Graveyard of the Hesperides

by Lindsey Davis

  LI

  Tiberius and his workmen were going over to Lesser Laurel Street. He looked amused at me going to see the undertaker. “You’re the expert! I reckon the key to this is whether the chicken clucked in the Dorian or Lydian mode…” Leaving him, I raised my arm in that universal gesture meaning, Go wrap yourself around a standard-bearer’s pole, Smarty!

  I found the undertaker’s. In view of the heat, he had no trade. Even the bereaved were staying at home while they let their dead go blue and bloated on the bier in the atrium. I wondered if the deaths at the Hesperides took place during hot weather; it could have been an extra factor for burying the victims fast.

  At the funeral company, I was a welcome surprise. Well, any lone female—especially a live one—was welcome, though the fellow did not push it. Mentally I thanked him. I was too hot to start fending off a grabber. Still, I wished my tunic was less flimsy and not sticking to me in the heat.

  His name was Silvinus. He attended the upper level of High Footpath society. This was not a large client base, since people there were either low-born or so lofty they spent all their time in palaces and villas. The Flavian emperors and members of their family owned private homes on the Viminal, but they tended to die either at or on their way to their many country estates. Diarrhea polished some of them off, though not Domitian, unfortunately.

  Despite his empty order book, Silvinus had a hopeful expression and, given the nature of his business, an incongruously bright outlook. I explained who I was and what I wanted to inspect. He gurgled how lucky it was that he had followed the aedile’s orders and kept the bones in a box, when he could have spread them around other people’s cremation pyres. I answered coolly, yes it was.

  He fetched them all out. Realizing that the female pelvis almost certainly belonged to someone I could now name gave me an odd jitter. I had seen bodies, but this must have been the first time I looked at bare bones and knew something about their owner. I commented as much; the undertaker nodded. He said most of the bodies he received were strangers to him, and frankly that was how he preferred it. When friends of his died, he asked a colleague to embalm them.

  He was more refined than the funeral director I had recently taken to using for unidentified corpses. Unlike the disreputable Fundanus, little about Silvinus suggested he played with the dead for secret sexual pleasure. This did not make him entirely civilized. “Keeping the skeletons for a while,” as requested by Manlius Faustus, meant they were disrespectfully jumbled in a large chest, so broken-up and higgledy-piggledy they could never be reassigned to sets. “So what will you do if a relative is found? If they want to reclaim one of the bodies?”

  “Ask pertinent questions to weed out a description, then use my skill to put together a few bones that look nearest.”

  “In fact, we thought the males all looked similar in build. Maybe they worked in the same profession, or came from the same village.”

  “Want my expert opinion?” he offered, carrying on whether I wanted it or not. “One of these men’s nasal bones survived, which doesn’t always happen. See…” He rummaged merrily among the skulls, tossing aside the noseless ones. “He must have had a hooked snout; could have been eastern. Possibly even North African, but if so, from the Greek end of the Mediterranean.”

  “You are talking Egypt?” I suggested.

  “This nose would look very appropriate in the Nile basin. But it’s only a guess. Half the republican Senate had a beak like this, if you believe the Forum statues.”

  “It would cause a stir if I said five senators were buried under the Garden of the Hesperides. A cynic might mutter in that case it was no surprise nobody noticed them missing for the past ten years. But disappearing senators are unlikely … I can tell you take an unusually keen interest in features,” I complimented Silvinus.

  “The only way the dead can communicate. ‘When I was alive I looked like this. Drink up and enjoy your time, for you will soon be ashes’…”

  Silvinus himself had a bald head and significant ears. Perhaps they helped him catch the faint sigh if ever a corpse had been brought in mistakenly. It would prevent that nightmare nervous people have, where they are helplessly buried or burned alive.

  “Now, Flavia Albia, to work! What are you looking for?”

  “A little fragile scrap of rib. One of the vigiles told us it was a chicken bone.”

  “Ah, that!”

  “You know what I mean?”

