The vestal vanishes lmorb-12 Read online

  He was about to bluster, but I cut him off.

  ‘What is it about Paulinus that you don’t want me to hear?’ I made a guess — it wasn’t difficult. ‘This is something connected with the Druids, isn’t it?’

  Priscilla put down her cup and took the tray from Trullius’s hand. ‘You tell him, husband, or I’ll do it myself. And don’t look at me like that. You were the one who insisted we should tell him everything, because he was sent here by Lavinia’s family. Well, from what he’s told us, this concerns Lavinia as well. You can’t go on supposing — now — that she simply ran away?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘Oh, by all the gods! Audelia has been murdered and her hands and head cut off. Do you want the same thing happening to that little girl? Vain and self-important as she might have been, she was just a child. Spoiled by her parents and her nursemaid — that was obvious — but nothing to deserve a dreadful fate like that.’ She slammed the tray down on the table. ‘Tell him, Trullius! You can’t escape it now. This household is already implicated in this mystery. It’s obvious that the family will blame us when they know — and it won’t help you to start concealing things.’

  Trullius reached out and poured himself another cupful from the jug. His one good hand was trembling as he raised it to his mouth but he wiped his lips against his sleeve and said, with violence, ‘Oh great Mars, woman, why did I listen to your pleas? Why did we ever have these people here? Of course we had no intimation at the time…’ He took another gulp. ‘It’s like this, citizen. My wife is quite convinced — though it is only hearsay and supposition on her part…’

  ‘Oh, get on with it,’ the woman said. ‘It’s Paulinus and Secunda, citizen. Their servant was a Druid. And there’s no supposition. They told me so themselves — although they claim they didn’t know she was a member of the sect until she came to trial.’

  I stared at her. ‘ She? It was a maidservant?’

  Priscilla pursed her lips. ‘Well, not exactly that. They don’t have what you and I would call a proper set of slaves. One or two labourers to run the farm, and some old crone who cleans the house for them, but otherwise they seem to do everything themselves, like common peasants. This was an outside wet nurse whom Paulinus employed.’

  Trullius agreed. ‘Used her to suckle that afflicted girl of his — because the mother was so frail she could not feed the child herself. This woman seemed ideal — she was healthy, clean and strong, lived not far away, and had just finished suckling children of her own. She took the foster-infant in to live with her, for a while at least.’

  I nodded. This was not an unusual arrangement in a Roman family. Many Roman mothers farm their children out to some healthy female who has ample milk to spare, in return for a small income and the certainty of good nutritious food — which of course the parents are anxious to provide, since their own offspring will benefit from it. Only the wealthy have a slave-nurse come to live with them, as Lavinia’s family had evidently done. ‘But this wet nurse proved to be a follower of the Druids?’

  Priscilla laughed harshly. ‘Not just the wet nurse. The whole household was involved — the very house where the infant had been kept. The husband went off to the woods each day — supposedly collecting firewood to sell — but actually fighting on the rebel side and supplying them with food and information all the time.’

  ‘Though, whatever anyone may tell you to the contrary,’ Trullius said, ‘I am sure Paulinus had no idea of that. He was only anxious that his daughter should be fed, especially since the mother was getting feebler all the time — until, of course, eventually she died.’

  His wife was making impatient noises now. ‘Well, tell him everything. Don’t stop the story now. Tell him how Paulinus kept up the arrangement for three years or more, until the child was weaned — though by that time it was clear that the thing was deaf and mute and there was no chance of it ever having a proper life. Couldn’t even sensibly be offered as a slave.’

  I could feel some sympathy with Paulinus over this. A deaf person is regarded as a ‘hopeless maniac’ under Roman law — meaning that education is impossible — and therefore the person has no legal rights at all and cannot get married or inherit property. I said aloud, ‘It must have been difficult for Paulinus.’

  Priscilla laughed again. ‘Indeed it was. He spent a fortune which he didn’t have, trying to find some sort of cure for it. And now tell me he wouldn’t be glad to earn some gold, spying for the Romans, if he got the chance. Though I for one would not blame him if he did. After what the Druids have been doing with their curses around here, they deserve their punishment.’

