'Must I?'
'If you care about justice at all. If you want to put Dio's shade to
rest.'
'If only it was clear to me exactly how Dio died.'
She sighed, exasperated. 'Asicius and Caelius broke into Coponius's house and stabbed the poor wretch.'
I ignored her, counting days in my head. 'There's still a chance that Eco might arrive tonight, or tomorrow-'
'Good. If he does, and if he brings word of those slaves, then perhaps we can add their testimony. But I told you, forget about the silver.'
We were speaking at such cross-purposes that I hardly heard her. 'There was something else,' I said. 'Something I'd forgotten. When I left your house yesterday, I intended to take with me that bit of gorgon's hair, to compare it to some of the same poison in my strongbox at home. I forgot it, somehow… ' I shuddered, remembering the ugliness of Chrysis's degradation and my flight from Clodia's bedchamber.
'Could I take the gorgon's hair home with me tonight?'
Clodia hesitated. 'I'm afraid not. Herennius has it. He said he might want to produce it as evidence tomorrow, when I give my testimony. Though I don't suppose showing the judges a lump of poison is likely to be as shocking as showing them a bloody dagger or whatever. Is it important?'
'No, I suppose not. I only wanted to make sure that I knew what the stuff was, for my own satisfaction.'
'If it would help convince you to testify, then I wish I still had it. I suppose I could somehow arrange to get the stuff back from Herennius, though it's rather late. In the morning there'll hardly be time-'
I shook my head. 'Don't bother.'
'No? Good!' She laughed weakly. 'I don't think I could stand to deal with one more troublesome detail tonight. I really am awfully tired.
Clodius's physician says that I shouldn't expect to feel completely Well for quite some time. To tell you the truth, I feel quite awful. I couldn't eat a bite of anything that was put in front of me tonight. I'll simply have to trust that the cook was up to his usual standard. Now, Gordianus assure me that you will testify tomorrow. Don't make me go to bed fretting about it. As I said, you need only tell the court what you've seen with your own eyes.'
I looked at her for a long moment, at her huge green eyes made all the more lustrous by illness, at the smooth white flesh of her throat curving down to her breasts and the sleek lines of her body wrapped in the transparent silk. I breathed in her perfume. What if Caelius had succeeded in poisoning her? She would be dead now, already beginning to rot. The idea was appalling, intolerable: the glittering eyes shut forever, the perfect body eaten by worms, the perfume overpowered by the stench of putrefaction.
'Yes, I'll testify. I don't see why not.'
She smiled and kissed me, full on the mouth, and pressed her body against me as if she had read my thoughts and wanted to show me that she was still very much alive and warm to the touch. From the garden I heard the sound of a poet declaiming, punctuated by laughter and applause.
Clodia broke the kiss and stepped back. 'I'd better take you back to Bethesda before she comes looking for you. Egyptian women are uncommonly jealous, I'm told.'
The party had no formal ending, or at least none that I stayed for. After the mime's encore, another meal commenced with the guests seated in new combinations. Eventually, those who had eaten and conversed and laughed and drunk enough began to wend their ways to the front door. Bethesda and I were among the first to leave. Catullus and Trygonion seemed to have disappeared.
'You look very thoughtful,' said Bethesda on the way home.
'And you look rather smug. Did you enjoy yourself that much?'
'Enjoyment was not really the point,' she said, suddenly haughty.
'What did Clodia mean by what she said to you?'
'When?'
'She asked if you had gotten the little statue of Attis. You said yes, and then she said, 'Good, now you're one of us.' '
'Did she say that?'
'Bethesda, I'm in no mood to be teased.'
'She only meant that I had been accepted by the other women here on the Palatine. The women who matter, anyway.
Thanks to Clodia.'
'Is that all she meant?'
'What do you mean, is that all? Think of it, of where I come from, who I am. I dreaded it when we moved from the farm back to Rome, into such a house, such a neighborhood. I never let you see how I felt, of course, but it was just as I feared. They treated me very badly at first.'
'Treated you badly?'
'Ignored me, shut me out. But after tonight, things will change. The others will treat me differently. As if I were one of them.'
This struck me as highly unlikely, but I shrugged. 'Why not? Almost anything seems to be possible in Rome these days.'
For some reason Bethesda took offense at this comment and didn't say another word to me all the way home.
Diana had stayed up for us. She demanded that her mother tell her everything about the party. While they settled in Diana's room, talking of what the women had worn and how they had dressed their hair, I escaped to our bedroom.
I stripped off my toga and put on a shabby tunic. I kept a lamp burning so that Bethesda could find her way around the room. I lay down on the sleeping couch and shut my eyes against the flickering light, but I couldn't sleep. I had drunk too much, eaten too much, heard too much poetry. From down the hall I could hear Diana's and Bethesda's muffled laughter. The sound reminded me of the sound of distant laughter in the garden, when Clodia had kissed me…
I had asked her for something, hadn't I? The poison, that was it! The gorgon's hair, so that I could compare it to the same stuff that Eco had given me to safeguard. Again, I had come home without it. Of course, I didn't really need Clodia's sample to make the comparison; I remembered clearly enough what the stuff had looked like. I had held it up to the lamplight, while Chrysis twisted in the corner and sobbed…
I shifted on the sleeping couch, determined to fall asleep, but the laughter from Diana's room kept me up, and my thoughts kept twisting endlessly in space, like Chrysis suspended upside down from the ceiling. Finally I got up and reached for the lamp.
There was a little storage room down the hallway from our bedroom, cluttered with rolled rugs and folded chairs and wooden boxes. After a brief search I found the strongbox amid the jumble. I tried to remember where I had hidden the key, and then realized I didn't need it. The little lock on the strongbox had been broken.
I took the box into the bedroom and set down the lamp so that it would light the inside.
There wasn't much inside the box-a blood-encrusted dagger that had been important at another trial, a few letters and some other mementos that I didn't want anyone else to touch. Among them was the little pyxis of poison that Eco had asked me to keep for him, not wanting to have it in his own house with the twins.
I picked up the pyxis by the rim of the lid, which came open. I gave a jerk, thinking I had clumsily spilled the contents, then realized there were no contents to be spilled.
The pyxis was empty. Only a few traces of poison remained, com-pacted against the inside corners of the box, identical to the crumbly yellow powder that Clodia had shown me.
What did it mean?
I set the pyxis aside and looked in the strongbox again, thinking the poison must have spilled inside. I saw no yellow powder, but I did see something else, a small object easily overlooked: an earring. It was a simple design, a little silver crook with a green glass bead for ornament. I recognized it at once; it was one of Bethesda's old earrings.
The crook of the earring was bent. I looked again at the broken lock of the strongbox. The metal facing was scored with tiny scratches. The aperture was small; the crook of the earring would have been ideal for poking
