Clodia's eyes brimmed with tears. "Is that what you think? That I wanted Caelius to die? That I murdered Cassandra? You think you know everything, Gordianus, yet you know nothing!"

XVIII

I had never seen her so completely unguarded, so wracked with emotion. I could never have imagined her so vulnerable. The tears that ran down her cheeks gave her a curious kind of beauty that transcended any she had previously possessed. I gazed at Clodia in wonder.

"Tell me, then. Tell me what I don't know," I said.

She caught her breath. She covered her face for a moment. When she withdrew her hand, the tears had ceased. Her features were composed. She stared at the fish in the pond as she spoke.

"For years I hated Marcus Caelius. A part of me lived for that hatred, the way that one can live for love. I turned to it whenever I saw no other reason to go on existing in a world where everything gold had turned to lead. In a strange way, that hatred nurtured me. What a poem Catullus could have made of that! Catullus knew that passion is passion; whether it's love or hate, it drives the spirit. Hating Caelius gave me a reason to draw my next breath.

"As it turned out, Caelius had never forgotten me, either. Men have more ways than women do to distract themselves from such a passion-building a political career, traveling the world, fighting in battles. But when he returned with Caesar from Spain, something stirred him to come and see me. I think he was suddenly struck by the futility of all his frantic pursuits for money and power. Caesar had turned the world upside down, and for a little while anything seemed possible. Sheer exhilaration drove Caelius forward until he realized that nothing was going to change, except perhaps for the worse. He found himself back in Rome, stuck with a meaningless magistracy, bored out of his wits. He was dispirited, angry, depressed. On a whim, one afternoon he came to see me. I was here in the garden. When the slave announced him, I thought surely the slave was mistaken, or else someone was playing a joke on me. 'Show him in!' I said, and a few moments later, Caelius appeared. A thousand thoughts rushed through my head, not least that I wanted to murder him. I imagined stabbing him and pushing him into this fishpond. That thought filled me with immense pleasure. How it came about that he was sitting beside me on this couch, I can't tell you. Nor can I tell you how it happened that his lips were on mine, and our arms were around each other, and we both were weeping.

"You think that I hatched some insidious plot against him, Gordianus, that I schemed to seduce him. But Caelius came to me, and what happened between us was totally spontaneous and totally mutual. Years ago, before we fell out, I thought I was in love with him. But what I had felt for him then was nothing compared to what I felt when he came to me that day. Both of us had received some very hard blows. We had learned a few lessons about humility and survival and what really matters in the world. The Caelius who came to me that day was neither the Caelius I had loved nor the Caelius I had hated, but another man, larger than either of those others and infinitely more capable of loving me. And I was a different woman from the one who had loved and then hated Caelius, though I didn't know it until that moment when we were reunited."

"Yet I never heard a whisper of gossip about you and Caelius," I said. "Such a tale would have been just the thing to excite the chin-waggers in the Forum."

"We made no show of what happened between us. We were discreet. Others would never have understood. It was no one else's business."

"Yet Calpurnia knew that Caelius was seeing you," I said.

"As you say, she has spies everywhere. Perhaps she intentionally had Caelius followed, or perhaps one of her informants just happened to notice him coming or going. What happened between us may have piqued her curiosity, but surely she had more pressing affairs of state to worry about."

"Caelius eventually gave her plenty to worry about. After Caesar left Rome, when Caelius began to press his radical legislation and to agitate in the Forum-what role did you play in that?"

"You think I planted the idea in his head, encouraged him, spurred him on. Nothing could be further from the truth! Do you think, after seeing what became of my brother, that I wanted to see Caelius meet the same end? 'The Roman mob is fickle,' I told him. 'You can stir them up easily enough, but once there's blood on the ground, they'll scatter like dust. For the moment, the moneylenders and landlords hold Caesar and his Senate in the palms of their hands. Volumnius and his sort have rattled the dice and cast a Venus Throw. There's no beating them at their own game.' But Caelius wouldn't listen to me. Just as he'd found me at last-found the passion he'd been missing for years and desperately searching for-so he thought that he'd finally hit his stride as a politician. He was no longer Cicero's errant flunky, you see. No longer Milo's red-faced apologist. No longer Caesar's underutilized underling, fobbed off with a safe, useless post in the government. Caelius had become his own man, dreaming his own dream. I feared for him. I told him so. I begged him to stop, to make peace with Isauricus and Trebonius, but it did no good. He believed he had discovered his destiny. There was no stopping him.

"At last he went too far. The Senate passed the Ultimate Decree against him. They made Caelius an outlaw, and then he had no choice but to play his final gambit. He had been in communication with Milo for quite some time, encouraging him to break out of Massilia and to bring his troop of gladiators back to Italy. I think it was in Caelius's mind from the beginning to raise an armed revolt. He meant for it to begin in Rome, then spread across the countryside, but even his powers of persuasion couldn't incite the rabble to sacrifice themselves in such a hopeless cause.

"Caelius went underground, slipping in and out of Rome like a shadow, often wearing a disguise, rallying his supporters and trying to make alliances-'laying the groundwork for a revolution,' he called it-though I don't think he accomplished much. Eventually he arranged to rendezvous with Milo, secretly, here in Rome. He had the temerity to ask me if he could bring Milo here to my house. Absolutely not, I told him. To even suggest such a thing was an insult to the shade of my brother. So they met in that apartment building in the Subura, the one where Cassandra kept a room. I suppose it was Calpurnia who arranged for Cassandra to rent that room as a way to keep watch on Caelius and his supporters in the building?"

"I think so, yes."

Clodia nodded. "Caelius was suspicious of Cassandra, but he didn't know anything about her for certain-whether she was genuine or not, or a black mailer, or a spy or nothing more than a petty schemer. I think he was glad to have her in the building for the same reason in reverse, so that he could keep an eye on her and that mute companion of hers, Rupa. That was how I found out about you and Cassandra. Caelius's agents had observed you coming and going in a manner that suggested only one thing: that the two of you were lovers. Imagine my surprise! Gordianus, that pillar of rectitude and restraint, indulging his animal appetites at last! It amused me that you of all people should have been stung by Cupid's arrow. But secretly I was happy for you. I was in love myself. I wished for the whole world to be in love, including you. Why not?

"Caelius met twice with Milo, two days running. I saw him the night after the first meeting. He was very excited, very talkative. I knew it might be the last time I would see him. Let him talk all he wants, I told myself. You may never hear his voice again.