to bother you with a personal matter when you have so much else on your mind, but it’s Ione.”
Pliny looked a question.
“I mean, well, she’s not herself these days. Irritable, cross with me and little Rufus, like something’s preying on her mind, and when I ask her she just turns away and won’t say anything. So I was thinking perhaps if you spoke to her?”
Pliny squeezed his shoulder affectionately. He was still feeling guilty about what had happened to his favorite freedman, though the wound luckily wasn’t as serious as it had looked when the soldiers carried him home that day covered in blood.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” he said. “She’s always been such a cheerful soul. But really wouldn’t it be better if Calpurnia spoke to her? Women tell each other things, you know, they don’t share with us men.”
“But they talk all the time, Patrone. Once even in the middle of the night, the mistress woke us up to talk to her. I don’t know what they said but when Ione came back to bed she was in a terrible state.”
“Really? In the middle of the night, you say? Well, I don’t know what I can do but I’ll have a word with ’Purnia about it.”
“Thank you, Patrone.”
***
That night
Pliny thrashes and struggles. His toga, wet and clinging, envelops him like a burial shroud, pinning his arms to his sides. No matter how hard he tries, he can’t break free. He is suffocating. He cries for help but they ignore him—Calpurnia and Ione, talking in low tones. What are they saying? He can’t make it out. Why don’t they hear him? Won’t someone help him? His heart is near bursting—
“Gaius, Gaius, wake up!”
With a wrenching effort he tore himself free of the dream. He was tangled in the damp sheet. It was moments before he could catch his breath and still his heart.
“Are you all right? I couldn’t wake you.” Calpurnia bent over him. “You’re soaking wet, shall I call Marinus?”
“No, no, I’m all right now. I was dreaming. What hour is it?”
“I don’t know—not yet dawn. There’s someone at the door with a message for you. He says it’s urgent.”
Chapter Twenty-one
The Kalends of November
An elderly man was waiting for him in the antechamber, flanked by two sleepy-eyed door-slaves, who eyed him with resentment. He was one of the Night Watch, he said, whose job was to patrol the streets on the lookout for fires. He ducked his head to Pliny. “They’re dead, sir, all of ’em. The whole family, slaughtered like. The husband, the wife, the little—”
“Whose family, man?” Pliny peered into the Night Watchman’s frightened face.
“Glaucon, your honor. One of his servants come running out of the house as I was passing by. I went into the house with him and looked. Then I come here, not knowing where else—”
“Take me there.” Pliny called for his cloak and shoes and sent someone to rouse his chair bearers and Galeo, his senior lictor.
Glaucon’s was a large, handsome town house near the temple of Artemis, a short walk from the palace. The servants who met them at the door were gibbering with fear. They had been wakened in the middle of the night, they said, by groans and the sound of retching coming from the master’s bedroom. When they burst in, they found him dying; he took his last rattling breath as they watched. His wife was already beyond help. They ran to the children’s rooms—Glaucon had two young sons and a daughter—and found them dead as well; and Glaucon’s old mother, not dead, but unconscious and barely breathing.
Pliny sent Galeo back for Marinus and when the physician arrived they inspected the bodies together. The stink of vomit was everywhere. In the master bedroom, Glaucon lay on the floor in a puddle of it. He had kicked over a bedside table in his death struggle and the pieces of a smashed water jug lay beside it. His wife was half on, half off the bed, her mouth open as though in mid-scream, her lips blue, her shift rucked up around her waist, exposing her nakedness. They went to the children’s rooms. In one, two boys of about eight or nine—they looked like twins—lay clutching each other. In the adjoining chamber, a pretty girl of about thirteen had gotten as far as the doorway before she collapsed. Glaucon’s old mother lay in her bed, eyes closed and soaked with sweat. A servant girl sat beside her, bathing her face with