As the days passed, Prisca suggested that I should begin to leave my room more often, as if I were slowly recovering from my ordeal. Luckily, I didn’t see much of Lucius, who was still living in the house on Via Triumphalis. ‘Soon to be our house,’ he said tenderly when he joined us for dinner one evening. ‘It’s good to see you looking so much better.’
‘Perhaps I’ll consult the calendar soon,’ my father suggested.
‘Leave it another week,’ Prisca said quickly. ‘Claudia still looks pale to me.’
I observed Sabine closely but she seemed the same as always — that is, the same as she had been since Aurelia’s death. She didn’t offer to make anyone tea and she showed no awareness of the missing perfume bottle. I almost laughed now thinking of the strange rush of blood that had led me to suspect her. Perhaps my abduction really had shocked me; the fright of being snatched from my room had been very real, after all.
I’d almost forgotten my suspicions by the time she entered my chamber early one morning, about a week after I’d found the perfume bottle.
‘Claudia, have you been in my room?’
Her tone was casual, but I noticed that she was scanning the bottles on my dresser and a cold hand closed around my heart.
‘No. Why?’
‘There’s something missing from my dressing table. A bottle of … of scent.’
I shrugged casually, though a strange tingling sensation had started in my limbs. ‘Maybe one of the slaves removed it.’
‘I don’t think so. Perhaps it was …’ She bit her bottom lip then shook her head. ‘Never mind. I must have misplaced it.’
Just because she missed it didn’t mean the bottle contained poison, I reminded myself when she’d left the room with one more glance at my dressing table. But what if it did?
Lucius came for dinner again the following night, and we had just arranged ourselves on the couches when a voice called, ‘Do you have room for one more?’
‘Marcus!’ Sabine jumped up and ran to him.
Unbidden, a few lines of Theocritus sprang into my head. As spring is sweeter than winter, and pippin than damson-plum … so am I gladdened above all at the sight of thee, and run to thee …
I wished I could run to him too. Instead, I had to laugh and flirt with my fiancé. I wondered if Marcus was impressed by my acting. Only now it wasn’t just suspicion of Lucius that I had to hide; I was still troubled by the contents of Sabine’s perfume bottle. I would speak to Marcus about it, I resolved. I had no love for Lucius, not after he’d hidden so much of his true character from us, but if there was even a small chance he was not guilty of murdering Aurelia, I had to let Marcus know.
All through dinner I tried to catch Marcus’s eye, hoping to convey by my look that I needed to speak to him, but when at last our eyes met the look he gave me was cold. My heart sank. Could he know already what I meant to tell him? Perhaps Sabine had said something? Accused me?
After dinner, I lingered near the fountain, scratching Jupiter behind the ears, hoping Marcus would seek me out. He did.
‘You were glaring at me all through dinner,’ I complained.
‘The way you were flirting with Lucius, I wouldn’t be surprised if you were married before the month is out.’
‘You and your mother both said I must pretend nothing has changed,’ I defended myself. ‘I was only acting as you told me to.’
‘You play your part too well,’ he growled.
Could I do nothing right in his eyes? I wondered in despair. ‘What does it matter to you?’ I muttered.
His face tightened. ‘It doesn’t matter to me, Claudia. It doesn’t matter at all.’
He walked away, and with him went my opportunity to reveal what I had learned in the books and what I had found in Sabine’s room.
I was determined that I would talk to him the next day, and I rose early to be sure of catching him before he left the house.
I found him pacing the atrium.
‘Marcus,’ I said hesitantly.
‘What is it, Claudia?’ He didn’t bother to hide his impatience. ‘I’m waiting to say goodbye to my mother and then I’m leaving for Veii.’
It seemed that the truce we had reached after he had kidnapped me no longer held. Maybe he had only been so nice that day because he felt guilty for frightening me?
‘I have to talk to you,’ I insisted. ‘Will you please come out into the garden?’
He was clearly reluctant, but did as I asked.
‘How was your trip to Bononia?’ I asked as we walked down the avenue between the cypress trees. ‘Did you find anything?’
