"No! I never-"

"You'll have to torture her if you want the truth!" Antonia stood in the doorway. Her fists were clenched, her hair disheveled. She looked utterly distraught, like a vengeful harpy. "Torture her, Lucius! That's what they do when a slave testifies in a court. It's your right-you're her master. It's your duty-you were Titus's host. I demand that you torture her until she confesses, and then put her to death!"

Davia turned as white as the moths that had flown from the hive. She fainted to the floor.

Antonia, mad with grief, retired to her room. Davia regained consciousness, but seemed to be in the grip of some brain-fever; she trembled wildly and would not speak.

"Gordianus, what am I to do?" Lucius paced back and forth in the foyer. "I suppose I'll have to torture the girl if she won't confess. But I don't even know how to go about such a thing! None of my farm slaves would make a suitable torturer. I suppose I could consult one of my cousins…"

"Talk of torture is premature," I said, wondering if Lucius would actually go through with such a thing. He was a gentle man in a cruel world; sometimes the world's expectations won out over his basic nature. He might surprise me. I didn't want to find out. "I think we should have another look at the body, now that we've calmed down a bit."

We returned to the stream. Titus lay as we had left him, naked except for his loincloth. Someone had closed his eyes.

"You know a lot about poisons, Gordianus," said Lucius. "What do you think?"

"There are many poisons and many reactions. I can't begin to guess what killed Titus. If we should find some store of poison in the kitchen, or if one of the other slaves observed Davia doing something to the food…"

Eco gestured to the scattered food, mimed the act of feeding a farm animal, then vividly enacted the animal's death-an unpleasant pantomime to watch, having just witnessed an actual death.

"Yes, we could verify the presence of poison in the food that way, at the waste of some poor beast. But if it was in the food we see here, why wasn't Antonia poisoned as well? Eco, bring me those pieces of the clay bottle. Do you remember hearing the sound of something breaking, at about the time we heard Titus cry out?"

Eco nodded and handed me the pieces of fired clay.

"What do you suppose was in this?" I said.

"Wine, I imagine. Or water," said Lucius.

"But there's a wineskin over there. And the inside of this bottle appears to be as dry as the outside. I have a hunch, Lucius. Would you summon Ursus?"

"Ursus?But why?"

"I have a question for him."

The beekeeper soon came lumbering down the hill. For such a big, bearish fellow, he was very squeamish in the presence of death. He stayed well away from the body and made a face every time he looked at it.

"I'm a city dweller, Ursus. I don't know very much about bees. I've never been stung by one. But I've heard that a bee sting can kill a man. Is that true, Ursus?"

He looked a bit embarrassed at the idea that his beloved bees could do such a thing. "Well, yes, it can happen. But it's rare. Most people get stung and it goes away soon enough. But some people…"

"Have you ever seen anyone die of a bee sting, Ursus?"

"No."

"But with all your lore, you must know something about it. How does it happen? How do they die?"

"It's their lungs that give out. They strangle to death. Can't breathe, turn blue…"

Lucius looked aghast. "Do you think that's it, Gordianus? That he was stung by one of my bees?"

"Let's have a look. The sting would leave a mark, wouldn't it, Ursus?"

"Oh, yes, a red swelling. And more than that, you'd find the poisoned barb. It stays behind when the bee flies off, snagged in the flesh. Just a tiny thing, but not hard to find."

We examined Titus's chest and limbs, rolled him over and examined his back. We combed through his hair and looked at his scalp.

"Nothing," said Lucius.

"Nothing," I admitted.

"What are the chances, anyway, that a bee happened to fly by-"

"The bottle, Eco. When did we hear it break? Before Titus cried out, or after?"

After, gestured Eco, rolling his fingers forward. He clapped twice. Immediately after.

"Yes, that's how I remember it, too. A bee, a cry, a broken bottle…" I pictured Antonia and Titus as I had last seen them together, hand in hand, doting on one another as they headed for the stream. "Two people in love, alone on a grassy bank- what might they reasonably be expected to get up to?"

"What do you mean, Gordianus?"

"I think we shall have to examine Titus more intimately."

"What do you mean?"

"I think we shall have to take off his loincloth. It's already loosened, you see. Probably by Antonia."

As I thought we might, we found the red, swollen bee sting in the most intimate of places.

"Of course, to be absolutely certain, we should find the stinger and remove it. I'll leave that task to you, Lucius. He was your friend, after all, not mine."

Lucius located and dutifully extracted the tiny barb. "Funny," he said. "I thought it would be bigger."

"What, the stinger?"

"No, his… well, the way he always bragged, I thought it must be… oh, never mind."

Confronted with the truth, Antonia confessed. She had never meant to kill Titus, only to punish him for his pursuit of Davia.

Her early morning trip to the stream, ostensibly to gather flowers, had actually been an expedition to capture a bee. For this purpose she used the clay bottle, plugged it with a cork stopper, then hid it beneath the flowers in her basket. Later, Titus himself unwittingly carried the bee in the bottle down to the stream, hidden in the basket of food.

It was the Priapus in the glen that had given Antonia the idea. "I've always thought the god looks so… vulnerable… like that," she told us. If she could inflict a wound on Titus in that most vulnerable part of the male anatomy, she thought, the punishment would be not only painful and humiliating, but stingingly appropriate.

As they lazed on their blanket beside the stream, Antonia drew Titus into an amorous embrace. They cuddled and loosened their clothing. Titus became aroused, just as she planned. While he lay back, closing his eyes with a dreamy smile, Antonia reached for the clay bottle.She shook it, to agitate the bee, then unstoppered it and quickly pressed the opening against his aroused member. The sting was inflicted before Titus realized what was happening. He bolted up, cried out and knocked the bottle from her hand. It broke against the trunk of a willow tree.

Antonia was ready to flee, knowing he might explode with anger. Instead, Titus began to clutch at his chest and choke. The catastrophe that swiftly followed took her utterly by surprise. Titus was dead within moments. Antonia's shock and grief were entirely genuine. She had meant to hurt him, but never to murder him.

But she could hardly admit what she had done. Impulsively, she chose Davia as a scapegoat. Davia was ultimately to blame anyway, she thought, for tempting her husband.

It was agreed that Lucius would not spread the whole truth of what had happened. Their circle of friends would be told that Titus had died of a bee sting, but not of Antonia's part. His death had been unintentional, after all, not deliberate murder. Antonia's grief was perhaps punishment enough. But her scape-goating of Davia was unforgivable. Would she have seen the lie through all the way to Davia's torture and death? Lucius thought so. He allowed her to stay the night, then sent her packing back to Rome, along with her husband's body, and told her never to visit or speak to him again.

Ironically, Titus might have been spared had he been a little more forthcoming or a little less amorous. Lucius later learned, in all the talk that followed Titus's death, that Titus had once been stung by a bee as a boy and had fallen very ill. Titus had never talked about this boyhood incident to his friends or to Antonia; only his old nurse and his closest relatives knew about it. When he hung back from seeing the honey harvest, I think he did so partly because he wanted time alone to pursue Davia, but also because he was (quite reasonably) afraid to go near the hives, and unwilling to admit his fear. If he had told us then of his extreme susceptibility to bee stings, I am certain that Antonia would never have attempted her vengeful scheme.