The Night Villa (13 page)

I look up from the steaming cup to Agnes’s face and I am amazed by the transformation that a few weeks in Italy has worked. Agnes’s skin has turned golden; her hair is shiny and sun-streaked. She’s put on just enough weight to take the gauntness out of her. Clearly there’s no need for me to feel guilty about neglecting Sam’s charge to watch over her: she’s thriving on a Mediterranean diet of sun and olive oil.

“Thanks, Agnes,” I say, sipping the hot, sweet tea. “It’s good to see you. Capri obviously agrees with you.”

“Isn’t it just the most beautiful place on earth? Wait till you see the Blue Grotto!” Agnes’s eyes shine with the same unearthly blue that the Capri landmark is famous for. “We even have our own grotto. Professor Lawrence and I went swimming there last week. I don’t ever want to leave!”

George Petherbridge and John Lyros share a smile at Agnes’s enthusiasm, but I take another hurried sip of tea, scalding my mouth, to hide the flicker of worry that darts through my mind. Agnes sounds like someone bewitched, and I’m hardly thrilled to hear she’s been spending time with Elgin.

“To tell you the truth, I haven’t gotten to see much of the island yet,” I say.

“Well, when Dr. Lawrence gets back—” Agnes begins, but John Lyros interrupts her.

“We’ll have to rectify that as soon as you’ve got your strength back. For now, though, I think we’d better get you out of this cold room and back upstairs.”

“Yes,” I concede, feeling like an ancient invalid, “but I wish I could start doing something for the project. I’d love to have a look at whatever you’ve got transcribed of Phineas’s scroll.”

“I can make a copy of the file and send it to your laptop,” Agnes offers. “I haven’t translated it yet, but the bits I was able to sight-read sounded fascinating. The Petronii really got up to some wild goings-on here…I mean…there.” She giggles. “Sometimes I forget that this isn’t the original villa.”

“Why don’t you do that?” Lyros says to Agnes. Then, putting a hand on my elbow as I get up, he says to me, “Why don’t you take a nap and then when you wake up it will be ready for you.”

“I’ll get right on it,” Agnes says eagerly. “It will be the perfect thing to keep your mind occupied while you’re recuperating.”

I return Agnes’s smile, but as John Lyros steers me from the room I can’t help but think that from what I’ve just seen of Phineas’s book, it won’t be restful reading.

I go back to my room and find the housekeeper setting up a tray for me.

“I’ll be eating with the rest of the staff from now on,” I tell her in Italian, “so you won’t have to keep bringing me my meals. You’ve been very, very kind,” I add, hoping to earn one of her rare smiles. But the face she turns to me is dour and I notice that she’s not wearing the coral necklace. Is it that wearing the necklace makes her smile, I wonder, or that she wears the necklace on days when she’s feeling happy? It’s a mystery.

When I finish my lunch—a delicious pasta dish with a sauce made from eggplants, sardines, and raisins, bread, and, of course, a plate of tomatoes and mozzarella—I try to read some of the Phineas volumes I brought with me, but the heavy lunch has left me too sleepy. I curl up on my bed, planning to take a short nap, but when I wake up it’s dark already. I had slept so soundly I hadn’t heard anyone come into my room, but there’s a tray on a chair by my bed with a covered dish and a note from Agnes that says, “Look in your e-mail—I’ve sent you the Phineas!”

Not trusting myself to eat another meal without yielding to its soporific effect, or to read in bed, I transfer the tray to my bed, drag the chair to the doorway, use it to prop open the door so that I’ve got plenty of air from the courtyard to keep me awake, and sit down on it with my laptop in my lap. I check to make sure the courtyard is empty. It is; the only light comes from a full moon that has just risen above the eastern edge of the villa. I open my laptop, download the document Agnes has sent me, and open up the file labeled
PHINEAS
. Two columns appear: the Latin text transcribed from the scroll, and a “rough” translation she’s prepared. I start out by reading back and forth between the two, but after noting how good her Latin translation is I read the English, only glancing occasionally back at the Latin to check a word or two.

