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“You acquitted yourself like a soldier,” smiled Sixtus, reclining on his couch at the head of the table. He reached stiffly for his winecup, and Dorcas, who sat at his feet, handed it to him. “Tell me, just out of curiosity. How did you contrive to delay Quindarvis’ arrival at the villa? You gave us the time we needed; had he arrived any sooner it could have been extremely embarrassing for us.”

“Maybe I should leave,” offered Arrius, making as if to rise. “I’m not sure I ought to know this.”

“No, no! Perfectly decent—well, classical, anyhow. Fact is, it’s just about the only thing I remember out of my schooling. Some Greek or other used it to fox a chariot race. You pull the linchpin out of the wheel and stick a wax one in the hole instead. Works just fine till you get going, then slam! You’re on the pavement. Not surprised he was annoyed. Dashed dirty trick. If you whittle it down a bit a candle works just fine. Pass the mustard, Professor.”

“He was an evil man,” said Aurelia Pollia quietly, “and I cannot say that I’m sorry that he came to the end he did.”

“It was merciful,” said Varus dryly, “compared to what it would have been.”

“What is hard to believe,” she continued, running the embroidered edge of her shawl through small fragile fingers, “is that he knew. I don’t understand someone like that, who comforted me, all that first night and all the next day, who cared for me, who stayed with me at a time when I was so distracted I think I would have lost my mind.”

“I suspect,” said Sixtus quietly, “that he stayed with you chiefly to make sure that you did not start asking yourself questions, such as, with the whole route from the Aventine to the Quirinal Hill to choose from, why did they decide to kidnap her on her very doorstep? And why would a man spend the day before the games he was sponsoring—the day when all the business of them has to be settled—loitering around the house of an absent patron, as Nicanor tells me he had from the eighth hour onward.”

There was a long pause. Then Lady Aurelia said, “I feel very badly about Nicanor. He was so good, and so helpful to me that night; and then to do that to him.”

“Well, y’know, slaves have to expect that kind of thing,” reasoned Felix brightly. “I mean, if they get on the wrong side of the law...” He glanced hastily around at Churaldin, who with a perfectly impassive face under the whiteness of a bandage was bringing in a basket of dates. “Well, there’s slaves and slaves, of course.” He wriggled in embarrassment. “Dash it, Professor, if you won’t pass me the mustard on the third time of asking...”

Marcus and Tullia hastily surfaced from drowning in each other’s eyes and looked around, startled, at reality. “Uh—oh, yes.” Marcus handed him the salt. Felix rolled his eyes heavenward in disgust.

Varus said, “I will make it up to Nicanor. Fate did him a terrible injustice, and he met it with great courage. A man deserves his freedom for that.” He glanced across at Marcus. “Who was the woman?”

Marcus hesitated, then said, “A slave of Porcius Craessius’. Her name is Hypatia.”

The prefect nodded. “I will speak to him in the morning.” He looked down the table at his daughter, who was blushingly attending to her untouched food. “And what would Quindarvis have done,” he asked quietly, “had not you and these mysterious friends of yours intervened, Sixtus?”

The old scholar glanced at Tullia, his brows drawn down in concern, and she met his eyes calmly and turned to look at her father.

She said quietly, “I knew from the first they planned to kill me. Plotina made them stop talking about it in front of me. They—they hadn’t done so to torment me, I don’t think; it was just as if I were a lamb or something. I was nothing to them. I think that was more frightening than anything else.”

Her mother, who had been reclining beside Varus, sat up and clasped her hands, her face suddenly wrung with compassion. Tullia gave her a bright, close-lipped smile, denying that the horrors had any aftermath of nightmares or fears. Varus was enough of a Roman to look down his nose disapprovingly at the display of emotion, and his wife quickly returned to her position on the couch. Tullia gave her a sideways glance of understanding connivance and pinched her ankle to let her know she understood.

“It’s an apt comparison,” said Sixtus after a moment. “He thought no more of you as a person, my child, than he thought of those poor devils he purchased from the courts to fling to the bears at his games. In a way it was staged like the games, a deliberately planned crescendo of pathos and horror. Had we not been on his heels, he might have waited a day or two after your father returned to the city to let public sentiment and your father’s horror and anxiety work itself to a fever pitch, secure in the knowledge that no matter how many Christians or supposed Christians were questioned, none of them would have the slightest idea where you were. Then I suspect your body would have been found under dramatic circumstances. The deaths of Judah Symmachus and his father, who was the real target of this murder attempt, would pass virtually unnoticed in the ensuing slaughter.”

