Pliny abandoned all attempts at speech and merely nodded. The emperor’s grip still held him fast.
“I knew I could count on you. Now then, you need only attend the procession and sacrifices tomorrow morning and then again on the Nones. The rest of your time you will devote to this matter. Understood? And now go home to your lovely child-bride. I envy you. You see the dragon I married!” Domitian let out an unpleasant laugh. “Come and kiss me, Gaius Plinius.” Domitian offered his cheek, a mark of signal favor.
Pliny and the city prefect emerged into the sultry September night. The sun had set hours ago and, except for a lamp glowing from a window here and there, darkness covered the great city like a lid on a pot. The two men stood talking at the foot of the steps while their litter slaves stretched and shook themselves.
“This business tonight in the furnace room. You must have known,” Pliny said, trying not to show his anger.
“Not in every particular,” Fulvus answered easily.
“But inviting the wives!”
“Much more likely than their husbands to let something spill. Now let us have done with complaining and turn to the matter of Verpa.”
“You might at least have prepared me for that! I’m a probate lawyer. I’m not used to dealing with criminals—at least, not this sort of criminal.”
Fulvus waved off the note of indignation. “Nothing could be simpler. Don’t worry the thing to death like one of your convoluted inheritance cases. Just have a look around the place tomorrow, take depositions from the son and the woman Scortilla—she’s a bit of a whore, I’m told. Do you know her? No? What chaste ears you have. Question the slaves, of course. Oh, don’t look so queasy, they won’t need much tickling. Someone will talk, they always do.”
“The slaves are being confined in the house?”
“Yes, well the Tullianum is full up at the moment with more important prisoners awaiting a—ah—final disposition of their cases, if you get my meaning.”
Pliny knew what he meant.
“So, no place else to put them. Anyway, then all you have to do is sit down and write an impassioned speech condemning them. All in a day’s work for a lawyer, I would have thought. And the emperor and I will be most grateful to you. Now, I’ve assigned you a centurion—manners a bit rough, but a good man—and five troopers from the City Battalions, all I can spare, I’m afraid. As for the slaves, I’ve ordered them collared and shackled in their sleeping quarters, and that’s where they’ll stay until we execute them. Why can’t this great city of ours build a proper prison?” He raised his arms to heaven. “Well, goodnight, my friend. Best to your wife.”
As they mounted their litters, Fulvus called back, “Full dress uniform tomorrow. Mustn’t let the Praetorians outshine us.”
Chapter Four
Late that night Pliny peeped into his wife’s bedroom. It was hot and she had thrown off the covers. She lay on her back, her chestnut hair spread out on the pillow, the swelling curve of her belly a gray outline against the pale lamplight. Old Helen slept on a cot at the foot of the bed.
He made scarcely a sound but Calpurnia awoke and sat up in the bed. “Dearest, forgive me…” She took pride in always waiting up for him.
“Don’t be silly. Helen was right to make you go to bed.”
“Was it a fine dinner? I wish I could have gone.”
“I am inexpressibly happy that you did not. Go back to sleep like a good girl. We’ll talk in the morning.” He kissed her forehead and felt a surge of tenderness run through him.
In his own bed in the adjoining room Pliny tossed fitfully. One could have said, before tonight, that if ever a man was pleased with himself, comfortable with his certainties, satisfied with his circumstances, and confident of his future, it was he.
Now doubts assailed him. He had attended dinners at the palace before but nothing like tonight’s grotesquerie. Was the emperor going mad as some in the Senate whispered? And if so, then where did duty lie? Could a good man serve a bad emperor and keep his own hands clean? Pliny was on the horns of a dilemma. He was a good man. But he was also an ambitious one, and he could not put out of his mind the emperor’s words to him: a chance to emulate his uncle, that paragon of learning, virtue, and dedication.
He tossed and turned, but sleep would not come. He counted the hours until dawn, when he must rise and present himself for the opening ceremony of the Roman Games, a festival that occupied two weeks in the middle of September—not September—“Germanicus,” he must remember to say! For many senators and lawyers, with the cessation of public business, the Games, which only the priests were strictly required to attend, meant a fifteen-day vacation from the sweltering cesspit of Rome to their estates in the hills. But no such respite for him this year. And all because this wretched Verpa had got himself killed.