Even their narrow escape from death left Aulus and Quintus silent and depressed. Neither could even find the spirit to complain about coming home from their great adventure to women who had spent their time carousing instead of weeping with fear for their men. Quintus had not even noticed yet that the wine Claudia pulled from the cellar had been his father’s favourite Caecuban.
With little more ado, everyone took themselves off to bed. Helena Justina had been offered her old room by an elderly slave. “Little Aelia has it nowadays, she decided she wanted her own place, but I can move her in with her parents.…”
“No, let their parents have time together.” Helena, convincingly sober by some sleight, wanted to go home to her own family. She needed the kind of reassurance Quintus had sought earlier. To count them. Touch them. Tell them they were loved. To make sure for herself that everyone was there, and safe.… Besides, she knew that her husband, left in charge, would be waiting for news of the situation. She could imagine him prowling about unhappily without her, pretending not to feel worry while he drove himself mad with it.
Night lay upon the Capena Gate. There was a period of rumbling commercial activity as delivery carts inhabited the road system, but after yesterday’s triumph, things were still slow. No one who lived in Rome noticed the familiar racket, anyway. Once their tasks were done, the wheeled vehicles evacuated the city. A quieter time ensued, where partygoers sometimes whooped or thieves yelled at the vigiles. Then there was peace. Stars. Near stillness. What passed for silence in a city of a million people, a city that was never entirely at rest.
Still wound up, Aulus and Quintus found sleep hard to come by. Their crazy evening on the Palatine reimposed itself, chuntering round in their heads obsessively as they tried to escape. Aulus and Meline, who sometimes kept to separate rooms, lay in each other’s arms tonight. Quintus, the tragic traditional husband, had his back to his wife, though he was comforted by Claudia pressed up against him, and had she needed, he would have turned to her. She, exhausted by wine and fearfulness, had collapsed, unable for once to listen out for troubled children. Quintus was doing that, until he too at last found sleep.
Only Aulus lay awake for some time longer. Aulus, the grim brother, the one who had always been most likely to harbour suspicions about situations where everyone assured him there was no need. His teeth clenched. He could not relax. Aulus Camillus had heard his relations congratulate each other that they had survived, that the threat had come to nothing, that the misery was ended. But Aulus assessed this as a crisis that was not yet over. To him, the black banquet’s climax seemed to be missing. Domitian, he reckoned, had unfinished business. So he lay on his back, staring up at the ceiling, trying not to disturb Meline, while he waited alone for the crunch to come. Yet even he succumbed to weariness eventually and sank into a deep slumber.
Just before dawn, the time when raids are carried out and sudden arrests are made, two households were woken by thunderous, protracted knocking.