“What are you proposing to do?” Camillus 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!”
Now that I had found the ingots, I crossed to examine them and introduced myself, as any lead mine slave would, by giving them a friendly kick. I hurt my toe, but did not care; at least I knew for certain this ghostly mass was real. As I bent to rub my foot my hand hit a small object hidden against the leaden stack. I held it up: it was a plain brass inkwell, its contents long ago dried up. All three of us looked at it but none of us spoke. I put it in the pocket of my tunic slowly, then shivered in my holiday cloak.
Helena Justina spoke up with a hint of dramatic urgency: “You are trespassing, Falco. I want you to go.”
I turned. As our eyes met, I felt the sudden familiar lift in my spirits. I felt certain, too, that we were partners sharing a charade.
Now there were three of us in the vault, a new tension had taken effect. It felt like belonging to a geometric problem where certain fixed elements would enable us to draw the figure if we followed Euclid’s rules. I smiled at her ladyship.
“I finally worked out that a few barrels of nutmeg were not enough to keep bringing down the roof of the Cloaca Maxima. Lead bars would though! The political plot has foundered; so the ringleader probably intends the ingots for himself. I’ve also worked out that he’ll make for the pigs and then make off. There’s a neat row of heavy-duty waggons in the yard that I reckon are due to leave laden with silver after curfew tonight. When he comes for them, here I am.”
“Falco!” cried Helena, apparently in outrage. “It’s my father—you cannot arrest papa!”
“Titus could. Still,” I commented drily, “in cases of treason we spare senators the inconvenience of a public trial. His honour can expect to receive a warning note in time to fall tidily on his own sword in the privacy of his very select home—”
“There is no evidence,” Helena argued.
Sadly I disagreed. “A great deal of circumstantial evidence has always pointed direct to Decimus. From his first volunteering to assist his friend the praetor, through to the way you and I were ambushed, and on to an unsavoury man who was planted in my rooms during the period when your father was so conveniently paying my rent…As a matter of interest, ladyship, why have you never mentioned the existence of this vault? What are you intending to do—let your father make good his escape with what silver there is? Very loyal. I’m certainly impressed!” She stayed silent, so I turned to her uncle, still playing the ingenuous part. “Bit of a turn up for you, sir? Your highly placed brother named as Domitian’s paymaster—”
“Shut up, Falco,” Helena said, but I went on:
“And madam here, who so admires an Emperor who will do the paperwork, yet seems magically eager to allow her noble father to diddle the Mint…Helena Justina, you know you can’t do it.”
“You know nothing about me, Falco,” she muttered in a low voice.
I whipped back, perhaps more intensely than I meant: “But oh my soul, I wanted to find out!”
I was desperate to get her away from here before things started getting rough—as I had no doubt they soon would.
“Sir, this is no place for a lady,” I appealed to her uncle. “Will you instruct your niece to go?”
“That is her decision, Falco.” His mouth compressed slightly in his practised, indifferent way. He had a strangely static face; I guessed he had always been self-sufficient, private to the point of being odd.
I was standing with my back to the cold bulk of the stacked lead bars, with Helena to my left and her uncle on the right. I could see he knew that whatever I was saying to her, I was always watching him. I tried again.
“Listen to me, ladyship. When you and I were in Britain you said Sosia had told me who the conspirators are. So she did.”
“Then you lied to me, Falco!”
“Not knowingly. But I know now, that before she died she identified the men involved. Titus Caesar is in possession of the evidence. So will you do as I say, Helena, I beg of you? What has happened here, and what happens today, need be nothing to do with you—”
Publius Camillus Meto finally broke in: “Wrong, Falco!”
Helena Justina was hugging her light mantle against the chill which lapped our skin. Wearing his toga, as a man of any standing would on a public festival, Publius held his arms folded just above his waist, like a soldier on a mission reassuring himself subconsciously that his dagger and his sword were still to hand. He was looking directly at me as he searched to discover the truth of what I really knew. I lifted an eyebrow, encouraging him to go on.
Then he said in a voice that became creamy with vindictiveness: “If you were properly informed, you would realize Helena Justina has been at the centre of this scheme since she was married to Pertinax!”
Odd how your mind works sometimes; before I even turned back to her, I had accepted that what he said was true.
My head spun. Our eyes met. She made no attempt to deny it. I ought to have known. With my brutal luck, I had bound myself to her wholeheartedly and until now had never doubted the lady’s honesty!
As she watched me accept it, I saw the contempt in her face. I had trained myself never to react visibly, yet I realized everything I felt for her had become all too obvious in my face. I could not change my expression. Simple distress held me rooted where I stood against the ingots, unable to accuse her, unable even to speak.
Then blackness exploded at the back of my skull, and among the blackness penetrating lights.