by Adrian Speed
“So do you expect more flare-ups now that he really is dead?”
“Not if I am allowed to finish my letters to make sure Commodus has the universal assent of the generals,” Tiberius Claudius shuffled the papyrus under his hands.
“Do you remember there being any arguments at supper last night?” Sir Reginald changed tack.
“Commodus complained about the war, as usual,” Tiberius Claudius sighed. “It's going to be hard to convince him to stay here now he's emperor in his own right. Which is daft.”
“Daft?”
“The Germans only respect strength!” Tiberius Claudius slapped a hand against the table. “They're not like the Parthians. They won't respect any treaty you try to give them. If the Germans aren't ruled by you they must be made afraid of you. They don't fear us yet.”
“Eight years is a long time to be on campaign, perhaps the soldiers need a break,” I suggested.
“Soldiers enjoy being on campaign. It brings them gold, women and slaves. It's only Commodus who's tired of it,” Tiberius Claudius ran his hands through his greying hair. “He wants to go back to Rome and be hailed as a hero. He wants the glory he hasn't yet earned.”
“In the weeks before he died, did the late emperor's behaviour change at all?” Sir Reginald asked. “Did he give any irrational orders, or suffer from a short temper or mood swings? Did he ever lose his co-ordination or balance?”
“Marcus Aurelius was, to the very end, the model of stoicism and athleticism,” Tiberius Claudius said solemnly. “Why? Do you suspect lead poisoning?”
“At the moment, Tiberius Claudius, I suspect everything,” Sir Reginald twisted the cane in his hands while he thought. “Do not take this the wrong way,” Sir Reginald said slowly, “but if you were to declare yourself emperor instead of Commodus, what would happen?”
“I would never besmirch the legacy of Marcus Aurelius by denying his chosen heir,” Tiberius Claudius locked eyes with Sir Reginald. The General’s were a very pale grey, flecked with white.
“But if you did.”
“There would be a very short, very bloody civil war,” Tiberius Claudius said.
“And you would win?”
“Commodus couldn't lead a horse to water,” Tiberius Claudius muttered. “Let alone an army to victory.” The man's hands picked up the papyrus once more and it shook in his hands. “Is that everything? I am very busy.”
“The Purple Pearl that the emperor wore, was it very precious to him?” Sir Reginald asked.
“It was given to him by Antonius Pious,” Tiberius Claudius said. “The emperor treasured it as much as he treasured Rome.”
“So would he willingly take it off?”
“Perhaps for circulation,” Tiberius Claudius suggested. “Or if he was preparing to sleep. It always looked a tight fit.”
“Thank you, Tiberius Claudius, you have been most helpful,” Sir Reginald bowed again and then turned on his heel, waving at me to follow.
“Regulus,” Tiberius Claudius raised a hand as Sir Reginald started to pull the door open.
“Yes?”
“Remember that poison is a woman's weapon, won't you?” Tiberius Claudius said. “A true man would not stoop that low. Either a woman, or a womanly person.”
“Understood.”
“And if you do find that the emperor was murdered,” Tiberius Claudius's voice began to shake. “Do not be afraid. The full force of Roman justice will fall down on them as an avalanche on a mountain village.”
“I would expect nothing less,” Sir Reginald tapped his hat and pulled the doors closed.
“So,” I said as we paused outside Tiberius Claudius's rooms. “Bruttia?”
Sir Reginald nodded slowly. “Yes, my dear, we must interview Bruttia.” One of his eyes squinted as an idea tried to form. “Then perhaps I think we shall have all the evidence we require.”
“You have an idea who killed him?”
“I have the idea of an idea,” Sir Reginald said slowly. He snapped back into motion. “Lead on Quintinius! To Bruttia! To Justice!”
*****
Bruttia lived in the east wing of the principia. As wife of the emperor's son she was protected from the rapacious eyes of common soldiers. Her husband was expected to get down to a soldier's level, live as they live, fight as they fight, but Bruttia lived life draped in satin.
Bruttia greeted us from a pile of cushions and, by Roman standards, in a state of undress. The day had barely started, so Bruttia was still without make-up and wearing only a simple sleeping gown. This made the girl giggle. As a seventeen-year-old girl she rarely stopped giggling.
