She was worse than unsatisfactory, as we were about to find out. I was glad that Helena had joined us. I needed a witness. Helena would back me up when I had to report the story. Now at last Caesius Secundus could stop wondering, although when he knew what had really happened to his daughter, it would increase his agitation. At least he could finally reconcile himself, bury those bones that I had seen in the lead coffin, apportion blame if he wanted to.

"My niece and I wanted to experience peace and solitude.' That fitted all I had seen in Marcella Naevia. And already I was viewing her apprehensively. I wondered if the girl had been another dreamer; maybe not.

The aunt's vague manner had hidden steel. I could imagine her being insidiously persuasive with her much younger companion, luring Caesia into her weird attitudes. Isolated with her aunt for weeks, a perfectly normal teenager might have lost her sense of reality.

"We walked up the Hill of Cronus to communicate with the gods. While we were there, there was a dramatic lightning storm. We felt close to Zeus, the All-Thunderer.'

"That's hardly peaceful!' I muttered. We had seen for ourselves how storms raged around Olympia.

"We were in another dimension of the world. We had taken ourselves far away from other people,' Marcella Naevia rhapsodised."We had escaped…' She paused.

"Escaped from whom?' snapped Helena."Your niece was young, a lively character,' she supplied."Her father described her to us as curious about the world – but she was – how old? – eighteen, I think. Was she immature for her age? I mean socially?'

Marcella Naevia nodded.

"Let us suppose,' Helena pressed on,"there was a man among the group you travelled with, a man who took advantage of women, a man who groped and harassed them. Marcella Caesia would have hated it.'

"I see you understand!' The aunt gushed with gratitude.

"Well, I would feel the same as she did. I can imagine your role too. You tried to protect the girl. You and she kept to yourselves. Eventually you went up the Hill of Cronus to get away from him.'

"Did he follow you?' I interrupted.

"He did not.'

"So he did not kill her?' So much for theories.

"No!' The aunt looked almost shocked that I'd suggested it.

Slowly I spelled out the situation to this ridiculous woman. Her father thinks that Marcella Caesia fell victim to a sexual predator. Caesius Secundus is tormented by that thought. If you know otherwise…

"It rained heavily.' Marcella Naevia abruptly resumed her story. She took on the trance-like demeanour which I found so annoying."I knew that sheltering was dangerous, but my niece would not heed my warnings. She hated being wet; she squealed and tried to take cover under a tree. The tree was struck by lightning. She was killed instantly.'

"For heavens' sake!' I could not believe what I was hearing."If you knew this, why not tell people?'

Helena too was outraged."You went back to the group; you said nothing that evening – but in the morning you raised a huge outcry. You held up the planned journey and made them all search – yet you never once said that you knew what had happened to Caesia? Then

you let Caesius Secundus fret his heart out for a year before he himself came to Greece and found the body! Even then, he told us, you pretended to be devastated… One word from you could have saved all that. Whatever can you have been thinking about?'

The woman's voice was cold."I decided that Zeus had taken her. That was why,' stressed Caesia's aunt, as if anybody rational would see this,"I left her there.'

I was used to unnatural deaths, deaths that had to be hidden because of the cruel ways they were brought about. Simply abandoning a body after an accident shocked me much more."You just left Marcella Caesia lying on the Hill of Cronus, under the burnt-out tree?'

Marcella Naevia sounded dreamy again."I laid her straight. I folded her hands gently upon her breast. I covered her with pine cones and needles. I kissed her and prayed over her. Then I let the gods, who so obviously loved her, keep her with them at that holy place.'

LVIII

There had been no crime. Since Camillus Aelianus was associated with a jurisprudence expert, we would check that point, but I felt sure of the outcome. Minas of Karystos would confirm that in law Caesia's death was natural. We could not prosecute Zeus.

Of course, in life, what happened afterwards was reprehensible. In life, no one sane, no one humane would refuse a father proper knowledge of his child's fate. Prevent him giving her a funeral and monument. Condemn him to years of obsession and unending mental torture.

Even in Athens, the community which had founded democratic legal principles, there was a wide gap between law and life.

Helena and I returned to the city, deeply disturbed yet helpless.

We left Marcella Naevia to her hillside existence. If anybody wanted to pursue her for her actions, they would find her. She was going nowhere. Greece had claimed her. She would most likely live out her semi-reclusive existence without interference. Poor diet and lack of care would deny her a long life. Dreams and spiritual fantasies would sustain her for a few more years, until she wasted into a slow decline, perhaps tended by bemused locals.

People would believe she had money (maybe she did have; she must have been wealthy once. That would guarantee her some notice from the community.

We could not even tell if she realised her niece's corpse had now been removed from Olympia by her distraught father. Talking to the woman, it was hard to tell which of our words made contact and which she chose to blot out.

I never thought her mad. She was rational, in her own way. She had made herself different, out of perversity. For me, if Marcella Naevia was culpable, she should be blamed for that deliberate withdrawal from normal society. Good Romans respect the community.

She had indulged herself, at the expense of destroying Caesius Secundus. He could be told the truth when Helena and I returned to Rome, but he would never fully recover from his long search. Once, he might have learned to live with the accident of nature that killed his daughter, but too much distress had intervened. He had lost his balance permanently. For him, peace of mind was now irretrievable. Helena said, every family has a crazy aunt. But they do not all cause such anguish or inflict such damage.

LIX

Helena and I arrived back at our inn, appalled and subdued. We then dampened the atmosphere for our young companions, telling them what we had learned from Marcella Naevia, and what we thought of her behaviour. All of us retired early to bed.

The evening was sultry and had made us short-tempered. It seemed appropriate that we were woken some hours later when the weather broke. Flashes of light through my eyelids disturbed me first, closely followed by brief cracks of thunder. As the storm came nearer, Helena also awoke. She and I lay in bed together, listening to the rain's onset. The thunder passed over but steady rain continued. It matched our melancholy mood. I fell asleep again, lulled by the incessant wash of water on the shutters of our room.

Later I woke a second time, suddenly aware of my mistake. Shocked by Marcella Naevia's story, I had left a big question unasked. I should have pressed her for the name of the man who bothered women. I needed to make her identify him formally. Phineus, presumably. He may not have killed Caesia – yet the aunt blamed him, and her father would always regard Phineus as implicated. Even Phineus himself had fled back to Rome, as if nervous of the consequences of his bad behaviour. It made him now my prime suspect in the murder three years later of Valeria Ventidia. But to accuse him, I must have evidence that he was a menace and a danger to the women on his tours. I needed Marcella Naevia to make a statement naming him.