Could the new day be more auspicious?
Again, the thud of iron on stone.
At the top of the stairs Vibius opened the hatch and whispered something down to him.
‘Agrippina? Here?’ Balbilus asked incredulously. ‘How is that possible?’
Vibius shrugged. ‘She’s in a wagon. She wants to be carried down to the tomb.’
‘It’s unbelievable! What a woman! Make sure her wagon is hidden from the road.’
Julia Agrippina. Great-granddaughter of Augustus. Incestuous sister of Caligula. Wife of the Emperor Claudius. The most powerful woman in Rome.
And one of us.
Agrippina was borne on a stretcher by her attendants and taken carefully down the stairs and placed gently on the floor. Balbilus knew her people. They could be trusted.
Agrippina was swaddled in blankets, her head resting on a silk pillow. She was pale and haggard and wincing in pain, but even in her fragile state her beauty shone through.
‘Balbilus,’ she said. ‘I had to come.’
‘Domina,’ he replied, falling to his knees to reach for her hand. ‘You should have summoned me. I would have come to you.’
‘No, I wanted this to happen here.’ She turned her head to the wall. ‘Your fresco – it’s done!’
‘I hope it’s to your liking.’
‘All the zodiacal signs. Beautifully drawn, and by your own hand, I see,’ she said, looking at his paint-stained fingers. ‘But tell me: this sequence of planets – what does it mean?’
‘It’s a small personal tribute, Domina. Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn. This was the alignment of the planets on the day I was born thirty-three years ago. I now question my decision. I should have chosen your alignment. I can have new plaster laid.’
‘Nonsense, my good seer. This is your tomb.’
‘Our tomb, Domina.’
‘I insist that you keep the fresco as it is.’
There was a faint cry from under her blanket.
‘Domina!’ Balbilus said. ‘It’s happened!’
‘Yes. Only two hours ago,’ Agrippina said weakly. ‘After all these years, and all these fucking men, finally: my firstborn.’
One of Agrippina’s maids pulled back her blanket to reveal a tiny pink baby. Agrippina pulled the infant’s blanket aside and said proudly, ‘See. It’s a boy. His name is Lucius Domitus Ahenobarbus.’
‘This is wonderful,’ Balbilus crowed. ‘Truly wonderful. ‘May I see?’
She turned the baby over. There was a perfect pink tail, wriggling energetically.
‘Your bloodlines are strong,’ Balbilus said with admiration. ‘I assume the Emperor doesn’t know?’
‘That bumbling, pathetic old man doesn’t even know I have one! Our unions are absurd affairs.’ Agrippina said. ‘This is between you and me. You honor me with the title Domina, but you, Balbilus, my great astrologer, you are my Dominus.’
Balbilus bowed his head.
‘I want to know about this boy,’ she said. ‘Tell me what will befall him.’
Balbilus had been reading the charts carefully. He knew each day of the week by heart, almost each hour. He rose to his feet and delivered the prophecy with great solemnity.
‘The boy’s rising sign, Sagittarius, is in tune with Leo where his moon is placed. As the moon represents you, Domina, you and the boy will enjoy harmonious relations.’
‘Ah, good,’ Agrippina purred.
‘The planet that rules this boy and which is his ascendant is highly propitious. It is Saturn, the evil one.’
She smiled.
‘And his moon is situated in the Eighth House, the House of Death. This indicates high position, large income, honors. Jupiter is in the Eleventh House, the House of Friends. From this will come the greatest good fortune and great fame, enormous power.’ He lowered his voice, ‘There is only one caveat.’
‘Tell me,’ Agrippina said.
‘He is square with Mars. This will serve to diminish his good fortune. How, I cannot say.’
She sighed. ‘It is a good reading. To say otherwise would be untrue. Nothing is perfect in our world. But tell me, Balbilus, will my son be Emperor?’
Balbilus closed his eyes. He felt his own tail tingle. ‘He will be Emperor,’ he said. ‘He will take the name Nero. And he will be perfectly evil. But you must know this: you yourself, his own mother, may be among the many he will kill.’
Agrippina hardly flinched as she said, ‘So be it.’
NINE
ELISABETTA HELD THE slim volume in her hands, felt its smooth binding, smelled the mustiness of the yellowing and crinkling vellum pages. It was only sixty-two pages long, yet she had the sense that there was more to it than its value as an antiquarian book.
She’d only asked to borrow it but Frau Lang had pressed her to have it.
‘What if it’s worth something?’ Elisabetta had asked.
Frau Lang had lowered her voice, cocking her head at the wall separating them from her husband. ‘I doubt you could buy a loaf with it but if there’s money to be made let the Church have it. My eternal soul could use the help.’
The envelope with its neatly written enigmatic message lay on Elisabetta’s desk at the Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology.
As you always taught – B holds the key.
What was B? The key to what?
11 September is surely a sign …
A sign? What was Ottinger up to and who was the writer, K?
And the curious symbol, vaguely astrological, vaguely anthropromorphic. What did it represent? And why was it so familiar?
Elisabetta drew it on her whiteboard with a black marker and glanced at it frequently.
She heard female voices coming down the corridor and hoped that some of the Institute’s nuns weren’t coming to ask her to join them for coffee. She wanted to shut her door but that, she thought, would have been rude. So she kept her chair turned away in order not to invite eye contact. The voices faded. She opened her desktop computer’s browser and searched: Marlowe – Faustus – B.
Voluminous results filled her screen. She began to scroll through a load of articles and failed to notice that an hour had flown by or that Professor De Stefano was trying to get her attention by tapping at her door in a fierce staccato.
She’d borrowed Micaela’s mobile phone the day before to brief him from the airport but this morning he was anxious for more.
‘So?’ he demanded a bit testily. ‘What does it all mean?’
‘I think I know what B is,’ she said.
De Stefano closed the office door and sat on the other chair.
She already had pages of notes. ‘Two versions exist of Doctor Faustus, an A text and a B text. The play was performed in London in the 1590s but the first published version, the so-called A text, didn’t appear until 1604, eleven years after Marlowe died. In 1616 a second version of the play was published, the B text.’ She scanned her notes. ‘It omitted thirty-six lines of the A text but added 676 new lines.’
‘Why two versions?’ De Stefano asked.
‘No one seems to know. Some scholars say that Marlowe wrote the A text and others revised it into the B text after his death. Some say he wrote both A and B. Some say both are differing products of actors’ memories of performances years after the fact.’
‘And what does this mean for us? For our situation?’
Elisabetta raised her hands in frustration. ‘I don’t know. We have a collection of facts which may be related to one another, although how is unclear. We have a first-century columbarium containing nearly a hundred skeletons – men, women and children, all with tails. There is evidence of a fire, perhaps coincident with the death of these people. The walls are decorated with a circular motif of astrological symbols depicted in a specific order. The upright Pisces symbol certainly can be seen as having a double meaning. We have the post-mortem photographs of an old man, Bruno Ottinger, with a tail and numbers tattooed on his back. What these numbers mean is unknown. We have a play by Christopher Marlowe in this man’s possession. It was given to him by another person, a K. On the note it’s written that ‘B is the key,’ and that September 11 was a sign. The book from 1620 is the so-called B text. The frontispiece of the book shows Faustus summoning the devil while standing inside a circle of astrological symbols which are laid out in the exact same order as in the circle on the columbarium fresco. These are the facts.’