“Can you recount the events of the previous evening?” Sir Reginald asked, a frown deepening on his face as Bruttia struggled to recover from whatever had just set her off.
“We were...ha ha, we were…” Bruttia struggled to regain her composure, biting the inside of her own mouth between words to try to calm down. “We had supper together, the whole family: Lucia, Tiberius Claudius, Commodus, the emperor, and me. The children had all been sent to bed.” She giggled at the idea that she was now an adult, who got to say things like that. “Then after, ha ha, after…um, supper, Commodus and I went back to his room to, well, you know.” She winked at me. “Then I came back here and had a right old time with my slaves. Did you know Persephone can play the lyre? She's ever so good. She knows so many songs about, well...” Bruttia collapsed into fits of laughter again.
“And what time did you go to sleep?” Sir Reginald asked, his impatience beginning to show through the cracks in his speech.
“Oh, early,” Bruttia said. “Really early. A girl needs her beauty sleep,” she pointed to her face. “It's no good walking around looking like this all day,” she pulled a face and lowered her voice. “Like some old Brundisium heifer.”
“Did you hear Lucilla return?” I asked.
“Or leave?” Sir Reginald continued the thought.
“Oh no,” Bruttia said. “We share a wall, yes, but you can't hear anything.” She slapped the plaster to demonstrate. “She could have a flock of shrieking harpies in there and I wouldn't hear it. And it wouldn't surprise me either,” she laughed again, a little at first but at the sight of Sir Reginald's stony expression it burst out much harder.
“Can you think of anyone who would want to hurt the emperor?” Sir Reginald asked.
“Maybe the cult of Dionysus?” Bruttia laughed. “I am not sure he'd recognise fun if it hit him in the face!”
“Please, this is serious.”
“Sorry for trying to make the best of a bad situation, I'm sure.” Bruttia pulled herself together and put her finger to her lips in thought. “Tiberius Claudius always looked at the emperor moodily, but he looks at everyone moodily.” She jolted as a sudden idea hit her. “Say, if Commodus is the emperor now, does that make me empress?”
“Well, yes—”
“So if I ordered you to do something you'd have to do it?”
“I'm not a Roman, so no,” Sir Reginald said quickly.
“Oh, darn,” Bruttia's face fell.
“You could of course give Quintinius an order,” Sir Reginald pointed to the General by the door. “You don't get much more Roman than him.”
“What a good idea!” Bruttia clapped her hands together. “Quintinius Cassius, I, Empress Bruttia, wife of Commodus Augustus Caesar, do hereby order you to...to...”
“Run laps?” Sir Reginald suggested with a smile.
“Yes! Run laps around the principia!” Bruttia ordered. “Run five laps for me.”
“As you command, my lady,” Quintinius shot a furious look at Sir Reginald and reluctantly left. The door shut tightly. The sound of his sandals on the tile floors outside echoed faintly off into the distance for a few moments before fading to nothing.
“What did Commodus think of his father?” Sir Reginald said slowly.
“Oh he was very tired of him,” Bruttia said, trying to put on a stern face. “As far as Commodus was concerned it wa
s always ‘do this, do that, a real emperor has to do this, a real emperor never does that’,” Bruttia shook her head, making her curls shake. “Commodus hated that.”
“And did that make him angry?”
“Sometimes. But he's always really nice to me,” Bruttia's smile turned on like a light bulb. “I get anything I want.”
“How very fortunate you are,” I said sarcastically, which went right over the top of Bruttia's head.
“You don't think...Commodus?” Bruttia's smile turned into a pout.
“Right now, my dear, I suspect everyone.” Sir Reginald inclined his head. “Even you.”
“No! No I didn't kill him! I don't even know how to kill a person! How could I kill someone? Look at my hands!” Before Sir Reginald could react she had pressed her hands against his. “They're soft as lily petals! How could I kill anyone?”
“But I suspect everyone.” Sir Reginald frowned and tried to pull away. “That's how investigations work—”
“But I didn't do it!” Bruttia insisted. “Look at me! Look at my arms! I've never done a day's work in my life!” Bruttia took Sir Reginald's hand and forced him to encircle it around her biceps. They were no thicker than a chair leg.
