‘Their loyalty didn’t prevent Claudius from being poisoned,’ Hiebermeyer said.
‘No,’ Jack murmured. ‘But for a first-century emperor, that was also the Roman way.’
‘Speaking of poison, what’s all this about opium?’ Hiebermeyer said. At that moment the light flashed green, and he reached over and deactivated the fan. ‘Sorry. It’ll have to wait.’
Jack crouched back into the ancient chamber and went straight over to the table, around to the far side between the chairs. He looked at what lay on the surface. He had been right. They were shrouded with grey matter, dust and fallen plaster, but there was no mistaking it. Sheets of papyrus, blank sheets. A pinned-out scroll, ready for writing. Ink pots, a metal stylus poised ready to dip into the ink, left where it had been abandoned for ever, the day when this place became hell on earth. Jack stared down, then glanced up again at the two portrait busts. Drusus and Germanicus. There were Romans alive in AD 79 who would still hark back to those glory days. The untimely deaths of two heroes meant that their memory lived on, for generations. Jack remembered something he had thought before. A Roman would have known the portraits of his ancestors intimately. And this was a private room. A room where a man kept his most precious heirlooms, the portraits of his ancestors.
Jack was beginning to think the impossible.
The portrait of his father. Of his brother.
The pieces were suddenly falling together. Jack felt a heady rush of excitement. Something else sprang into his mind, from talking to Costas about Pliny the Elder the day before. He reached into his bag, his heart pounding, took out the little red book and placed it on the table, under his headlamp beam. He clipped on his dust mask, carefully picked up an ancient sheet of papyrus, shook it slightly, and shone his Maglite through it. He laughed quietly to himself. ‘Well I’ll be damned.’
‘What is it?’ Costas said.
Jack held the paper up to the light so the others could see. ‘Look, there’s a second layer of papyrus underneath, coarser than the upper layer. It means the surface is of the best quality, but underneath it the paper is strengthened, less transparent. And unless I’m mistaken, the sheet measures exactly one Roman foot across.’
‘So?’
Jack put down the sheet and picked up the book, his copy of the Natural History. ‘Listen to what Pliny has to say about paper. Book 13, Chapter 79, on papyrus:
‘ “The Emperor Claudius imposed modifications on the best quality because the thinness of the paper in Augustus’ time was not able to withstand the pressure of pens. In addition it allowed the writing to show through, and this brought fear of blots caused by writing on the back of the paper. Moreover, the excessive transparency of the paper looked unsightly in other ways. So the bottom layer of the paper was made from leaves of the second quality, and the cross-strips from papyrus of the first quality. Claudius also increased the width of the sheet to a foot.” ’
Hiebermeyer leaned over the table and peered at the sheet closely with a small eyeglass. ‘And unless I’m mistaken, this is the best-quality ink available at the time,’ he said excitedly. ‘Gall ink, in all probability, made from the desert beetle. I’m a bit of an expert, you know, having studied ink types when we found papyrus documents reused as mummy wrappings in Egypt. Pliny writes about that too.’
‘Then I’m about to make an extraordinary suggestion,’ Jack said, replacing the sheet carefully on the table and looking intently at the others. ‘I think it’s possible, just possible, that we’re standing in the study of a man who should never have been here, who history tells us died a quarter of century before the eruption of Vesuvius.’
‘A man who once ruled an empire,’ Maria said softly.
Hiebermeyer was nodding slowly, and whispered the words, almost to himself. ‘Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus.’
Jack held up the coin, allowing the light to pick out the portrait. ‘Not the emperor Claudius, not the god Claudius, but Claudius the scholar. Claudius who may have somehow faked his own poisoning and survived for all those years after his disappearance from Rome, hidden away in this villa. Claudius who must have finally perished just as Pliny the Elder did, in the cataclysm of AD 79.’
There was a stunned silence, and Costas looked keenly at Jack. ‘Well,’ he said quietly. ‘That’s another little bit of history you’re going to have to rewrite.’
‘And not the only bit.’ Maria had her back to them, and was hunched over the lower shelf in the corner of the room. ‘There’s more here, Jack. Much more. Books and books of it.’
Jack came round the table and they all crouched beside her. There was a collective gasp of astonishment. In front of them, below the shelves they had seen from the entrance, were two further shelves packed with several dozen cylindrical boxes, each about eighteen inches high. ‘They’re lidded, sealed with some kind of mortar,’ Hiebermeyer murmured. ‘Hollowedout stone, Egyptian marble by the look of it. They look like reused canopic jars. No expense spared here.’
‘This one’s open.’ Maria took out her Maglite, twisted it on and shone it at the top of the cylinder on the right side of the lower shelf. The hollowed-out interior was about a foot wide, and inside it they could see further narrow cylindrical shapes, with a space where one appeared to have been removed.
‘Eureka,’ Hiebermeyer said, his voice tight with emotion.
‘What is it?’ Costas asked.
‘Papyrus scrolls,’ Hiebermeyer said. ‘Tightly wound papyrus scrolls.’
‘Jack, they’re not carbonized,’ Maria whispered. ‘It’s a miracle.’ She reached out, then held back, as if she wanted the spell to remain unbroken, to preserve that moment of realization before their action changed history.
‘Any idea what they are?’ Costas said.
‘There should be sillyboi, labels describing each book,’ Jack said. ‘Scrolls don’t have spines, so books were identified with pasted labels, usually hanging out over the shelf. I don’t see any here.’
‘Wait a second.’ Maria peered closely at the top of the sealed cylinder next to the one with the displaced lid. ‘There are markings. Engravings in the stone. Words, in Latin. I can read it. Historiae Carthaginienses Antiquae.’
‘ The History of the Ancient Carthaginians,’ Jack whispered. ‘Claudius’ lost History of Carthage. It’s mentioned in other ancient sources, but not a word of it survived. Or so we thought. There may only ever have been one copy, too controversial to publish. The only dispassionate account of Rome’s greatest rival. Who else but Claudius himself would have had that, in his own private library? These jars must contain his other works.’
‘Wait for it, Jack.’ Hiebermeyer had sidled over to the basket of scrolls by the door, and was holding up a flap of papyrus attached to one of the decorative handles. ‘ Naturalis Historia, G. Plinius Secundus. My God. Looks like we’ve got a complete edition of Pliny’s Natural History.’
‘Looks like you’ve found that Latin library after all,’ Costas said.
Jack felt an overwhelming sense of certainty. He looked at the scroll, remembered his sense of the room when he first saw it, those two portraits. There had been another here, another presence, as if the old man so covetous of his private space had allowed in one other, a man whose imprint was still here, around them. ‘There’s something else that’s niggling me about this place,’ Jack said. ‘About who was here.’