I knew it was a lucky day that delivered me from shipwreck and brought me to this safe harbor,
he wrote, dating his entry
DIES SATURNI AD XII KAL. SEP DCCCXXXIII A.U.C
., which Agnes has translated as August 21, AD 79,
but I did not know how lucky until last night when the mistress of the house told me its secret.

I smile at Phineas’s teasing introduction and look out the doorway to the courtyard where the bronze statue of the goddess Night gleams in the moonlight. The patter of the fountain and the more distant sound of the sea fade away as I enter Phineas’s world.

My hostess Calatoria Vimidis began the evening by apologizing for the fare. “Since my husband’s death, and with the children in Rome, I live here quite simply.”

“I am most sorry to learn that Gaius Petronius Stephanus is no longer with us. He had a reputation as a man of great learning and discrimination and I would have liked to have seen what he thought of some of the works I have brought back with me…. But you mustn’t apologize for your more than generous hospitality. Everything is delicious,” I told her with perfect veracity. “I have never tasted oysters so fresh! And you would have needed an excellent soothsayer to predict my arrival as I did not know myself that the gods would drive my ship here.”

She looked away toward the sea and I was afraid I’d offended her, but before I could apologize she said, “You see, that’s the oddity of your arrival. I believe there were signs that told of your coming, but I stupidly misread them. Seven days ago I went to the sibyl.”

“At Cumae? How exciting! I am most anxious to pay a visit there myself.”

“Well, I wish you better luck reading her meaning than I had,” she said, taking a sip of wine.

“What did she say?”

“She said nothing. She scribbled on a leaf three sentences: Poseidon will enact his wrath. The sea will take back what belongs to it. The maiden shall be returned to her mother.”

“Ah, so you think Poseidon’s wrath might have referred to the storm that caused my ship to founder?”

“Perhaps, although really it wasn’t much of a storm. I’m surprised your crew was destroyed by it.”

“Perhaps from the safety of this beautiful villa it didn’t seem like much of a storm, but from where I stood on the deck of the ship as we passed between the point of Surrentum and the isle of Capreae it felt like all the winds of Aeolus had been let loose and that the whirlpool of Charybdis was trying to drag me down to my death. I even glimpsed the white bones that litter the rocks of the sirens that Homer spoke of. Believing that I must have done something to anger the gods, perhaps by taking from their native shrines the records of their mysteries, I poured a libation into the sea to Minerva whose temple crowns the Surrentum heights. Then I had myself and my trunk put in a small rowboat, hoping that my contagion wouldn’t doom the whole ship. I fully expected to perish, but then my little boat found its way to this shore. I can only assume that the gods smile on my endeavors, especially since I was brought here.” I toasted my hostess and she inclined her head modestly, showing off as she did an exquisite pearl diadem fastened in her dark hair.

“But the sea did claim the rest of your crew,” she pointed out, signaling to a slave girl to refill my wineglass. “Perhaps you had trespassed against some native God…. You say you’ve brought back records of the mysteries?”

“Yes, my own impressions recorded in a journal I have kept over the years and some other texts…old books sold to me by priests to increase the wealth of their shrines, sacred texts that I found moldering in bookshops, philosophical treatises copied over by temple slaves and sold on the black market of Alexandria. You’d be amazed at the traffic in magical secrets practiced in the bazaars of the East—it’s enough to tarnish one’s belief in these religions when so often there’s a price attached to their mysteries.” I noticed that the slave girl, who was filling my glass, had paused to listen to what I was saying, a becoming blush on her face, and that Calatoria was watching her carefully. A favorite being trained to serve at table? I wondered. “I see by your fine paintings that you honor Demeter and Persephone. You are a follower of the Eleusinian Mysteries, perhaps?”

At the mention of the two goddesses, the slave girl, who was just returning my glass to the table beside my couch, flinched. The glass fell to the marble floor and shattered in as many pieces as the mosaic pattern that decorated the floor. My hostess’s face became like stone and in the flickering lamplight I observed that her features, which had seemed lovely only a moment ago, hardened and turned quite ugly. So a passing cloud may transform a peaceful and beautiful landscape into a gloomy scene of violence and destruction. Calatoria leapt from her couch and slapped the girl’s face.

