visitors were bringing you bad news or just a battering. He never knew if they were unwelcome manifestations of his own life and work, or some violent hangover from when I had lived here.
Someone came through the door into the room behind us. The steps were light and quick, even after mounting six flights of stairs. The person emerged through the folding doors. I was nearest; I stayed motionless, though ready to jump.
“Gods, you two are still a disreputable pair!” We relaxed.
“Evening, Maia.” We were not drunk, or even lightly disheveled. Still, all my family liked to be unfair.
I wondered why my sister would be visiting Petronius. I knew him well enough to tell when he was nervous; he was wondering the same.
Petro raised the flagon, offering. Maia seemed tempted, but then shook her head. She looked tired. Almost certainly she needed solace, but she had four children relying on her at home.
“Helena said you were up here slumming, Marcus. I can’t stop; Marius is downstairs, inspecting that terrible dog of yours. He wants to know if there’s a puppy yet. I’ll murder you for this-”
“I am doing my utmost to keep Nux chaste.”
“Well, speaking of chaste maidens, I heard something today that I thought you would be intrigued to know,” said Maia. “I was talking to one of the other mothers whose daughter is in the Vestal Virgins’ lottery like my Cloelia. This woman happens to know Caecilia Paeta socially and had visited their house this afternoon. She’s more welcome there than I am-but then her husband is some sort of Temple of Concord priest-well, I may be unfair to the man; perhaps he’s a decent step-washer… Anyway she told me she found all the Laelii running about in a fine tizz, and though they want to pretend publicly that there’s nothing amiss, she knows why. Something has happened to Gaia Laelia.”
I sat up. “Are you going to tell us?”
Maia had relished the tale up to this point. Now her voice stilled with genuine concern. “They have lost her, Marcus. She has absolutely vanished. Nobody knows where the child is.”
XXVI
IT WAS NONE of our business. At least, that was what we would be told by the Laelii. Anyway, there was little we could do at that late hour.
Petronius said he would escort Maia and her young son back home, not that Maia thought twice about the risk. Helena and I went straight to bed. All of us hoped, as you have to when a child is lost, that by morning everything would have resolved itself and Gaia would have turned up, leaving the adventure to become just one of those neverforgotten stories people retell every year around the fire at Saturnalia to embarrass the victim. But when a missing person is a child who has said that her family wants her dead, it evokes a bad feeling, however calm you try to stay.
Next day, Maia went early to see her friend, the mother who had told her the news. Anxious herself, the woman had already called to see Caecilia Paeta, Gaia’s mother. The child had not come home. The family were making light of it publicly.
Helena then visited the Laelius house with Maia-as matrons offering sympathy-but they were briskly rebuffed at the door.
Children lose themselves for all sorts of reasons. They forget the way home. They stay with friends without bothering to tell anyone. Occasionally, though, they have made sinister friends nobody knows about, and are lured to dangerous fates.
Children like to hide. Many “lost” children are found again at home: stuck in a cupboard or head-down in a giant urn. Usually they have managed not to suffocate.
Sometimes girls are abducted for brothels. Petronius Longus muttered to me in an undertone, that in the disgusting stews where anything goes there would be a very unpleasant premium on a six-yearold from a good home, who was known to be a potential Vestal Virgin. As soon as Maia reported next morning that the child was still missing, he took it upon himself to put out an immediate all-cohort alert.
“You are my star witness, Falco. Description of the child, please?”
“Jupiter, how do I know?” Suddenly I felt more patient towards all the vague witnesses I had previously yelled at for giving me incompetent statements. “Her name is Gaia Laelia, daughter of Laelius Scaurus. She is six years old; she’s small. She was well dressed, with jewelry-bangles-and her hair fixed up-”
“That can be changed,” Petro said grimly. If she had been snatched by brothel-owners, disguising her was the first thing they would do. “ Right. Dark hairs, dark eyes. Well spoken, confident. Pretty-”
Petro groaned.
Perhaps against his better judgment, he decided to tell Rubella, his cohort commander, what was happening. He could not ignore the possibility that Gaia had been kidnapped to order. That would mean all the other girls whose names were in the lottery might be potential targets too.
Rubella first told Petronius he was off his head. Despite that, the sceptical tribune immediately took himself to see the Prefect of the Urban Cohorts. At least the Fourth would be covered if there was any fallout later. Should the Prefect take this story seriously, his next step would probably be to ask the office of the Pontifex Maximusthe Emperor, of course-for a full list of the young girls in the lottery so all their parents could be warned. Since the Laelius family wanted to pretend this was a slight domestic problem that nobody need know about, I thought things were escalating dangerously. But in view of their social prominence, they would not be surprised that the story had been leaked.
Time counts. The Laelii were ignoring that. Even if little Gaia were just trapped in a store cupboard in her own home, they needed to hold a systematic search. They had to start now. Petronius and I could have instructed them how to go about it; we were frustrated by our inability even to approach those involved. But a Flamen Dialis was as close to the gods as you could get in human form, and a retired one could be just as arrogant. Laelius Numentinus had represented Jupiter on earth for thirty years. Both of us knew better than to tackle him. Petronius was too lowly a member of the vigiles, and his superiors had firmly told him to make no approach unless or until the Laelii directly requested help. As for me, I was the upstart in charge of the Capitoline geese-and Laelius Numentinus had made it plain what he thought of that.
It was now eight days before the Ides of June. Tomorrow the festival of Vesta would begin. Today had no sacred connections at all. As Procurator of Poultry, I had no demands on my time. When Helena and Maia returned, furious, from their abortive mission to offer sympathy at the Laelius residence, I was ready with a ploy to outflank that secretive family. It involved a visit to a very different house, one that was even more carefully closed to the public: the House of the Vestals at the end of the Sacred Way.
XXVII
IT WAS NOT too far to walk, down from the Aventine via the Temple of Ceres, around the end of the Circus Maximus at the Cattle Market end, and into the Forum below the Capitol in the shadow of the Tarpeian Rock. We took the Sacred Way past the Basilica, turned under the Arch of Augustus between the Temples of Castor and Julius Caesar, and at about the midpoint of the Forum came to the Virgins’ sanctuary. On our left the Regia, once the palace of Numa Pompilius, the second King of Rome, and now the office of the Pontifex; on our right the Temple of Vesta; beyond the temple, established between the Sacred Way and the Via Nova, the House of the Vestals.
