One Virgin Too Many Read online

  The sparrows were back. They had discovered a large supply of crumbs. There was a smooth white bench with a marble table, both with sphinxes for legs, which it would be natural for workmen to take over for their regularly accessed lunch boxes. As I suspected: two used wineskins had been carefully hidden down against one of the bench legs because the lads could not be bothered to take their empties home with them. The sparrows hopped around in the dry pool, looking up at me as if asking where their drinking water and bath had gone.

  “I really would not have thought a small girl would have been happy playing here.”

  The escort slave piped up again: “She goes over there.” He led me to one of the colonnaded corridors. Against the house wall was a small shrine. Apparently, Gaia would pretend this was the Temple of the Vestals. She would sprinkle water about, tend an imaginary fire, and pretend to be making salt cakes. I found a bunch of sticks, painstakingly tied together with wool in the form of a mop, which Gaia must use for pretending to clean out the temple, in imitation of the Virgins’ daily rites.

  “Do they let her have ingredients for the pretend salt cakes?”

  “No. The Flamen does not like it.” Surprise!

  I squatted down on my heels in front of the shrine. A lattice wall and a bank of oleander bushes hid me from most of the rest of the garden. Unless the nurse had stuck very close to her, Gaia could easily have stopped playing and sneaked off.

  I heaved myself upright. Ignoring the two slaves, I set off to the nearest doorway out of the colonnade. I passed salons and anterooms bare of furniture. This was the least used part of the house. More what a child would like. Private. Unobserved. With that ever-attractive atmosphere of a place nobody was supposed to go into without permission. But there was no sign of Gaia.

  I kept walking.

  On the plan, three sides of this house had streets marked beside them. There were shops and lockups leased to artisans; I would check later that they were all quite separate, with no access from the house, though I was certain the ex-Flamen would have insisted upon it. The fourth side had nothing shown, though the house extended slightly in two small wings.

  As I thought. There was a rectangular outdoor area between the wings. It was larger than it looked on the plan. “You could have told me there was another garden!”

  “Gaia is not allowed to come here,” protested the nurse sullenly.

  “Are you sure she obeys?”

  Work was being carried out here too. When the Laelii took over, this part must have been a wilderness. It was supposed to form a small potager with square beds where lines of vegetable and salad crops could be grown for the house. Untended for years, giant parsley and asparagus fern were running riot. Some patches of ground had been cleared; one was now cleanly dug over, others still had stumps of perennial weeds sticking up. The whole central area ought to be shaded by a complex series of pergolas, supporting old vines.

  There a disaster greeted me. “Oh Jupiter, that’s some hard pruning!”

  The vines had been sliced right off a foot from the ground. Unbelievable. From the debris, I could see they had been until recently mature, healthy climbers, once well trained; new bunches had already formed among the bright green leaves. It was too late anyway to be cutting back vines, and the entire crop had now been lost. Mounds of limp vegetation were heaped everywhere. To me, with country ancestors, it was heartbreaking. I stepped out into the desecration, then could not bear to go on.

  My mind was running on two different tracks. The Laelii would have to allocate slaves to help me here. All of this rubbish would have to be lifted, the mounds cleared right back to bare earth and the tangled branches forked over … But destroying those vines had been unforgivable.

  “Did Numentinus order this?” Sensing my outrage, the slaves merely nodded. “Dear gods!”

  “He cannot walk under vines.”

  “He can now! He stopped being the Flamen Dialis last year.”

  I forced myself to restrain my anger and returned temporarily to the house.

  XXXVI

  STATILIA LAELIA AND Ariminius Modullus, the ex-Flamen’s daughter and her husband the Pomonalis, were together when I saw them.

  I had managed to control my angry breathing by the time I was led into their presence. They were seated side by side on a couch, rather too deliberately for it to be natural. They seemed relaxed. That’s about as relaxed as if they had both swallowed burning hot broth and had no water to cool their scorched mouths. If I had been sure a crime had been committed, they would immediately have become suspects.

