There was no suspicion in his voice, and to my relief I heard it fade into silence as they retreated down the hallway. But I knew what I had seen when our eyes met. A slight wrinkle had appeared across his smooth and eminently golden brow, and a look of puzzlement sparked in his blue eyes as if he wondered which of his many servants I might be, and if not his slave then whose, and what I was doing upstairs during the party. If my expression in that instant was as transparent as his — if I had looked a tenth as startled and fearful as I felt — Chrysogonus would be sending bodyguards up to investigate as quickly as he could.
I stepped back into the room. 'Rufus is right. We must hurry. There's only one other thing I wanted to ask you,' I said; in fact, it was the only real reason I had for corning. 'There was a girl, a slave, a whore — young, blonde, pretty. From the House of Swans — Elena.'
I saw by their eyes that they knew her. They exchanged a conspiratorial glance, as if deciding who should speak. Felix cleared his slender throat.
'Yes, the girl Elena. The master was very fond of her.'
'How fond?'
There was a strained silence. I stood in the doorway, imagining sounds from the hall. 'Quickly!' I said.
It was Chrestus who spoke — Chrestus, the emotional one, the one who had wept before. But his voice was quite flat and dull, as if all passion had been burned from it. 'The House of Swans — you mentioned it, so you know where she came from. That was where the master found her. From the first she was different from the rest. At least the master thought so. We were only puzzled that he left her there so long. How he hesitated, as a man might hesitate in taking a bride. As if bringing her into the house would truly change his life, and such an old man wasn't sure he wanted such a change. He had finally made up his mind to buy her, but the brothel owner was a hard bargainer, he kept stalling and changing his price. The master was growing desperate. It was because of a note from Elena that he left Caecilia Metella's party that night.'
'Did he know that she was pregnant? Did you?'
They looked at one another thoughtfully. 'We didn't know at the time,' said Chrestus, 'but that was simple enough to figure out later.'
'Later, when she was brought to Capito's house?'
'Ah, yes, so you know that as well. Then perhaps you know what they did to her on the night she arrived. They tried to break her body. They tried to kill the child inside her, though they wouldn't resort to outright abortion — for some reason Capito thought that would offend the gods. Imagine that, from a man with so much blood on his hands! Afraid of the unborn and the ghosts of the dead, but quite happy to strangle the living.'
'And Elena?'
'They couldn't break her will. She survived. They kept her shut away from the others, the way he keeps us shut away here, but I managed to speak with her a few times, enough that I finally won a bit of her trust. She swore she'd never sent the message that brought the master out into the streets that night. I don't know if I believed her or not. And she swore the child was his.'
Something rustled across the floor behind me. I grabbed the hilt of my knife and turned, just in time to glimpse the long tail of a rat slithering between two rolled carpets stacked against the wall. 'And then the child was born,' I said. 'And then what?'
"That was the end of them both.'
'What do you mean?'
'The end of Elena. The end of the child.'
'What happened?'
'It was the night she went into her labour. Everyone in the household knew her time had come. The women seemed to know without being told; the male slaves were nervous and testy. That was the same night that the steward told Felix and me that Capito was sending us back to Rome. To Magnus, we thought; he was in the city then, along with Mallius Glaucia. But the steward said no, that we were being sent to a new master altogether.
"The next morning they herded us out bright and early and loaded us into an ox cart with a few other objects that were headed for Chrysogonus's house — furniture, crates, that sort of thing. And just before we were to leave, they brought out Elena.
'She could hardly stand, she was so weak. Thin and wasted, pasty, damp with sweat — she must have given birth only hours before. There was no place for her to lie in the cart; the best we could do was to make our clothes into padding and help her sit against the crates. She was groggy and feverish, she hardly knew where she was, but she kept asking for the baby.
'Finally the midwife came mnning out of the house. She was breathless, weeping, hysterical. "For the gods' sake," I whispered to her, "where is the child?" She stared at Elena, afraid to speak. But Elena hardly seemed conscious; she was lying against Felix's shoulder, muttering, shivering, her eyelids flickering. "A boy," the midwife whispered, "it was a boy."
"Yes, yes," I said, "but where is it? We'll be going any minute!" You can imagine how confused and angry I was, wondering how we would ever manage to take care of a frail mother and a newborn infant. "Dead," the midwife whispered, so low that I could barely hear. "I tried to stop him, but I couldn't — he tore the boy away from me. I followed him all the way to the quarry and watched him throw the child onto the rocks."
"Then the driver came, with Capito behind him, yelling at him to start right away. Capito was as white as chalk. Oh, how strange! I remember it all in this very instant, as if I were there now! The crack of the driver's whip. The cart beginning to roll, the house receding. Everything loose and jostling. Elena suddenly awake, whimpering for her baby, too weak to cry out. Capito staring after us, as stiff as a pillar, ashen-faced, like a column of ash! And the midwife dropping to her knees, clutching Capito about the thighs, crying, "Master, mercy!" And just as we were driving onto the road, a man came running around the corner of the house, breathing hard, then stepping back into the shade of the trees — Sextus Roscius. The last I saw or heard was the midwife clutching at Capito and crying out louder and louder, "Master, mercy!'"
He took a shuddering breath and turned his face to the wall. Felix laid his hand on Chrestus's shoulder and continued the story. 'What a journey that was! Three days — no, four — in a jolting ox cart. Enough to splinter your bones and make your jaw come unhinged. We walked as much of the way as we could, but one of us had to stay in the cart with Elena. She could eat nothing. She never slept, but she never seemed awake, either. At least we were spared from having to tell her about the baby. On the third day she started bleeding between her legs. The driver wouldn't stop until sun-down. We found a midwife who could staunch the bleeding, but Elena was as hot as a coal. The next day she died in our arms, within sight of the Fontinal Gate.'
The lamp sputtered and the room became dim. Felix calmly stooped and picked up the lamp, took it to a bench in the corner of the room, and added more oil. In the flaring light I saw Tiro staring at the two slaves, his eyes wide and moist.
'Then it was Capito who killed the child?' I said, without conviction, like an actor speaking the wrong line.
Felix stood with his hands tighdy laced, his knuckles bone white. Chrestus looked up at me, blinking like a man awakened from a dream. 'Capito?' he said quietly. 'Well, I suppose. I told you, Magnus and Glaucia were far away in Rome. Who else could it have been?'
26
Chrysogonus's house was large, but not sprawling after the manner of Caecilia's mansion; yet somehow, without the girl Aufilia to guide us, Tiro and I took a wrong turn in search of the slaves' stairway. After a failed attempt to trace our steps backwards, we found ourselves in a narrow gallery that opened onto the empty balcony that overlooked our hiding place by the cypress trees outside the pantry door.