The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits Volume 2 (The Mammoth Book Series)

by Mike Ashley

  He wiped away a trickle of sweat running down his fleshy neck. “But if it’s some damning revelation you’re seeking,” he continued, “I will tell you this before any wag-tongues among the servants bring it to your attention. Our father left his estate equally to my brother and myself. Thus if the child and his mother were to join Damian, the entire estate would become mine. So there it is, Lord Chamberlain. I’m the only person I can think of who might be inclined to harm either or both of them.”

  John spent the rest of the afternoon interviewing the servants, who provided little of assistance to his investigation although he learned a great deal about their opinions of each other.

  One of his last conversations proceeded along those very lines. The oldest estate worker, he was informed, was almost seventy and remained living there more from charity than from expectation of service, or at least according to Jason.

  “They call Cepheus the head gardener, sir, but he spends most of his time pottering about and the rest of it reminiscing about the old days with anyone who’ll listen. Of late, too, he’s taken to loitering by the late master’s mausoleum. Some of the others say he’s preparing himself for when he must also leave the world, although personally I think he’s just keeping out of sight of the mistress.” As he spoke, the brawny man sporting a thick shock of glistening black hair continued to hoe savagely at the rock-hard flower bed where John had found him labouring, as if to prove to his highly placed interrogator that he, at any rate, was not just idly standing about.

  “Perhaps that is the way Cepheus is being rewarded for his past service?” John suggested.

  “You could say that, sir. Then again, some of us have to live by our labours while others gain softer lives by the goodness of Fortuna.”

  “Did you serve with Anthea when she first arrived here? You appear to be about her age.”

  The blunt question caused Jason to pause in his work and frown. “Sir, surely you don’t think I resent Anthea’s good fortune?” he blurted out, distress evident in his tone.

  John pointed out that there was no doubt that many would feel that way. “But what I am more interested in is the tablet you found,” he concluded.

  Jason described again how it had appeared in a bucket of water he had drawn from the well. “I might not be an educated man,” he went on, “but I don’t take any heed of these country superstitions. I wouldn’t pay a single nummus to have a few lines scraped on a bit of lead. But I was sorry that it upset the mistress. Will she be all right?”

  John reassured the young servant and left him to continue his battle with the parched earth.

  Just as Jason had predicted, Cepheus was discovered worrying at a spadeful of dry dirt beside a hedge not far from Damian’s mausoleum, an unremarkable monument that, like many of its fellows, resembled a small Greek temple. Not surprisingly, the old gardener was quite ready to stop working and recall events long gone.

  “Yes, your excellency, we have much to be grateful for these days,” Cepheus piped, leaning on his spade. John gestured him to a stone bench set between a nearby pair of drooping laurel bushes. The old man limped painfully over to it and seated himself with a sigh of gratitude.

  The gardener had once been big of frame, but now it was shrunken with age and his coarsely woven work tunic hung shapelessly from hunched shoulders. He did not need much encouragement to air his opinions.

  “The old master, that is to say the father of Burrhus and Damian, he was a very difficult man indeed, excellency,” he declared vehemently. “He was quick to anger and his wife was the same. A well matched pair, they were. Now, Helen was the old mistress’s maid before she was appointed cook, or rather banished to work in the kitchen when the old mistress decided Helen had become aged and ugly. Not that she had, your excellency, she was just a little plumper than the comely lass she’d always been. But that was the way of the old mistress. Cruel in words as well as actions, she was.”

  He scowled. “She once accused Helen of stealing a bracelet,” he went on. “A number of small valuables disappeared about the same time, mere vanities they were, just trifles. I seem to recall one of the house slaves was sold because of those thefts, or possibly that after the alabaster vase was broken . . . the details fade, I fear.” Nor could he recall the slave’s name when pressed. Requested to continue with his tale, however, Cepheus obliged with another spate of words.

  “Well, the old master ordered Helen beaten until she admitted she had taken the bracelet. It was his right, excellency, I cannot deny that. But she hadn’t stolen it, as she said all along. It was discovered a day or so later, fallen down behind something or other, I forget what it was, a chest in the mistress’s bedroom, perhaps.”

  The incident had taken place years before but John noted that as the old man recounted it his veined and calloused hands had clenched into fists.

  * * *

  John was more concerned about the current threat to the family. At day’s end, having spoken to every servant on the estate and listened patiently to their litany of petty grievances, he returned to the villa and again examined the tablet.

  At first glance its pitted length of beaten lead appeared unremarkable, but its intent was as blunt as its inscription, or at least to anyone who could read the language in which was expressed. It began with a command.

  I call you and bind you, shade, by all the gods of this world and the next. Return and work this evil upon the master of the estate and all that he calls family. Take away their breath, torment them with pain, cause them to falter . . .

  and so on down a list of similar dreadful afflictions and catastrophes.

  John knew that none of the servants had the education necessary to write the curse in any language, let alone Latin. Nor could any of them have afforded to purchase a tablet. On the other hand, it was possible that whoever made it had merely copied the inscription from a book of magick, scratching its letters into the lead without understanding the words they formed. Yet the ill-wisher was obviously knowledgeable enough about the tablet’s supposed workings – or had been instructed in them – to drop the small lead roll into the well, thereby placing it as close to the Underworld as possible.

