"What?" I saw Publius' head come up.
Helena Justina demanded almost impatiently but with a tinge of bitterness, "Isn't it obvious?" She straightened her shoulders, then declared in the taut voice I had only heard her use when insulted to the heart by me, "Pertinax may have provided the warehouse with its secret vault, but he had not the brains to devise a plot so devious. I assume it is my father who organized all this."
As she gestured angrily towards the bank of ingots, Camillus Meto stared at her. They and I contemplated the consequences of what she had suggested. In a Roman scandal none of the family escapes. Unborn generations, judged by the honour of their ancestors, were already condemned by this act against the state. The disgrace of a senator would drag down all his relations. His loss of honour afflicted the respectable and the innocent too, including his brother and his sons. Publius would be permanently scarred. The good-hearted lad I had met in Germany with Helena would find his career blighted before it was under way; his brother in Spain too. Far away in Britain this curse would fall unhappily on Aelia Camilla; through her marriage, even onto Gaius. And here on Helena.
Her uncle threw back that oddly ordinary head and commented in a heavy voice, "Oh Helena, Helena! I knew of course; I had known for a long time. I was not sure whether you had realized!"
I thought, if he was in the plot himself this man was acting extraordinarily well. If he was, Helena must know. But in that case, the lass was lucky I was here. Facing up to him alone was desperately dangerous…
LX
"What are you proposing to do?" Camillas Meto asked his niece in a cautious tone.
"If I can, put things right." She spoke very crisply, without a second thought. That was Helena all over. I loved the poor deluded girl for her straightforwardness!
A tickle ran across my foot so insistently I lifted my leg and shook, though I knew that in this arid hole no creature was likely to live. The darkness pressed coolly on my prickling skin. The passage lay buried in thick silence, though far away I could hear a remote, single note of applause as the Triumph continued at the Capitol.
In the faint light of half a dozen small oil lamps, Helena Justina was half turned away, though I knew her so well I could tell her moods from the inflexion in her voice. She sounded wan, as she always did if she felt troubled and alone. I could not interpret whether she had confided the truth to her uncle, or was testing him. As for him, he looked like a man whose emotions were either very shallow or so deep you could never hope to fathom them.
"I would have expected you to suppose your father was too respectable!" he commented.
Helena sighed. "Isn't that the point? The family rely on him to do everything that is noble. But when I was in Britain I had a long talk with my aunt. Aelia Camilla told me a great deal to explain all this. How Grandfather Camillus lived in Bithynia, partly to save money when the family's financial resources were running low. How he nursed his wife's dowry for twenty-five years in order to find funds to qualify father for the senate"
"So how do you and sister Aelia account for this?" Publius enquired, sounding intrigued yet with the usual slight sneer in his tone.
"You know papa." Helena spoke gravely. "Not one of life's firebrands! Perhaps the strain of carrying responsibilities which he felt were above his talents drove him to some wild political gesture. If our Gnaeus, using his position as a son-in-law, applied any kind of pressure papa might be vulnerable. Perhaps Gnaeus used blackmail. My father then struggled to stave off family disgrace as he did so, becoming inextricably drawn in. While I was still married, perhaps he hoped somehow to protect me. Every man has his weakness, Falco would say."
"Ah Falco again!" Publius now adopted the note of thinly disguised contempt he had always used when dealing with me. "Falco has ridden dangerously close. If anything is to be salvaged from all this we shall need to deflect that young man."
"Oh I've tried that!" Helena Justina gave an oddly narrow smile. A cold fist clenched in my stomach; an involuntary tremor ran down the back of my thigh.
"I thought so!" scoffed Publius candidly. "Well, this heirloom is an unexpected bonus for you. What will you do with it then, run off with friend Falco?"
"Believe me," Helena snapped fiercely, like the girl I first met in Britain, "Didius Falco would not thank you for suggesting that! His one aim in life is to shed me as soon as he can."
"Really? My spies tell me he looks at you as if he were jealous of the very air you breathe."
