With much prompting, I drew out the same story Caecilia had told about Gaia’s morning: breakfast with the family; weaving; then play in a garden here at home.
“So when did you decide that you had lost her?” Athene gave me a sly look. “Never mind when you really reported it.” I had seen that look a hundred times. Liars often give themselves away; it can be almost as if they are begging, or daring, you to find out the true story. “Don’t mess me about. When did you first notice?”
“Near lunchtime.”
“You mean, beforehand?”
“Yes,” admitted the girl sullenly.
“Why did you tell Gaia’s mother the child had chosen to eat lunch by herself?”
“She does that!”
“Yes, but this time you knew you could not find her. You should have told the truth. Why did you lie? Were you frightened?”
Athene said nothing. I sympathized, but her behavior had been illogical and dangerous.
“Why do you think Gaia likes to eat lunch alone?”
“To get away from them,” growled the nurse. It was her first sign of honesty. “I just thought she had hidden herself somewhere. I thought she would turn up.”
“Might she hide to get you into trouble?”
“She never has done,” admitted the nurse grudgingly.
“I know she was unhappy,” I said. “Was anybody cruel to Gaia? Tell me the truth. I won’t tell them you said it.”
“Not cruel.” Perhaps not kind either.
“Did they punish her for wrongdoing?”
“If she had asked for it.”
“Like that day she locked you up and took the litter?”
“She should never have done that. She must have known it would cause a hurricane.”
“What happened when she came home?”
“The old man was waiting, and he gave her an earful.”
“Anything else?”
“She had to stay in her room and miss dinner. Afterwards, I was always supposed to stick with her all day and sleep in her room at night. She yelled at me too much when I tried that, so I made a bed outside the door.”
“They didn’t beat her?”
Athene looked surprised. “Nobody ever so much as smacked the child.”
“Did you?”
“No. I would be beaten for it.”
“So did you find her troublesome to control?”
Once again, the girl reluctantly admitted that things were not as bad as I might have supposed. “Not normally.” She smiled grimly. “ People here do what they are told. If she had played me up too much, the old one would have told her it was not what their type do. ‘Better is expected of us, Gaia!’ he would say.”
“So Numentinus rules by sheer force of personality?” She did not understand me. “If you were meant to stick with Gaia all the time, why was she playing in the garden by herself yesterday morning?”
“I had to do something else. Her mother came by and said, ‘Oh, you can leave her to enjoy herself for a while!’ Then I had to help one of the other girls with a job she was doing.”
“What job?”
Athene looked vague. “Can’t remember.”
“Hmm. When you did go back to look for Gaia, there was no sign of her? But you kept quiet at first.”
“Not for long. I thought Gaia would be hungry. I went and lurked by the kitchen so when she came looking for a bite I could pounce on her.”
“Could she have been to the kitchen before you got there?”
“No. I asked them. They had kicked her out earlier when she kept bothering them for water to put in the jar she was playing with. I got shooed off too in the end, so then I had to go and own up to her mother.”
“A search was carried out?”
“Oh yes. They never stopped looking-well, not until you came. The Emperor descended on the old man, and then we all had orders to stop rushing around. We were told you were coming, and everything had to look calm.”
“I don’t see why. They have nothing to be ashamed of in panicking over a lost child of that age. If it was my daughter and Vespasian dropped in, I would ask him to join the search party.”
“You’ve got some nerve!”
Briefly, I grinned. “That’s what he says.”
I felt there was not much more I could screw out of this bundle, so next I made her take me outside to the courtyard garden where Gaia liked to play.
XXXV
TWENTY OR SO sparrows took off as we emerged. It suggested a lack of human presence previously.
We were in an interior peristyle, with slender columns on four sides forming shady colonnades; water canals added to the cool effect. I now knew from the plan that, by chance, I had first entered the house by a lesser door, one of three approaches (two doors and a short staircase) on different streets of the block. As I would expect in a house of this quality, used by people who thought they were superior, the property occupied its own insula.
The main entrance was out of action currently, due to the building work. The hod-carriers were not remodeling it, but had used the small rooms either side of the door as stores for their tools and materials, spilling over into the corridor, which they had completely blocked with spare ladders and trestles. I was amazed Numentinus stood for it; it just showed that the power of the construction industry eclipses anything organized religion has ever managed to devise. He had once been Jupiter’s representative, but now a few cheap laborers could run rings around him, quite unafraid of his verbal thunderbolts.
Had the main entrance been in use, there would have been a fine view from the door, right through the atrium, to a glimpse of this garden’s greenery-letting callers know what excellent taste and what an excellent amount of money (or what huge debts), the occupants possessed.
The peristyle had a formal layout. The surrounding columns were gray stone, carved with fine spiral decorations. The space within contained box trees clipped into obelisks and empty statue bases, which I was told were awaiting family busts. A central circular hedge surrounded a pool, drained so it showed the blue lining, in the center of which reclined a metal ocean god with shaggy seaweed hair, forming a fountain, silent because of the drained works. Not much scope for a would-be Vestal Virgin to play in this drained basin.
“Where are the builders?” I asked Athene. “They don’t seem keen to finish. Have you got Gloccus and Cotta in?”
“Who? They were told to go today, because you were coming.”
“That was stupid. They could have helped me search. Builders like an excuse to do something that is not in their contract. Were they here yesterday morning?”
“Yes.”
“Did anybody think to ask them if they saw anything?”
“The Pomonalis did.” So somebody had shown initiative. He would be next on my list for interview.
“Did they say anything?”
“No,” returned the nurse, looking slightly shifty, I thought. Dear gods, she probably eyed up the laborers.
I walked out into the garden. There were signs it had been neglected but recently revived with emergency treatment. The clipped trees were bare in places, where they had been shaved too hard after growing lanky. I saw
