Regina had had a small trapdoor installed here. She peeled back a flap of turf and took a key she wore beneath her dress. The complicated lock was stiff, perhaps rusted, but by using two hands she managed to work its heavy mechanism. Then, with Brica’s help, she lifted the trap to expose a blacked-out shaft, with iron rungs set into the wall.
Brica peered down uncertainly. “What is it?”
“A place of safety.” Castor had a torch, she saw; she grabbed this from his hands. “Castor. Stay here. Guard this place. Don’t let anybody down here. Not yet.”
“But—”
“Your wife will be safe here. Will you do as I say?”
“Yes, mistress.”
“Brica, follow me.”
With the torch held high, Regina made her way down the iron rungs. It was a difficult journey to make with one free hand, and she felt stiff, heavy, clumsy; she was getting too old for such adventures. But Brica was following.
At the bottom of the shaft Regina found herself standing in an arched tunnel, lined with concrete and brick. The walls were pocked with chambers, shelves, and alcoves, as if she had entered a vast cupboard. The roof was only a little higher than her own head, and if she had reached out she could have touched both walls. This tunnel was only part of a great warren of passageways and chambers that had been dug into this soft rock. Everything was blackened by the smoke of torches and candles, and there was a smell of damp and rot.
Brica was fingering her dress, which was streaked with black mud. “I am filthy,” she murmured.
Regina could hear a hint of humor in her daughter’s voice. She hugged her briefly. “I doubt if your wedding procession is likely to take place today. Not unless you want a few black-painted barbarians to join it …”
Brica walked slowly down the narrow passageway. The walls were painted with symbols, lamb, fish, shepherd, Christian symbols, and the alcoves contained objects like lamps and glass vessels — and many, many wrapped-up shrouds. These were bodies, some already centuries old, wrapped in lime-coated cloth. “What is this place?”
“A Catacomb. A Christian cemetery, from the days of persecution. They dug out such cellars to bury their dead without interference. The owner of the estate in those days must have been sympathetic. There are many such holes in the ground, here along the Appian Way.”
“And here you think we will be safe.”
“The barbarians are not Romans,” Regina said dryly. “They will not even know such places exist. And if they did they would ignore them for the easier pickings of the mansions and churches above the ground. As soon as I learned this place was here I realized its usefulness, and had passageways sunk to it from the house. I used workmen from outside the city — I doubt we will be betrayed.”
“You always did think ahead, Mother,” Brica said dryly. “We must fetch the others.”
“I’ll do that,” Regina said sharply. “You stay here. When they come they will be confused, frightened. Drunk! Organize them. Reassure them. I am counting on you, Brica. Look — there is food here, a little water to be had from this spigot, torches to be lit here.”
Brica nodded. “I understand.”
“Good.” Regina hurried up to the surface.
Julia and the elders had already organized a queue, reasonably orderly, before the gaping hole in the ground, where Castor still stood patiently.
Regina clambered up on a low wall and clapped her hands for attention. “We can take only the children, and some women. Julia, you go first, and help Brica. Then the children, the smallest first. If we can take mothers, we will do so. Husbands, fathers, please go to your homes. I know you will all understand your duty.”
She was greeted by somber, blanched faces. There were grave nods of acquiescence.
The children started to file nervously into the shaft, many of them weeping to be separated from their mothers. Regina saw Venus pass into the ground, and the baby Aemilia in the arms of her mother, Regina’s half sister Leda.
Sulla came to her. His broad, slightly bloated face was streaked with tears. But Amator was just behind him. Sulla said, “Regina, let me come. The Vandals — someone like me—” There had been rumors of how the Vandals treated those they saw as decadent, of pretty boys being murdered by impalement.
Amator pulled at his arm. “No, Come away, my love, come away with me. I will make you safe — you don’t need this witch and her hole in the ground—”
Regina felt a cold satisfaction. She had not planned the arrival of the barbarians that day, but by keeping Sulla and Amator close to her, she had set up this opportunity. And now it was unfolding perfectly.
She stepped close to Sulla and whispered, “You can join us.” You and Amator’s legacy, she thought. “But first you must free yourself.” Sulla looked confused. She let a knife fall from her sleeve — a knife she always carried in these difficult times — and slipped it into his hand. “Free yourself.”
His eyes widened. He nodded and pulled away.
Castor approached Regina. “Is Brica—”
“She is safe.”
He nodded. “Soon I will be with her.”
“No. I have an assignment for you. When the last of us has descended, close the hatch and cover it over with turf. Move the furniture — a table, a couch — conceal the entrance. Do you understand? I know it means you will be kept apart from Brica. But it is the only way she can be safe. She is counting on you, Castor.”
His eyes narrowed, and she wondered briefly if he read her calculation: that despite the marriage only that morning, already she was separating him from Brica, drawing her back into the family. But he nodded, and he hurried to help the elders usher the children to the shaft.
Regina stayed by the trapdoor, helping the students descend into the dark, until she saw Sulla embrace Amator — and Amator fell to the ground, unnoticed in the chaotic confusion in the garden — and then, as the smoke of the fires grew thick in the air, she clambered down into the ground herself.
The Vandals remained in the city for two weeks. They invaded the homes of the rich, broke into the Christian churches, stripped the gilded tiles from the ancient Temple of Capitoline Jupiter. And they murdered, maimed, and raped Romans both high and low.
Regina had prepared for a siege. She had installed a lead-pipe feed from the main water supply, and there were caches of food — dried fruit, meat, nuts. Even if the trapdoor entrance in the peristylium was discovered and broken open, the Catacombs were a warren that extended far underground, and there were many places where the tunnels could be blocked off and defended. There was even another tunnel that led out of here altogether to one of the main city sewers, out of which they could find a way to the daylight. It wouldn’t be a pleasant journey, but it would lead them to safety.
Stuck in these soot-stained tunnels, it wasn’t a happy time for anybody. But despite their protests at deprivation, fear for their families, and plain discomfort in this place of corpses, Regina knew that her charges accepted that she had delivered them to safety, out of sight of the black-painted monsters rampaging above.
Brica pined for Castor, but Regina was unconcerned. In the final crisis Brica had shown her true loyalties — to the family buried in the ground, not to the boy on the surface — and she sensed that their marriage, even children, would not change that. Brica, after all, carried Regina’s own blood, and the blood of Julia, and it was no surprise that her instincts had in the end proven similar.