“Madam, please unhand me,” Sir Reginald protested. His face blushed red as he heard me smirking in the corner.
“But I didn't do it!”
“Very well! Very well!” Sir Reginald said and Bruttia finally broke away from him, settling back onto her cushions, holding one of the smaller silken ones like a child would hold a teddy bear.
“Well it was a very mean thing to say,” Bruttia said, holding the cushion tightly. “It's bad enough he's dead, without you going around accusing innocent girls.”
“Yes, well, lesson learned,” Sir Reginald said, straightening his suit. “And I'll thank you to stop laughing Hannah.”
“But it was just so funny!” I said between gasps of laughter that I finally gave up trying to contain. “A teenage girl throwing herself at you!”
The faint sound of footsteps alerted us to Quintinius’s first lap of the principia. Sir Reginald nodded to himself. “Well I think that's all we need here,” he said fiddling with his cuff links. “Although,” he raised one finger to the sky. “We do need to check Lucilla's bedroom.”
“We do?” I blinked.
“We do.” Sir Reginald turned to Bruttia. “And we could do with a guide.”
“Me? Oh I've barely been in there,” Bruttia said.
“Well I've been in even less, so, if you would?” Sir Reginald waved a hand towards the door.
“Well, if you really need me,” Bruttia stood up and clicked her fingers for a slave to follow her.
As daughter and daughter-in-law of the emperor, Bruttia and Lucilla had very similar sized rooms but decorated completely differently. Bruttia's room was filled with sheets of hanging cloth, piles of cushions and wall hangings, until it looked more like the inside of a Persian court than a Roman bedroom. Lucilla was more traditional. Heavy wooden furniture filled the room, with a bed of dark ebony and a small, plain writing stand with a reed pen and paper, for a scribe, not Lucilla herself. The perfume Lucilla had worn in the vault hung sweet and heavy in the room.
“Not a lot to see,” Bruttia confessed. “Lucilla only sleeps here.”
“Nice statues,” I walked towards an inset in the wall where a number of statuettes stood about a palm high, perfect miniature people, every fold of cloth and hair on their heads made of crisp bronze.
“Don't touch the household gods!” Bruttia moved like lightning between me and the defenceless figurines. “Where did you dig this girl up, Regulus? The wilds of Hibernia?”
“Oh much further away,” Sir Reginald said walking around the room. Sir Reginald peered around a dressing screen. Scarlet, azure and gold clothes were stacked neatly behind it on top of a bolt of dull grey wool.
“I'm from Canada,” I said.
“Caledonia?” Bruttia misheard. “North of the wall?”
“You know Hadrian's Wall?”
“Everyone knows the wall keeping Britannia safe from being overrun by you...picts,” Bruttia growled.
“I'm not a pict.” I turned to Sir Reginald for help. He was inspecting a pile of make-up cases without a care in the world. “I didn't mean to touch the gods, OK? I just thought they were...impressive.”
“Of course they're impressive! They're gods!” Bruttia waved her hands in the air theatrically. “You act as if you don't have any gods where you come from.”
“Well most Canadians believe in only one god. I mean some people–”
“What? There are Jews in Caledonia?”
“Well, I mean, no, er–”
“Surely not Christians!”
“Well—”
“Stop confusing me!”
“Sir Reginald?” I started backing away from Bruttia and then cursed myself for slipping up.
“Who's Sir Reginald? Do you mean him? He said he was called Regulus! What's going on?” Bruttia wailed.
“Hannah, stop confusing the poor girl,” Sir Reginald said, lifting open a jar of blush, deep red paste that provided the pink of Lucilla's cheeks. He sat it down next to the kohl, lifted up a scent bottle, sniffed and sneezed violently. “Good grief!” Sir Reginald rammed the stopper down and put it back where he found it. “One could replace chloroform with that.”
“Why would you sniff it?”
“I had to double check something,” Sir Reginald scrabbled at his nose. It still stung. “And now I'm sure.” He blinked the tears of his watering eyes away and stumbled over to the writing desk.
