The Venus Throw (50 page)

I had only a moment to ponder the question, for the twins suddenly rushed into the room in a burst of laughter and golden hair. Meto might know a thing or two about military strategy, but he was no match for his niece and nephew. Titania advanced from the left, Titus from the right. Each grabbed hold of an arm and climbed onto him.

“When did they get so big? And so strong!” Meto laughed.

“They intend to wrestle you, I think,” said Eco, chagrined.

“Or at least immobilize you,” I said.

“They’ve succeeded.” Meto grunted. The twins squealed with triumph.

“You’d better give up now, while you can,” I suggested. “Gaul-fighting Uncle Meto can take a lot rougher treatment than their delicate old grandpa, and they know it.”

“I give up!” gasped Meto. The twins released him at once and then turned to mount a skirmish against me. Their
attack turned out to be an assault of harmless hugs and kisses, to which I submitted without a struggle.

“But what’s this?” I said.

“What?” said Titania.

“This piece of jewelry pinned on your tunic?”

“A gorgon’s eye!” cried Titus. “It gives her magical powers, and I have to get it away from her, even if I have to chop her head off!”

“But where did it come from?” My mouth was suddenly dry. It was an earring of simple design, a silver crook with a green glass bead—the twin of the earring which had been used to force the lock of my strongbox, and which had been carelessly dropped inside when the poison was taken.

“It came from the land of Libya, where the Gorgons live,” said Titania. “It can make you invisible. That’s what Titus says.”

“Yes, but how did you come to have it?” From the tone of my voice she knew I wanted a serious answer.

“She
gave
it to me,” said Titania. “She told me she’d lost the other one and she didn’t want it anymore.”

“Who gave it to you?”

Titania told me. My heart sped up.

“And will it really make me invisible?” she said.

“No.” My voice shook. “I mean,
yes
. Why not? The other earring made her invisible. To my eyes, anyway. It made me think I saw the truth, when I couldn’t begin to see it. Oh, Cybele!”

Eco furrowed his brow. “Papa, what are you talking about?”

“I have to go home now. I think I may have been very, very wrong about something.”

Belbo answered the front door. At the sight of me he broke into a grin. “Master! Thank the gods you’re here!”

“Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing at all . . . now that you’re back.”

“Has her mood been that terrible?”

Belbo rolled his eyes in answer, then jumped at the voice from behind him.

“Whose mood?” Bethesda’s voice was like frost in the springtime.

I nodded to dismiss Belbo, who quickly disappeared. Bethesda and I looked at each other in silence for a long moment. “Where have you been?” she finally said.

“I spent the night at Eco’s house.”

“And the night before that?”

“I was in bed with a drunken poet, actually.”

She snorted. “Did you see the trial yesterday?”

“Yes.”

“Quite a spectacle, wasn’t it?”

“You were there?”

“Of course. Belbo held me a place at the very front. I never saw you, though.”

“I was standing at the back. I never saw you either.”

“Strange, isn’t it, that we could be so close and yet not see each other.” Her gaze softened a bit. “Caelius was acquitted. I was glad.”

“So was I, I suppose.”

“But what they did to Clodia was horrible.”

“Yes, it was appalling.”

“I wanted to stop them. I would have stopped them, if I could have.”

“I felt the same.”

“Now she’s left the city,” said Bethesda.

“How did you know that?”

Bethesda saw the look on my face and scowled. “Don’t be so suspicious. Do you imagine there’s some soft of secret conspiracy of women? A slave brought a note from Clodia this morning. I was supposed to visit her tomorrow, and she wanted to let me know that, she wouldn’t be home. She didn’t say where she was going, only that she was leaving Rome at once.”

She crossed her arms and walked into the garden. I followed. She kept her back to me. “I apologize for deceiving you, husband. You know the truth, don’t you?”

“I think I do.”

“I should explain. That man—Dio—I can hardly say his name. Back in Alexandria, before you bought me—”

“I know.”

“How could you?”

“I overheard you talking to Clodia the other day, in the garden at the back of the house.”

