I crumpled the parchment in my fist and threw it across the room.
‘I told you!’ snapped Milo. ‘I told you he’d never sign.’
Caelius sighed. He clapped his hands. I heard a noise behind me and turned to see two burly men step through the doorway. They must have been waiting just outside the room. They had the look of hired assassins.
‘A couple of my fellow future senators?’ I said.
Caelius stepped to the cupboard. A few moments later he returned with a cup and held it out to me. ‘Take it,’ he said.
I looked in the cup. ‘Wine?’
‘Cheap stuff. Sorry it’s not a better vintage, but the likes of Volumnius have sucked up all the good stuff. Drink, Gordianus. Swallow every drop.’
I stared in the cup. ‘Wine . . . and what else?’
‘Drink it!’ said Milo.
Behind me the two henchmen stepped so close I could hear them breathing, one in each ear. I heard the slither of daggers drawn from scabbards. ‘Do what he says,’ one of them whispered. ‘Drink!’
‘Either that,’ said the other, ‘or else—’ I felt the prick of a dagger against my ribs, then the prick of its twin from the other direction.
Why poison me? Because a man of my years found dead without a mark on him would raise no suspicions, prompt no questions. They could leave my body in the street, and anyone would think I had died of natural causes.
Or would they carry me down the stairs and leave me in Cassandra’s bed? Did she play some role in their scheme – or was she, too, a victim? What if they killed her as well, and left our bodies to be discovered together with the poison beside us? I imagined my family’s shame and consternation. The cup trembled in my hand.
‘Cassandra—’ I said.
‘Shut up and drink!’ yelled Caelius. In a flash, as if he’d dropped a mask, his face changed completely. One moment he was the charming, unflappable orator, and the next, a vicious, desperate fugitive easily capable of murder or of crimes much worse. I had been afraid of Milo; it was Caelius I should have feared more.
The daggers pressed harder against my flesh. Caelius and Milo stepped closer.
‘You don’t want to die by daggers,’ growled Milo. ‘Think of it! The metal slicing into your flesh, pulling out, cutting into you again. The blood spurting out of you. The cold seeping into your limbs. The long, agonizing wait to die. Drink, you fool!’
He gripped my wrist and forced me to raise the cup. Wine sloshed against my lips, but I kept my mouth shut.
‘Never mind the daggers. Grab his arms!’ shouted Milo, taking the cup from me. The men behind me twisted my arms behind my back. Caelius pinched my jaw and forced it open. Wine poured into my mouth and down my throat. The taste was bitter. I swallowed to keep from sucking it into my lungs.
‘All of it!’ whispered Milo. ‘Every drop!’ I coughed and sputtered. Wine trickled over my chin and cheeks, but most of it went into my belly. He poured until the cup was empty.
Caelius and Milo stepped back. Their henchmen released me. I staggered forward, feeling dizzy. I dropped to my knees. Caelius and Milo spun above me, going in and out of focus each time I blinked. The room became dark, as if night fell.
Their voices echoed strangely and seemed to come from a great distance. ‘We should have put hemlock in the wine instead of that other stuff,’ said Milo. ‘We should lop his head off, here and now.’
‘No!’ said Caelius. ‘I gave her my word. I promised, and you agreed—’
‘A promise made to a witch!’
‘Call her that if you want, since you’re not worthy to utter her name! I gave her my word, and my word still means something, Milo. Does yours?’
‘Don’t bait me, Caelius.’
‘Then don’t speak of killing him!’
‘It was your crazy idea to try to win him over.’
‘For a moment, I thought I had. The fool! No matter. By the time he wakes . . .’
Caelius’s voice faded away. The floor rushed up to my face. The room turned black.
As if in a dream, I saw Cassandra standing on a distant horizon. Her lips formed words I could not hear. She stretched out her arms, beckoning to me even as she receded farther and farther beyond my grasp, until she vanished altogether.
I opened my eyes.
My head pounded. My body was stiff. The least movement caused me to groan. My mouth had a strange, unpleasant taste. My bladder was uncomfortably fall. My stomach growled.