  “I saw it.”

  “I hope you didn’t throw it out?”

  “Oh no.” Did a strange expression appear then? “Your man miscalled it.” Well, that was Morellus. “Definitely not poultry in my humble opinion—which is never wrong. Are you here because you suspect as much, Albia?”

  “I don’t know what I suspect,” I answered honestly. “I feel uneasy—the more I think about it, the more I have to take a second look.”

  “Well, that’s understandable!” he commented obliquely.

  Silvinus began excavating in his assembly of bones, which took a long time since the rib in question was so small. At first he followed the well-known masculine route of tossing stuff around unsystematically, soon losing track of what he had searched already. Bones were broken in the process. Eventually I managed to prod him into being more methodical. When he had searched through and set aside about a quarter of the remains, he reached in and picked out what we wanted.

  I managed not to say wasn’t he glad he did it my way? I just smiled and thanked him. Better keep him sweet. I still needed his expertise.

  The fragment looked as much like a chicken bone as when I first saw it. I reminded Silvinus that the skeletons had been found in the backyard of a bar, where all manner of food leftovers could have been chucked out for decades. “It seems reasonable that this should be a relic of somebody’s Chicken Vardana.”

  “Doubt it. A customer might toss a small bone over his shoulder onto the ground if he was badly brought up. Invariably, a dog or cat or vermin would remove it,” Silvinus demurred. “How many rats do you think live in the average eating house?”

  “Too many! And indeed the bones were buried deep. I accept what you say. So what is it?”

  “Did you dig up any other food remains?” I had agreed with him, but he kept pressing his point, clearly proud of his skill. “Bars cannot afford to hurl their cooking products out into an area where people will sit. Customers will be put off by awful smells, and scavengers running over their feet. No, no, cookshops and bars will take their rubbish to the nearest dump outside. Let the rats run wild at the end of the street or, better, in someone else’s street.”

  “Right. So was this some hasty sacrifice, buried with the dead?” While he lectured me, I was holding the tiny piece of bone in the palm of my hand. “I suppose I am now half-prepared for your verdict, Silvinus,” I hinted.

  He accepted the prod. “It was a kind of tragic sacrifice. A soul was given to the gods … That is from a child, Flavia Albia.” He broke the news gently, so I was braced. “In my view, that is a rib from a baby.”

  I let out an unintended sigh.

  Having broken the news, the undertaker went into unrestrained macabre detail: “It was probably unborn. Could have been lying in the pelvis and became separated when the workmen were digging.”

  “It’s true they were not careful with the first body they found. The woman had perhaps been disturbed; a lot of her is missing.”

  Silvinus would not be deterred. “Alternatively, sometimes in burials the body’s gases expel a fetus into the grave. Don’t ask me how I know about that.” Pointedly, I did not ask, so he told me anyway. “If you are digging a hole for a funerary urn and you come across an old grave, you can occasionally find the baby has been pushed out between a woman’s thighs. I mean, after she was put in the ground.”

  “Alive?” I revised my opinion: all undertakers are gruesome. “I mean the baby.”

  “Not for long!” If he saw my face, he ignored my qualms. “Almost certainly the
fetus would be dead when its mother was interred. However, there is a school of thought that expulsion can happen even while a female corpse is being laid out. It’s a horror story directors use to scare their apprentices.”

  Since I was not his apprentice, I did not need scaring. I checked that he was certain about the bone. “It’s from a fetus then. Once we knew what we were excavating, care was taken. Why did we only find one rib?”

  “How old is your burial?”

  “Ten years.”

  “No coffins?”

  “Bare earth.”

  “That’s your answer. Lost over time. All the other baby bones must have decayed completely in the soil.”

  “Even the little skull?” I really did not want the child to have been beheaded like its mother.

  “The head would be soft and unformed, remember. So yes, it could vanish into the earth. I don’t know why this single rib should have survived on its own. No reason. Just coincidence.”

