“Just that I did not kill Gorgo, that I was at home when it happened.”
“I haven’t spoken with Jocasta yet. I will call on her tomorrow, after court. Are you sure there is no one else to vouch for your whereabouts?”
He shrugged. “I am sorry. There is none.”
I left him, feeling unsettled. For a man facing death, he was not terribly desperate to demonstrate his innocence. Perhaps, I thought, I was too hasty in ruling out crucifixion.
I rejoined Julia in the triclinium where a late supper had been laid out, just our own party attending, no guests for once. I lay on the couch with a sigh of relief and picked up a hard-boiled egg. A slave filled my cup and I sampled the superb vintage. I was getting too used to this.
“What a strange visit this has turned out to be,” Circe said. “Murder, erupting volcanoes—what next?”
“It isn’t erupting,” said young Marcus. “I spoke with a local naturalist today. He calls this a ‘venting.’ He said every few years Vesuvius lets off a bit of smoke and ash, maybe emits a little lava, then it will go back to just smoking for several years.”
“It makes me nervous,” Circe said.
“Thank you, Decius Caecilius,” said Antonia.
“For what?” I asked.
“For making Gelon our houseguest. Now that he is no longer connected with the priest’s daughter, I’ll have to work on him.”
“I hear there are good armorers over in Pompeii,” said Marcus. “You might want to get yourself a throat protector.”
“You will leave that young man strictly alone,” Julia ordered. “He is a suspect in a case the praetor is trying. He is a prisoner, not a guest.”
Antonia shrugged. “Prisoners, hostages—what’s the difference? Two years ago my brother had that Gallic prince Vercingetorix in the house. He was a prisoner, but do you think I let that stop me?”
“A barbarian prince, even an enemy prince,” Circe said, “is a far cry from the son of a Numidian slaver.”
“I’m always amazed at the ability you ladies have to draw distinctions,” I said.
“This is your fault,” said Julia. “You never should have brought him into this house. The local lockup would have been quite good enough for him, even if he is innocent. It might have taught him a little humility.”
“Lectures on humility from a Caesar!” Antonia cried, laughing. “I like them arrogant, even the wicked ones.”
Julia gave up and applied herself to dinner. It seemed that patrician propriety was not to be a feature of our household for the duration.
When dinner was done, Julia and I stayed behind in the triclinium, and I called for Hermes to report. He seemed uncommonly somber when he came in, not at all his usual mischievous self.
“The altar was clean swept,” he reported, “and I couldn’t find where they dumped the ashes, so I went straight to the house.”
“You got in and out undetected, I trust?” I asked.
“Naturally.”
“Pride in burglar skills is not becoming in a free man, Hermes,” Julia chided him.
“Says the poem thief,” I commented. “What have you found?”
“First, this.” He tossed me a little bundle of something hard that gave beneath my fingers when I caught it. It was a small bag of purple silk. Whatever was inside, the bag itself was a minor extravagance. I released the drawstrings and withdrew the contents. Julia gasped and snatched it from my fingers.
It was a necklace formed of some twenty lozenges of gold, each the size of Julia’s thumb, each set with an emerald as big as the nail of that digit and carved with the image of a deity.
“This is fabulous!” Julia exclaimed. “You’ve never given me anything this fine.”
“I’ve never been that rich,” I reminded her. “Still, we’ve seen ladies around here wearing jewelry as expensive. But if Gelon gave her that, Papa must be giving him a more generous allowance than my father gave me.”
“There was more going on in that girl’s life than keeping the temple tidy,” Julia commented, unable to stop fondling the necklace. Just what I needed. Now she would want one like it.
“All right,” I said to Hermes. “This bauble didn’t put that wan look on your face. What else did you find?”
“As I was leaving I thought I was alone in the place. But I heard someone crying. It didn’t sound like grief for the dead woman. I traced the sound and found a lockup next to the pen for sacrificial animals.”
“I suppose you just had to look,” Julia said.
“There’s a little window in the door. It was dim inside, so it took a while for me to make anything out, but I saw that it was the slave girl Charmian. She had good reason to cry. She’d been severely beaten. From her neck to her heels she’s striped like a zebra. And it wasn’t done with rods or a flagellum, either, it was laid on with a flagrum.” He referred to the fearsome whip with multiple thongs studded with bone or bronze.