Fortune's Fool Page 6

  The men climbed the two ladders and began hacking at the wall. Removing the plaster raised a cloud of dust. Tacitus and I stepped back as the workmen began to cough.

  “Let’s go get something to eat,” I suggested. “We can check back in a while to see how they’re doing.”

  We went into the garden through the rear gate and found Julia and Aurora looking at the dust rising over the wall.

  “It’s going to be a dirty job,” Julia said.

  Aurora met my eyes but then looked down as though we were just master and slave. Felix had given me short, polite answers to my questions about their dinner on the lake. I’d like to hear Aurora’s version.

  “Are the other women up yet?” I asked.

  Julia shook her head. “They soon will be, though. It can’t be easy to sleep through that.”

  I took Aurora by the elbow and turned her toward my room. “While we have a chance, let’s talk.”

  She resisted being led but didn’t go so far as to pull her arm away from me in front of other people. “What do you want to talk about, my lord?”

  “I know why you’re angry at me. I was stupid.”

  As soon as we were in my room, Aurora did jerk her arm away from me. “If you’ll forgive me, my lord, ‘stupid’ doesn’t begin to describe it. You didn’t trust me.”

  “I didn’t trust myself.”

  “In either case, I’m not ready to talk. I will be, I’m sure, but not now.” She got halfway out the door and stopped. “By the way, I enjoyed my supper by the lake with my husband last night. We talked until well after dark. Felix knows how to listen to a woman.”

  “What else can he do?”

  Anger flared in her eyes and she stepped toward me. “Don’t talk like that, Gaius. Masters do cruel things to slaves. We don’t have any control over what happens to us. Like Medea said about women and their husbands, if Fortune gives us a good one, we should be thankful. Otherwise death is better. Felix is a gracious and thoughtful man. I may end up thanking you for arranging this marriage.”

  “Even worse. You’ll have to thank Livia. She insisted on it.”

  She looked out toward the garden. “Perhaps I should do that now. Here she comes.”

  Accompanied by my mother and Pompeia, Livia stalked—that was the only word I could find to describe her gait—across the garden. Aurora bowed to me and left before the three women stood before me.

  “I see no ghosts or monsters got to you during the night,” I said to Livia.

  “Do I detect disappointment in your voice? I did hear a scraping noise in the wall.”

  “Rats, most likely,” Tacitus said. “As much as I hate to think about it, they’re probably in all the walls in a country estate like this.”

  Pompeia took in a quick breath. “Do you think we have them at Narnia, too?”

  “I’m sure you do. Who knows what we’ll find when that wall comes down.”

  We were beginning to eat and discussing the size and arrangement of the addition when a cry of surprise went up from the other side of the wall. Not the surprise of delight, but more like fear.

  I stood. “We’d better see what that’s about.”

  Before I could take more than a step one of the workmen came running in through the back gate. “My lord, my lord! Come quickly. Please.”

  He turned around and ran back through the gate. All we could do was follow him.

  We turned the corner of the house and I could see that the top courses of the finished stone had been removed from the wall. The rubble had begun to tumble out. The workmen were standing around something, all looking down at the ground.

  “All right, fellows,” the man who had summoned us said. “Move aside.”

  The workers stepped back and I saw, lying on the ground amid the rough stones, a jumble of bones and a human skull.

  IV

  Fortune raises up and fortune brings low both the man who fares well and the one who fares badly.

  —Sophocles

  Stepping around the pile of rubble, I climbed two rungs up one of the ladders and looked into the interior of the wall. When I investigate a crime—and a skeleton in a wall certainly implied “crime”—I have to see the scene before anyone starts moving things. A lot can be learned from where things are lying and what is next to what. But, in this case, I hadn’t seen it until things had already been moved. I stepped off the ladder.

  “Pull out the rest of the bones,” I ordered my servants. The women standing behind me gasped.

  “But, my lord,” the head of the crew said, “do you want to disturb him…them? The dead don’t like—”

  “He’s already been disturbed, and I certainly don’t intend to leave him in there. Get him out.” I agree with Epicurus that the dead know nothing, but I didn’t want to say that in front of a group of superstitious servants.

  In a few moments the rest of the skeleton had been extracted and laid on the ground in a jumbled pile. The paleness of the bones glared against the gray stone as the sun rose full over the horizon. Tacitus and I knelt beside the skeleton. When I touched one of the bones, Livia, Pompeia, and my mother all gasped.

  “I don’t want those hands touching me,” Livia said with a shudder. “Not ever again.”

  I quickly picked up another bone, rubbed my hand up and down it to clean it off, and began laying the bones out in their proper arrangement. Tacitus assisted me.

  “You saw him,” Livia screeched. “He touched it! You all saw him.” She made a retching sound and ran back toward the rear gate, followed by her caterwauling mother.

  “Gaius, what…what are you doing?” my mother asked in shock.

  “What I have to do, Mother.” I hoped she didn’t realize that I was talking on two levels. “You’d best go back inside. And the rest of you, get back to your duties,” I said to the other workmen and servants who had come out to gawk. “Put someone on guard at the front and rear of the house and don’t let anyone come out here. We’ll call a halt to this work for now.” It was one order they were all eager to obey.