  ‘You think that he betrayed the wet nurse to the authorities?’ I said. If so, it opened up a whole new avenue of thought.

  Trullius shook his head. ‘I’m quite certain he did nothing of the kind. I don’t believe he had it in him to be cruel to anyone. And Secunda is the same.’

  Priscilla looked at him sharply. ‘She’s his second wife, of course, and they’ve not been married long. She’s very dutiful. Of course she would support him in anything he did. But Paulinus would do anything to save his child from threat, including betraying his grandmother, let alone the nurse. Though admittedly he kept her on in his employ right up to the night when they arrested her.’

  ‘The wet nurse was still with them?’ I was surprised at that. ‘Surely it is not the custom to retain the nurse, after the child has been weaned and gone back home again?’

  Priscilla sighed, as if explaining to a simpleton. ‘But the child was deaf, of course. It could not be left, and no ordinary slave could cope with it, poor things. And Paulinus refused to do the obvious and have the child put down — she was the only reminder of his beloved wife, I heard him say. So he paid the former wet nurse to come in every day and take care of the girl.’ She glanced at Trullius. ‘My husband will not have it, but there must have been a cost, and everybody knows that household wasn’t rich. Yet now he’s suddenly got money in his purse, and is talking about buying a pair of live-in slaves. Don’t you think that is significant?’

  Trullius was pouring yet another cup of wine. ‘Don’t listen to her, citizen. There’s nothing odd at all. Secunda brought him a small dowry when they wed, no doubt part of that was used to cover the expense. And it was sensible. The child had known the wet nurse all her life and was fond of her. They even managed to communicate, after a fashion — so Paulinus said — waving their hands about and drawing on a slate. I simply don’t believe that he’d betray the wet nurse to the law, whatever the reward. Especially since he knew what punishment they would inflict on her.’

  I was appalled. ‘They threw her to the beasts?’

  The two householders exchanged a glance at this, but it was Trullius who spoke. ‘It didn’t come to that. Paulinus did his best for them, I heard Audelia say. Bribed the guard to give them hemlock they could drink and die with dignity — both the wet nurse and her child and husband too.’ He rounded on his wife. ‘Would he have done that, woman, if he’d betrayed them first? It isn’t in his character. You say yourself he is a gentle man. And yet you think he’d do a thing like that? It makes no kind of sense.’

  She tossed her head. ‘Even a good man knows his duty when it comes to Druids — and serve them right, I say. I don’t believe he’d let them suffer, if he could save them that, but after the atrocities that took place in the wood, he might have felt obliged to name them to the authorities. After all, he is a citizen, and related to an important family, even if he isn’t a wealthy man himself. And that is just the point. Here are the authorities offering a reward, and suddenly the wet nurse is arrested and arraigned, and those two, who never had a proper establishment before, are suddenly in the market for not one slave, but two.’

  ‘One who is mute, and the other a mere child. An untrained one at that, from what I glimpsed of him. Cheap bargains, both of them.’ He gulped down the contents of his cup. ‘Don’t be so stupid, wife! Secunda’s dowry would have paid for slaves like
that a thousand times.’

  I cut across the bickering. ‘Did you say they had not been married long?’

  Trullius shook his head, and said, now with the careful diction of the slightly drunk, ‘Not very long at all, I understand. A month or so at most. I’m not sure exactly when. Paulinus told me he’d been looking for a wife to help him raise the girl, but most women would not take on such a burden all their lives. Then he met Secunda, who was longing for a child, and didn’t care what defects it might have. Not a wealthy marriage, but it has worked out very well. He is clearly fond of her, and she is fond of him.’

  The woman snorted. ‘They were lucky then.’ She sobered suddenly. ‘Or perhaps he’s not. His first wife died and now Secunda clearly isn’t well.’

  ‘Yet she went to the slave-market?’ I said, thinking of the markets I have known myself — both as a purchaser and as a slave for sale. They are unpleasant places: the buyers prodding muscles and assessing teeth, the menfolk leering and pinching the females on display, amid the nauseating smell of fear and unwashed flesh. ‘Hardly a place for anybody frail.’

