Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 100, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 603 & 604, October 1992

Bethesda shrugged. To change the subject, I turned to Eco. “And speaking of outrageous fees, what did that thief of a tutor teach you today?”

Eco jumped from his couch and ran to fetch his stylus and wax tablet.

Bethesda uncrossed her arms. “If you continue with these matters,” she said, her voice now pitched to conceal her own unease, “I think that your friend Lucius Claudius gives you good advice. There is no need to take Eco along with you. He’s busy with his lessons and should stay at home. He’s safe here, from evil men and evil spirits alike.”

I nodded, for I had been thinking the same thing myself.

The next morning I stepped quietly past the soldier’s house. He did not spy me and call out, though I could tell he was awake and in his garden; I smelled the tang of burning leaves on the air.

I had promised Lucius and Cornelia that I would come again to the house on the Palatine, but there was another call I wanted to make first.

A few questions in the right ears and a few coins in the right hands were all it took to find the house of Furius’s mother on the Caelian Hill, where his survivors had fled after he was proscribed, beheaded, and dispossessed. The house was small and narrow, wedged in among other small, narrow houses that might have been standing for a hundred years; the street had somehow survived the fires and the constant rebuilding that continually changes the face of the city, and seemed to take me into an older, simpler Rome, when rich and poor alike lived in modest private dwellings, before the powerful began to flaunt their wealth with great houses and the poor were pressed together into many-storied tenements.

A knock upon the door summoned a veritable giant, a hulking, thick-chested slave with squinting eyes and a scowling mouth — not the door slave of a secure and respectable home, but quite obviously a bodyguard. I stepped back a few paces so that I did not have to strain to look up at him, and asked to see his master.

“If you had legitimate business here, you’d know that there is no master in this house,” he growled.

“Of course,” I said, “I misspoke myself. I meant to say your mistress — the mother of the late Furius.”

He scowled. “Do you misspeak yourself again, stranger, or could it be that you don’t know that the old mistress had a stroke not long after her son’s death? She and her daughter are in seclusion and see no one.”

“What was I thinking? I meant to say, of course, Furius’s widow—”

But the slave had had enough of me, and slammed the door in my face.

I heard a cackle of laughter behind me and turned to see a toothless old slavewoman sweeping the portico of the house across the street. “You’d have had an easier time getting in to see the dictator Sulla when he was alive,” she laughed.

I smiled and shrugged. “Are they always so unfriendly and abrupt?”

“With strangers, always. You can’t blame them — a house full of women with no man around but a bodyguard.”

“No man in the house — ah, not since Furius was executed.”

“You knew him?” asked the slavewoman.

“Not exactly. But I know of him.”

“Terrible, what they did to him. He was no enemy of Sulla’s. Furius had no stomach for politics or fighting. A gentle man, wouldn’t have kicked a dog from his front step.”

“But his brother took up arms against Sulla, and died fighting him.”

“That was his brother, not Furius. I knew them both, from when they were boys growing up in that house with their mother. Furius was a peaceful child, and a cautious man. A philosopher, not a fighter. What was done to him was a terrible injustice — naming him an enemy of the state, taking all his property, cutting off his...” She stopped her sweeping and cleared her throat. She hardened her jaw. “And who are you? Another schemer come to torment his womenfolk?”

“Not at all.”

“Because I’ll tell you right now that you’ll never get in to see his mother or sister. Ever since the death, and after that the old woman’s stroke, they haven’t stirred out of that house. A long time to be in mourning, you might say, but Furius was all they had. His widow goes out to do the marketing, with the little girl; but she still wears black. They all took his death very hard.”

At that moment the door across the street opened. A blonde woman emerged, draped in a black stola. Beside her, reaching up to hold her hand, was a little girl with haunted eyes and black curls. Closing the door and following behind was the giant, who saw me and scowled.

“On their way to market,” whispered the old slavewoman. “She usually goes at this time of morning. Ah, look at the precious little one, so serious-looking yet so pretty. Not so much like her mother, not so fair; no, the very image of her aunt, I’ve always said.”

“Her aunt? Not her father?”

“Him, too, of course...”