m sure Pompey will understand. He might not even notice the difference,” coaxed Hortensia, realizing even as she said it that there was no chance that the Vestal would comply.
“You must come down from there right now! Another Vestal will be coming to take over from Fabia. By the power of the goddess I command you to come down!”
Her voice had reached a pitch of terror now and very reluctantly Hortensia slid the roll back into place and climbed back down to floor-level.
“Cornelia, please,” she urged as she stepped off the last rung. “Your instincts were correct. I confess I doubted you at first. But now I believe that there is something very worrying going on here.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” Cornelia bit back. “One of my priestesses is dead!”
“Then surely you can see how important it is for us to know what is inside that will?” pleaded Hortensia. “You must listen to me. I am quite convinced that will is a forgery. If I’m right, it won’t matter if we open it.”
But Cornelia shook her head stubbornly. “I took a sacred vow. I cannot break it.”
“Even if you know it may save the Republic?” asked Hortensia incredulously.
“I trust to Vesta’s guidance.”
The priestess’s face was a mask as she propelled her protesting guest out of the room and back along the tunnel to the Vestals’ palace. Try as she might, with all the persuasive rhetoric at her disposal, Hortensia was unable to sway the Vestal and eventually was left with no choice but to allow herself to be shepherded across the courtyard and out through a side gate.
She was leaving, head bowed in restless thought, when she heard her name being spoken in an urgent whisper. Fabia was hurrying down the marble steps of the temple, clutching the folds of her veil under her chin. Her pale, pointed face was anxious and she drew Hortensia into the shade of the colonnade that ran along the front of the Vestals’ palace.
“Have you discovered something? About Helena?”
“I may have. But won’t you be in terrible trouble if they discover the hearth unattended?”
“Another Vestal came to take over from me. Please, you must tell me what it is you suspect.”
“I can’t know for sure. Your priestess would not let me confirm it one way or another,” answered Hortensia darkly.
Fabia nodded. “I heard you. You wish to inspect the will of Pompey. I listened outside the sanctuary door,” she explained guiltily. “It means so much to me, you see. Finding out what happened to Helena.”
Hortensia was touched by her earnest concern. “She was a good friend of yours?” she asked.
Fabia nodded. “She was my best friend. We came to the order at the same time. I was ten, Helena a year older. What they say she did, throwing herself in the river to escape the shame of discovery, that’s a lie.” She shook her head, stubborn anger written across her face. “I understand how the affairs of these men work, you see. Did you know that when Cornelia spoke of scandals attached to the Temple, she was talking about me?”
“No,” said Hortensia in surprise. Fabia nodded, twisting her hands together.
“Three years ago, someone claimed that I had engaged in … immoral conduct with a man. I had never even met him you understand, but this man’s enemies knew that such a charge would damage him, and I was as good a Vestal as any other. Fortunately, the case came to nothing and the charges against me were thrown out. But if I had been found guilty of breaking my oath of celibacy … they would have buried me alive.”
Fabia covered her face with her hands for a moment and breathed deeply before continuing. “The Chief Vestal believed me and I will always be grateful to her. But she does not understand how the world works beyond the walls of this temple. How could she when she has known no other life since she was a child? I wish I could help you.”
Hortensia empathized with the mulish determination on Fabia’s face but she shook her head warningly. “Promise me you will not endanger yourself. You are right, everything is different beyond the walls of this temple, but I fear that even here you may not be safe. I am going to speak to my Papa about all of this. He will know exactly what to do.”
XXI
WHEN HORTENSIA EMERGED FROM THE COLONNADE, THE FIRST person she saw was Caepio, pacing about at the foot of the temple steps. He took her arm and led her to the waiting litter. His usually smiling face was pale and tense and he looked angrier than she had ever seen him.
“Where’s Elpidia?” she asked.
“I sent her home. In Jupiter’s name what has been going on, Hortensia?” he demanded. “Lucrio greets me looking as though he has been in a brawl with Diagoras of Rhodes, and informs me cool as you like that he has waited only to pass on your message and that he is now going to the forum to fetch you from the Vestals’ house and that you – if you please – will explain everything on your return. You can imagine what I had to say to him. I don’t know what is going on but I do know that you have been keeping secrets from me, Hortensia, and it stops now.”
Hortensia waited for him to get into the litter alongside her and then leant her head thankfully against his shoulder.
“You are quite right, it does. I am so glad you are here.”
