despite all your efforts to destroy him-while you languished in obscurity, your fortune squandered, your reputation a joke, your beloved brother dead and gone. Vengeance must never be far from your thoughts. What else is there for you to think about now that everything that once brought you pleasure is gone, including your beauty?'
She stared at me blankly. 'You needn't speak so cruelly, Gordianus.'
'You dare to call me cruel when it was you who deliberately snared Marcus Caelius a second time in your net, all the while plotting how finally to destroy him? I said your beauty was gone, and it's true. But Caelius knew you when you still possessed it. He was under its spell once, and he never forgot. He remembered you as you were-as I remember you. You sought him out. You seduced him a second time; you managed to make him fall in love with you all over again. You made him trust you. And then what? How did you plant the seeds of discontent in his heart? Very subtly, I imagine, with a well-placed word here and there. You cast aspersions on Caesar-mild at first, then more and more caustic. You reminded him of the power of the Roman mob and the fact that no one since your brother had successfully harnessed their power. I can hear you: 'Caesar doesn't know your value, Marcus. He's wasting your talents! Why does he reward mediocrities like Trebonius above you? Because he's jealous of you, that's why! Because he secretly fears you! If only my dear brother were still alive. What an opportunity he could make of this situation! The people are miserable, they've lost their faith in Caesar, they despise him-all they need is a man who can harness their anger, a man with the gift of speech and the nerve to pit himself against the lapdogs Caesar has left in charge of the city. Such a man could make himself ruler of Rome!' '
Clodia stared at me, her eyes flashing, but she said nothing.
'Shall I go on? Very well. You encouraged him to make wilder and wilder promises to the mob, to bait his fellow magistrates, to insult the Senate, to speak words of sedition against Caesar himself. When he finally went too far and Isauricus tried to arrest him, how that must have delighted you! But Caelius slipped the net. He went into hiding. Then he made common cause with Milo-the convicted killer of your brother-and how that must have galled you! Meanwhile, you never ceased plotting Caelius's destruction. I think you were still in touch with him, still guiding him toward his ruin. Perhaps he balked, seeing the hopelessness of the prospect before him. Did you goad him on, telling him the gods were on his side? Did you cast aspersions on his manhood? Did you tell him only a coward would stop in midcourse? And when Milo-superstitious, omen-fearing Milo-sought out a seeress to show him the future, what did you do about that, Clodia?'
I waited for her to answer, wanting to hear the truth from her own lips, but she only continued to stare at me with a wild look in her eyes.
'Cassandra was Calpurnia's spy,' I said. 'Did you know that?'
She wrinkled her brow and spoke at last. 'No. But I'm not surprised.'
'Milo wanted to seek her out for a prophecy. Did you know that?'
'Yes.'
'So you were still in touch with Caelius, even after he went into hiding?'
'Yes. After his escape from Isauricus, he came to this house a few times, always in disguise. False beards. False bosoms!' A smile crept over her lips, though she seemed to fight it. 'He loved that sort of thing, going about in disguises. He was mad, completely mad, from the first day I knew him to the last. You might have thought he was taking part in some adolescent prank, not trying to bring down the state. He told me that he'd been in contact with Milo, and Milo was almost ready to join forces with him. 'I know how much you hate him,' he said to me, 'but it's the only way. Together we can pull it off!' There was only one catch. Milo had heard of what he called 'this half-mad seeress, this woman called Cassandra'-it was Fausta who told him about her-and he was determined first to hear what Cassandra had to say. Milo had latched onto the idea that Cassandra, and only Cassandra, could tell him the future. He was utterly convinced of it. He refused to take another step until he heard from Cassandra's own lips that the enterprise would succeed.'
I shook my head. 'But Cassandra had explicit instructions from Calpurnia to tell Milo no such thing. She was to predict only doom for the insurrection. She was to send Milo and Caelius scrambling to throw themselves on Caesar's mercy. From what you've just told me, if Cassandra had succeeded in carrying out Calpurnia's instructions, then Milo would never had ridden south with Caelius that day. Someone must have prevented her from delivering that prophecy, someone who wanted the insurrection to go ahead, knowing that it could end only in the destruction of both Milo and Caelius. And that was what you wanted above all else, wasn't it, Clodia?' I shook my head. 'I understand your hatred for both of those men. I don't doubt that you wanted to see them humiliated and dead, their memories disgraced, their heads delivered to Calpurnia as trophies. But why did Cassandra have to die? Was there no other way?'
Clodia's eyes brimmed with tears. 'Is that what you think? That I wanted Caelius to die? That I murdered Cassandra? You think you know everything, Gordianus, yet you know nothing!'
XVIII
I had never seen her so completely unguarded, so wracked with emotion. I could never have imagined her so vulnerable. The tears that ran down her cheeks gave her a curious kind of beauty that transcended any she had previously possessed. I gazed at Clodia in wonder.
'Tell me, then. Tell me what I don't know,' I said.
She caught her breath. She covered her face for a moment. When she withdrew her hand, the tears had ceased. Her features were composed. She stared at the fish in the pond as she spoke.
'For years I hated Marcus Caelius. A part of me lived for that hatred, the way that one can live for love. I turned to it whenever I saw no other reason to go on existing in a world where everything gold had turned to lead. In a strange way, that hatred nurtured me. What a poem Catullus could have made of that! Catullus knew that passion is passion; whether it's love or hate, it drives the spirit. Hating Caelius gave me a reason to draw my next breath.
'As it turned out, Caelius had never forgotten me, either. Men have more ways than women do to distract themselves from such a passion-building a political career, traveling the world, fighting in battles. But when he returned with Caesar from Spain, something stirred him to come and see me. I think he was suddenly struck by the futility of all his frantic pursuits for money and power. Caesar had turned the world upside down, and for a little while anything seemed possible. Sheer exhilaration drove Caelius forward until he realized that nothing was going to change, except perhaps for the worse. He found himself back in Rome, stuck with a meaningless magistracy, bored out of his wits. He was dispirited, angry, depressed. On a whim, one afternoon he came to see me. I was here in the garden. When the slave announced him, I thought surely the slave was mistaken, or else someone was playing a joke on me. 'Show him in!' I said, and a few moments later, Caelius appeared. A thousand thoughts rushed through my head, not least that I wanted to murder him. I imagined stabbing him and pushing him into this fishpond. That thought filled me with immense pleasure. How it came about that he was sitting beside me on this couch, I can't tell you. Nor can I tell you how it happened that his lips were on mine, and our arms were around each other, and we both were weeping.
'You think that I hatched some insidious plot against him, Gordianus, that I schemed to seduce him. But Caelius came to me, and what happened between us was totally spontaneous and totally mutual. Years ago, before we fell out, I thought I was in love with him. But what I had felt for him then was nothing compared to what I felt when he came to me that day. Both of us had received some very hard blows. We had learned a few lessons about humility and survival and what really matters in the world. The Caelius who came to me that day was neither the Caelius I had loved nor the Caelius I had hated, but another man, larger than either of those others and infinitely more capable of loving me. And I was a different woman from the one who had loved and then hated Caelius, though I didn't know it until that moment when we were reunited.'
'Yet I never heard a whisper of gossip about you and Caelius,' I said. 'Such a tale would have been just the thing to excite the chin-waggers in the Forum.'
'We made no show of what happened between us. We were discreet. Others would never have understood. It was no one else's business.'
'Yet Calpurnia knew that Caelius was seeing you,' I said.
'As you say, she has spies everywhere. Perhaps she intentionally had Caelius followed, or perhaps one of her informants just happened to notice him coming or going. What happened between us may have piqued her curiosity,