I lay on the hard, bare floor. I stirred and managed to sit upright. Judging from the angle of the sunlight that entered the window, no time at all had passed since I fell to the floor. Indeed, the light seemed to indicate that time had regressed by an hour or two. I blinked in befuddlement.
One of the chairs had been pushed against the wall. The other lay on its side on the floor. The cupboard doors stood open. From where I sat, I could see that its shelves had been emptied.
I stared at the pocket vase on the wall. The rose drooped. Half its petals had fallen to the floor below.
I had been unconscious for almost twenty-four hours.
I managed to stand. For a moment I thought I was all right, then I felt light-headed. I staggered and clutched the cupboard to stay upright. Oily spots swam before my eyes. The dizziness slowly passed.
I turned towards the doorway and gave a start. I was not alone in the room.
A man was lying face down on the floor just inside the doorway, before the curtain that was closed for privacy. He was a large fellow, with massive limbs and a neck like a tree trunk. From the way he was lying, with his neck unnaturally bent, I was almost certain he was dead.
Even so, I approached him cautiously, taking unsteady steps. I reached down and lifted his head by a handful of hair. I heard a sickening crack. His neck was broken.
I looked at his face. He wasn’t one of the men who had held me while Caelius and Milo forced the drugged wine down my throat.
Who was he? Who had killed him and left me alive?
I stepped over the body and pushed aside the curtain. The hallway was empty. I made my way to the head of the stairs and carefully descended, taking unsteady steps. I reached the bottom, negotiated the hallway, and came to the curtain that hung over Cassandra’s doorway.
I whispered her name. My voice was hoarse and feeble. I spoke her name again, louder. There was no answer.
I pushed aside the curtain. The room was completely bare. Not even the pallet remained.
I stood for a long time, feeling nothing, waiting for my head to clear. Suddenly I was desperately thirsty. I moved to the doorway. As I was stepping through, my foot struck something concealed amid the folds of the curtain. I stopped to pick it up. It was Cassandra’s leather biting stick.
Had she left in great haste? Or had someone else cleared out the room? Cassandra had so few possessions, it seemed hardly possible she could have forgotten such a personal object. If she had overlooked it somehow, surely she would have missed it and come back for it.
Where was Cassandra?
I left the building and walked down the street, shielding my eyes against the sunshine. I felt that sense of unreality that comes from having slept a very long time and waking at an odd hour of the day. I walked down the Street of Copper Pots, wincing at the clanging of metal against metal. I found a public toilet and emptied my bladder. I found a public fountain and splashed my face, then drank until my thirst was quenched. I was famished, but that could wait.
I took the shortest route towards my house, cutting across the Forum. Amid the formal squares and ornate temples, my sense of unreality only deepened. I seemed to be walking in a dream.
‘Gordianus!’
I turned around and confronted one-armed Canininus. The rest of the chin-waggers stood in a group nearby. One by one they looked up from some heated discussion to stare at me.
‘So you are alive,’ said Canininus, ‘even if you look half-dead.’
Mild-mannered Manlius stepped closer, followed by t
he others. ‘Gordianus! Your family is worried sick about you. Your son-in-law and that crazy Massilian have been scouring the city for you. They say you went off somewhere on your own yesterday and never showed up for dinner. They were here not an hour ago, along with those two little mischief makers, asking if anyone’s seen you. Where have you been?’
Volcatius, the old Pompeian, flashed a lecherous grin. ‘I’ll bet I can guess. You know the old Etruscan proverb: when a man’s gone missing, it’s because of a miss. Am I right, Gordianus? Was she worth the trouble you’ll face when you get back home?’ He tittered.
‘Meanwhile, you’ve missed the best gossip in ages,’ said Canininus. ‘Milo and Caelius were both spotted right here in the city, together, only this morning.’
‘It’s a fact!’ said Manlius. ‘Someone saw them heading from the Subura towards the Capena Gate with an entourage of very rough-looking fellows – some of Milo’s notorious gladiators, most likely. They were posing as master and slave—’
‘Caelius playing the master, of course, since he’s the one with the brains,’ said Canininus. ‘As soon as they were outside the gate, they mounted horses that were waiting for them and sped like lightning towards the south. What do you make of that?’