"Really?" Helena echoed sarcastically; then she snapped back vigorously, "And what spies are those, uncle?"
Her uncle did not answer her.
It was then, contemplating what Helena might possibly be about to reveal of her private feelings for me, that fright and yearning tore me apart so much that I was racked by a catastrophic sneeze.
There was no time to back out down the passage, so I adopted my most nonchalant face and slid out into the vault.
"Your green peppers are top quality!" I congratulated Helena to camouflage the reason for the sneeze.
"Oh Falco!" I hoped I detected a gleam in her expression, as though she welcomed me, yet she sounded quite angry. "Whatever are you doing here?"
"I understood you had invited me."
"I understood you had declined to come!"
"Luckily for you, when the third five-year-old kicked my shins with his tiny iron-shod boot, family duty began to pall. Is this where Atius Pertinax used to keep his petty cash?"
"It's a saffron vault, Falco."
"I must make a note to build one in when I design my country villa! Any chance of me palming half a pint of Malabathron? I want some for a special girl I know."
"Only you," remarked Helena, "could offer to flatter a woman with a present you had stolen from her first!"
"I hope so," I agreed cheerfully. "With any luck I'm the only one who knows which really suits you best."
All this time her sneering uncle had been watching the two of us, and I had more sense than to imagine he was hoping to learn anything from my seduction technique.
"Young man," he accosted in his thin voice, "why exactly have you come wandering in here?"
I beamed at him, as guileless as a village idiot. "Looking for the silver pigs!"
Now that I had found the ingots, I crossed to examine them and introduced myself, as any lead mine slave would, by giving them a friendly kick. I hurt my toe, but did not care; at least I knew for certain this ghostly mass was real. As I bent to rub my foot my hand hit a small object hidden against the leaden stack. I held it up: it was a plain brass inkwell, its contents long ago dried up. All three of us looked at it but none of us spoke. I put it in the pocket of my tunic slowly, then shivered in my holiday cloak.
Helena Justina spoke up with a hint of dramatic urgency: "You are trespassing, Falco. I want you to go."
I turned. As our eyes met, I felt the sudden familiar lift in my spirits. I felt certain, too, that we were partners sharing a charade.
Now there was three of us in the vault, a new tension had taken effect. It felt like belonging to a geometric problem where certain fixed elements would enable us to draw the figure if we followed Euclid's rules. I smiled at her ladyship.
"I finally worked out that a few barrels of nutmeg were not enough to keep bringing down the roof of the Cloaca Maxima. Lead bars would though! The political plot has foundered; so the ringleader probably intends the ingots for himself. I've also worked out that he'll make for the pigs and then make off. There's a neat row of heavy-duty waggons in the yard that I reckon are due to leave laden with silver after curfew tonight. When he comes for them, here I am."
"Falco!" cried Helena, apparently in outrage. "It's my father you cannot arrest papa!"
Titus could. Still," I commented drily, "in cases of treason we spare senators the inconvenience of a public trial. His honour can expect to receive a warning note in time to fall tidily on his own sword in the privacy of his very select home"
There is no evidence,
" Helena argued.
Sadly I disagreed. "A great deal of circumstantial evidence has always pointed direct to Decimus. From his first volunteering to assist his friend the praetor, through to the way you and I were ambushed, and on to an unsavoury man who was planted in my rooms during the period when your father was so conveniently paying my rent… As a matter of interest, ladyship, why have you never mentioned the existence of this vault? What are you intending to do let your father make good his escape with what silver there is? Very loyal! I'm certainly impressed!" She stayed silent, so I turned to her uncle, still playing the ingenuous part. "Bit of a turn up for you, sir? Your highly placed brother named as Domitian's paymaster"
"Shut up, Falco," Helena said, but I went on:
"And madam here, who so admires an Emperor who will do the paperwork, yet seems magically eager to allow her noble father to diddle the Mint… Helena Justina, you know you can't do it!"
