The Gods Help Those Read online

  “You said you were walking in the garden to calm the child. Why were you all the way back here by the gate?”

  She hesitated. “I didn’t want to disturb anyone, my lord. The tyke was fretful.”

  She still wasn’t telling me the whole truth. “Are you sure you weren’t about to leave the house? Perhaps to take the child to Regulus?”

  “Pssht! What would Regulus want with him, my lord? He’s got a son of his own—insufferable little brat that he is.” She clapped her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry, my lord. I shouldn’t speak so of my betters.”

  She had just expressed the opinion held by everyone who’d ever met Regulus’ pampered, overindulged son.

  “As you can see, my lord, the latch is still in place. I did not open the gate. I don’t see how your girl Aurora could have either, and left it latched like it is.”

  I sent Merione to her room with one of the other servants to keep watch on her. We would need her to feed the baby when we found him, as I was sure I would do as soon as I was free to search. With clouds hanging low, the sundial in the garden was useless, but it felt like it was close to the third hour when Tacitus arrived, with Josephus only moments behind him. Tacitus was accompanied by half a dozen servants, while Josephus risked walking the streets by himself. I hadn’t seen him in a couple of years. His face was as downcast as it had ever been any time I’d been around him before. His gray-and-white beard accented the melancholy that seemed to hang over him. His olive skin and general Eastern appearance contrasted with his Roman toga bearing the equestrian stripe.

  Tacitus knows more about Josephus as a historian than I do. My uncle had done his best to inculcate in me an interest in history—while Vesuvius erupted I was copying passages from Livy that he’d assigned me—but oratory and poetry crowded out other growth in my literary garden.

  “What are you writing now?” Tacitus asked after we exchanged pleasantries.

  Josephus, in his sad, deep voice, said, “I’ve begun a large-scale study of Jewish history, based on our holy books and other sources.”

  “I look forward to reading it,” Tacitus said.

  “You may be the only one,” Josephus replied. “Domitian’s entirely against the idea. My servant has heard rumors that he may even throw me out of my rooms. I’m not sure how much longer he’ll feel obligated to maintain me as Vespasian and Titus did.”

  Tacitus and I exchanged a glance when we caught the singular “servant.” Since his surrender to Domitian’s father, Josephus had been living in the imperial residence on the Palatine. Vespasian had treated him as an honored guest, Titus more like a family member. Domitian treats him like a tenant he wants to evict. He turned to me. “You said you needed my assistance, Gaius Pliny. How can I help you?”

  “A man was found dead in my warehouse when it collapsed the day before yesterday.” I decided not to mention how he died. Being asked to identify a dead man is not as frightening, or as incriminating, as being asked to identify a murder victim. “I thought you might know who he is.”

  “Why would you think such a thing? This must be more than just a random dead man.”

  “He is circumcised, and he wears an equestrian stripe. There can’t be that many Jews in our class in Rome.”

  Josephus nodded once and pursed his lips, as if pondering some philosophical problem. “Can you not identify him from his signet ring?”

  “He wasn’t wearing one.”

  “We think someone removed it before we got there,” Tacitus offered.

  “Well, that is certainly curious. I might even call it ominous.” Josephus stroked his beard. “Where is the man?”

  I turned toward the room at the back of the garden. “He’s back here. I must warn you, he is getting to the point that we’re going to have to dispose of the body very soon.”

  “Today,” Tacitus said with a grimace. “Yesterday would have been better.”

  Josephus drew himself up. “Let’s make this quick then. The odor of rotting flesh has never sat easy on my stomach.” Maybe that was why he surrendered and tried to urge those defending Jerusalem to surrender.

  That odor seemed to be advancing toward us as we approached the room. Josephus put a hand over his mouth. As quickly as I could, I opened the door to the room and pulled the blanket down far enough that Josephus could see the man’s face. He took a quick look and stepped away, waving for me to close the door.

  Tacitus and I followed Josephus as he hurried to the fish pond in the middle of the garden. Kneeling, he picked up a handful of water and rubbed it over his face, then repeated the process and blew air out of his nostrils.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “I just need to get rid of that stench.”

  I summoned the first servant I saw and told him to tell Phineas to take a message to Malachi that he could come get the body.

  “May I offer you some wine?” I asked Josephus.

  “No, thank you. I think I’ll be all right.” He moved to a bench at the opposite end of the garden from the room where the dead man lay and sat down. “I heard you mention Malachi.”

  “Two of my servants attend his synagogue. Do you know him?”

  “I know of him. He would never speak to me or allow me in his synagogue. You know all about that, of course.”

  I nodded. Josephus’ story was well-known, and I had talked with him about it on the couple of occasions our paths had crossed. He always brought up the subject. I waited, then asked, “Can you tell us anything about that man?”

  “Well, to begin with, his name is Julius Berenicianus.”

  “Bere—” Tacitus stuttered.

  “Berenicianus, son of Berenice.”

  “Titus’ mistress? That Berenice?”

  Josephus nodded. “Julia Berenice. She’s the only one I know of.”

  We sat down beside him. “This sounds like something of a story,” Tacitus said with anticipation. It did to me, too, but I had almost hoped for a simple “no” so I could get on to finding Aurora and the baby.