I shrugged. ‘Another wild rumour?’ I managed to say. Despite the water I had drunk, my mouth was as dry as chalk.
‘Never mind Caelius and Milo,’ said Volcatius. ‘Gordianus never answered my question. Who was she, Gordianus? Some cheap whore in the Subura? Or one of those great ladies you occasionally call upon in your line of work? She must have put you through quite a marathon if you’re just now staggering home.’
I pushed past him and hurried on. I tripped on an uneven paving stone and heard laughter behind me.
‘She’s crippled him!’ cried Volcatius. ‘I want to meet this Amazon.’
‘You needn’t be rude,’ Manlius called after me.
‘Gordianus thinks he’s too good for the likes of us,’ said Canininus. ‘He never comes around anymore. When we do see him, he goes stalking off in a huff like a . . .’
His voice receded behind me. I walked as fast as I could, heading for the steep pathway at the far side of the Forum that would take me home. Inside the folds of my tunic, I clutched Cassandra’s biting stick.
‘Where in Hades have you been?’
The tone – frantic, furious, and relieved all at once, implicitly warning me never to do such a thing again – reminded me of Bethesda. How many times over the years had I heard that precise tone when I returned home from some scrape I had gotten myself into? But it wasn’t Bethesda who rushed up to me in the foyer, looking fit to be tied. It was Diana.
I told my daughter the truth – or part of it. That I had met unexpectedly (for me, if not for them) with Milo and Caelius in the Subura on the previous day, that they had put forward a proposition that I refused, that they had forced me to swallow a soporific of some sort, that I had only just awakened and had made my way straight home.
‘What were you doing in the Subura in the first place?’ asked Diana, frowning. ‘How is it that Milo and Caelius were able to find you? Did they have you followed, or did they just happen to come upon you? What sort of drug did they give you?’ Diana had inherited my own inquisitive nature, but she had yet to master the rules of a successful interrogation. Ask too many questions at once and you invite the overwhelmed subject to shrug helplessly and give no answer. That was exactly what I did.
‘Everyone in the household is out looking for you,’ she said. ‘Davus is down at the fish market. Hieronymus is at the Senian Baths. I sent Mopsus and Androcles over to Eco’s house to find out if he’d turned up anything. We’ve all been mad with worry.’
‘What about your mother? This must have been especially hard on her.’
Diana sighed. ‘I managed to keep it from her. She didn’t come out of her room even once yesterday, so she didn’t see the rest of us all flustered and in a panic when you didn’t show up for dinner. But she did ask for you later, and I had to make up something on the spot – a lie about you spending the night away from the city because an old client needed to tap your memory about a trial from years ago. I don’t think I could have fooled her if she wasn’t so unwell. As it was, she just nodded and turned her face away and pulled the coverlet around her neck. How can she be cold when the weather’s so hot? But at least she didn’t realize you were missing, so she didn’t have that worry to add to her illness.’
‘How is she today?’
‘Better, I suppose, because she’s determined to go out. A little while ago she sent for one of the slave girls to come help her dress. She says she wants to go to the market. She says she’s thought of something that might make her better – radishes. She says she must have radishes.’
A few moments later, Davus arrived home. He was so glad to see me, he let out a roar and lifted me high in the air, squeezing the breath out of me. Diana shushed him and told him to put me down at once because Bethesda was coming and mustn’t see him making such a fuss. Davus obediently put me down, but couldn’t stop grinning at me.
Bethesda stepped into the room. Dressed in a freshly laundered stola, with her hair combed and pinned, she looked slightly pale but better than I had seen her in quite some time. She gave Davus a sidelong look but said nothing and shook her head ruefully, no doubt wondering once again how her daughter had come to marry such a grinning simpleton.
‘Radishes!’ she announced. Her voice was hoarse, but surprisingly strong.
And so we made our way – slowly, to accommodate Bethesda – down to the market, in search of the latest commodity Bethesda imagined might provide a cure for her malaise.