Marcus shook his head. In the daylight I saw that he looked exhausted, dark shadows around his eyes. ‘All I’ve found is more creditors. Lucius owes money everywhere. But that doesn’t prove anything. Perhaps I was wrong about him. There’s nothing to link him to Aurelia’s death.’
He had given me my opening. ‘I think you were wrong about Lucius. I’ve been doing some reading while you were away, about poisons. About hemlock in particular.’
‘You think Aurelia was poisoned with hemlock?’ He sounded interested.
I told him about the passage describing Socrates’s death. ‘Doesn’t it sound like Aurelia’s last hours?’ I asked sombrely.
Marcus’s face was pale but he didn’t say anything.
I continued, ‘I’ve been researching hemlock. Did you know that hemlock and parsley look alike? When Aurelia was sick, Sabine made her several cups of tea using parsley from her own garden.’
Marcus frowned. ‘What are you suggesting? That Sabine accidentally poisoned her own sister?’
I drew a breath. ‘It’s possible … And it’s also possible it was no accident.’ We had reached the terrace at the back of the garden. ‘Wait here,’ I said. ‘I’ll be right back.’ I hurried to my room and fetched the bottle I had taken from Sabine’s dresser. My heart was beating fast, from nerves as much as haste, when I returned to find him sitting at the table with his arms folded and in his eyes the look of a gathering storm.
‘This had better be good,’ he said. ‘By Pollux, I’m beginning to regret saving you from marrying that duplicitous swine. On reflection I think you deserve each other.’
Ignoring his insults, ignoring the fact that I wanted to weep to hear how he despised me, I handed him the bottle. ‘I found this in Sabine’s room.’
‘So?’ He gave me a puzzled look as he undid the stopper and peered inside. He tilted the bottle to one side and saw how the liquid oozed. ‘That doesn’t look like perfume. It seems more like honey.’
‘Smell it.’
Holding the bottle to his nose, he sniffed tentatively then made a face. ‘I didn’t know honey could rot.’
‘I don’t think it can. But hemlock is supposed to have a rank odour.’
Slowly, deliberately, he replaced the stopper on the bottle, set it on the table, then lifted his eyes to mine. ‘Do I understand you right? Are you suggesting that Sabine deliberately poisoned Aurelia?’ I could tell he was barely containing his rage.
‘I don’t want it to be true, but I think so. Yes.’ The flagstones felt as if they might buckle beneath my feet.
‘And what would her motive be?’ I should have known he’d spot the flaw in my argument. ‘You’re making a big mistake, Claudia. If you fetch Sabine here, I’ll prove it.’
As I went to find Sabine, I didn’t know what I hoped for: that he would discover his sister was innocent? Yes, of course that was what I hoped for. But a small, mean part of me hoped that I would be proved right, and that he would no longer hate me. But he would probably hate me anyway, I told myself dully, for being the bringer of such news. In which case, all I hoped for was to know the truth.
I went first to the atrium, sure that Sabine would be there by now, but she wasn’t; she was in her room, lying on the bed.
‘Are you ill?’ I asked.
‘I … no.’ She sat up.
‘Marcus is in the garden. He wants to say goodbye to y
ou before he returns to Veii.’
She rose and followed me to where Marcus was waiting.
When he saw her, he gave her a searching look. ‘You look even paler than usual, Sabine. Sit with me a minute.’ He gestured to the seat opposite him. ‘Is something troubling you?’
‘No. I’m still missing Aurelia, that’s all.’
He nodded his understanding and shot me a reproachful look. But he continued to question her, clearly determined to prove me wrong.
‘You’re feeling low, I can tell. Isn’t there some way we can help you? We could make you a tea, perhaps — a healing tea. What would you advise?’
Sabine looked about her nervously and I thought I saw a flicker in Marcus’s eyes as he too noted it. But his tone was conversational as he asked, ‘Maybe camomile? Camomile can be bitter, though, can’t it?’
He placed the bottle I had given him in the centre of the table between them and said, ‘You could always sweeten it with some honey.’
Sabine looked from him to the bottle, and a change came across her face. ‘Where did you get that?’ She shot me an accusing look.