  “I saw Berenice when Titus brought her back after the war,” Tacitus said. “She was quite a striking woman. Somewhat older than Titus, though, wasn’t she?”

  Josephus nodded. “By about ten years, although precise information about her is hard to come by. I believe she was born in the fourteenth year of Tiberius’ reign.”

  “So that would make her about fifty-seven.”

  “I believe so. She was the daughter of Herod Agrippa the Elder. She had a brother of the same name and a sister named Drusilla, along with two or three other siblings. Berenice is a beautiful woman, but Drusilla was quite stunning. Berenice was jealous of her and did everything she could to interfere in her life and make her miserable.”

  “You’re using the past tense. Is Drusilla dead?”

  “Yes. And this will interest you I’m sure, Gaius Pliny. Drusilla was in Pompeii when Vesuvius erupted. She and your uncle are the only two people, out of the thousands who died there, whom anyone has been able to identify by name.”

  “Back to Berenice,” Tacitus said. “From what I’ve heard, she had an incestuous relationship with her brother, the younger Herod Agrippa.”

  “That is entirely likely,” Josephus said. “Her brother never married. Berenice, after the death of a husband—and she lost several—would always return to Agrippa’s court. I’ve been told that they adored one of our holy books, a love poem attributed to King Solomon. It contains lines such as ‘You have ravished my heart, my sister, my bride’ and ‘I come to my garden, my sister, my bride.’ ”

  I wanted to get this story back on track. “This Julius Berenicianus wasn’t Titus’ child, was he?”

  “Oh, no,” Josephus said quickly. “As I said, Berenice was married several times. The first time, as one might expect, was when she was about fourteen, to a member of a prominent family in Alexandria. He died after a couple of years.” Josephus stroked his beard. “I’m sorry to be so vague about dates and ages, but information abou
t this family is not easy to come by. A few years later Berenice was married again, this time to her uncle, also named Herod. He was the father of the poor fellow who’s stinking up your back room, and of another son, Julius Hyrcanus. There is no record of him since the early days of Rome’s war with the Jews. He—that, is Hyrcanus—simply disappeared.”

  “Killed?”

  “Most likely, but I can’t prove it or disprove it.”

  “The dead man,” Tacitus said. “How old was he?”

  “He must have been about thirty or so.”

  That would fit with my estimate of his age. “Why was he named after his mother?”

  “Berenice was a wealthy, strong-willed woman. If Titus could have married her, she would have made herself queen of Rome, just like Nero’s mother tried to do.”

  I chuckled. “My tutor, Quintilian, once told me that, during Titus’ time in power, he appeared in court to speak in a case on behalf of Berenice, only to find her sitting as a judge in the case.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me at all,” Josephus said.

  “You said she was wealthy,” Tacitus said. “So she’s dead?”

  “I don’t actually know,” Josephus said. “No one, so far as I can determine, has seen her for almost five years. She left Rome, as I’m sure you know, because people disapproved so strongly of her relationship with Titus that he had to send her away. I have no idea what happened to her after that. I’m also quite surprised to learn that one of her sons was here in the city.”

  “ ‘One of’?”

  “Yes. She had several. One died in his teens, I believe. Two of them were her sons by her uncle, who was also her husband. One of those disappeared by the end of the war. The other I have only tidbits of information about.”

  “Do you know if her son was married or had any children?” I asked.

  Josephus shook his head. “Getting information about him is even harder than uncovering anything reliable about his mother.”

  “Then it should interest you to know,” I said, “that in the warehouse, along with this man and several others, we found a male child who had been circumcised.”

  Josephus’ eyebrows arched with interest. “Was the child alive?”

  “Yes, he is.”

  “Where is he? May I see him?”

  “We brought him here,” I said, “but at the moment I…I—”

  “What Gaius Pliny means to say is that…well, he’s lost him,” Tacitus said with a smirk.

  “Now, it’s not that simple, and you know it.”

  Josephus’ interest turned to agitation. “You’ve got to find him, Gaius Pliny. Considering how wealthy Berenice was—or perhaps is—that child could be the heir to an immense fortune.”

  That might explain why Regulus wanted him, I thought. Could it also be why his father—if that’s who he was—had been stabbed twice in the back?

  Tacitus invited Josephus to see his library and to talk more about Josephus’ proposed history of the Jews. I assured him that I did not need his assistance to find Aurora and would let him know as soon as she and the baby were back in my house.

  “Do you want me to send Julia over here?” he asked before joining Josephus at the door. “Aurora’s behavior obviously has something to do with…what happened last summer. Julia could be some help to her.”

  “I don’t think that will be necessary, but thank you for offering.”

  As soon as the door closed behind them, I headed for the rear gate in the garden. Merione may not have been able to imagine how Aurora could have gone through the gate while leaving it latched from the inside, but I knew exactly how she did it.