  John poured himself a cup of wine and retired to the villa’s colonnade. He could just distinguish Damian’s mausoleum at the far end of the garden, glimmering in the fast fading light. It would be pleasing to think that the man’s shade was nearby, guarding his family, although as a Mithran John believed that a man achieved immortality only by ascending to the celestial home of the sun, not lingering in the world below.

  His thoughts had just turned to examining one possible solution after another when an apparition came shambling out of the gathering shadows. John leapt to his feet, his hand automatically going to the blade at his belt. But it was only the gardener Cepheus, panting as he lurched along with painful slowness.

  “Your pardon, excellency,” the old man gasped in a panic stricken voice, “but the master has returned. I just saw him standing beside his mausoleum, staring at the villa. But I couldn’t catch him, although I tried hard enough.”

  John grabbed a torch from the colonnade wall and ran to the spot Cepheus had indicated, cutting swiftly across flower beds and vegetable patches alike. Crashing through ornamental bushes whose thorns clawed at his tunic, he quickly arrived at the building. Nothing moved in the deepening twilight there or nearby and he could hear only his breathing and the increasingly loud night sounds of insects. The earth in front of the mausoleum was hard packed and showed no trace of footprints, either the apparition’s or from the pursuit of it that Cepheus claimed to have made.

  He informed the gardener as much when he returned to the colonnade.

  “I didn’t get too close to it, excellency. And a shade wouldn’t leave footprints, would it?” Cepheus’s voice quavered. He had collapsed on the bench lately vacated by John.

  As John questioned him further, Hypatia emerged from the villa with wine for the shocked old man. Even as she placed the cu
p into his trembling hand, Anthea appeared, looking much like an apparition herself in a nimbus of white silk garments.

  “I thought I heard Solon crying,” she said, glancing around in a dazed fashion. “Hypatia . . .”

  The woman sprang to her side. “He is well, Anthea. I sang him to sleep just a little while ago.”

  Anthea looked confused as John quickly explained recent events. “But the supposed apparition is nothing to worry about,” he assured her, “It’s more than likely it was just one of your servants off to a romantic tryst.”

  “But I saw it, excellency,” Cepheus insisted from the bench as soon as the women had gone back inside, “and it was the master. I tried to catch him but I wasn’t fast enough.” He dropped the wine cup and it shattered on the colonnade’s flagstones.

  John put a reassuring hand on the old man’s bony shoulder. “One of the servants will help you to your bed, Cepheus,” he said gently. “But before you go, tell me, what makes you so convinced that it was Damian?”

  Cepheus hesitated. “I . . . I don’t know.” He looked at the cup fragments at his feet. “I tried to catch him,” he repeated. “But he got away and now he’s wandering around the estate and it’s my fault . . . old and crippled and useless as I am.”

  An enormous full moon, caught in the tops of the cedars along the estate’s outer wall, was silvering the garden by the time Hypatia re-emerged. She told John that mother and child were sleeping and the servant who had been put in charge of Cepheus had reported the old man was now snoring safely on his pallet.

  “If I may say so, master, I think that Cepheus is dwelling over much on the past,” Hypatia continued. “When my grandmother grew old and her senses failed, she sometimes saw days long gone more vividly than the world around her.”

  “Anthea did not take Cepheus’s imaginings seriously?”

  Hypatia shook her dark head. “She was quite calm. Thankfully she’s always been a sensible woman.”

  “Her marriage took place after you had left your employment here?”

  “Some time afterwards, master.” Hypatia paused. The shadow that passed over her face was not caused by the guttering of the torch set in a bracket on the colonnade wall. “I was here only a short time. But this afternoon Helen mentioned something to me that may be of interest perhaps.”

  John encouraged his servant to continue.

  “She was talking about the family. It seems that Anthea and Damian were . . . familiar . . . before Anthea was manumitted. Damian’s father freed her at Damian’s request, for he genuinely wanted to marry her, according to Helen.”

  “He had the right to manumit her for any reason,” John replied. “He could have married her himself for that matter, if she had agreed to it.”

  “Yes, indeed. But it’s . . . well, Helen says Solon was conceived before his mother was a freed woman.”

  “I can see that that would be extremely important to Anthea,” John acknowledged, thinking of the comments Burrhus had made. In retrospect, it was not surprising that Damian had turned to John for occasional help rather than consult his own brother, himself a man of some influence. “But did Helen also happen to reveal anything of her own history, such as how she came to be cook or her contretemps with the old mistress?”

  Hypatia expressed mystification at her employer’s questions.

  “It involved a severe beating and Cepheus at least is still angry about it,” John explained. “It might have happened yesterday, the way he clenched his fists as he spoke of it.”

  Hypatia smiled. “I think I can explain that, master. Cepheus has always been quite taken with Helen. But she turned him away, it seems.”

  The rickety ladder creaked under John’s weight as he descended into the well.