The deep mellow voice ceased; there was silence, as Varus looked down into the darkness of his wine. “It is my shame,” he said quietly, “that you are right.”

“It is an easy matter,” returned the former imperial governor, “to get at a man through his child.”

“As Quindarvis knew,” the prefect replied. “And since I had thrown those poor silly Christians to the beasts without any more thought than he showed, it made the accusation all the easier to believe.”

There was an embarrassed pause in the conversation following this remark, as Dorcas, who had sat in almost unnoticed silence, glanced up suddenly and met his eyes. The prefect reddened. But she only said softly, “At least you acted out of your own conviction and the law, rather than for personal gain.”

“No,” said Varus softly, looking down at his hands, smooth and unworked around the chased gold rim of the cup. “After this long, I really cannot say what my motives were. But I suspect that the fact that I was sponsoring games affected my judgment.” And he raised his head, staring down the hastily averted gazes of astonishment from his wife and child. “If there is divine justice,” he continued stiffly, as an old man does when he uses muscles long inactive, “I can only say that I am thankful that I received less than my deserving.”

The silence that followed this admission was so painful that out of sheer tact Sixtus stepped gracefully in and changed the subject by asking, “By the way, prefect, what will be done with Plotina? She was in this thing up to the neck, of course.”

“Will they kill her?” asked Tullia unhappily. “It wasn’t that she was kind to me—she wasn’t—but she did keep the men from abusing me. I’m sure it was simply to keep there from being any uproar, but I owe her that.”

“If it were not for Plotina,” added Dorcas, “the man Lucius would undoubtedly have killed me when he found me outside Tullia’s room in the brothel.” She glanced across at Arrius, her brows drawn together in concern.

Varus said dryly, “I don’t think we need worry about Madam Plotina. Too many people will be interested in keeping her from trial. I expect she’ll merely find herself invited to leave Rome and never return.”

Sixtus remarked, “There are worse fates,” and drained his cup. “And with Quindarvis dead, I doubt that any of this is going to come to trial—or, indeed, to public notice—at all. And in a town like Rome,” he added in a kindlier voice, as Tullia’s cheeks flushed a bright vermilion, “you’ll find that there is so much gossip that one scandal very quickly chases another. In a year very few people will know, or care, where you were.”

Stealthily, Aurelia Pollia reached to grip her daughter’s hand. “What surprises me,” she said, with a timid glance, as though for permission, at her husband, “is that they would dare to keep her in town at all. Wasn’t it terribly dangerous?”

Arrius shrugged. “What’s one more girl in a place like that?” he asked. “It was only chance that connected Plotina’s place with Quindarvis in Marcus’ mind at all. And they had no way of knowing you’d have the wits to throw down your earring that way, Tertullia.”

Tullia smiled wryly. “It was the only thing I had that was small enough to fit through the crack I’d made,” she said. “The window was boarded up, you see. I worked—days I worked—to chip a hole in the corner of one of the boards. It was stupid, because the only thing I had to work with was a hairpin, but it was the only thing I could think of to do. I knew from the street sounds I was several stories up, and fairly near the Forum. I thought if I could just throw something down, someone might recognize it. I suppose in a city the size of Rome that was a terrible long shot.”

“Here, don’t speak ill of long shots,” protested Felix. “Only the other day I backed the scrawniest little chap in the arena you ever saw, couldn’t have weighed any more than you do, Tulla, and by Castor he killed his man, at fifty to one.” He looked across at her for a moment, as though trying to reconcile this slender girl in soft rose-colored linen, her hair smoothed neatly back in the old-fashioned republican style her father favored, with the hoyden who’d gamely followed him and his brother in and out of trouble in their early days. For a moment he seemed to struggle with untoward leanings to serious emotion and thought. Then he said, “Y’know, Tulla, it’s good to see you safe. I thought poor Silenus was going to fret himself to death there for a while.”

She met Marcus’ eyes, and he colored to the roots of his shorn hair.