"You know nothing about me, Falco," she muttered in a low voice.
I whipped back, perhaps more intensely than I meant: "But oh my soul, I wanted to find out!"
I was desperate to get her away from here before things started getting rough as I had no doubt they soon would.
"Sir, this is no place for a lady," I appealed to her uncle. "Will you instruct your niece to go?"
That is her decision, Falco." His mouth compressed slightly in his practised, indifferent way. He had a strangely static face; I guessed he had always been self-sufficient, private to the point of being odd.
I was standing with my back to the cold bulk of the stacked lead bars, with Helena to my left and her uncle on the right. I could see he knew that whatever I was saying to her, I was always watching him. I tried again.
"Listen to me, ladyship. When you and I were in Britain you said Sosia had told me who the conspirators are. So she did."
Then you lied to me, Falco!"
"Not knowingly. But I know now, that before she died she identified the men involved. Titus Caesar is in possession of the evidence. So will you do as I say, Helena, I beg of you? What has happened here, and what happens today, need be nothing to do with you"
Publius Camillus Meto finally broke in: "Wrong, Falco!"
Helena Justina was hugging her light mantle against the chill which lapped our skin. Wearing his toga, as a man of any standing would on a public festival, Publius held his arms folded just above his waist, like a soldier on a mission reassuring himself subconsciously that his dagger and his sword were still to hand. He was looking directly at me as he searched to discover the truth of what I really knew. I lifted an eyebrow, encouraging him to go on.
Then he said in a voice that became creamy with vindictiveness: "If you were properly informed, you would realize Helena Justina has been at the centre of this scheme since she was married to Pertinax!"
Odd how your mind works sometimes; before I even turned back to her, I had accepted that what he said was true.
My head spun. Our eyes met. She made no attempt to deny it. I ought to have known. With my brutal luck, I had bound myself to her wholeheartedly and until now had never doubted the lady's honesty!
As she watched me accept it, I saw the contempt in her face. I had trained myself never to react visibly, yet I realized everything I felt for her had become all too obvious in my face. I could not change my expression. Simple distress held me rooted where I stood against the ingots, unable to accuse her, unable even to speak.
Then blackness exploded at the back of my skull, and among the blackness penetrating lights.
LXI
Nothing she had ever said was true. Nothing she had ever done was real… I was unconscious but I still saw her stark face, frozen at that moment when she watched me realize.
I was recovering my senses enough to know I was lying on my face, while someone Camillus Meto himself was tying up my arms and feet. He had made quite a good job of it, though he had made the mistake of not trussing the two lots of rope together as I would have done myself. If he left me alone, I might manage to obtain a degree of mobility.
Odd how your mind continues working even in unconsciousness. As I came round, I could now hear an indignant voice asking the questions I ought to have demanded immediately: if it was Helena, why did she tell me Pertinax owned the contraband ship? Why did she give Titus Caesar the conspirators' names? Why did she send me Sosia's bracelet today?…
I must have groaned.
"Keep still," Meto grunted.
I had always suspected that bland exterior might conceal a jaggedly clever man. He had selected the one statement that would devastate me; then clubbed me with the pommel of a sword, which I could now see lying near. Trying to distract him I started to mumble, "I haven't felt so stupid since an army training officer told us the session was over, then ran at us with his drawn weapon as we left the exercise ground… The lesson was, never to trust your opponent until he was carrion On second thoughts I added innocently, "Or until you have him very securely tied up!"
Standing directly above me Meto apologized insincerely. "Sorry!"
Really, there was no pretence any longer. And I had no doubt; the moment he had struck me down he acknowledged his own guilt.
"Where's Helena?" I demanded.
"I've got her outside."
I tried to keep my voice level, but that news left me frantic. What had he done to her? What would he do to her?
"People will start looking for me, Metol"
"Not yet."
"Did you have to say that about her?" I was violently angry.
"It only matters if you cared for her"
"Oh no!" I interrupted gratingly. "It only matters if she ever cared for me!"