  Looking up, he could see a small circle of light resembling one of the windows high in the dome of the Great Church in Constantinople. Below, where he tried not to look, the water was a black mirror reflecting the flame of the lamp he carried in one hand. The walls around him were constructed of the same rough stone as the subterranean mithraeum where he worshipped.

  He took another reluctant step down. He had once seen a comrade in arms drown.

  During the night Anthea had lost her calm demeanour. The tablet had been removed from its proximity to the Underworld and should have been rendered powerless, she had cried that morning. There must still be another in the well, for how else to explain the appearance of her husband’s shade? Someone must investigate, and it must be done immediately.

  John’s grasp slipped on the rung. The pounding of his heart thundered in his head as he realized that despite the chill seeping into his flesh as he climbed downwards, his hands were slippery with sweat. He might indeed have been descending into the Underworld.

  The water had fallen significantly during the drought and he was now below its usual level. He paused and moved his lamp about carefully, noting that the edges of the roughly hewn stones around him formed small ledges here and there. On one close to hand lay a nummus of a type no longer minted, on another a shard of broken pottery.

  A little further down something reflected a gleam of lamplight. Trying to keep it in sight he descended another couple of steps, and then another, gasping as water swirled up over his boot. He swung the lamp towards the thing that had captured its light and peered intently.

  A shape sprang towards him, dropping into the water with a splash. The largest toad he had ever seen.

  Startled despite himself, he dropped the lamp on the creature’s narrow stone perch. Oil spilled out and flamed, enabling him to see what some would say the creature had been guarding.

  John felt a quick flash of relief that he would not have to descend further and fish around in the dark water.

  For, just as Anthea had feared, it was another curse tablet.

  The inscription scratched on the smooth lead was in Latin as before. However, this time it was specific, naming its victims as Anthea, wife of Damian, and their son Solon.

  Rhea looked blankly at the small tablet, and then at John. The herbalist was a tiny woman, with a beak of a nose and the inquisitive, darting gaze of a magpie. “You tell me it is Latin. But what does it say, excellency?” She had a surprisingly strong voice for one so small of stature.

  “Burrhus mentioned that you once worked for a colleague of his,” John replied. “Was he also an advocate?”

  “Indeed he was. But may I point out that while such men require Latin, their servants do not?”

  “Where have you been these past few days?” put in Hypatia from the kitchen window, fearing that the older woman’s blunt manner of speaking might cause difficulties. “We may be needing more of your coltsfoot concoction soon.”

  “I thought your cough was nearly gone, my lady?” Rhea replied, addressing Anthea, whose arrival completed the crowd in the small kitchen.

  “Almost,” she replied. “If only you could help Solon as much! Although I will say he does look stronger this morning.”

  Rhea’s bird-like gaze darted about the kitchen, lighting first on Hypatia, and then on John.

  “I do know something about these curse tablets, Lord Chamberlain,” she declared. “I know, for one thing, that none but an evil person would seek to use such a foul thing to force the shade of a father to injure his son.” She paused to make the sign of her religion. “And though some may tell you otherwise, I have never indulged in such magick. I use only the fine plants blessing this world to work my healing.”

  Hypatia hastily requested Rhea to accompany her to the garden in hopes of finding a herbal gift that might be of some assistance to Solon. Anthea was at John’s elbow immediately.

  “Here’s a strange thing,” she whispered, glancing outside at the two herbalists, now deep in animated conversation. “When Rhea first came to treat me, Burrhus mentioned that she had transcribed all manner of legal notices for that colleague of his. Wouldn’t such notices be written in Latin?”

  John made no comment.

  “It’s
plain the old woman’s lying for some reason,” Anthea went on. “I would never have suspected it of her, for she’s done me nothing but good with her herbal remedies. Unfortunately we can’t ask Burrhus about it right now. He went to the city this afternoon to plead a case. But he’ll be back tomorrow morning.”

  John sat on the stone bench, deep in thought. The dry leaves of the laurel bushes shielding him from the moonlight rustled faintly in an evening breeze that had brought no respite from the day’s heat.

  Did Jason harbour ill will towards mother and child, he wondered. He had served with Anthea but was still a servant. Did he envy her good fortune? And he was her age. Perhaps he had professed affection and she had turned him away, as had happened with Helen and Cepheus.

  He considered the elderly cook and gardener. Might deep resentment against their old master and his wife extend to the next generation, and the one after that?

  Helen could easily have slipped something harmful into her mistress’s meals. But equally Rhea would have had many similar opportunities. John had not discerned what her reason for such actions might be but the herbalist had admitted to some knowledge of curse tablets, and Anthea had already indicated her strong suspicion of the woman.

  There again, Rhea would not have needed any reason at all if she had merely been consulted. By Burrhus, for example. He could certainly afford to purchase a curse table – and he definitely knew Latin.

  John shifted on his hard seat, hunching over like an old man. Yes, everything seemed to point at Burrhus, a man who had seen half his father’s estate pass to a woman he considered still a slave. A man who had much to gain by losing his sister-in-law and nephew.

  There was movement in the moonlight beyond the mausoleum. It was a wisp of a figure, dressed in red. The apparition turned its shadowy face in John’s direction before pivoting with otherwordly slowness to stare towards the villa.