  I had only seen Ariminius from behind, when he came to Fountain Court, but I recognized his voice, affecting light conversation; at once, those slightly crude vowels I had overheard at my apartment jarred again. Face-to-face, he turned out to be an unassuming type with rather straight, untidy eyebrows and a mole near his nose. He was not wearing a flamen’s pointed hat this time; he at least knew how to be normal when he was at home.

  To my surprise, I did recognize his wife: she was the woman I had glimpsed briefly in the atrium when I first came here with Maia, the one who had been gathered up by a train of slaves and borne off before I could speak to her. The slaves were all here today again, clustered protectively around her even when her husband was present to supervise. Perhaps she was a nervous type. (Nervous of what?) Or was a flamen’s daughter customarily afforded fierce chaperonage from men?

  Statilia Laelia bore little resemblance to her brother Scaurus, except in manner. She had the same vague outlook as though nothing much would excite her and she would never exert herself in a cause. She was sitting with one knee crossed over the other, and did not shift from that position. She wore a plain white gown, with neither braid nor jewelry. Her hair was tied back but otherwise hung loose; frankly it looked less than clean, yet she wound strands of it between her fingers, near her mouth, all the time. Her lower lip tended to sag open slightly; when she did close up, her mouth was a tight little button.

  “Thank you both for seeing me; I hope not to trouble you long.” I was slick with the smarm today. I appalled myself. “I have managed to trace little Gaia’s movements up until she was supposed to be playing in the peristyle garden. I believe her mother saw her there and said she could be left unsupervised, so that’s a definite placing. Can either of you help me with what happened afterwards?”

  They shook their heads. “I was out, attending to business,” said Ariminius, firmly separating himself from the problem. “You did not see Gaia after breakfast, did you, my love?” Laelia shook her head and twisted her hair some more.

  The endearment had sounded formal. I wondered what kind of relationship they really had. Laelia seemed a limp specimen, but I was never fooled by such couples. They were probably at it like rabbits all the time. The fact they had no children meant nothing. I knew that was from choice. Alongside Ariminius’ ghastly pot of crocus hair pomade in their bedroom, I had found a jar of the distinctive alum wax contraceptive that Helena and I used. It had been nearly empty, but an identical heavy jar with a film of clear wax sealing it had stood right alongside. They were not intending to run out.

  “Thanks.” I decided to treat Ariminius as a sensible contact with whom I could share my thoughts. “Look, I don’t think Gaia stayed in the peristyle. She’s not there now anyway; nowhere to hide. You have an area of rough ground behind the house, which I need to search. Can you let me borrow some sturdy slaves to turn over the weed piles and forage through the undergrowth?”

  “Oh, Gaia would not have gone there!” twittered Laelia.

  “Maybe not. I have to search to be sure.”

  “We can give you all the help you need. The outlook is bad, isn’t it?” asked Ariminius, looking at me searchingly. “Tell us the truth, Falco. You think she may be …” He could not say it.

  “You’re right. The situation is desperate. When a child has been missing for a day and night, the odds double that she will not be found alive.”

  “She would
roam all over the place,” he told me, in a brisk, low voice. He was plainly ignoring Numentinus’ wish to be circumspect. Laelia did not protest but shrank into his shadow, not contributing either. Whereas Gaia’s mother had at least been driven by her fear for her child, Laelia was obeying family commands to stay silent—though she watched me closely. I felt her observation was almost malicious. She was curious what I would find out—and had a nasty little smile as she waited to see me thwarted.

  “I can imagine what it was like living on the Palatine with an adventurous infant,” I commented to Ariminius.

  “At least here the house is contained. Three sides face the street with secure doors and windows, and the area you mentioned at the back of the building has a high wall all around it.”

  “But she has been known to run off. The nurse neglects her duties?” I suggested.

  The Pomonalis sighed. “She flirts with the workmen whenever she can.”