“Iusta! Do you have any idea how expensive those glasses were? What a stupid girl—”

The girl—Iusta, what an unusual name!—fell to her knees and hurriedly began collecting the broken pieces, as if she could put the glass back together again if she moved quickly enough, but her only reward for her haste was a cut hand.

“And now you’ll drip blood over everything!” With a disgusted sigh, Calatoria sank back down onto her couch and, realizing that I was observing her, tried to resume a placid countenance. “Slaves! This one has received all the training of a patrician, a whimsy of my late husband’s, and yet she can’t even serve a glass of wine without breaking something.”

“Iusta is a rather unusual name. Another whimsy of your husband’s?”

“Of the girl’s mother. She bought her freedom soon after the girl’s birth and she celebrated by giving her daughter that preposterous name. I would not have allowed it, but my husband had a weak spot for the slaves and the girl’s mother had belonged to his mother.”

Throughout this conversation its object kept her head bent steadily to her task, giving no sign that she heard us except for the rising color in her cheeks, which I detected because of the reflection of the torchlight on her face.

“The mother bought her own freedom, but the girl is still a slave?”

“Yes, well, she was born while her mother was still a slave, so she remains a slave, although her mother tried to claim otherwise and retain the girl, but I eventually prevailed in court and Iusta came back to me—along with some oyster farms her mother had bought. In fact, the oysters we dined upon tonight are from them. Vitalis’s oysters have proved a better bargain than her daughter, clumsy as she is. Still, I find she has uses…. That’s quite enough, Iusta. Go have the cook bandage your hand before you bleed to death and cheat me of your value once again.”

The girl rose and with her eyes still on the ground bowed to her mistress. I watched her as she walked across the courtyard and descended the steps to the lower level of the villa. “Yes, I can see what you mean,” I said, turning back to my hostess whose eyes, I noted, were glittering as though she had a fever. “She has a certain charm.”

“I’m glad you approve. Doesn’t she remind you of the Persephone?”

I followed my hostess’s gaze to the painting on the west wall of the courtyard, to the figure of Persephone as she was seized by the god of the underworld and saw immediately that she was right. The slave girl did bear an uncanny resemblance to the maiden in the painting.

Calatoria was clearly pleased by my reaction. “Take a closer look,” she suggested and I did. I rose from my couch—a little unsteadily, I admit, from my hostess’s excellent wine—and approached the painting on the west wall of the peristylium. Calatoria followed me, an oil lamp in her hand, which she held up to the painting. The girl’s expression of horror as she is seized by the god leapt out of the shadows—her open mouth and flashing eyes—and I saw that she could be the twin of the clumsy slave girl.

Calatoria lowered the lamp slightly and, following the orb of light, my eyes fell on the girl’s breast bared as Hades ripped her stola from her shoulder, his dark hand sinking into the tender white flesh of her shoulder. “A marvel!” I pronounced. “The girl must have modeled for the painter.”

“It was her mother, actually. See, she modeled for the initiate as well.” Calatoria led me to the north wall where the figures depicted a series of mystery rites. Calatoria held her lamp up to the face of a young girl kneeling beside a trunk upon which the rape of Persephone was depicted. The girl’s posture exactly matched the slave girl’s when she had knelt to retrieve the broken glass. I could have sworn that even the color in the painted supplicant’s cheeks matched the blush of the slave girl Iusta.

“Remarkable,” I said.

“Yes, so you can see why I insist upon keeping her. Her mother—and her mother’s mother and her mother before her—have all participated in the rites of the maiden which we honor here. In exchange for their service they have each in turn been granted the opportunity to buy their freedom, but only after they have provided their replacement. The rite can only take place when the girl attains the age of seventeen, which she just has. And so, you see how remarkable it is that you have arrived at just this time.”

“You mean the rites of the maiden will be conducted here—and soon?”

“Yes, this household has hosted the rites for many years, twice since I became its mistress. It is an honor.”

“And when do the rites take place?”

“In three days’ time, on the evening of Dies Martis, nine days before the Kalends of September.”

I didn’t have to translate the Roman date into our calendar. I knew full well that nine days before the Kalends of September was August 24, the day Vesuvius erupted.