  That left only Julia and Aurora standing behind us. I knew I didn’t have to caution Aurora, but I asked Julia, “Are you sure you want to be here?”

  She seemed no more bothered than if she were watching us lay out pieces of a mosaic floor before cementing it in place. “Oh, I wouldn’t miss a chance to watch you two work, not after all Tacitus has told me. That’s part of an arm, isn’t it?” She ran a finger over the bone Tacitus had just picked up and then squeezed her own arm.

  “The upper part.” Tacitus held it beside his own arm and then placed it where it belonged. “There are two bones in the lower part. That’s why you can turn your wrist.” He ran his hand over Julia’s arm. I wondered what they would do when we found the leg bones or the pelvis.

  When we were finished, I lay down beside the skeleton we had reconstructed. “He was a little bit taller than you,” Tacitus said. “Of course, a lot of men are taller than you.”

  I ignored the jibe as I got up and dusted myself off. Tacitus is a full head taller than I am, as he likes to remind me every chance he gets.

  “How do you know it’s a man?” Julia asked.

  “We don’t,” Tacitus admitted. “I just said ‘he’ to avoid saying ‘it.’ Given the height, I think it’s more likely a male, but, without clothing or jewelry or any hints of that sort, we can’t tell.”

  “Wouldn’t there be some bits of cloth left?” Julia asked.

  Tacitus looked into the wall. “I would expect so. I think he must have been stripped before he was put in here.”

  “Possibly to make it more difficult to identify him,” Aurora said. “How do you think he died?”

  I wasn’t sure to whom the question was directed. I pointed to several cracked ribs. “Those could be injuries received from a beating.”

  “Or they could have been broken by stones being dropped on top of him after his body was placed in the wall,” Tacitus said.

  Getting to her knees, A
urora shook her head. “Stones dumped on top of him wouldn’t have hit with enough force to do that much damage, my lord. He was beaten.” She still wasn’t talking to me.

  “I agree. This is different, though.” I picked up the skull and pointed to a spot I had noticed on the side of it. “This hole is deeper. He was hit here by something with a point on it.”

  Aurora got up and stepped around us, paying close attention to the pieces of rock that had fallen out of the wall along with the skeleton. She picked up one and examined it like a woman looking over a jewel her lover has given her.

  “Have you found something?” I asked.

  “I think he might not have been dead when he was put into the wall.” She held the rock up in Julia’s direction and pointed to dark stains on it. “Isn’t that blood?”

  “It could be,” I said. “Probably where one of his wounds brushed against the rock.”

  Aurora peered closely at the stone. “My lord, I believe these are letters.”

  * * *

  “We need a chest or basket to put these bones in,” I said.

  “I’ll get something, my lord,” Aurora said before I could tell her to.

  “I’ll go with you.” Julia shook the dust off her gown and caught up with Aurora as they turned the corner of the house.

  “‘My lord’?” Tacitus arched his eyebrows. “Oh, you really are in trouble, Gaius.”

  “What do you mean? That’s the appropriate way for her to address me, especially out in the open like this, where someone might overhear us.” I was bluffing. Aurora’s coldness cut me deeply. I ached to take her aside and try to set things right between us.

  Tacitus waved his hand dismissively. “Well, you’re going to need all the luck that Tyche ring can bring you to sort this out.” He grabbed the strap around my neck and gave it a tug. “But we’ve got another problem here.” He knelt beside the skeleton.

  I was glad to turn my attention to something that I could deal with logically. “All right, what do we know?”

  “We know when the wall was built—twenty years ago—so we know when this person died. He, or she, was hit several times, including the blow to the head, then dumped between the two finished courses of stone. He was near the top, and rubble was thrown in on top of him.”

  I looked up at the wall, as though it could tell me something. “It must have happened when the wall was almost complete, or somebody would have noticed the smell as the body decayed. We need to find out exactly when the wall was finished—to the day, if possible.”

  “Your mother or some of the older servants must know.”

  “I’m not sure how reliable my mother’s memory is right now.” I picked up a leg bone and examined it more closely. “These marks look like something gnawed on the bone.”

  “Rats, I’m sure.”

  “Could they get in between the pieces of rubble?” I looked at the broken wall, afraid to visualize what might be going on inside it and the rest of the walls of the house.

  “Rats can squeeze in anywhere, my friend. As I said last night, I’m sure they’re scampering around in your walls right now. The scent of anything they can eat draws them. And they can eat almost anything.”

  I held the bone reverently. Being in the presence of a victim of a heinous crime—and murder is the most heinous of all crimes—I couldn’t help but feel the terror that must have come over this man when he realized what was happening to him. I closed my eyes and could feel the shock of a stone crashing into my head. If he was still alive when he was thrown into the wall, he must have seen—or felt, if it was dark—the rocks piling up on top of him, crushing him. Did he try to push them aside? Did he cry out? My breathing grew more rapid.

  “Gaius Pliny,” Tacitus said, “are you all right?”

  I took a deep breath. “Yes. I hope the poor fellow was dead before the rats went to work on him.”