‘It doesn’t matter where I got it,’ said Marcus. ‘I’d like to see you sip some honey from this bottle.’ His voice was steady.
‘I — no, I can’t. I … I don’t like honey.’
‘That’s not true, is it, Sabine?’
His tone was persuasive. I began to understand why he was so successful in the law court.
‘I have seen you eat figs drizzled with honey,’ he went on. ‘I have seen you sweeten your tea with honey. Perhaps it is just this honey you do not like?’
She seized on the excuse he’d offered. ‘Yes, some honey is not to my taste. Different flowers …’
‘And yet you kept this bottle of honey on your dressing table.’
‘Did I? I’m not sure. The bottle doesn’t look familiar.’
‘Is there hemlock in this honey, Sabine?’
She looked at him as if he were a magician. ‘How do you …? You can’t possibly know that!’
Marcus did not say a word, just kept staring steadily.
It was an effective trick, as Sabine seemed compelled to fill the silence.
‘I didn’t mean to do it! I didn’t want to do it.’ The words were tumbling out of her almost as if she was relieved to unburden herself at last. ‘I did it for Lucius.’ Her voice softened as she said his name. ‘He came to look at my garden one day and I could sense that he was unhappy. When I asked him about it he confided in me. He told me that he didn’t want to marry Aurelia, but he couldn’t refuse Gaius, whom he loved like a father. He was trapped!’
Her telling seemed rather melodramatic to me but Marcus just said, ‘And so he gave you the idea to poison Aurelia,’ as if the path Sabine had taken was both logical and reasonable.
Sabine squirmed uncomfortably. ‘Not … not exactly. It wasn’t quite like that. It’s just that when I identified the hemlock in the garden —’
‘How did hemlock come to be in your garden?’ Marcus interrupted.
‘It was among the plants Lucius gave me when he returned from his trip to Bononia. At first I thought it was parsley, until I noticed the red splotches on the stem, the odour …’
So I had been right about that, anyway.
‘I was going to destroy it, but then Lucius came to talk to me and he was so upset. He said he couldn’t love Aurelia, that he loved someone else. He wished there was a way of calling off the wedding to Aurelia so he could marry his true love.’ She lifted her head to look at her brother, eyes imploring him to understand. ‘He said I was much more to him than a sister. If you had seen the way he looked at me … No one has ever looked at me like that!’
I could imagine; those warm eyes, sincere and pleading, full of longing. Who wouldn’t want to help him? And there was Sabine, so desperate for love and approval. So innocent. Unable to see that Lucius did indeed have his gaze fixed on someone else; someone able to ensure a large dowry and an even larger inheritance, I thought cynically. And that was not Sabine. Though I had been no less foolish.
‘I just used a little at first, the day of the engagement party. I thought maybe if Aurelia was sick the party couldn’t go ahead. I was just trying to delay things, to give Lucius a chance to break free. But even when Aurelia was ill Mama was so insistent that she carry on. So then I used a little more, and then more still, and then … then Aurelia was dead. And I couldn’t believe I had done it.’ She began to cry. ‘But it was her own fault!’ she sobbed.
I inhaled sharply. She couldn’t believe that, surely! It was chilling to hear her defend herself, as if all her thoughts and actions had been justified. I saw Marcus flinch, but he didn’t interrupt.
‘It was selfish of her to take Lucius for herself,’ Sabine declared. ‘She’d already had a husband! Why couldn’t Lucius be mine? But after Aurelia died … He guessed what had happened. He said he would keep my secret, though.’
Sabine had seemed to forget that I was there, but now, as if I had spoken aloud, she turned to stare at me. ‘And then you bewitched him! He told me that I had been mistaken to think he loved me. He had never loved me — it had been you all along.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He didn’t love me. He didn’t love either of us. He only wanted my money. Tell her, Marcus.’
‘It’s true, Sabine. He has terrible debts.’
The girl shook her head, still looking at me, her expression filled with loathing. ‘I would have poisoned you, only Lucius said if anything happened to you he would tell everyone that I had killed Aurelia. He ripped out the hemlock plant, just to be sure I couldn’t use it again.’