  As children, one afternoon we had listened to my uncle and some of his friends talk about how a crime might be committed in a room with all the doors and windows locked or barred from the inside. They proposed a contest, with a prize of an amphora of Falernian for the first one to devise a method. Taking up the challenge, Aurora and I had noticed the crack in the rear door of the garden, just above the latch, which was a piece of wood that fit into a U-shaped bracket. We figured out how to use a slip knot on a piece of string that would fit through the crack. Once outside, we could drop the latch into place and then pull hard enough that the knot would come untied and the string could be drawn through the crack. We never revealed our secret to my uncle, and none of his friends ever claimed the prize.

  Now, taking three servants with me, I went out the gate and turned right. The street behind the house is barely more than a narrow lane to allow deliveries of supplies to the houses. I stopped at the third house down the hill from mine and told my servants to wait on the street. This house did not extend quite all the way back to the narrow lane. As children, Aurora and I had learned from an elderly servant that, at some time long-past, there had been a well here, for the common use of all the houses in this block. All of these houses now had water piped in from the aqueducts, so the well had been covered over and forgotten. But the flat stone covering the opening wasn’t difficult for an adult—or two children—to push aside. As soon as I did, I heard the fretting of a baby.

  I squeezed past the stone, leaving enough of an opening to provide some light. Several step-like ledges ran around the shaft of the well. That’s where Aurora was sitting, in tears, with the child sucking on one of her breasts and crying intermittently. I hardly recognized her in the dim light, with her long hair streaming over her shoulders and her eyes wild, maniacal.

  “I can’t feed him, Gaius,” she cried. “He’s so hungry, and I can’t feed him.”

  I sat close beside her but did not touch her. “My darling, I know you’re grieving over the baby you lost—”

  “You lost him, too, Gaius. Don’t you ever feel that you lost him, too?”

  Her voice was rising, frantic. I kept my own voice calm, trying to reassure her. “Of course I do. It was our child.”

  “He wasn’t an ‘it.’ He was us.” She slapped me, then looked at me in horror, drawing back slowly. “Oh, Gaius, my lord! What have I done? Please forgive me!” Still holding the baby, she fell at my feet, a precarious perch on the narrow ledge. “I think I’m going mad.”

  I took her arms and pulled her up, but she wouldn’t go any farther than her knees. When I lifted her chin, her face was contorted with tears.

  “I know what would happen to me, my lord, if I did that to any other master in any other house in Rome, and I know you have to punish me. I’ll accept whatever you decide.” She turned her face down again, drawing the baby so close to her I was afraid she might smother the child.

  Pulling her up to sit beside me, I wrapped my arms around her and tried to loosen her grip on the infant. “How could you think I would ever hurt you? No one saw what just happened here. I know it will never happen again.”

  “No, my lord. I swear it, and I beg your forgiveness.”

  “You have it.” I kissed her forehead and stroked the baby’s head. “This is not between master and slave. It’s between us. I know you’re deeply distraught over the loss of our child. But you knew you were carrying him. You’d been thinking about him for a while, without telling me. I didn’t know anything until the moment you had the miscarriage. I clearly didn’t appreciate just how much it has affected you.”

  “It has, Gaius. No one else knows about it, except Tacitus and Julia, and that’s two people too many. I have no one to talk to. Any time I start to feel sad about it, I have to choke it down.”

  She let me pull her closer beside me. “Felix knows, doesn’t he?” I asked as tenderly as I could.

  She shook her head. “He knows I was hurt, but I never told him all of it. The only time I can let my feelings out is at night, when I’m with you. That’s why I cry so much.”

  “We could have found a baby for you to raise. There are dozens of them abandoned every day in Rome.”

  Aurora looked at me in disbelief. “How can you even say that? Nobody would understand if I suddenly wanted a baby. Forgive me, Gaius, but that was a stupid thing t
o say.”

  I could feel my ears burning. “Yes, I guess you’re right.”

  “Besides, it’s not just a matter of a baby, any baby. I feel—no, I know—that I was meant to find this baby and to care for him.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier all around if you told Felix about your miscarriage? He would support you if he knew the whole story.”

  “No, absolutely not. Anyone who knows could let a careless word slip and Livia could find out. If she did, there would be nothing you could do to protect me, or yourself.”

  “So you keep holding it back—”

  “Until it spews out, like Vesuvius erupting.”

  “And woe to anyone in the path.” I hugged her. “Men and women, I guess, express their feelings about such things differently.”

  She stroked the baby’s head and kissed him. “I’m not sure men even have feelings about their children. If they did, how could they discard them or sell them as slaves, the way my father did?”

  I could not argue with her on that point. It would be better to get her focused on the baby. “You said the child was hungry. He needs to be fed. Let’s go home and let Merione take care of that, if she’s still willing after you attacked her.”

  “She was leaving the house! I had to stop her.”

  “She says she was just walking around in the garden, trying to settle the child and get him to sleep. She happened to be by the rear gate and you over-reacted.”

  Aurora shook her head vigorously. “She’s lying. I was watching her from the arbor. She looked around to make sure no one could see her and then she headed straight for the gate. She had her hand on the latch. Another moment and she would have been gone. I don’t trust her, Gaius. She is, first and foremost, Regulus’ servant. Can’t we get someone else?”

  “I’ll do my best to find someone.” We sat quietly for a few moments until her breathing became lighter and steadier. “Are you ready to go home now?”