She looked over her shoulder. Her eyes lit up as she comprehended, then became clouded. “But I never said his name! I made a point of not saying his name to Clodia.”

“Even so . . .”

She nodded and turned her face away.

“You should have told me, Bethesda. You should have told me long ago.” I stepped closer and put my hand on the back of her neck.

She reached up and touched my fingers. “Then you understand?”

“I can’t be sorry that Dio’s dead. When I think of what he did to you and your mother, and to who knows how many others . . .”

“Then say you forgive me.”

“Forgive me first, Bethesda, for Laving had less faith in you than I should have.”

“I forgive you, husband.”

“And I forgive you, wife, for deceiving me.”

“And for poisoning a guest in your house?”

“You confess?”

She took a deep breath. “Yes.”

I shook my head. “No. I can’t forgive you for poisoning Dio.”

She stiffened.

“But I will forgive you for continuing to deceive me with a false confession.”

She turned. From the way she looked up at me, searching my face for signs of what I knew, I was satisfied that I had found the truth at last.

A little while later I was sitting in my library, looking out the open windows onto the garden. The vines and flowers were in bloom. Bees and butterflies flitted in the bright sunshine.

Diana appeared in the doorway. “You wanted to see me, Papa?”

“Yes.”

She looked grave for a moment, then brightened. “Mother says that Meto is back.”

“Yes, for a short visit. He’s at Eco’s house. They’ll all be coming over for dinner soon.”

“I can’t wait to see him.”

I nodded and found myself unable to look at her. I watched the bees and butterflies instead. “Did your mother tell you what I wanted to talk to you about?”

“Yes, Papa.” She suddenly hardened her voice, the way her mother always did at the beginning of an argument to show that she would not be shaken.

“When did your mother first tell you about Dio? About what he did to her?”

“Years ago, Papa. As soon as I was old enough to understand.”

“And yet she never told me!”

“It was between her and me, Papa. A thing for a mother to tell a daughter. Men have secrets they never share with women.”

“I suppose we do. So, when Dio came to the house that day—”

“When you introduced him, I had no idea who he was. Mother had never told me the man’s name, only how wicked he was. But when I told Mother the visitor’s name and where he was from, I saw from her face that something was terribly
wrong. All at once I knew. ‘It’s him, isn’t it?’ I said. She couldn’t be sure, so we went to have a look.”

“Yes, I remember the way you both looked at him, and the way he looked at you. No wonder he was startled by the sight of you, especially when the two of you stood side by side! How much you look like her, when she was young. I saw every look that passed between the three of you, and yet I understood nothing—like a dog watching orators debate. And to think, I was the one who suggested that the two of you fix something for Dio to eat! Was it your mother who told you to get the poison?”

“No, Papa. I thought of it myself. I knew where the poison was—”

“Of course you did, because I made such a point of warning you about it when I got it from Eco. So dangerous, I thought, to have poison in a house with a child. Dangerous in a way I never considered! But your mother must have known when you mixed it into Dio’s portion?”

“No. I did it while her back was turned, then made sure that I did the serving.”

“You did it all on your own! In the blink of an eye you made up your mind to kill a man, then fetched the poison, slipped it into his food, and . . .”

Diana lowered her eyes.

“All on your own!”

She nodded. I shook my head. “When did Bethesda give you those old green-glass earrings of hers?”

Diana sighed. “Ages ago, Papa. She tired of them, and there were scratches in the glass, so she let me have them. I wore them from time to time.”

“And I never noticed. Of course, Bethesda wears her hair up, showing her ears. You still wear your hair down, like a girl . . .”

“It’s funny. I can’t remember wearing them that day. I can’t even remember using one of them to pry open the lock on the strongbox to get at the poison, but I suppose I must
have. It’s like it all happened underwater. I didn’t realize until days later that I’d lost the earring. I looked everywhere for it. Everywhere but inside your strongbox. Finally I gave up on finding it. I gave the widowed earring to Titania.”

“Yes, Titania told me.” I shook my head. “You left the lock just as it was, broken. You never even tried to replace the poison you’d taken, if only with something that looked similar.” I winced. “That fact alone should have told me that Bethesda wasn’t responsible. She would have covered her tracks! You behaved like a child, Diana, thinking you could leave such clues and not be found out. When did you tell your mother?”

