The jailer saw his look and his face twisted into an unpleasant grin. ‘Nah, we don’t keep Mother Rome down there. Not yet anyway. She’s marked for special attention she is.’
‘Mother Rome?’ Valerius was mystified.
‘You’ll see. Tullius!’
A curtain opened in the partition and a second man appeared, unshaven and as filthy as the first. ‘Gentleman wants to see the pretty lady. I’ll have your sword, sir, if you don’t mind. Rules are rules.’ Valerius reluctantly complied. ‘Not that you’d hurt her, I’m sure. I was a bit surprised you being sent to question her, though, what with all them others being here day after day.’
The stench from the rear of the chamber was even more noxious than that emanating from the tullianum, and at first Valerius found it difficult to see in the gloom. A figure stepped out of the darkness and he cursed.
The ruined face grinned mockingly. Rodan was dressed in a stained white tunic and stank of old wine, but his hand held a sword, a gladius like the one Valerius had surrendered a moment earlier.
‘I thought you’d be here sooner,’ the Praetorian said conversationally. ‘Torquatus was very keen you should get a chance to talk to the lady.’
He ushered Valerius forward, but the young Roman wasn’t fooled by the show of manners. Rodan’s wild eyes, and the way he held the sword, were utterly at odds with the softness of his voice. He took two cautious steps into the chamber. When he saw what waited in the darkness he felt the blood drain from his face. ‘Who did this?’
He had seen war in all its awfulness, and cruelty and death that had reached its height on the night he’d watched Cornelius Sulla burn. But the humiliation Nero had devised for Lucina Graecina somehow overshadowed them all.
‘She’s been in there for more than two weeks,’ Rodan reflected. ‘She’s a tough old bitch.’
They had placed Lucina Graecina in a low, barred cage of the type used to transport wild animals from Africa for the arena. Gone was the haughty noblewoman he had met in the garden. She had been replaced by this naked, filth-streaked crone, her stringy body patterned with burns and bruises and her face hidden behind the matted curtain of her hair. The pen was too short to allow her to lie down in any comfort and too low for her to sit up. Instead, she was forced to crouch on all fours, with the bars cutting agonizingly into her knees.
‘Mother Rome.’ Rodan laughed. ‘With her dry tits hanging down like that, she looks just like the old she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus.’
Valerius remembered the pride and defiance of the woman he had met in the garden and restrained the urge to smash his wooden fist into the grinning face. ‘You did this?’
The Praetorian spat on the soiled straw at his feet. ‘On the orders of the Emperor. Lucina Graecina is a traitor to Rome and is to be questioned to reveal her associates and anyone connected with the sect of Christus, the Galilean. You are to take any steps necessary to ensure her full co-operation.’ He laughed. ‘Any steps.’
‘I should kill you here and now, and the jailers. It would be a month before anyone noticed the stink from that hole. If they ever did.’
‘You could try,’ Rodan said, weighing his sword and moving between Valerius and the doorway. ‘Maybe that’s what the Emperor had in mind all along.’
‘I want to talk to her.’
The Praetorian shrugged, amusement in his eyes. ‘You don’t want to kill me?’
‘Let me talk to her. Alone.’
Rodan disappeared through the partition. Valerius could hear the man’s laughter ringing in his ears.
When they were alone, he crouched over the cage where Lucina knelt, her body shaking with terror and pain. She felt his presence and cringed away like a beaten animal.
‘My lady,’ he whispered. ‘I will do what I can for you, but first you must help me. I need to know who betrayed you and I need you to tell me the significance of the numbers MCVII. The time for saying nothing is past. Please.’
The bowed head turned towards him and the tangled mass of hair parted. He looked into a face made unrecognizable by her suffering and recoiled from two red-rimmed eyes that mirrored the deepest pits of Hades. Lucina Graecina, noblewoman of Rome, threw back her head and howled like the she-wolf she resembled.
She was quite mad.
XXVII
‘Find Sextus and Felix. I want to know the names or descriptions of everyone Lucina has met since they started following her. Between them they shouldn’t have missed anyone.’
Marcus nodded. ‘She’s not talking?’
‘I doubt if she’ll ever talk again,’ Valerius said wearily. He described Lucina’s ordeal at the hands of Rodan. ‘Watch out for him. I have a feeling they’re much closer to us than we think.’
Like a conjuror, Serpentius produced a long dagger from his belt. ‘I hope he comes close enough just the once.’
Valerius shook his head. ‘There may come a time for that, but this is not it. If we can discover how he knows so much about us, we can use it against him now. Killing him won’t solve anything. Torquatus will just find some other executioner.’
‘What good is a list of the people she’s met?’ Marcus said. ‘We can’t follow them all and the chances of any of them being involved with the Christus sect are slim. Look at the trouble she took to hide her association with Cornelius — much good it did the poor bastards. Do you get the feeling that every time we get close to anyone they suddenly die on us?’
Privately, Valerius agreed. Too often he had felt he was one step ahead of his enemies only to discover that he was actually one step behind. Was it possible that someone in his household was a spy? Or even one of these men he had come to trust with his life? He met Serpentius’s fierce wolf’s eyes and dismissed the thought as quickly as it had appeared.
‘All I know is that whatever information Lucina had is now in Torquatus’s hands and we have to do something. I don’t understand why, but this has turned into a race and he doesn’t want us to get to Petrus first. We’ll meet later at the house.’
That evening, before he looked in on Olivia, Valerius placed an oil lamp in the window above the front door. The change in his sister astonished him. Julia held her hand as she sat up in bed. The young slave lowered her eyes. ‘I wanted to surprise you, master. I hope I was right. She has been like this since your father left this morning.’
‘Father?’
‘He had business in town, he said. But he spent more than an hour with Olivia.’
‘I knew he was here, because I could hear his words and they comforted me.’ Olivia’s voice sounded weary, but she held out her other hand to Valerius. ‘When he had gone, I opened my eyes and everything was so much brighter than I remembered. Julia brought me a cushion and I was able to sit up. I have eaten some fruit, Valerius. You should be proud of me.’
‘I am,’ he said. But he was prouder still that she had somehow found the strength to fight the thing that threatened to destroy her.
‘Now, tell me about your latest case!’ she said brightly.
He thought about the water theft for the first time in a month. Old Honorius would be foaming at the mouth. ‘It would bore you back to sleep,’ he said. ‘But fortunately I have put it aside for a while. Lately, I have been working for the State.’
‘Is that why you are so tired?’ she asked as Julia crept from the room.
He smiled. ‘No, it is running after my baby sister that makes me tired.’
‘Then I must make sure you do not have to for much longer.’ They both knew the sentence had a dual meaning, but Valerius chose to ignore it. Olivia continued. ‘Julia tells me you have a new companion. She says he is “dark, saturnine and dangerous” but her voice makes him seem kind. I think she likes him.’