  ‘Wanted to see what her husband bought, I suppose,’ Trullius replied. He’d begun to wave the wine-cup in an emphatic way. ‘And when they’d finished shopping they didn’t have to walk. They had their cart to take them home again. They didn’t leave it here — I could hardly have a farm-cart in the court with Vestal Virgins here — Paulinus took it to a hiring-stables at the gate where they look after passing horses overnight. And before my wife has theories about that, I’m sure Audelia gave them money so they could pay for it! I know she’d slipped Secunda some jewels before she left, and I suspect she let her have a purse as well. Certainly there was some kind of parting gift and it would be like Audelia to be generous.’

  ‘Did you see the party after they came back from town?’ I asked.

  He nodded. ‘Of course. They came for their possessions, citizen. They had some luggage which they left here while they shopped — another travelling box: much rougher than Audelia’s, of course, and a lid that didn’t fit. They’d brought a lot of stuff with them in fact. There was a present for Audelia, I know — I saw Secunda hand it to her in the coach — and they’d brought goods to trade in town while they were here: several amphorae from the weight of it, most likely full of produce from the farm. They clearly sold a lot of it, as well. I saw Paulinus take a clanking sack of something into town but all I saw him carrying when he came back again was a woven rug that he said Secunda chose.’ The wine was making him rather garrulous.

  ‘You see?’ Priscilla said, triumphantly to me. ‘Buying not only slaves, but luxuries. And they can’t have bartered all the goods they’d brought — the box was still quite heavy when they brought it down.’

  Trullius waved his cup at her. ‘But, woman, since the Vestal had given them her purse they didn’t need to barter everything. And there wasn’t that much left. The box was not too heavy for one man to lift. Paulinus lifted it onto the cart himself.’

  That rather puzzled me. ‘Yet they had slaves by then? You would have expected them to bring the baggage down.’

  Priscilla answered that. ‘They would have been no use. A skinny woman — who in any case stayed attending Secunda in the cart — and a scruffy little lad who looked too thin and weak to carry anything. Unprepossessing creatures, both of them. Personally, I wouldn’t have them in the house. Whatever Paulinus paid for them, it was a lot too much. And that won’t be the end of the expense. They’ll both want new tunics, by the looks of it — the one the boy was wearing was scarcely more than rags.’

  Trullius shook his head. ‘You always have a theory about everything! Make up your mind which one you think is true. One moment Paulinus is taking Roman gold, and the next he can’t afford a decent slave. Anyway, I don’t know how you saw enough to know. They looked all right to me.’ He turned to me. ‘And that is all we can tell you, citizen. If you want more information you should ask the slave trader — he’ll be in the market for another day. You can see him in the morning, if you are quick enough.’ He seized the lamp again. ‘Though you will have to rise betimes. So if you would like to follow me upstairs…?’

  Priscilla had leapt up to her feet at once. ‘Husband, don’t be so ridiculous! Of course he doesn’t want to go to bed. There’s someone he must see.’

  ‘Can’t it wait till morning?’ he grumbled. ‘It’s far too late to see anyone tonight.’

  ‘It’s not too late for this! Can’t you see what’s clearer than the candle on that wall? Look at what’s happened. When Lavinia disappeared, we didn’t think of Druids. We had no idea that they might be involved. But now it seems certain that they had a hand in this. This citizen is right. Someone in this household must have dealings with the sect — someone told them who was coming here, someone who let them in. And it must have been someone who was in the house today — there have been no visitors, till this citizen arrived.’

  ‘Except the temple messenger,’ Trullius pointed out, putting down the lamp and fumbling to pour the last few drops of wine.

  She treated this with the disdain that it deserved. ‘Even you, Trullius, don’t believe that it was him. But someone was clearly in contact with the Druids. It wasn’t you and me. It certainly wasn’t Audelia herself. It wasn’t the raedarius or the horse-rider, they both left here when Audelia was alive. Paulinus and Secunda may have had unwitting dealings with a Druid, but they’re hardly followers, and anyway they were gone before Lavinia disappeared. So unless one of our own servants is involved — which I don’t believe — there is only one person left that it could be.’