  “Right. I don’t want to be indelicate, but do you think it goes beyond flirting?” I did wonder if Gaia had seen something that shocked her.

  Ariminius scoffed quietly. “You have seen the nurse! But the men don’t mind laughing with her—any excuse to stop their work.”

  “And then Gaia slips away?”

  “She means no harm,” Laelia cooed, like a doting aunt. “She just plays by herself.”

  “A huge imagination, I gather?” The woman nodded. I asked quietly, “And is that why she came to tell me someone wanted her dead?”

  Both bristled. Both ignored the question fixedly.

  “I think she really had been threatened,” I said.

  Still no answer.

  I looked pointedly from one to another, as if deciding whether the death threats came from either of them. Then I let it drop. “There are various possibilities,” I told them coldly. “Prime options are that—being unhappy for reasons that nobody wants to admit—Gaia ran away either to seek out her father or your aunt Terentia. My view is, you should inform both of them, so they can look out for her.”

  “Your view is noted,” said Ariminius. “I shall discuss with the Flamen whether to tell Scaurus.”

  “Terentia Paulla already knows the child is lost?”

  “She does,” replied Ariminius—not revealing that the ex-Vestal had been staying here until only that morning. I in turn did not reveal that I was aware she had been a visitor.

  “Other possibilities are that the child may be here, hiding or trapped; a full systematic search is my next move. The third option is that she has been abducted, possibly for financial gain.”

  “We are not a wealthy family,” Laelia said, raising her eyebrows.

  “That’s a comparative term, of course. Where you see only mortgages, a starving robber might nonetheless hope to extract a fortune. Is money a problem?” I saw Ariminius shake his head, as much at his wife as at me. Although I had first thought him ineffectual, he now seemed to have a grasp of reality the others here lacked. Laelia just shrugged vaguely. I said to him, “Well, please inform me immediately if anything like a ransom note arrives.”

  “Oh yes.” Ransomers would probably address the ex-Flamen, but Ariminius was playing the man of decision again. At any rate, if he saw a large spider who could only run slowly he would perhaps think about ways he could step on it.

  “The worst possibility, if indeed she has been abducted, is that she is brothel fodder by now.” I was being blunt deliberately. Shock tactics were the only weapon I had left. “A potential Vestal Virgin would be seen as rich pickings.”

  “Dear gods, Falco!”

  “I don’t mean to frighten anyone. But you have to know. That is one reason why the Emperor decided to take Gaia’s loss so seriously. That is why I am here. That is why you have to be frank. The child is six. Wherever she is, she must be terrified by now. And I have to get to her fast. I need to know about any unusual occurrences—anyone seen hanging around—any aspect of her inclusion in the lottery that could affect her. She wanted to be a Vestal, but it was not universally popular, I understand?” I had borne around on the old tack again: their family feuds.

  “Oh, that was just Aunt Terentia!” Laelia assured me. Nervousness got the better of her, and she giggled uncharacteristically. “She was wicked about it—actually, she said enough women in this family had had their bedroom lives ruined.”

  I managed not to look startled. “She did not enjoy the celibate life herself, then?”

  Laelia now regretted having spoken. “Oh no, she was devoted to her calling.”

  “She was a chaste Virgin—and afterwards she married. The sequence is not unknown. So, tell me about ‘Uncle Tiberius.’ Am I right that his boudoir life was, let’s say, uninhibited?”

  A glance was exchanged by the husband and wife. Ariminius had moved his foot against Laelia’s; coincidence, perhaps. If it was a warning, it was not much of a kick.

  “The man is dead,” he reminded me rather pompously.

  “So all he deserves now are eulogies? Luckily we are past the funeral, so you can drop the sickening pretense that he was a worthy descendant of right-thinking republican heroes, and had unimpeachable moral standards.” I looked at Laelia. “I gather he thought he should share his manly favors widely. Did he ever make advances to you?”