Laughing, he picked up the sword. "Well, Falco, if she did you bungled it!"
"Oh I bungle everything!" I admitted with regret.
But I knew a horse who could have sworn an affidavit that that was untrue.
I lay still. I had an idea Camillus Meto might be the type to kick me in the ribs; mine had suffered enough on this case and still pained me as it was. While I was a slave I had braced myself for constant mistreatment, but now I had convinced myself that was over I could feel uncontrollable panic rising at the mere threat.
A low whistle sounded at the end of the passage. I heard Meto walk towards the door. He exchanged a few words just outside, then reported without coming back in, "My men are here to remove the silver pigs. Don't try anything Falco remember the girl. I'm taking her with me, so neither you nor my brother should do anything that causes us to be pursued!"
He went out. I lay trussed on the floor. One careless emotion had cost me the case. So far I had lost the silver, lost my lady, lost a villain and probably before the day was out I would kiss farewell to my miserable life.
It seemed a long afternoon. Someone rolled me aside, then shadowy figures filtered out the marked bars from the pile, working methodically to extract those that were stamped. As they staggered to and fro removing them, I recognized among the group the two jelly brains who had kidnapped Sosia. Neither showed any interest in me.
When their task was complete the groaning labourers left the vault, leaving me and the remaining bars of lead in the pitch dark.
I sensed slight vibrations. Then I guessed that the cart loads of silver had rumbled away overhead, taking the risk that the disruption caused by Vespasian's Triumph would enable them to slip through the deserted streets in daylight, despite the curfew laws. The faint hope I had nurtured, that the patrol of Praetorians Titus promised me would turn up while the carts were still here, evaporated; no Guards would be free until the Emperor was back in his palace tonight, and even then there was a fair chance those listed for duty would prefer to celebrate…
Petronius Longus always said in any case that the Praetorians could not catch a flea.
I wondered thoughtfully where Petronius Longus himself was at this moment…
I had ended up lying on my back. I began to rock sideways, swinging more and more until with a
groan I turned onto my front. Blood surged painfully back into my arms. With my face in the dust, I cursed a few times for form's sake, then bent at the knees with my feet in the air and grabbed for my ankles with my bound hands.
After this lively fiasco had continued for some minutes, for once my luck turned: my violent contortions shook free the knife I had hidden down the wide back piece of my left boot. I felt it skitter down the side of my leg and heard it drop to the floor.
I cursed again, with greater feeling, as I straightened with an excruciating wrench.
I started to skate about on the floor, searching for my knife. When at last I located the thing my real troubles began. I wriggled sideways, then half onto my back, until after several desperate attempts I managed to nab the knife between the fingers of one hand.
I could probably have managed to cut through the rope round my ankles without losing much of my leg, but unless I had been an acrobat that took me no further to freedom since my hands would remain inaccessible behind my back. Luckily the men who dragged out the ingots had been so exhausted by the time they had finished that they had left the door fractionally ajar. Slithering and bumping I managed to find it from memory, aided by its draught. I wedged the handle of my dagger between the door and its frame. Holding one shoulder against the door, I began the task of cutting through the binding on my hands.
This clever game resulted in much Falco agitation and two cut wrists.
It took a long time and several bouts of apoplexy, but eventually I managed to break free.
LXII
The noise of the Triumph was more subdued, but still distracting, when I emerged.
The yard was of course empty, but I decided to look around. I crossed stiffly to the great door, listened, heard nothing, so squeezed discreetly in. I stopped by the door while my eyes grew accustomed to the shimmering cinnamon haze.
They were still here! Helena Justina, the dimmed light of my battered life, looking almost as jaded as I felt, was sitting on a bale; she seemed unharmed, though she had been tied up. The reason her slippery uncle had not yet absconded was immediately apparent; he was helping himself to sack loads of her top-class peppercorns. Pertinax had been his partner, so I suppose Meto reckoned half fell due to him. He glanced up and spotted me.
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