“Are you not feeling well?” I ask her.
“It’s nothing serious, Cymbelin.”
“Have I done something to annoy you?”
“Not at all. It’s just a passing thing,” she says. “These dark winter days—”
But today hasn’t been dark at all. Cool, yes, but the sun has been a thing of glory all day, illuminating the December sky with a bright radiance that makes my British heart ache. Nor is it the bad time of month for her; so I am mystified by Lucilla’s gloomy remoteness. I can see that no probing of mine will produce a useful answer, though. I’ll just have to wait for her mood to change.
At the party that night she is no more ebullient than before. She floats about like a wraith, indifferently greeting people who seem scarcely more familiar to her than they are to me.
“I wonder where everyone is,” I say. “Severina told me she had to go back to Roma to take care of something today. But where’s Prince Camillus? Count Nero Romulus? Have they gone back to Roma, too? And Prince Flavius Rufus—he doesn’t seem to be at his own party.”
Lucilla shrugs. “Oh, they must be here and there, somewhere around. Take me back to the room, will you, Cymbelin? I’m not feeling at all partyish, tonight. There’s a good fellow. I’m sorry to be spoiling the fun like this.”
“Won’t you tell me what’s wrong, Lucilla?”
“Nothing. Nothing. I just feel—I don’t know, a little tired. Low-spirited, maybe. Please. I want to go back to the room.”
She undresses and gets into bed. Facing that party full of strangers without her is too daunting for me, and so I get into bed beside her. I realize, after a moment, that she’s quietly sobbing.
“Hold me, Cymbelin,” she murmurs.
I take her into my arms. Her closeness, her nakedness, arouse me as always, and I tentatively begin to make love to her, but she asks me to stop. So we lie there, trying to fall asleep at this strangely early hour, while distant sounds of laughter and music drift toward us through the frosty night air.
The next day things are worse. She doesn’t want to leave our suite at all. But she tells me to go out without her: makes it quite clear, in fact, that she wants to be alone.
What a strange Saturnalia week this is turning into! How little jollity there is, how much unexplained tension!
But explanations will be coming, soon enough.
At midday, after a dispiriting stroll through the grounds, I return to the room to see whether Lucilla has taken a turn for the better.
Lucilla is gone.
There’s no trace of her. Her closets are empty. She has packed and vanished, without a word to me, without any sort of warning, leaving no message for me, not the slightest clue. I am on my own in the Imperial villa, among strangers.
Things are happening in the capital this day, immense events, a convulsion of the most colossal kind. Of which we who remain at the Imperial villa will remain ignorant all day, though the world has been utterly transformed while we innocently swim and gamble and stroll about the grounds of this most lavish of all Imperial residences.
It had, in fact, begun to happen a couple of days before, when certain of the guests at the villa separately and individually left Tibur and returned to the capital, even though Saturnalia was still going on and the climactic parties had not yet taken place. One by one they had gone back to Roma, not only Severina Floriana but others as well, all those whose absences I had noticed.
What pretexts were used to lure Prince Flavius Rufus, Prince Camillus, and their sister Princess Severina away from the villa may never be known. The two newly appointed Consuls, I was told, had received messages in the Emperor’s hand, summoning them to a meeting at which they would be granted certain high privileges and benefits of their new rank. The outgoing Consul, Bassanius, still was carrying a note ostensibly from the Praetorian Prefect, Actinius Varro, when his body was found, telling him that a conspiracy against the Emperor’s life had been detected and that his presence in Roma was urgently required. The note was a forgery. So it went, one lie or another serving to pry the lordlings and princelings of the Empire away from the pleasures of the Saturnalia at Tibur, just for a single day.
Certain other party guests who returned to Roma, that day and the next, hadn’t needed to be lured. They understood perfectly well what was about to happen and intended to be present at the scene during the events. That group included Count Nero Romulus; Atticus, the ship-owner; the banker Garofalo; the merchant from Hispania, Scipio Lucullo; Diodorus the gladiator; and half a dozen other patricians and men of wealth who were members of the conspiracy. For them the jaunt to Tibur had been a way of inducing a mood of complacency at the capital, for what was there to fear with so many of the most powerful figures of the realm off at the great pleasure dome for a week of delights? But then these key figures took care to return quickly and quietly to Roma when the time to strike had arrived.
On the fatal morning these things occurred, as all the world would shortly learn:
A squadron of Marcus Sempronius Diodorus’s gladiators broke into the mansion of Praetorian Prefect Varro and slew him just before sunrise. The Praetorian Guard then was told that the Emperor had discovered that Varro was plotting against him, and had replaced him as prefect with Diodorus. This fiction was readily enough accepted; Varro had never been popular among his own men and the Praetorians are always willing to accept a change in leadership, since that usually means a distribution of bonuses to insure their loyalty to their new commander.
With the Praetorians neutralized, it was an easy matter for a team of gunmen to penetrate the palace where Emperor Maxentius was staying that night—the Vatican, it was, a palace on the far side of the river in the vicinity of the Mauseoleum of Hadrianus—and break into the royal apartments. The Emperor, his wife, and his children fled in wild panic through the hallways, but were caught and put to death just outside the Imperial baths.
Prince Camillus, who had reached the capital in the small hours of the night, had not yet gone to bed when the conspirators reached his palace on the Forum side of the Palatine. Hearing them slaughtering his guards, the poor fat fool fled through a cellar door and ran for his life toward the Temple of Castor and Pollux, where he hoped to find sanctuary; but his pursuers overtook him and cut him down on the steps of the temple.
As for Prince Flavius Rufus, he awakened to the sound of gunfire and reacted instantly, darting behind his palace to a winery that he kept there. His workmen were not yet done crushing the grapes of the autumn harvest. Jumping into a wooden cart, he ordered them to heap great bunches of grapes on top of him and to wheel him out of the city, concealed in that fashion. He actually succeeded in reaching Neapolis safely a couple of days later and proclaimed himself Emperor, but he was captured and killed soon after—with some help, I have heard, from Marcellus Domitianus Frontinus.
Two younger princes of the royal house still survived—Prince Augustus Caesar, who was sixteen and off in Parisi at the university, and Prince Quintus Fabius, a boy of ten, I think, who dwelled at one of the Imperial residences in Roma. Although Prince Augustus did live long enough to proclaim himself Emperor and actually set out across Gallia with the wild intention of marching on Roma, he was seized and shot in the third day of his reign. Those three days, I suppose, put this young and virtually unknown Augustus into history as the last of all the Emperors of Roma.
What happened to young Quintus Fabius, no one knows for sure. He was the only member of the Imperial family whose body never was found. Some say that he was spirited out of Roma on the day of the murders wearing peasant clothes and is still alive in some remote province. But he has never come forth to claim the throne, so if he is still alive to this day, he lives very quietly and secretively, wherever he may be.