“Not until just the other day, after Clodia’s visit.”

“Why did you wait so long? I’m not surprised that you didn’t tell me, but I thought you had no secrets from your mother?”

“I meant to tell her right after Dio left the house. I wanted to. But I was suddenly afraid. Then I was confused. The next day, after you were gone, we heard that Dio had died. I could see that Mother was pleased, though she never spoke a word. But everyone said that Dio had been stabbed to death, and if that was so, how could I have poisoned him? Maybe the stuff was harmless, I thought, not poison at all, just a yellow spice. Maybe I had only imagined doing it. It all seemed so strange. I didn’t know what to do. I just wanted to forget and be done with it.”

I nodded. “So Bethesda didn’t know the truth until after Clodia’s visit. All her protests that Caelius was innocent were only statements of opinion! She was also sure that Caelius could never have poisoned Clodia. Well, she was wrong on both counts—Caelius tried his best to kill Dio and Clodia both. So much for Bethesda as a judge of character. So much for me, admiring Dio! What prompted you to finally tell her?”

“It was hearing her tell Clodia what happened to her and her mother when she was a girl. I was amazed to hear her
talk about it to anyone but me. It made me cry. That was when I finally made up my mind to tell her I poisoned Dio, not because I was proud of what I did, but because I didn’t want to have any secrets from her. So that night, after Clodia left, I told her. She said that we mustn’t tell anyone. ‘Not even Papa?’ I said. ‘Especially not him!’

“But a couple of days later, after the two of you came back from Clodia’s house, Mother came into my room to tell me about the party, and then you burst in, shouting at her. You’d gone looking for the poison and found the broken lock and the empty pyxis. You threw the earring on the floor—and suddenly I realized where I had lost it. But what you said made no sense. You seemed to think that for some reason Mother had stolen the poison for Clodia . . .”

I groaned and shook my head. “I accused her of deceiving me, and she admitted it—but we were talking about different things! I thought she had given the poison to Clodia behind my back, but the deception was something else—she knew you had poisoned Dio and kept it from me.”

Diana nodded. “After you went storming out of the house, Mother told me, ‘If he does figure out the truth, keep your mouth shut. Let me take the blame.’ But you found me out, didn’t you, Papa?” She spoke without recrimination, but rather with a hint of pride—of Bethesda for shielding her, of me for finding her out.

I looked at her face in the soft light from the garden and saw a girl-child with lustrous black hair and the beginnings of a woman’s beauty. “I don’t know what to make of you, Diana. You’re a mystery, like your mother. Why did you do it? What gave you the strength to go through with it?”

“How can you not understand, Papa? Do you remember when we were in this room the other day and I wanted to see the letter you were writing to Meto? It was a letter about the work you were doing, looking into Dio’s death. I asked you why it was so important for you to know who killed Dio. You talked about peace of mind. You said to me, ‘If
someone who was close to you had been hurt, wouldn’t you want to avenge that person, to redress the wrong that was done to them, if you could?’ Of course, Papa! That’s exactly what I did. I did it for Mother. I did it for the grandmother I’ll never know. Would you have me undo it, if I could? If you could turn back time, would you have me do nothing, instead?”

I studied her face, confused, and tried to remember what I believed about murder and justice, right and wrong.

“Wouldn’t you have done the same thing yourself, Papa?”

For an instant the veil of mystery dissolved. The eyes that looked back at me were as familiar and empty of secrets as my own eyes in a minor. Flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. I put my hands on her shoulders and kissed her brow. From the garden came the noise of the family arriving for dinner—Eco, Menenia, Meto, the all-conquering twins. I drew back and looked into Diana’s eyes again, and saw with a shiver of regret that the veil had returned. She was a mystery again, distinct and wholly of herself, another mortal adrift in the cosmos: out of my control, beyond my comprehension. The moment of recognition was fleeting, as such moments always are, like music which fills the void to overflowing and then vanishes in the twinkling of an eye.