Caepio, who had expected to encounter Hortensia in an obstinate mood, was wrong-footed.
“I need to talk to you and to Papa, very urgently,” she added.
It was a great comfort to share the bu
rden of her knowledge with someone else. Keeping her voice low so that the litter bearers would not hear them over the noise from the Sacred Way, she told Caepio everything that had happened in the last few days, from her first interview with the Chief Vestal and being shown the inscription naming Pompey on the temple floor, to Lucrio’s report of the conversation between Tiberius Dolabella and Crassus. She was deliberately vague on the details of why Lucrio had been at Dolabella’s villa, but realized she had to give some explanation, and intimated that Lucrio had heard that Tiberius may have information on the deaths of his family. Caepio listened without interrupting, his brow becoming more and more heavily furrowed. When Hortensia had finished, he was silent and it was only once they were climbing the Palatine that he spoke.
“Hortensia, do you hear what you are saying? You are proposing to accuse a consul of Rome of conspiracy against his co-consul, without a shred of evidence.”
“I am not proposing to do any such thing,” she said impatiently. “Not yet anyway. But you heard what the Vestals found, you heard what Lucrio said.”
“What you heard is more likely to get Lucrio thrown back into the arena, or worse still, the river Tiber. A slave’s testimony is inadmissible in a Roman court. Unless it has been extracted from him by torture.” Caepio grimaced and admitted, “Though on seeing the state of Lucrio, they might be persuaded.”
“But you believe him, don’t you?”
He did not answer her straight away and when he did, he chose his words carefully.
“I can readily believe that Crassus may have hired Tiberius to steal something from the Vestals’ archive for him. It’s well known that Tiberius would commit any kind of villainy if the price was right. If the dead girl of whom they spoke was the Vestal – and I don’t deny it sounds plausible – then that is a terrible offense without question. But you will not find it easy to persuade others of it, particularly since Lucrio, by his own admission, only overheard this conversation when he was in the act of breaking into Tiberius’s house and recalled it only after his subsequent capture. It is far more likely he would be the one to face punishment.”
Hortensia looked taken aback but only for a moment. “So what would you do? I agree Lucrio’s name must be kept out of it but are we supposed to sit back and let them conspire against a consul of Rome without so much as lifting a finger?” she demanded.
“Did Lucrio actually hear them mention Pompey’s name at any point?”
“No, but I told you about the inscription on the floor and the will in the archive.”
“The inscription means nothing without proof that the priestess was murdered, which you don’t have. A jury would be far more likely to believe your first instinct, that the girl was naming Pompey as her lover. He pretends to be a model of fidelity but the women of the Subura would tell you different. As for this idea of a falsified will, I’m sorry my darling, but they’re almost impossible to forge. They have to be witnessed and sealed by seven people for a start, and even if you could get round that fact, Crassus knows full well that no one’s ever going to believe Pompey is suddenly so fond of him that he’s willing to write his will in Crassus’s favor. All you have otherwise is a conversation about a stolen document, the identification and provenance of which you really have no idea.”
Hortensia was silenced and after a moment’s reflective pause, Caepio continued.
“Lucrio said that Crassus mentioned someone from the Subura? Someone who wanted more money? That’s interesting. Crassus owns a lot of the apartment blocks in that district. He buys them up cheap whenever they catch fire and the owners are so desperate they’ll accept any sum, then puts out the fire with his own brigade, fixes them up and rents them out for the best profit he can get. I heard one came down just the other day. What would you care to bet that the ‘leech’ he talked about was the owner of that tower? That would solve one part of the mystery.”
“I want to tell Papa. He’ll know what to do.”
Caepio was silent for a moment.
“I really don’t think you should talk to him about this, Hortensia.”
“Why not?” she demanded.
“You don’t know what kind of a hornet’s nest you will stir up if you interfere and in all likelihood it is Lucrio who will end up in trouble. Remember how your father reacted the last time you took a hand in someone else’s affairs? What if you’re wrong about the will? What do you think will happen then?”