  I was prepared for her to hide behind her husband, but she answered straight: “No. Though I must say, I did not care for him.” It was very direct—too much so, perhaps, as though she had rehearsed it.

  “You knew what he was like?”

  This time her gaze did waver. Perhaps the man had groped her, yet she had never told her husband. I wished I could have talked to her without the Pomonalis present.

  “You knew he had made himself unpleasant to Caecilia Paeta?” I insisted.

  “Yes, I knew that,” Laelia answered in a low voice.

  “It was you she confided in?”

  “Yes.” I wondered briefly: If Caecilia had attracted the lecher but Laelia did not, was Laelia jealous?

  “Did she tell you of her fears that he might one day go for Gaia?”

  “Yes!” These affirmatives were snapping out now.

  “Did anybody tell Laelius Numentinus?”

  “Oh no.”

  “You already had enough troubles in this family?” I asked dryly.

  “How right you are!” returned Laelia, rather defiantly. That did not mean she would expound on what those troubles were. Ariminius, I noticed, looked distinctly uncomfortable.

  “Did Terentia Paulla know what the man she had married turned out to be like?”

  Laelia now sought support from her husband. He was the one taking decisions on what confidences to reveal—or what lies to tell. He said, “Terentia Paulla knew what she was doing when she married.”

  I gazed at him. “How did she know?”

  “Uncle Tiberius was a very old friend of the family.”

  I paused. That, colleagues, is always an intriguing situation. Old friends of families are rarely what everyone pretends. They may well be like this one: dirty swine who can never keep their pricks under their tunics, men who bully the women into tolerating their abuse because quite simply no one ever complained before and it seems too late to say anything after so many years.

  “So why, if his predilections were obvious, did an extremely holy woman who had just spent three decades living modestly ever want to marry him?”

  “Only she can answer that!” cried Laelia harshly.

  “Well, if I have no luck finding Gaia, I may have to talk to your aunt.” I noticed that caused a shock of panic, at least in Laelia. She hid it well.

  Despite her disguised alarm, for once it was the wife and not her husband who came out with the official tale: “Aunt Terentia prefers to see nobody at present. She is in mourning for her husband—and not in the best of health.” Mourning for her husband—or mourning her own stupidity in marrying a philanderer? Poor health—or just poor judgment?

  “I shall try to spare her then. I met you
r brother,” I told Laelia. “Do you get on with Scaurus?”

  “Yes, we’re very close.” I let that go too. I would not fancy having my sisters asked the same question.

  “I believe you have seen him recently?”

  “Not for anything special,” gasped Laelia, looking nervous at the question. Her shiftiness seemed to have something to do with her husband, as if he might not know.

  “Wasn’t there a family conference?”

  “Minor legal issues,” Ariminius put in. Still watching Laelia, who was now feigning wide-eyed innocence, I remembered that Meldina, the girl at the farm, had mentioned that Scaurus had been to Rome recently “to see his sister.” Once again, I yearned to interrogate Laelia without her husband. They seemed welded together, unfortunately.

  “Issues arising from the death of Terentia’s husband?”

  Ariminius did not want to go down this route. “Partly.”

  “So Terentia was present?”

  “Terentia Paulla is always welcome.”

  Why, then, had the slave with the sponge and bucket been instructed to say that Terentia never came anymore?

  “This family conference must have been a lively occasion!” I remarked quietly. Laelia and Ariminius exchanged glances in which more was being said than I yet understood. “By the way,” I enquired casually, “what did your ever-so-friendly Uncle Tiberius actually die of?” When nobody answered I did not press the point, but asked, “Was his wife with him when he died?”

  Ariminius looked me straight in the eye. “No, Falco,” he said gently, as if he knew why I was asking. “Terentia Paulla was dining with her old colleagues at the House of the Vestals that night.”

  The ultimate unshakable alibi—had anybody needed one, of course.

  I stared straight back at Ariminius. “Sorry,” I said, not bothering to explain why.