“Aren't those private?”
“Probably,” Sir Reginald picked up the papyrus scrolls and ran his eyes down them. “Let's see, terrible poetry, terrible poetry, a letter to Tiberius Claudius about a slave...” I walked over to join him. The handwriting was even neater than Marcus Aurelius's had been; the work of a professional scribe. “Nothing interesting.”
“Are we done here?” Bruttia asked, folding her arms. Her expression was set hard. “I thought this would be fun but it's not.”
“Yes, I think I've seen everything I need.” Sir Reginald put the papyrus back on the desk. “Come along Hannah.”
“Where to next?”
“I want to examine the vault where the death occurred again,” Sir Reginald said. “Things aren't adding up.”
“Okie-doke.” I fell into step behind him. In the corridor Bruttia swept passed us without even saying goodbye and shut herself up in her chamber.
A hammering of feet on the ground and a rattling of armour alerted us to the imminent arrival of Quintinius. He turned the corner, came to a stop before us and saluted.
“How many is that?” I asked.
“Finished four,” Quintinius said and glared at Sir Reginald. “No thanks to you, Regulus.”
“Well you did a great service to the emperor,” Sir Reginald tapped Quintinius's breast plate. The General was streaming with sweat but didn't look out of breath. If the empress had commanded it he could have kept running all day.
“Great service? How?”
“You proved that it's very hard to hear anything happening in the corridor from Bruttia's room, backing up her story,” Sir Reginald smiled. “Which is also why you can skip the fifth lap. She won't know.”
“You could still hear the footsteps,” I said.
Sir Reginald nodded. “Well yes, but very softly. If Bruttia had been asleep it would not be enough to disturb her. And it wasn't as if Quintinius just walked past, he smacked those hob-nail sandals down on the stone like he was trying to shake the underworld itself. No offence, Quintinius.”
“None taken.”
“And the armour rattled a lot. I see what you mean. If Lucilla had sneaked out of her room last night Bruttia wouldn't have known.”
“Exactly, so we only have Attia's word for where Lucilla was last night.”
“The slave?” Quintinius asked. “I'll have her taken to the to
rturers at once.”
“No!” Sir Reginald said rather quickly. “No, I mean, we don't want to tip our hand yet. I need a bit more evidence.” He tapped his cane on the floor. “I need to go back to the vault, Quintinius. One last time.”
Chapter VII
Sir Reginald's pocket-watch opened with a click that echoed around the paymaster's vault. Lucilla looked up at the noise, but he ignored her. We’d been in Vindobona one hour and ten minutes; perhaps ninety minutes left before Commodus's rise to power would be unpreventable, at least, by Sir Reginald’s reckoning. If Commodus was a killer we’d have to move fast.
“Honourable lady, you have had your time to grieve,” he said, not looking up from his watch. “I am going to have to ask you to leave again. You will be allowed back in a short time, but I need to deliberate with my associate.” Sir Reginald snapped the watch shut and stared at her.
Lucilla drew herself upright and made for the doorway.
“I will not say I am happy to go,” she said. “But I will do as the famous Regulus commands.”
“Very kind,” Sir Reginald tipped his hat to her. “Guard, has Lucilla touched anything while we've been gone?”
“Upon my honour sir, she has touched nothing but the emperor's cloak and held his hand,” The guard saluted as Lucilla passed.
“Very good,” said Sir Reginald, stepping towards the dead emperor. “Time for English, I think, Hannah,” he said, switching languages without effort.
“You won't hear me complaining.” I sagged with relief. “Latin is a hard language to listen to, let alone speak.”
“And yet, to their ears, English sounds like madness.” He shook out his jacket sleeves and inspected the desk.
“Well, we can at least test one theory,” I said, and drew a pen from my pocket. I approached the emperor and drew back his lips with the pen. His teeth were healthy for his age, somewhat yellow, but none were missing or rotten. “He doesn't have lead poisoning,” I said and drew my pen back. “If it had been lead poisoning the teeth would be stained blue.”
“I never suspected lead poisoning.” Sir Reginald didn't turn around. He was inspecting the desk with an eagle eye.
“You said you suspected everything,” I reminded him.