Hortensia felt conflicted. Perhaps Caepio was right. Hortensius would indeed be angry if he thought she was interfering again in matters that didn’t concern her. More to the point, how could she tell him what she knew without revealing how she had come by her knowledge? It dawned on her with dismal certainty that her father would be far less inclined than Caepio to believe that Lucrio had been outside Tiberius’s house for good reasons. In fact, he would be determined to believe the opposite and the consequences of that didn’t bear thinking about. She also hadn’t forgotten Tiberius’s presence next to her father at the trial. Hortensia had some ill-formed notion that perhaps, rather as Caepio had suggested, Tiberius hoped to cultivate Hortensius’s acquaintance so that he might defend him in the event that the conspiracy should be discovered. Distasteful though it was to contemplate, if there were a relationship between Tiberius and her father, it didn’t improve the chances of Lucrio’s story being believed.
By now they had reached their villa. Hortensia jumped down from the litter, ignoring Caepio, with whom she was by now quite aggrieved. How could her husband not see what she saw? She accepted that Lucrio’s evidence probably wouldn’t convince a jury and not for the world would she place him in any kind of danger. But if Tiberius and Crassus really were hatching some kind of plot against Pompey and had murdered a priestess in order to accomplish it, then it was the duty of any Roman citizen to expose them. Caepio’s lack of enthusiasm for the fight was bewildering to Hortensia.
Feeling upset and frustrated, Hortensia swept through the atrium to her private salon, pointedly shutting Caepio out by loudly giving instructions to Eucherius that she was not to be disturbed for the rest of the day. Then, an hour later, she confused the young door-keeper by ordering him to fetch Lucrio and send him to her. When Lucrio eventually came in, he found Hortensia pacing up and down, fiddling with the string of rose beads around her neck. She looked up, wincing at the purple bruising around his eyes which was now rippled with yellow. The cut on his lip was hardening into a rusty scab.
“You really do look awful,” she observed.
Lucrio smiled wryly, as well as he was able.
“You did not know me in my soldiering days, domina. I have looked much worse, believe me.”
“You should put some lavender ointment on those bruises.”
“Elpidia has already overcome her distaste of me and attended to it. She wanted to lay cabbage leaves over my face. An infallible Roman remedy, she said. But I told her no.”
Hortensia laughed but was quickly serious again.
“You have been honest with me, Lucrio. Now I’m going to trust you with something.” She locked her fingers together purposefully and told him about her two interviews with Cornelia.
“The Chief Vestal is convinced that this girl Helena was murdered because she discovered an intruder stealing something from the temple sanctuary. Now that I’ve heard your story I think that in fact she discovered Tiberius Dolabella replacing one document with another and was then silenced. It’s the only explanation for why the Vestals haven’t noticed anything missing. I’ve seen Pompey’s archive. I think that what Tiberius stole for Crassus was Pompey’s will and the one that’s there now is a forgery. The question is, what do they hope to accomplish by it?”
“Pompey’s death, one imagines, domina.”
Hortensia nodded. “Yes, I fear that too. But if so, why tamper with the will? It’s well known that Crassus and Pompey hate each other; no one’s going to believe it if Pompey suddenly writes his will in Crassus’s favor,” she said, repeating Cae
pio’s reasoning as if it were her own. “Lucrio, I need your help. I have to find out what’s in that will and I have to prove whatever it is that Crassus and Tiberius are planning.”
He didn’t answer her immediately. A slight frown creased his brow.
“Why don’t you just tell your father what you suspect, domina? As I suggested before?” he asked eventually.
“I did think of that, but what if I’m wrong? Then Cornelia will suffer terrible punishment for showing me a private citizen’s documents. The truth is, I have no witness but you.”
“I understand,” said Lucrio drily. “My testimony doesn’t count.”
“No,” admitted Hortensia, “and Papa would probably have you run out of Italy.”
“I can live with that if I have the chance to kill Dolabella first.”
She shook her head.
“I need your help, Lucrio. I can’t do this alone.”
“Are you sure you want to even try, domina? You don’t know what you may discover.”
“That’s what Caepio says, but I don’t have a choice. The Vestals have put their trust in me, I have a duty to help them.” She saw that he was still frowning. “I promise you I have not forgotten what you told me and when the time comes I will not stop you from exacting whatever revenge you have set your heart upon, though I fear …” Hortensia stopped and bit her lip.
“You fear what, domina?”
“I fear what may happen to you of course,” she confessed. “It’s a capital crime to kill a Roman citizen. What will you … I mean, what did you mean to do afterwards? Will you flee? Back to Lusitania?”
Lucrio met her anxious gaze. “Perhaps. But if I am caught, domina, it is a price I am prepared to pay.”
Hortensia swallowed and shook her head vigorously.
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