I told her I was sending a slave to fetch the money for her. In fact, I dispatched the fellow to the Subura to finish off Rupa. The slave I sent was a big, burly fellow, a former gladiator like Birria. I thought he'd have no trouble, but it seems that Rupa was more than a match for him.'
'That was the dead body I found when I woke! Rupa killed him-there in the room while I lay unconscious. Cassandra left Rupa to watch over me. When your man arrived, there must have been a struggle, and Rupa broke his neck. Then Rupa must have panicked. He gathered up everything in Cassandra's room and ran off.' Everything, I thought, except her biting stick, which he must have dropped or over looked.
'So far as I know, the mute is still in hiding,' said Fausta.
'And even as I woke, Cassandra was here, in this house…'
'Waiting with me in the garden. When one of the slaves brought in a cold porridge for the midday meal and served a portion to each of us, Cassandra suspected nothing.'
'What poison did you use?'
'How should I know? I bought it from a fellow who's been in that sort of business a long time; Milo used to go to him occasionally. Painful, or painless, he asked me. I told him I didn't care so long as it was guaranteed to work quickly. But it didn't. The poison acted very slowly. We both finished our porridge and put the bowls aside. Nothing happened. I began to think I had misjudged the dose, or perhaps I'd even given her the wrong portion. Had I poisoned myself? I sat there imagining a burning in my gut as I watched her, unable to take my eyes off her, waiting to see the first sign of distress on her face. Finally-finally! — the poison began to take effect. At first she merely felt ill. She said she thought something in the porridge had disagreed with her. Then a look came over her face-shock, panic-as she realized what was happening. She screamed and threw her empty bowl at me and ran from the garden. I tried to stop her. We struggled. I tore her tunica. She escaped and ran from the house. Birria went after her, but she lost him. He didn't know which way she'd gone.
'I was frantic with worry. Who might she see before the poison finished her? What might she tell them? Finally, later that day, I heard the report of her death in the marketplace. She died in your arms, I was told. Had she told you what happened? Surely not, because hours passed, then days, and you did nothing about it. Still, I was torn by doubts. That was why I dared to come to see her funeral pyre. You were there. So were Calpurnia and some of the other women who had known Cassandra. Everyone saw me, yet no one reacted. That was when I knew for certain that no one suspected I had killed her. I watched her burn, and I was finally satisfied that I had gotten away with it. At last I could turn my thoughts to Milo and wait for the delicious news of his destruction.'
I shook my head. 'I thought it was Clodia! I thought Clodia would stop at nothing to destroy Marcus Caelius, but in the end she was desperate to save him-from himself! And I thought that you would do whatever you could to stop Milo from carrying out such a mad scheme, but your only desire was to see him destroy himself.'
'Paradoxes amuse you, don't they, Finder? I told you, I've no patience with playwrights' devices, similes, metaphors, and such. Ironies and enigmas displease me even more. But I do know when the final act is over.' Fausta reached for the pitcher on the table beside her and filled the cup to the brim. 'You'll forgive me if I don't offer you a cup as well,' she said, lifting it to her lips.
I gave a start and reached for the cup, but too late. She had swallowed the contents in a single draught.
Fausta put down the cup. Her eyes glittered. She blinked and swayed slightly. 'The poison merchant promised me that this one would act much more quickly and without… too much… pain.' She grimaced. 'The liar! It hurts like Hades!' She gripped her belly and staggered out of the room, into the portico off the garden. 'People will say I did it out of grief. It's an honorable thing for a widow to take her own life… after her husband dies in battle. Sulla's daughter shall bring no shame to his memory!'
Fausta collapsed to the floor. Birria, who had been pacing the garden, gave a cry and rushed to her. He knelt and scooped her up. Her eyes were open, but she was as limp as a sack of grain in his arms, already dead. He threw back his head and let out a howl. Tears streamed down his face. 'No!' he cried. He stared up at me. 'What have you done to her?'
'She did it to herself,' I said, pointing to the doorway and the little tripod table just inside.
Birria spied the pitcher and the cup. For a long moment he stared into Fausta's lifeless eyes. Finally he released her. I heard a slither of metal as he pulled his short sword from its scabbard. I started back, but the blade was not for me. Kneeling over Fausta, he turned the sword against his belly and braced himself. A look came over his features such as one sometimes sees on the face of a gladiator in the arena at the end-a look at once resigned and defiant, contemptuous of life itself.
Birria drew a last breath and fell onto his sword. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he let out a gasp. Blood poured from the wound and trickled from his lips. He pitched and heaved for a moment, then stiffened, then collapsed across the body of his mistress.
XIX
'Egypt!'
Bethesda delivered this pronouncement in much the same fashion that she had announced her previous, sudden insights into a cure for her illness. How she arrived at these revelations, where the knowledge came from, and why she trusted it, I had no idea. I only knew that where once she had uttered, 'Radishes!' and the household had gone on an expedition in search of radishes, now she uttered, 'Egypt!'
A trip to Egypt would cure her-that, and only that.
'Why Egypt?' I asked.
'Because I came from Egypt. We all came from Egypt. Egypt is where all life began.' She said this as if it were a fact that no one could possibly dispute, like saying, 'Things fall down, not up,' or, 'The sun shines during the day, not at night.'
I had thought she might say: Because Egypt is where we met, Husband. Egypt is where you found me and fell in love with me, and Egypt is where I intend to reclaim you and purify you of the transgression you committed with another woman. But that was not what she said, of course. Did she know about Cassandra? I thought not; she had been too preoccupied with her own illness.
Did Diana know? Not for certain, perhaps, but Diana had to suspect something. So far, she hadn't confronted or questioned me. If she had suspicions, she kept them to herself-more for her mother's sake, I suspected, than for mine. What was done was done, and the important thing was to keep peace in the household, at least until her mother got better.
'I must return to Alexandria,' Bethesda announced at break fast one morning, and not for the first time. 'I must bathe once more in the Nile, the river of life. In Egypt I shall either find a cure, or I shall find eternal rest.'
'Mother, don't say that!' Diana put down her bowl of watery farina and gripped her stomach. Had her mother's words upset her digestion-or was Diana, too, falling prey to some malady? She was nauseous as many mornings as not. It seemed to me that a curse had fallen on all the women in my life.
This was the first time that Bethesda had explicitly mentioned the possibility of dying in Egypt. Was that the real point of the journey she insisted on making, and was all her talk of a cure a mere pretense? Did she know that she was dying, and did she wish to end her days in Alexandria, where her life had begun?
'We can't afford it,' I said bluntly. 'I wish we could, but-'
There was a noise at the front door, not a friendly or respectful knocking, but a loud, insistent banging. Davus frowned, exchanged a guarded look with me, and went to answer it.
A moment later he returned and spoke in my ear. 'Trouble,' he said.
'Stay here,' I said to the others, and followed Davus to the foyer. I looked through the peephole. On my doorstep a pair of hulking giants flanked a small ferret of a man in a toga. The ferret saw my eye at the peephole and spoke up.
'It's no good hiding behind that door, Gordianus the Finder. A man can avoid the day of reckoning for only so long.'
'Who are you, and what are you doing on my doorstep?' I asked, though I knew already. Since the annihilation of Caelius and Milo, the moneylenders and landlords of Rome reigned supreme. Any organized resistance to them had evaporated. Trebonius was said to favor creditors quite blatantly now in any negotiation he