  *

  I felt the structure of my case shift. If the skeleton was Rhodina, she had been pregnant. From the size of the child’s rib, Silvinus believed she must have been showing, and more likely into her final trimester, so everyone who saw her would be aware of it. This could be so relevant. All kinds of dynamics might have been altered by her expecting a baby. It could be simple: this was a reason why she wanted to free herself from Old Thales. It could be why he wanted to get rid of her. Or it could have affected other people.

  Several suspects in my disreputable cast list might have felt annoyed or threatened by the potential child. Sometimes repercussions will depend on who the baby’s father is, though with a bar waitress there was no way she could have known. Did that matter? When a father is named by a woman, it can stick, however ridiculous her claim. She couldn’t prove who was responsible—but nor could anyone prove it was not the man she named. What might matter in my investigation was who she said he was, and whether he accepted it.

  If Rhodina was bright, she might have used her pregnancy for manipulation. For her, this baby could have seemed an opportunity to give her family and herself a better life. From what I had heard about her, that was a real possibility.

  LII

  I now felt there were two aspects to this inquiry. Perhaps they were unrelated. One was the tempestuous Thales/Rufia/Rhodina triangle. I considered Gavius, too, but reckoned he had been merely on the sidelines of the main tragedy.

  The other mystery was the five men who died. Their identities remained as unknown as the day we uncovered their skeletons. They could have been from the east, but that might be wide of the mark. I had discovered no clues to their identities, nor could I say why someone had methodically deleted all five from earthly existence.

  The second question would have to wait until I turned up something I could bite on. On the first, little by little, as I massaged potential witnesses, I had come to know the characters involved. That helped suggest motives. Motives helped me see what to tackle next.

  I knew what I wanted to explore: the inheritance. When I discussed it with Tiberius before, it had not seemed necessarily significant. How much money did Liberalis have, and what proportion of it derived from Thales? I remembered saying I could find out via the amount of tax he had paid on his legacy, at which Tiberius had cynically guffawed. But there was a way to check more accurately. Never mind the tax; I needed Thales’ will.

  I was ready to leave Silvinus, but on the off chance I asked, “You conduct most funerals around the High Footpath, you said? So did you happen to send off Old Thales to his gods? The landlord of the Hesperides?”

  “I did.”

  “Oh! Can you remember when it was? The new landlord told my partner it happened about six months ago—I’d like to have a more exact date, if possible.” I decided to explain why; Silvinus was a fellow professional. “I am hoping to track down his will—if they deposited a copy in the archives as they should have. I think he must have had one, because of giving the bar to Julius Liberalis.”

  “He did. I heard them read it.”

  “Oh wonderful!”

  Silvinus was such a very useful witness, informed and willing to volunteer information; he made a pleasant change. “They didn’t bother waiting the nine days of formal mourning,” he said.

  “Liberalis was bursting for confirmation the bar was his. He told me that he was the only obvious legatee. That might explain the rush.”

  “If he was sure he would get it, why did he seem so anxious?” mused Silvinus. “It felt as if he was afraid there might be rival contenders.”

  “Were they at the funeral?”

  “No. By the time Liberalis was appointed executor and sole heir, he was the last man standing.”

  “He often seems nervous. He had waited a long time for the bar, so perhaps he just needed formal reassurance … You were invited to the will reading?”

  Silvinus grinned. “Not exactly ‘invited.’ After we burned Thales, they had a get-together back at the bar. I am a little bit nosy, I’m afraid. I made sure I tagged along.”

  “Well-practiced!” I smiled back.

  “Of course. Supervising a pyre is thirsty work. I do feel people want to be appreciative if you take care of their loved ones. Even if they forget to ask me, I assume they meant to.”

  “You could save me a very time-consuming trip to the Atrium of Liberty.” Copies of executed wills are supposed to be archived, in case the original is ever lost. But people can deposit them anywhere suitable, in temples for instance. I had been caught out before through not knowing the right place to look. Sometimes I don’t want to ask the parties involved.

