With full light we went over the scene. As is common with stables, the ground in front, where the body lay, was a mash of trampled mud and straw. Footprints, both human and animal, were so plentiful that they told us nothing. I examined the ground closely for any foreign matter, but there was nothing. Just the beautiful girl, whose eyes stared up at nothing, expressing nothing, not even the reproach I deserved.
“Well, my dear,” I said, “I don’t think we’re going to learn anything here.”
“Don’t be so sure, my love,” Julia said. To my horror, she further opened the unfortunate girl’s gown and felt her breasts, then her belly. Apparently satisfied, she straightened. “This girl is—was, I should say, pregnant. About three months along.”
Her words did not shock me at all, but her actions did. Romans do not at all mind turning live bodies into dead ones. We do it all the time. However, we have a ritual revulsion for touching dead bodies before the proper rites have been performed. Death contaminates, and the purificatory lustrum must be performed before the body can be handled. And here was Julia, the very personification of patrician rectitude, touching the body of a murdered slave.
Mind you, I did not doubt for a second that her judgment was correct. Few women knew more about pregnancy than Julia, since the subject was her passion. She suffered from the Julians’ famous infertility and she had been to every midwife, medium, and quack physician in Rome to find a cure. Still, as many years as we tried, she had achieved pregnancy rarely, carried a child to term only twice, and these infants had not survived their first four months. I accepted this as the gods’ will where it came to the Julians, as opposed to my own family, whose fertility was little less than pestilential. In our circles, where you cannot produce heirs, you adopt. But Julia resisted this expedient, still hoping to produce an heir of good Julian-Caecilian stock.
“What of it?” I asked, when I got over my shock. “Girl slaves get pregnant all the time, and a beauty like this one must have had more opportunity than most. Julia, you’ve contaminated yourself! We’ll have to summon a priest and perform a lustrum.”
“Don’t be an idiot!” she snapped. “Touching the dead can’t contaminate anyone. The gods aren’t that petty.”
I was astonished. This was the first time I had ever heard Julia speak against ritual law. Of course, I never truly credited all that primitive mumbo-jumbo myself, but I had never seen any point in taking chances. Moreover, I had always thought that old, patrician families like the Julians were even more tradition-bound than mine. But Julia had become something of a freethinker. She had been consulting with Alexandrian philosophers.
“All right, I grant your point. What difference does it make that this poor child was pregnant?”
“We can’t know, but it’s something we didn’t know before. As you’ve so often intoned to me in such portentous tones, my love, ‘every fact, however innocuous it may seem at the moment, may have a crucial bearing upon the case.’ ”
“Yes, I did say that, didn’t I? I think it was that lecture I delivered in the Basilica Julia just after that business with the flood and Scaurus’s death.”
“Maybe you just practiced on me,” she said, with that tired patience she sometimes showed when she judged me an especial idiot. “But we have here a temple whose staff are expected to be renowned for chastity. This girl’s condition coincides with the mass murder of its priesthood. Might there not be some connection?”
“Well, I suppose so,” I said, still having trouble dealing with the fact that Julia had just handled a corpse with her bare hands. “But what might that connection be?”
“That’s your field, dear,” she said, turning away. “As for me, I will concentrate upon the staff of the Oracle, and the women of the district.” She left a warning unspoken: I had better be circumspect about the women of the district. I had learned to heed Julia’s warnings in such matters.
So I summoned young Sextus Vespillo. He appeared with commendable dispatch, and turned pale when he saw the girl’s corpse. He was old enough not to be dismayed by the occasional corpse, but he clearly had been fond of the girl. I gave him a moment to regain his composure.
“I heard there had been another killing,” he said, when his color returned. “I didn’t know who it was.”
“It’s time you told me how you encountered this girl and how she came to reveal the hidden tunnel to you.” We walked from the stables and turned our steps toward the temple. I had no urgent business there but it was more pleasant than the crime scene.