Needless to say, when I reached the top, the ladder I had left beside the shrine on the other side was no longer there. No use hoping for help from Aelianus. He would have removed himself from this dangerous scene.
I could lower myself onto the shrine’s roof, then drop carefully. I had done worse. Alternatively, I could sit astride the wall, and try to raise the inner ladder up enough to heave it over. I was still debating when I heard troops marching outside, coming towards the temple enclosure. I stepped down a few rungs again, keeping out of sight. Then somebody below on the ground behind me grabbed the back of my left calf.
Thinking it was Constantia about to grope me again, I turned to protest, only to find myself looking down into the ferocious scowls of three lictors. Normally they have nothing much to do; today was now their best day ever. For perhaps the first time in history they had caught an intruder. They were thrilled.
The man who had hold of me jerked my foot outwards. I fell off the ladder, luckily on top of him. It gave me a soft landing, though it seemed to annoy him.
My captors did then courteously allow me to put on my toga. I would be formally attired for my interview with the Chief Vestal. That’s the interview I was now compelled to have, where she would sentence me to death.
XLIX
WHAT A HORRENDOUS woman.
She looked as if she had been boiled in milk for too long. She was in full garb, with the white, purple-bordered veil that they wear at sacrifices, its two cords pinned under her double chin with her special Vestal’s brooch. I recognized her outline and deportment from seeing her at the theater and at festivals. One of the well-built, statuesque variety. One with truly Gorgonesque features. Religious devotion oozing from her. This time the sacrificial beast was a captured informer; that did seem to give her pleasure.
“A man! And what are you doing here?” she enunciated sarcastically.
I left Constantia out of it. She was watching. All of the four lesser Virgins had appeared and were jostling behind their leader excitedly, owl-eyed; Constantia was conspicuous by the yellow hem hanging down under the white robe that she must have flung on top of her lounging wear.
“I merely wanted to ask some vital questions of Terentia Paulla,” I decided to say. Nobody present looked identifiable as Terentia. She had retired from her duties, so she was allowed to see men; anyway, she could say that I had never found her. Would that let me off?
Also present at my humiliation was a full set of lictors, and their other prize: Camillus Aelianus. “This man, a respectable senator’s heir, saw somebody lurking suspiciously, ma’am.”
“Is this the felon you saw?”
“Oh no. That was a tall, handsome, fair-haired man.” Good try.
“Thanks for exonerating me, young sir, but if you don’t regard me as handsome, let me give you the name of a competent oculist.”
“You have defiled the House of Vesta.” Something about the slow, deliberate way the Chief Vestal made her pronouncements was beginning to draw my attention.
I suppose after my visit to Constantia I should have been prepared for anything. The Chief Vestal was a forty-year-old, iron-hard, prudish, dictatorial image of moral purity. And something else: Jupiter! She had the slack eyelids of a drear toper who had really been hitting the amphora. The rich evidence hung on her breath. On close inspection, anyone could detect that she was a hesitant, sozzled, soused, fuzzled, bung-licking, dreg-draining, secret Bacchanalian.
Why mince words? The Chief Vestal was a lush.
In the time it was taking for the woman’s thoughts to broach the grape-clogged path from brain to speech, I managed to invent and try out various sickly protests about the official nature of my mission, the high level of support I could command, and the urgency of finding Gaia Laelia, through whatever unorthodox means it took. I made myself out to be, in this search, actually a servant of the Vestals. Reduced to the lowest depths, I even muttered that old sad plea about no harm having been done.
Indubitably, a waste of breath.
Then Aelianus came up with a winner.
“Ma’am…” His tone was meek and respectful. He knew how to playact, apparently. I would never have thought it; he had always seemed so bad-tempered and prim. “I am a mere observer brought to this scene by chance”-Overdoing it, Aulus!-“but the man does appear to have an official mission; his need to collect information was urgent and desperate. His efforts on behalf of the small child are completely benign. If his motives were well meant, can I appeal to you? Am I not correct that if a Virgin meets a criminal she has, by ancient tradition, the power of interceding for his reprieve?”
“You are correct, young man.” The Chief Vestal surveyed Aelianus through those heavy lids. “There is a condition, however, or the Vestals would be subject to constant harassment by convicts. It has to be proved that the meeting between the criminal and the Virgin was a complete coincidence.” She turned back to me, triumphant with spite. “ Breaking into the House of the Vestals with ladders makes this meeting far from coincidental. Take him to the Mamertine Jail-the condemned cell!”
It had been a good try by Aelianus, but I could see her point. Without more ado the lictors and their henchmen massed around me, and I was marched out.
“What an absolutely terrible woman!” Always be friendly to your guards. Sometimes they find you a better cell.
Her personal lictor leered at me. “Lovely, isn’t she?”
I barked my shin on a builder’s trestle. “Having some work done? Progress seems slow. Don’t tell me Vespasian is reluctant to pay for it?”
“The Chief Vestal has a full set of working drawings for complete remodeling. She’ll wait. She’ll get exactly what she wants one day.”
“I’d like to see that.”
“What a shame!” They guffawed as they dragged me along the Sacred Way, knowing that I only had about one day’s life left to me.
When we arrived under the Gemonian Stairs in the shadow of the Capitol, it took them hours to find and fetch the custodian, who was not expecting customers. All too soon, though, I was being installed in the dungeon which normally houses foreigners who have rebelled against Roman authority, that bare, stinking hole near the Tabularium from which the public strangler extracts his victims when they pay the final, fatal price for being enemies of Rome. My arrival dismayed the jailer, who normally makes a small fortune from showing tourists the cells where barbarians are so briefly dumped at the end of a Triumph. He would still admit the gamblers, but he realized that for the short time I was in occupation before I was exterminated, I would expect to share the fees. He went off gloomily, back to wherever he had been enjoying himself.
The Mamertine is a crude prison. Strong stone walls enclose irregular cells that used to form part of a quarry. Water runs through it. At least the jailer’s lack of interest meant he just left me in the upper cell, not shoved down through the hole in the floor into the fearsome lower depths. It was pitch dark. It was chilly. It was solitary and depressing.
This was still, just about, the eighth day before the Ides of June. Behind me lay the longest day I could ever remember, and now I was facing death. I toyed with a few none-too-serious plans for escaping. Once I would have had a go. The problem with being the wellknown equestrian Procurator of the Sacred Geese and Chickens was that I could never again merge into anonymity. If I did escape, either I would have no life, even on the Aventine, or I would be recognized by the public and thrown straight back in here.