“And yet you did not, as your brother says, fret yourself to death,” said the city prefect slowly. “You acted with courage and tenacity for which, knowing your philosophic antecedents, I would hardly have credited you.”

He felt the prefect’s gaze going through him like a hot probe, as though sizing him up and gauging his manhood. He swallowed hard. “No, sir,” he said. “I would have given up, or failed, or done something stupid, if it weren’t for my friends—Sixtus, Arrius, Felix, Churaldin—Dorcas—the Christians. Without them I could never have even begun.”

“Indeed,” said Tullia’s father, and folded his elegant hands. “So tell me now, Silanus, do you propose to return to the life of philosophy?”

In the long silence that followed, the sounds of the quiet evening came to him, singly and clear: the trickle of the moss-choked fountain, the rustle of the gray cat among the jungles of vines that blocked the walkway, the evening quarrelings of the birds. He found himself acutely conscious of the girl who sat at her parents’ feet, watching him with wide brown eyes filled with hope and dread, and of Arrius, like a lean tawny lion next to him on the couch. For a moment he did not know what to say.

Finally he stammered, “Well, the thing is, philosophy isn’t a life. It’s a mode of living, like—like a religion, or an ethical system, can be. But you can’t just be a philosopher. Not unless you’re a genius, which I’m not.”

“You may not be a philosophic genius,” said Arrius after a moment, “but you do have a flair for looking into things. Things that maybe we wouldn’t trust a paid informer with. You have the advantage of education and a gentlemanly background, as well as wits, Professor. If you’re looking for a life to replace that of a philosopher, come see me at the praetorian prefect’s office in the morning. I think he’d like to talk to you.”

Marcus fought to suppress the surge of illogical delight that broke over him like a wave. It was stupid, of course. Any reasonable man would have run shrieking from the prospect of making a living at the kind of thing he had been engaged in for the last week or so. His smarting shoulder, cracked ribs, and aching throat all winced in protest as he said, “Do you think I’d do for it?”

“Marcus!” cried his brother in horror. “Caius’ll have a stroke!”

Arrius thought it over and said, “With a little training.”

“Mother’ll faint! No,” Felix added after a moment, “dash it, knowing Mother... But anyway, you can’t turn into a—a paid police informer!”

Across the table, Tullia was signaling
Say yes!
her eyes sparkling like stars.
The hoyden!
thought Marcus, who had no idea what his own eyes looked like.

“He won’t be a paid informer,” corrected the centurion equably. “He’ll be a regular junior civil servant, on a civil servant’s salary. Nothing excessive, but—sufficient.”

Marcus looked from Tullia to her father, who preserved his stern judgelike countenance and betrayed no thoughts of his own. His mouth felt like wood as he asked, “Sufficient—to keep a wife on.”

“If she isn’t picky,” said Arrius brutally.

As though he had drunk several glasses of neat wine, a warmth of deep delight rushed through him, brightening the twilit room like an all-encompassing halo. A sound like the ocean seemed to roar in his ears.

“Dash it, Professor, you don’t need their piddling salary!” protested Felix, a peripheral twitter on the edge of a world bounded by the brown depths of Tullia’s singing eyes. “You can’t do it! You’re a rich man, you can’t...”

Marcus swung around, startled as if his brother had flung ice water over him. “What?”

“I said you don’t need their money,” said Felix plaintively. The wreath of hyacinth he wore over his shorn hair hung askew, and he pushed it up indignantly. “The old paterfamilias never got around to making a will. The three of us inherit as a consortium. Even settin’ aside a whopping chunk for Aemilia’s dowry, that leaves us all buttered on both sides. You’d have known that,” he added, “if you’d stuck around at the banquet, instead of—well, instead of leaving.”

“And when were you at the banquet?” retorted Marcus.

“Later,” said his brother hastily, “after you’d torn m’cloak for me, rot you. And went and ruined my bronze silk.”

“If we inherit as a consortium,” purred Marcus, “you’re rich enough to buy another bronze silk.”

“Well, I will. Fact is, I already have. And I’ll buy another, to wear to your wedding.”

Varus said, in a stiff disapproving tone, “Owing to the recentness of your father’s death, it is unseemly to discuss such matters for the time being. When the nine days of mourning are past...” He paused, feeling himself the center of all eyes, particularly his wife’s and daughter’s. He sipped his wine. “We shall see.”