A Pot of Poison
I turned to my father, wordlessly. He was the doctor, not me.
He was looking at Arcturus, and it was as if he was swiftly calculating in his mind his weight in gold, or his value. He asked him a few questions – not about Theodora, but about himself. Who was his father? Where was his farm? Arcturus answered, briefly and impatient.
“We have to hurry!” Arcturus blurted out finally. “Sir, we need your help. We can pay—”
My father smiled without humour.
“I have never taken a fee for treatment, but I cannot leave the Emperor.” He looked at me, then drew me to one side.
“Do you trust this young man?” he said quietly.
It was an odd question. I looked at him in surprise. “Of course,” I said without thinking.
My father nodded.
“Then you go.”
“Me?” I was shocked. “But I’m not a doctor.”
He was listening to raised voices from inside the palace, and what he heard seemed to make his mind up. He gripped my wrist so hard that I was silent in shock.
“Listen to me, daughter, and do as I tell you. Go and get your medicine chest. Do it swiftly and let no one see you. Get your cloak and dress warmly and take anything of value that you can easily carry. Then go with this young man and do not come back until I summon you. Do you understand?”
“But—” I began.
“Go!” he said, sounding stern but kind. Still, something in his voice scared me.
“But what about you?” I blurted.
He sighed. For a moment, he looked like my father again, the man nothing could shake or trouble, who calmly treated good news just as he treated bad.
“I have given years to serving the Emperor,” he said quietly. “Whether I was right or wrong, the gods will judge. But, if I am a Roman, now is not the time to abandon my duty.”
Then he strode off, following the lights and voices towards the apartments of the Emperor.
I did as he told me, though I was confused and frightened. I ran upstairs and put all my possessions into the silver chest that the Empress had given me. I did not have much. There was a hush all over the palace, but I felt as if no one was asleep. It felt more as if everyone was awake, listening, waiting and watching. I wondered if Caracalla had something planned. As I hurried back through the palace to the door where Arcturus was waiting, I glimpsed a few frightened faces peeping from behind doors. The doors shut as soon as I got close to them.
“What’s happening in there?” Arcturus demanded as I stepped out with him into the snow.
“I don’t know. I hope my father will be all right.”
“Thank you for coming,” he said, and I could hear in his voice that he meant it. “There is no one of our family here but me, and I have no skills in medicine.”
I did not reply. I wished I had his faith in me, but I knew that the small store of medicines I had in the box was not going to work miracles. Only the gods could do that.
Eboracum in the pale light of dawn was menacing and silent. A few men slipped from shadow to shadow, watching us and sometimes following us for a few blocks. A few carts rumbled through the streets, and threw up the filthy melted snow on my cloak. I could hear whispering voices and the clash and jangle of soldiers’ armour. It seemed that the feeling I had sensed in the courtyard, the nervous terror, had spilled out into the city too.
“Like I said, she has been ill for days,” Arcturus told me as we went on. “Low in mood, no appetite.”
“How many days?”
“Since last market day at least. That’s when I arrived, as usual. I could see she was not well, so I stayed. She got worse and worse. I have called in doctors, but nothing they did has worked – they bled her, they gave her medicines. So I thought, perhaps the Emperor’s own doctor. . .”
We reached the house, where a frightened-looking Vitia was standing by the open door ready to welcome us in. A light was burning in the back room, and I went straight in.
As soon as I saw Theodora, lying on her bed, I knew she was far beyond my help. Her lips were pale and dry and her eyes rolled back. Still, I took an oil lamp, knelt down and tried to make her understand me.
“Can you speak, Theodora? What do you feel?”
Vitia came forward timidly.
“She has not been herself. She said she felt sad, then she complained of stomach aches and of tingling in her limbs. She could not sleep, but instead she seemed half asleep in the daytime, slurring her words as if she were drunk – though I know she never touches wine.”
“And she said she could not see properly,” added another girl.
I stood up again. This was too serious for me. If there was to be any chance of saving Theodora, I knew I had to get a proper doctor, one from the palace who would know what they were doing. By now the sun was up, but the city was still oddly quiet. I looked around for Avitoria – she was known at the palace. She was hanging back, in the shadows by the door. I went to her. She looked at me with a strange, almost frightened expression in her eyes. I was not surprised she was afraid. Her mistress was dying.
“Avitoria,” I told her, “go back to the palace with Arcturus and tell my father that we need a proper doctor. He must come, or send someone. The Emperor has a hundred doctors, surely one can be spared to save Theodora. Go!”
She hesitated, then nodded and hurried to the door. Arcturus followed.
I watched her go down the steps. As I did so, I thought of the theriac. It was a complex medicine that I did not know how to prepare. It was meant for emperors, and the cost of it was enormous. But it was supposed to be good for anything, and this was an emergency. Once I had thought of the theriac, I knew I could not rest until I had at least tried it.
I went back in to Theodora. There was more daylight now, coming through the high, small window. I measured out a grain of theriac and opened her lips to feed it in. She did not even flinch. In the growing light, I noticed her gums. They did not look normal. There was a blue line along them, almost like the line left by the tide when it goes out.
My heart began beating very fast. I felt that I was on the brink of something, some discovery, but I did not know what it was.
Aware of the girls watching me intently, I began to search the room. I did not really know what I was looking for, but somewhere, somehow, I thought, there had to be some clues.
“What did she eat last night?” I asked.
“Nothing, she had no appetite.”
“She ate nothing at all?”
“The last thing she ate was a pie that Avitoria bought her from the pastry shop, a few days ago,” said Vitia. “But when people are ill from food, that is different, isn’t it?”
“Very different,” I said.
“She had a little ale,” one of the British girls, Regina, said. “Avitoria saw to it, because we were working.”
I looked at the tankard that was on the table. I picked it up and held it in the daylight. It was hard to tell in the darkness, but I thought I could see a little white powder on the rim – and caught the scent of roses.
I turned and ran out of the house, my heart thumping, feeling sick. I went over to the rubbish heap. I searched the snow-covered pile for the dead cat I had seen weeks ago. It was nothing but a few scraps of fur and bone now. Under the bone, something winked and glinted in the dawn light.
I bent to pick it up. It was a cosmetic pot made of gold, inlaid with red glass in the shape of a snake. I recognised it at once. Only one woman in this town had anything so beautiful: Julia Domna, the Empress. The cosmetic pot was the one in which she kept the white lead which she used for lightening her skin.
It can poison, even as far as death. I remembered my father’s words clearly, his towering rage back in Rome, my mother’s exasperation. But even the Empress uses it!
She did. And the last time I had seen this pot was in Avitoria’s hand. Now here it lay, outside her house – and inside, her mistress Theodora lay poisoned and on the brink of death.
*
“Avitoria poisoned Theodora?” you say, shocked.
I nodded. “I think so.”
“But why? She was a kind mistress. She was going to free her in her will!”
“She was – until Julia Domna arrived. The Empress wanted to buy Avitoria from Theodora. I believe Avitoria decided she could not bear being sold away from her home, and lose any chance of reaching her family again. She decided to do something about it. If Theodora died before she could sell her, Avitoria would be free.”
“So, she was a murderess!” you say, full of pious rage. “Of course, you told the Emperor?”
I take a deep breath, and go on.