I thought back to the ruined garden we had found on our return from Oplontis, whole plants pulled out by the roots. It occurred to me now that it hadn’t really looked like the doing of a cat. Not a whole garden bed like that. Why had we believed it was Jupiter? Lucius — he was the one who had blamed the cat. My heart quickened. So Lucius had destroyed the garden himself. By doing so, he had not only stopped Sabine from using the poisonous plant again, but also destroyed the evidence that could link him with the poison. All at once I was sure that though he might not have been the one to murder Aurelia, he had orchestrated her death as surely as if he had wielded the weapon himself. And yet still we had no proof …
‘But he didn’t know I had kept this.’ Sabine nodded at the bottle that stood between her and Marcus on the table. ‘I extracted the juice and mixed it with honey so that I could use it more easily.’
‘Oh, Sabine.’ Marcus’s composure was slipping now, as the realisation that Aurelia had been knowingly poisoned by her own sister hit him.
‘Claudia …’ He turned to me. ‘Could you get my mother, please?’
‘No!’ Sabine broke in. ‘You don’t have to tell her, do you? She’d only be angry at me; she never takes my side.’
I gasped aloud then. Had a daemon taken possession of her that she should speak like this?
‘Sabine.’ For the first time Marcus sounded angry. ‘Do you understand what you have done? You have killed our sister! Claudia …’
He turned to me again. So many conflicting emotions in the eyes that met mine. Anger, sorrow, anguish — terrible, terrible anguish.
‘Of course.’ I rose from my seat, and as I did a movement caught my eye. Sabine, her eyes glittering fever-bright, had snatched up the bottle. ‘Sabine, no! Marcus, stop her!’
Marcus turned and lunged as she upended the bottle and drank the contents.
‘It is too late,’ she said, her voice strangely gleeful, as he dashed the bottle from her hand. ‘You wanted to see me drink it, and now I have.’
‘Claudia, go quickly — run!’ said Marcus. ‘Our mother — and Theodotus, perhaps he knows of an antidote.’
Still rooted to the spot, I stared at Sabine. ‘Why did you do that?’ I whispered. ‘There is no cure.’
‘Please, Claudia,’ Marcus begged, his voice breaking.
I ran to the atrium. P
risca was at her desk as usual, her stylus busy. She looked up somewhat crossly as I ran across the room. ‘Claudia, you’re meant to be recovering slowly, remember?’
‘Prisca, you have to come,’ I interrupted. ‘It’s Sabine. She’s taken poison!’
‘What?’ Prisca had leaped to her feet before I’d finished speaking. ‘Where is she?’
‘The terrace. Marcus is with her. I have to fetch Theodotus.’
And then I was running one way and she was running the other.
‘Where is Theodotus?’ I said to the slave at the door leading to the other part of the house. ‘We need him quickly!’
‘Theodotus is needed urgently!’
I heard the cry go down the corridor, taken up by others. Probably no more than two or three minutes passed — minutes that seemed unbearably long — before the steward stood before me.
‘It’s Sabine,’ I gasped, my pulse racing so that I could hardly draw breath to speak. ‘On the terrace. She has taken hemlock.’
‘How much?’
‘I don’t know exactly. It was mixed with honey. I think perhaps two or three spoonsful.’
‘Oh.’ He stepped backwards as if he had been pushed. ‘That much … Then she hasn’t long.’
When we reached the terrace, Marcus and Prisca had helped Sabine to a couch.
‘I have such a pain in my stomach,’ she said weakly. Then, not long after, she exclaimed almost in wonder, ‘I can’t feel my legs.’
After that, it was eerily like Aurelia’s death, only this time without the bewilderment, the surprise — only a sense of horrific inevitability as the paralysis crept up her body and she lapsed into unconsciousness. By nightfall she was dead.
I sat frozen.
Prisca and Marcus cried for Sabine, but theirs was a complicated grief. This time it was Prisca who had captured her daughter’s last breath then called her name, but I heard how my stepmother’s voice faltered. None of us said it aloud, but maybe Sabine’s death was for the best.
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