"No." Her voice was hard.
He laughed shortly, with an implication I objected to. "Cast you off?"
Helena ignored the remark. "A down payment on an Empire!" she marvelled in her old, bitter way. "Falco would have liked to see this. Such a pity he found out that three quarters of this eerie booty no longer contains any silver at all."
"Clever old Falco!" Publius said quietly. "I can't see the Praetorians knocking at seaside villas in Pompeii and Oplontis, trying to sell them cheap lead water pipes!" He seemed more positive than I remembered him before. "What were you doing here all alone when I came in?"
"Thinking." She sounded sad. Thinking about Sosia, I wondered if this vault was where she died. She knew it was here; she visited once with Gnaeus and me. She may have come, knowing that it was a secret place"
With an abrupt movement Sosia's father set his lamp on a shelf and folded his arms, gazing round bleakly as lines deeply incised his face.
"It's too late to make any difference!" he stated, in a strained voice. He wanted to stop her. For his sake, so did I. He could not stand here and face it. His voice had the harsh break I remembered from Sosia's funeral, as if he were still fretting to avoid the fact of her death, brusquely rejecting anyone who reminded him.
Helena sighed. "Fair, reverent and dutiful; father read me your eulogy. He was so upset"
"He copes!" Publius rapped.
"Not so well as he did. Father said to me recently, he felt he was drowning in a whirlpool now I see this I understand!"
"What?" I saw Publius' head come up.
Helena Justina demanded almost impatiently but with a tinge of bitterness, "Isn't it obvious?" She straightened her shoulders, then declared in the taut voice I had only heard her use when insulted to the heart by me, "Pertinax may have provided the warehouse with its secret vault, but he had not the brains to devise a plot so devious. I assume it is my father who organized all this."
As she gestured angrily towards the bank of ingots, Camillus Meto stared at her. They and I contemplated the consequences of what she had suggested. In a Roman scandal none of the family escapes. Unborn generations, judged by the honour of their ancestors, were already condemned by this act against the state. The disgrace of a senator would drag down all his relations. His loss of honour afflicted the respectable and the innocent too, including his brother and his sons. Publius would be permanently scarred. The good-hearted lad I had met in Germany with Helena would find his career blighted before it was under way; his brother in Spain too. Far away in Britain this curse would fall unhappily on Aelia Camilla; through her marriage, even onto Gaius. And here on Helena.
Her uncle threw back that oddly ordinary head and commented in a heavy voice, "Oh Helena, Helena! I knew of course; I had known for a long time. I was not sure whether you had realized!"
I thought, if he was in the plot himself this man was acting extraordinarily well. If he was, Helena must know. But in that case, the lass was lucky I was here. Facing up to him alone was desperately dangerous…
LX
"What are you proposing to do?" Camillas Meto asked his niece in a cautious tone.
"If I can, put things right." She spoke very crisply, without a second thought. That was Helena all over. I loved the poor deluded girl for her straightforwardness!
A tickle ran across my foot so insistently I lifted my leg and shook, though I knew that in this arid hole no creature was likely to live. The darkness pressed coolly on my prickling skin. The passage lay buried in thick silence, though far away I could hear a remote, single note of applause as the Triumph continued at the Capitol.
In the faint light of half a dozen small oil lamps, Helena Justina was half turned away, though I knew her so well I could tell her moods from the inflexion in her voice. She sounded wan, as she always did if she felt troubled and alone. I could not interpret whether she had confided the truth to her uncle, or was testing him. As for him, he looked like a man whose emotions were either very shallow or so deep you could never hope to fathom them.
"I would have expected you to suppose your father was too respectable!" he commented.
Helena sighed. "Isn't that the point? The family rely on him to do everything that is noble. But when I was in Britain I had a long talk with my aunt. Aelia Camilla told me a great deal to explain all this. How Grandfather Camillus lived in Bithynia, partly to save money when the family's financial resources were running low. How he nursed his wife's dowry for twenty-five years in order to find funds to qualify father for the senate"
"So how do you and sister Aelia account for this?" Publius enquired, sounding intrigued yet with the usual slight sneer in his tone.
"You know papa." Helena spoke gravely. "Not one of life's firebrands! Perhaps the strain of carrying responsibilities which he felt were above his talents drove him to some wild political gesture. If our Gnaeus, using his position as a son-in-law, applied any kind of pressure papa might be vulnerable. Perhaps Gnaeus used blackmail. My father then struggled to stave off family disgrace as he did so, becoming inextricably drawn in. While I was still married, perhaps he hoped somehow to protect me. Every man has his weakness, Falco would say."
"Ah Falco again!" Publius now adopted the note of thinly disguised contempt he had always used when dealing with me. "Falco has ridden dangerously close. If anything is to be salvaged from all this we shall need to deflect that young man."
"Oh I've tried that!" Helena Justina gave an oddly narrow smile. A cold fist clenched in my stomach; an involuntary tremor ran down the back of my thigh.
"I thought so!" scoffed Publius candidly. "Well, this heirloom is an unexpected bonus for you. What will you do with it then, run off with friend Falco?"
"Believe me," Helena snapped fiercely, like the girl I first met in Britain, "Didius Falco would not thank you for suggesting that! His one aim in life is to shed me as soon as he can."
"Really? My spies tell me he looks at you as if he were jealous of the very air you breathe."
"Really?" Helena echoed sarcastically; then she snapped back vigorously, "And what spies are those, uncle?"
Her uncle did not answer her.
It was then, contemplating what Helena might possibly be about to reveal of her private feelings for me, that fright and yearning tore me apart so much that I was racked by a catastrophic sneeze.
There was no time to back out down the passage, so I adopted my most nonchalant face and slid out into the vault.
"Your green peppers are top quality!" I congratulated Helena to camouflage the reason for the sneeze.
"Oh Falco!" I hoped I detected a gleam in her expression, as though she welcomed me, yet she sounded quite angry. "Whatever are you doing here?"
"I understood you had invited me."
"I understood you had declined to come!"
"Luckily for you, when the third five-year-old kicked my shins with his tiny iron-shod boot, family duty began to pall. Is this where Atius Pertinax used to keep his petty cash?"
"It's a saffron vault, Falco."
"I must make a note to build one in when I design my country villa! Any chance of me palming half a pint of Malabathron? I want some for a special girl I know."
"Only you," remarked Helena, "could offer to flatter a woman with a present you had stolen from her first!"
"I hope so," I agreed cheerfully. "With any luck I'm the only one who knows which really suits you best."
All this time her sneering uncle had been watching the two of us, and I had more sense than to imagine he was hoping to learn anything from my seduction technique.
"Young man," he accosted in his thin voice, "why exactly have you come wandering in here?"
I beamed at him, as guileless as a village idiot. "Looking for the silver pigs!"