  “He must have been killed at night, don’t you think?”

  I nodded. “He must have been. And I doubt that he was killed here. He was struck several times, in the head and the ribs, so there obviously was a struggle. That would have created some noise. Surely someone would have heard.”

  “It wasn’t someone in this house then, was it?”

  “I’ve never heard of anyone going missing, but I’ll certainly ask the older servants.”

  “But he must have been killed near here.” Tacitus looked round as though he could identify the spot where the murder had taken place. “Somebody wouldn’t have killed him in Comum, for example, then hauled him all the way out here to dispose of the body.”

  “No, that wouldn’t make any sense. But who would have been out here at night, near the time the wall was being finished? And why?”

  “It could have been somebody that people here would have known. That might be why there’s no sign of clothing or jewelry that someone could recognize.”

  “He might have been wearing something worth stealing.” I put the leg bone back in its place and climbed one of the ladders again, peering into the rubble between the two walls. “We need to pull more of this stone out. The rats might have carried something away from the body.”

  “They are attracted to shiny objects. Shall we call some of your servants?”

  “No, let’s do it ourselves, and carefully. The fewer people who know what we find, the better.”

  We dislodged some more of the rubble, coughing in the dust, and examined the stones for blood stains or any other markings.

  “Is that a nest of some sort?” I asked, pointing to a dark wad of material about an arm’s length below where we had found the skeleton.

  “I think it is,” Tacitus said from the other ladder. He reached down and dislodged the thing. “It’s made mostly of human hair. Black hair. There’s nothing in it. I don’t think it’s been used in a long time.”

  “Do you see any more rocks with bloodstains on them?”

  We turned over a number of the rocks, but they had gotten so jumbled when they started falling out of the wall that it was hard to tell what came from where.

  “Here’s one more,” Tacitus said, brushing dust off a rock and holding it up to the full light of the sun. “That could be a C, couldn’t it?”

  “It just looks like a smear to me.”

  * * *

  Julia caught up with me as we turned the corner of the house and slipped her arm through mine.

  “Slow down,” she said. “Those bones aren’t going anywhere.”

  I let her stop me. “I just need to get out of Gaius’ sight. I am so angry at him right now.”

  “You’ve made that abundantly clear. You obviously were talking to anyone but him.”

  “I can’t talk to him, not yet.” I squeezed her hand.

  “You have to be careful, Aurora. You know he loves you and he’s caught in a very difficult position. He didn’t want to arrange this marriage. Be patient with him. Don’t say or do anything you can’t make up for.”

  I knew she was right. And he had picked the perfect husband for me, a man who was incapable of coupling with me but was gentle and considerate. What upset me so badly was that he didn’t trust me enough to tell me before we came up here.

  “From what I saw of him,” Julia said, “Felix seems a nice enough man.”

  “He is. I actually enjoyed spending an evening with him.”

  “Do you think he understands what’s expected of him? I mean, about—” She made a gesture with her hands mimicking the act of coupling. I was surprised to see a noble woman doing something I would have expected from a slave. But Julia is full of surprises.

  I had promised Felix that I wouldn’t reveal his secret to anyone. As much as I felt the urge to talk to someone and as much as I liked Julia, she was not a person who could keep such a secret. “Yes,” I said, “he understands. There won’t be any problem about that.”

  Julia winked. “Too old, huh? Well, if he can’t get aroused by you, he must be almost dead.”

  I decided just to leave
it at that.

  * * *

  I expected Julia and Aurora to return with a container of some kind. After a while they did come back carrying a small wooden chest between them, the sort of thing we use to store clothing or blankets. What I didn’t expect was for Naomi to accompany them.

  “Will this do?” Julia asked as they set the chest down in front of me. Aurora looked up at me with an expression that seemed softer than any I’d seen so far today but still not warm, like embers buried in ashes, waiting to be fanned to life again.

  “That’s fine. It will even make it easier to burn the bones when we’re ready to do that. Whoever this was, I want to give him a proper funeral.”

  “My lord,” Naomi began, then paused.

  I turned to her. “Does my mother need something?”

  “No, my lord. I wanted to ask a favor of you.”

  “What sort of favor?”

  “It’s what you just said—about burning the bones. I’d like to ask you not to do that.”

  Having a Jewish slave in my household—and one who holds a prominent place as my mother’s closest confidante—I’ve learned some things about their customs. Instead of burning their dead, they place them in a tomb and come back a year or so later to gather the desiccated remains and place them in a container, usually a carved stone box. When my mother dies, I am determined that she will have a Roman burial. I will not let her suffer the indignity of rotting and having her body gnawed by rodents. A funeral pyre is final and purifying.

  “Why not?” I asked. “We have no reason to think this person was a Jew. We certainly can’t tell if he was circumcised.”

  “It’s highly unlikely that he was Jewish,” Tacitus put in.

  “But not impossible, my lord,” Naomi said. “It would cost you nothing to keep the bones. In fact, it would cost you much less than the expense of a funeral pyre for a person you don’t even know.”

  “We’re not going to do anything immediately,” I said. The bones were all the evidence I had of whatever had happened. “I’ll keep your request in mind.”