  “I can tell you everything!” Boasting, Silvinus looked as if he was wondering what it was worth to me. We were getting on so well, why spoil it? I had no wish to find out that his idea of payment was something other than coinage.

  “Spill then!” I urged, pretending to be taken up with excitement, brushing aside any ideas he had. “Oh, this is so good, Silvinus!” I sounded like Julia and Favonia with a new wheeze. “Liberalis was given the bar. What interests me is whether there was more to pass on to him? I don’t know whether he had any money to start with—or even whether Thales was financially sound, come to that?”

  Silvinus let himself be overcome with the fine joy of sharing knowledge. “Julius Liberalis was left enough to pay for a big funeral, with endless trays of stuffed vine leaves afterward for a large section of the neighborhood.”

  “Thales was very popular? There were a lot of mourners?”

  “He was and there were.”

  “Well, I daresay when a bar owner dies, even people who never patronized his place suddenly feel a great fondness for him and want to raise a free wine cup … Was it your first visit? Did you drink there normally?”

  “No. A lot of my work takes place at night.” Funerals have to happen after dark. “By the time we get back from the necropolis afterward, put away the equipment and lock up, all I want is my bed. But I went to that wake and I was surprised. Thales owned a big place. No wonder Liberalis was so keen to have it.”

  “What did Thales die of?” I shot in, suddenly wondering. So far nobody in my investigation had mentioned it, but his undertaker would know.

  Silvinus enjoyed telling me. “Age, drink, overeating, shoddy living. Wine, women and song, or as we define it in the trade, natural causes.”

  “His time had come?” I was glad to hear at least one person in the Ten Traders managed to pass away in non-suspicious circumstances. “And tell me, Silvinus, apart from the bar itself and the price of a good funeral, did he leave a pile? Was he very wealthy?”

  Once again my informant took huge pleasure in his revelation: “You mean, Flavia Albia, in addition to the premises and profits—plus his gains from gambling?”

  “Gambling?” That was a new side to his character. “Old Thales was a gambler? Successful with his bets?”

  Silvinus shook his head; I had misunderstood. “I expect he did place the occasional wager
. I am not talking about that. Of course they keep it very quiet, but the Garden of the Hesperides has always had a secret reputation—at least so people tell me—for serious illegal betting. People came long distances on special nights. A hard core of regulars. I suppose Thales allowed it, always on the basis that he took a cut.”

  I blinked. “Let me guess. Legitimate food and drink sales are out front at the counters; fornication goes on in the rooms upstairs—meanwhile the boards are set up and the gambling occurs privately in the courtyard at the back?” Silvinus pretended that a man like him, who liked an early night at home, could not possibly know. “Pull a curtain across the corridor and it’s out of sight from the street,” I continued. “Being in the garden gives them time to drop any evidence into a bucket if someone whistles that the law is coming. The vigiles walk in, only to find them all daintily picking at olive bowls.”

  “That is assuming the law do not engage in bets like everyone else, Flavia Albia.”

  “Of course they love it.” That is why you never see any court cases on the subject. There are even board games scratched onto the steps of the Basilica Julia. Quite often it’s barristers playing, with decrepit old judges leaning in to watch.

  I remembered the year the Flavian Amphitheater opened, that long city party with its hundred days of games; it was also a hundred-day-long excuse to make the whole of Rome a gigantic betting ring. Thales must have pulled in lucre by the sack-load. If there was ever a year when he would have done so well it created envy, that was it. The only surprise was that Old Thales survived and was not himself buried deep against the boundary wall.

  This explained why Liberalis always sounded so anxious; he must have feared he could lose a fortune. Possibly even Rufia had wanted a share, in return for running the bar. Then along came the fecund Rhodina. Money explained why a barmaid that everyone else hankered after had cozied up to Thales of all people. Liberalis may have realized he himself looked so hopeless that Thales, under pressure, might easily change his mind about who was left the bar.