  The metal cup dropped from Trullius’s good hand and bounced sharply on the floor, hard enough to make a big dent in the rim. He stood mouth open, looking at his wife. ‘You mean…? You can’t mean…? Not Lavinia’s nurse?’

  Priscilla smiled triumphantly. ‘Well done, husband. I was sure you’d work it out. Now aren’t you glad you let me lock her up?’ She took the lamp and motioned me to rise. ‘Follow me, citizen. I’ll take you there at once.’

  SEVENTEEN

  I followed Priscilla through a musty painted passage, out into a sort of courtyard where — by the smell — the kitchen and the stables were. But the kitchen fire was evidently doused again by now and it was cold and dark out there, so that even with the oil-lamp it was hard to see. A quiet whinnying from a building close nearby suggested where the horses and the horsemen had been housed. There was no light from there either — even the slaves were clearly all abed, as I was beginning to wish I was, myself.

  I stumbled on a cobblestone, bruising my big toe. ‘You’ve got her in the stable?’ I said, as my mishap brought the party to a halt.

  Priscilla laughed. ‘We’ve got her over there.’ She gestured to a squat little circular building on the right, which I had not noticed up till now. It was hardly taller than my shoulder and an arms-width round, with a low entrance at the front and a sort of open chimney at the top. ‘It used to be the kiln, though the roof’s part-ruined now. But it’s got solid walls, apart from the fire-hole in front, and we block that up at night. We use this now as a punishment-cell for disobedient slaves.’ She bent down to roll a large stone from the entrance as she spoke, and I found myself peering into a tiny clay-lined space, cold and damp and disagreeable.

  There was a woman in there, blinking in the light. She was no longer young. Her plump flesh was sagging and her reddish hair — pulled back from her face into a coiled plait — was streaked with grey. She was huddled in the centre, knees pulled to her chin, and shivering in the draught from the chimney-space. In the glow of the oil-lamp I could see that her hands and feet were loosely bound with rope, and her thin tunic was the orange-colour of the livery worn by the servants in Lavinius’s country house.

  She squinted up at us. ‘What do you want now? You’ve no right to keep me here. I’ve told you all I know. I’ll answer to my mistress, if to anyone. She knows I would have guarded Lavinia with my life! Send me back
to her.’ Her voice was harsh, almost defiant, but she spoke Latin well. Then she noticed me. ‘Who is the citizen in the toga?’ she enquired. ‘Has he come to harry me as well?’

  ‘He will ask the questions!’ Priscilla snapped, but she answered anyway. ‘His name’s Libertus, and he’s been sent here by Lavinia’s family to find out what happened and what you know of it.’

  It was not quite the truth and I was on the point of setting matters straight but the prisoner forestalled me. Something that might have been a spark of hope flashed into her eyes. ‘Cyra sent you?’ she said, eagerly.

  ‘She knew that I was coming,’ I agreed. ‘But really I am here at Publius’s behest to find news of his bride. But then I learned that Lavinia had disappeared as well, and I am bound to investigate that matter too, of course.’

  The hope — if that was what it was — had died. She looked away and stared dully at the floor. ‘Then I really cannot help you, citizen. As I told these householders, I can’t imagine what would make Lavinia run away. She seemed so happy with her cousin yesterday.’

  Her voice had softened, and she spoke with such concern that I was moved to murmur, ‘You were fond of your young charge?’

  She raised her eyes. They sparkled in the darkness like a wolf’s. ‘It is no secret, citizen. I adored that little girl. Loved her like I would have loved my own, if it had lived. I swear to you, citizen, I would lay down my life rather than have any harm come to that child. So can you imagine what a shock it was, when I went into the room and found she wasn’t there? When I’d been on guard outside the door all day, as well? I was asked, you know, to fetch a tray for her and when I went back, it was to find she wasn’t there — almost as if I’d been sent deliberately away. It almost breaks my heart — just ask that woman there!’

  It was clear that she was speaking with completely sincerity. Yet something was stirring in the cobwebs of my brain. There was something about this account that did not quite make sense, but I could not for the life of me work out what it was. I searched my memory. Surely this version of events tallied exactly with what I’d heard before? Yet I still felt that some important detail was eluding me. I was still puzzling over it when Trullius spoke up.