“Master, I don’t know what you mean...”
“Davia,” I said, “you must tell us what was going on between you and Titus Didius.”
She stammered and looked away.
“Davia! A man is dead. His wife accuses you. You’re in great danger. If you’re innocent, the truth could save you. Be brave! Now tell us what passed between you and Titus Didius.”
“Nothing! I swear it, by my mother’s shade. Not that he didn’t try, and keep trying. He approached me at the master’s house in the city that night he first saw me. He tried to get me to go into an empty room with him. I wouldn’t do it. He kept trying the same thing here. Following me, trapping me. Touching me. I never encouraged him! Yesterday, while you were all down at the hives, he came after me, pulling at my clothes, kissing me. I just kept moving away. He seemed to like that, chasing me. When everyone finally came back, I almost wept with relief.”
“He harassed you, then,” said Lucius sadly. “My fault, I suppose; I should have warned him to keep his hands off my property. But was it really so terrible that you had to poison him?”
“No! I never—”
“You’ll have to torture her if you want the truth!” Antonia stood in the doorway. Her fists were clenched, her hair disheveled. She looked utterly distraught, like a vengeful harpy. “Torture her, Lucius! That’s what they do when a slave testifies in a court. It’s your right — you’re her master. It’s your duty — you were Titus’s host. I demand that you torture her until she confesses, and then put her to death!”
Davia turned as white as the moths that had flown from the hive. She fainted to the floor.
Antonia, mad with grief, retired to her room. Davia regained consciousness, but seemed to be in the grip of some brain fever; she trembled wildly and would not speak.
“Gordianus, what am I to do?” Lucius paced back and forth in the foyer. “I suppose I’ll have to torture the girl if she won’t confess. But I don’t even know how to go about such a thing! None of my slaves would make a suitable torturer. I suppose I could consult one of my neighbors—”
“Talk of torture is premature,” I said, wondering if Lucius could actually go through with such a thing. He was a gentle man in a cruel world; sometimes the world’s expectations won out over his basic nature. He might surprise me. I didn’t want to find out. “I think we should have another look at the body, now that we’ve calmed down a bit.”
We returned to the stream. Titus lay as we had left him, except that someone had closed his eyes and pulled down his tunic.
“You know a lot about poisons, Gordianus,” said Lucius. “What do you think?”
“There are many poisons and many reactions. I can’t begin to guess what killed Titus. If we should find some store of poison in the kitchen, or if one of the other slaves observed Davia doing something to the food...”
Eco gestured to the scattered food, mimed the act of feeding a farm animal, and vividly performed the animal’s death — a hard thing to watch, having just witnessed an actual death.
“Yes, we could verify the presence of poison in the food that way, at the waste of some poor beast. But if it was in the food we see here, why wasn’t Antonia poisoned as well? Eco, bring me those pieces of the clay bottle. Do you remember hearing the sound of something breaking at about the time we heard Titus cry out?”
Eco nodded and handed me the pieces of fired clay.
“What do you suppose was in this?” I said.
“Wine, I imagine. Or water,” said Lucius.
“But there’s a wineskin over there. And the inside of this bottle appears to be as dry as the outside. I have a hunch, Lucius. Would you summon Ursus?”
“Ursus? But why?”
“I have a question for him.”
The beekeeper soon came lumbering down the hill. For such a big, bearish fellow, he was very squeamish in the presence of death. He stayed well away from the body and made a face every time he looked at it.
“I’m a city dweller, Ursus. I don’t know very much about bees. I’ve never been stung by one. But I’ve heard that a bee sting can kill a man. Is that true, Ursus?”
He looked embarrassed at the idea that his beloved bees could do such a thing. “Well, yes, it can happen. But it’s rare. Most people get stung and it just goes away. But some people...”
“Have you ever seen anyone die of a bee sting, Ursus?”
“No.”
“But with all your lore, you must know something about it. How does it happen? How do they die?”
“It’s their lungs that give out. They strangle to death. Can’t breathe, turn blue...”
Lucius looked aghast. “Do you think that’s it, Gordianus? That he was stung by one of my bees?”
“Let’s have a look. The sting would leave a mark, wouldn’t it, Ursus?”
“Oh yes, a red swelling. And more than that, you’d find the poisoned barb itself. It stays behind in the flesh when the bee flies off. Just a tiny thing, but it would be there.”
We pulled off Titus’s tunic, examining his chest and limbs, rolled him over, and examined his back. We combed through his hair and looked at his scalp.
“Nothing,” said Lucius.
“Nothing,” I admitted.
“What are the chances, anyway, that a bee happened to fly by—”
“The bottle, Eco. When did we hear it break? Before Titus cried out, or after?”
After, gestured Eco, rolling his fingers forward. He clapped. Immediately after.
“Yes, that’s how I remember it, too. A bee, a cry, a broken bottle...” I pictured Antonia and Titus as I had last seen them together, hand in hand, doting on one another as they headed for the stream. “Two people in love, alone on a grassy bank — what might they reasonably be expected to get up to?”
“What do you mean, Gordianus?”
“I think we shall have to examine Titus more intimately.”
“What do you mean?”
“I think we shall have to take off his loincloth. It’s already loosened, you see. Probably by Antonia.”
As I thought we might, we found the red, swollen bee sting in the most intimate of places.
“Of course, to be absolutely certain, we should find the stinger and remove it. I’ll leave that task to you, Lucius. He was your friend, after all, not mine.”
Lucius located and dutifully extracted the tiny barb. “Funny,” he said. “I thought it would be bigger.”
“What, the stinger?”
“No, his... well, the way he always bragged, I thought it must be... oh, never mind.”
Confronted with the truth, Antonia confessed. She had never meant to kill Titus, only to punish him for his pursuit of Davia.
Her early morning trip to the stream had actually been an expedition to capture a bee. The stoppered clay bottle containing her prize had been hidden under the flowers in her basket. Later, Titus himself unwittingly carried the bee in the bottle down to the stream in the basket of food.
It was the Priapus in the glen that had given her the inspiration. “I’ve always thought the god looks so... vulnerable... like that,” she told us. If she could inflict a wound on Titus in that most vulnerable of places, the punishment would be not only painful and humiliating but strikingly appropriate.
As they lazed on their blanket beside the stream, cuddling with their clothing on, Titus became aroused, just as she planned. Antonia reached for the bottle and unstoppered it. Titus was lying back with his eyes closed and a dreamy smile on his lips. The wound was inflicted before he realized what was happening. He cried out and knocked the bottle from her hand. It broke against the trunk of a willow tree.
She was ready to flee, knowing he might explode with anger. But the catastrophe that followed took her completely by surprise. Her shock and grief at Titus’s death were entirely genuine.