We walked from vendor to vendor, searching in vain for a radish that would satisfy Bethesda’s discriminating gaze. I suggested that Bethesda might look for carrots instead. She insisted that the soup she had in mind would allow no substitutions.
At last Bethesda cried, ‘Eureka!’ Sure enough, she held in her hands a truly admirable bunch of radishes – firm and red, with crisp, green leaves and long, trailing roots.
The price the vendor named was exorbitant.
‘Perhaps I could manage with just two radishes,’ said Bethesda. ‘Or perhaps only one. Yes, one would do, I’m sure. I imagine we can afford one, can’t we, Husband?’
I looked into her brown eyes and felt a pang of guilt, thinking of Bethesda’s suffering, thinking of Cassandra . . .
‘I shall buy you more than one radish, Wife. I shall buy you the whole bunch of them. Davus, you’re carrying the money bag. Hand it to Diana so that she can pay the man.’
‘Papa, are you sure?’ said Diana. ‘It’s so much.’
‘Of course I’m sure. Pay the scoundrel!’
The vendor was ecstatic. Bethesda, clutching the radishes to her breast, gave me a look to melt my heart. Then a shadow crossed her face, and I knew that she suddenly felt unwell. I touched her arm. ‘Shall we go home now, Wife?’
Just then, there was a commotion from another part of the market. A man yelled. A woman shrieked: ‘It’s her! The madwoman!’
I turned about to see Cassandra staggering towards me. Her blue tunica was torn at the neck and pulled awry, her golden hair wild and unkempt. There was a crazed expression on her face, and in her eyes, a look of utter panic.
She ran to me, reaching forward, her gait uneven. ‘Gordianus, help me!’ She fell into my arms and dropped to her knees, pulling me down with her.
‘Cassandra!’ I gasped. I lowered my voice to a whisper. ‘If this is some pretence—’
She clutched my arms and cried out. Her body convulsed.
Diana knelt beside me. ‘Papa, what’s wrong with her?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s the god in her,’ said Bethesda. ‘The same god that compels her prophecies must be tearing her apart inside.’
A crowd gathered. ‘Draw back, all of you!’ I shouted. Cassandra clutched at me again, but her grip was weakening. Her
eyelids flickered and drooped.
‘Cassandra, what’s wrong? What’s happened?’ I whispered.
‘Poison,’ she said. ‘She’s poisoned me!’
‘Who? What did she give you?’ Our faces were so close that I felt her shallow breath on my lips. Her eyes seemed huge, her blue irises eclipsed by the enormous blackness of her pupils.
‘Something – in the drink . . .’ Cassandra said.
A moment later, she was dead.
XVI
Davus and I left Clodia on the banks of the Tiber, gazing at the sunlight on the water, alone with her memories. We retraced our steps past the riverside gardens of the rich and back into the city.
Davus was refreshed from his swim, but the heat of the day oppressed me. I was weary in mind and body. By the time we made our way up the slope of the Palatine to my house, I wanted nothing more than a few quiet hours of rest in a shady corner of my garden.
I had spoken to them all now – all the women who’d come to see Cassandra end in flames – except one.
Would Caesar’s wife deign to see me? The more I thought about it, the less likely it seemed. Calpurnia would be surrounded by an army of advisors and attendants and bodyguards to protect her both from those who sought her husband’s favours and those who sought his destruction. There was the complication that she might consider me an enemy since I had turned my back on Caesar along with Meto in Massilia.
From what I knew of Calpurnia, she was not the sort to act on a sudden whim or a sentimental impulse or out of prurient interest. She was sensible, discreet, and utterly respectable – precisely the qualities that had convinced Caesar to marry her. Everyone knew his famous quip about his previous wife, whom he had summarily divorced after she became the subject of gossip: ‘Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.’ Calpurnia was said to be so devoid of even petty vices that no scandal could ever be attached to her; not the sort of woman, I thought, to admit the likes of myself into her presence, even for a formal audience. People might talk.
And yet, she had come to see Cassandra burn.
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