'Felix and Crepito must have been shitting Nile delta mud-how did Priscillus take it?'
'Surprisingly well,' said the chamberlain.
Up until then I had been surviving, but I suddenly felt too much aware that it was my first day out of doors. Excitement and the heat from the pyre were threatening to keel me over. I stopped talking. I had to concentrate on fighting this sudden sweat.
The chamberlain had done enough that day for truth and justice; I could feel him closing up.
A small group of us watched the last spurt of the sweet-scented flames as Viridovix went in the Roman fashion to his own remote gods.
'He was a prince!' I murmured. 'Though a dedicated cook. A classic. He and I saw out his last night in the way any cook would have wanted-with a good drink, pilfered from the higher-ups… in fact,' I sighed, 'I wouldn't mind knowing what the vintage was, so I can buy myself an amphora and drink it in his memory-'
'Here's your man then-' The chamberlain stopped a youngster, with the swollen eyelids of a late-riser up before his natural time, who was on his way forward to pour a libation on the pyre. 'Galenus keeps our cellar-'
'Thanks! Galenus, can you tell me what variety of Falernian Crepito and Felix drink – would it be Faustianum?'
'Falernian?' He pulled up. 'Not here! You must mean the Setinum-they reckon it's superior-one of their fads.'
Setinum was what Viridovix had listed on his menu, certainly.
'Are you sure you hadn't made an exception for a special occasion? There was a nice wine here the night your master died. It was in a blue glass flask with silver lustre on the shoulders…'
The lad became even more definite. 'Not one I ever put out that night.'
'We were on orders to impress,' confirmed the chamberlain. 'Nothing less than the gold jugs and anything set with gemstones.'
'Your flask isn't one of mine,' Galenus assured me. 'I don't recall even seeing one like that.'
'It never came back to you in the buttery?'
'No; I'm sure. I keep my eye open for fancy glass, for when the ladies want a tipple served up daintily in the afternoons.'
'That's very interesting!' I said. 'I wonder if it could have been a present someone brought?'
'Priscillus,' inserted another lad, a round and red-faced little apple who had been listening to us avidly. 'I was on shoe duty,' he explained. In the thick of it, removing people's sandals as they arrived. 'Priscillus brought the sparkling blue flask.'
I smiled at the russet. 'And was there a little bowl in matching glass?'
He did not hesitate. 'Oh Priscillus had that in a satchel put aside with his cloak. When he was leaving he suddenly remembered, and rushed to put the bowl on the sideboard with the flask. He had even brought some myrrh in a little bag, which he tipped in to make the present all complete…'
What a touching thought. I could hardly contain my admiration: a model guest!
Chapter LVI
I looked around for the skivvy Anthea, but the burning pyre seemed to have brought the cook's death fully home to her; the wheyfaced scullion was sobbing in the arms of two weepy cronies the way teenage girls do. I had a couple of questions ready, but I abandoned them.
Not long before the smoke died down, I recognised a figure approaching from the gatehouse. It was one of Severina's slaves.
'She wants you to come for lunch.' It was typical of this solid doorstopper that he grunted it without preliminaries.
'Thanks, but I won't be able to manage it.'
'She won't like that!' he said.
I was tired of his mistress trying to make demands on me when I had busy plans of my own, but to get rid of him I said I would break my previous appointment if I could (not meaning to try). Then I slung one end of my black cloak over my shoulder and studied the pyre like a mourner who was lost in melancholy thought: the transience of life, inevitable death, how to avoid the Furies, how to placate the Fates (and how soon can one politely make an escape from this funeral…).
When the slave had gone I cast my garland and poured my oil, said a few words in private to the cook's soul, then collected my hired donkey and left the scene.
At the site where the cake stall once stood I reined in thoughtfully.
I had to be clear what I intended doing now. I had been working for Severina simply to stay close enough to study her as a suspect. It must be nearly time to choose where I really stood.
Yet it was beginning to look as if Severina's theories about who killed Hortensius Novus might be accurate. Priscillus for one had attempted it, after Novus took his stubborn business stand. And apparently either Pollia or Atilia was responsible for another try, with a poisoned cake.
I considered the one line of events which I could now trace satisfactorily: Priscillus planting the poisoned spices which killed Viridovix. A murder which did remove a key witness to what had happened that day in the kitchen-yet a murder brought about by chance. If I had not gone into the dining room for professional reasons that evening, Viridovix would never have rushed in there too. No one could have planned that. Poor Viridovix was an accident.
For obvious and very strong reasons I wanted to avenge the cook. For equally strong social reasons, there was no future in doing it.
True, I had enough evidence to ask a magistrate to indict Appius Priscillus. But face facts: Viridovix was a slave. If I showed that Priscillus had killed him-especially without intending to-what would probably happen if it ever reached a court would be not a murder trial, but a civil suit by the Hortensii for the loss of their slave. The worst charge levelled against Appius Priscillus would be a compensation claim for lost property. No court would put much value on a Gallic prisoner of war; a cook, and not even Alexandrian! Two hundred sestercii, at the outside.
That left my only hope of exacting retribution for Viridovix in the indirect approach: through proving what had happened to his dead master and bringing that culprit to book. All I knew was what had not happened. I could name suspects with motives, but possessing a motive to kill someone was not, in these enlightened days, enough to have them denounced publically. They had made attempts; yet as far as I knew the attempts had failed. Again, probably no charge.
Lastly, there was Severina Zotica. Severina, who had established a wonderful motive for herself when Novus agreed to marry her-and lost it, the moment he died before their wedding contracts were exchanged.
Perhaps she had another motive. But if so, I could not fathom what it was.
Why do funerals always arouse such a tearing appetite? I had to stop thinking about life, death, and retribution. All I could apply my mind to was the now futile memory of delectable cakes.
What ineptitude makes a landlord destroy such a boon to the community? Minnius would have been an asset to the neighbourhood whatever rent he paid. By clearing him out, Hortensius Felix must have made his name a byword for pointless destructiveness all over the Pincian. Well, landlords are used to that. Who knows what labyrinthine form of reasoning churns in a lessor's perverted mind? Though in this case the answer was unfortunately obvious: Minnius knew too much.
What could he have known? Simple: Minnius knew who bought the dinner-party cakes.
It was dangerous knowledge. For a moment I even wondered if the cakeman might be dead. Perhaps one dark night after Hortensius Novus was poisoned, sinister shapes had come flitting down the hill from the freedmen's mansion, battered the unlucky pastry king while he was sleeping, and buried the corpse in a shallow grave on the site of his flattened oven and stall… No. I was still sick and rambling. One glance round the area convinced me that no soil had been disturbed. (I was a market gardener's grandson-but more than that, I had been in the army; the army teaches you all there is to know about digging hostile ground.) After a long hot Roman August it would be obvious if anyone had attempted to scrape at this hard-baked hillside. Only the sun had forced open these giant cracks where furiously aimless ants ferried themselves to and fro with specks of chaff while the more sensible lizards basked. Only wheels and hooves had ever packed down the surface of this road.