He could have told me this in confidence later, which is what I would have done in his shoes. Anacrites and I glared at each other. We could both see that Aelianus had deliberately said it in front of both of us. He was not the pushover we both had taken him for.
Anacrites tried to make light of it. “I’m letting you have him first, Falco.”
“But you’ll take advantage of the experience I give him? I train him, then you pinch him?”
“You owe me now.”
“Anacrites, I owe you zilch!” I turned to Aelianus. “As for you, you reprobate, let’s not pretend you want to set aside your purple stripes and go slumming.” Aelianus did not really believe I had anything to teach him; if he joined me, his only desire would be to show me how to do my job by effortlessly surpassing me. “I am supposed to be in partnership with your brother-when he deigns to show his face.”
Aelianus grinned. “He pinched my girl-I’ll pinch his position!”
“Well, that’s fair,” I commented, quoting him on another subject.
After a moment we were all laughing.
We calmed down.
“That was a facer about Ventidius,” I said. We all walked slowly towards the Circus side of the Palatine where a path wound down.
“Have you been told the whole story now, I wonder?” Anacrites mused. He was not so dumb sometimes.
“Doubt it. Just enough to keep us off their backs. It does explain a lot. The ex-Vestal married a man who turned out to be a lecher-and so shameless that he even tried it on with one of her own female relatives-Caecilia Paeta, her nephew’s wife; Caecilia told me herself. The rest now fits: Terentia presumably heard about it. Perhaps Caecilia told her, or the other one-Laelia, the ex-Flamen’s daughter. So Terentia runs wild and slays Ventidius in the Sacred Grove, bloodily cutting his throat and saving the drips as if he were the white beast at a religious sacrifice.”
Aelianus took up the story: “To the Arval Brothers this must have been a double horror. The corpse was a terrible sight-I can vouch for that-but it must also have seemed that night as if every cult in the old religion was touched by the scandal: the Arvals themselves, the Vestals, and even the College of Flamens-”
“Right,” I said. “The dead man was an Arval, and it happened in the Sacred Grove; the killer was a Vestal. Ventidius had been the lover of the previous Flaminica. That seems to have been common knowledge in Rome. Certainly most women knew. Then, to cap it all, the whole bunch is related to the child who has been picked out as the next Vestal.”
“So that was why a coverup was so readily agreed upon?” suggested Anacrites. “Influence?”
We stopped, on the heights just by the carefully preserved (that is, entirely rebuilt) supposed Hut of Romulus.
“Looks like it. Numentinus was definitely nagging the Arvals about something; he was at the Master’s house the next night, and they did not sound too pleased about it. They were even less pleased about us,” I said. “Everything would probably have worked very smoothly, if Aelianus and I had not started to poke about. The corpse was spirited away and a funeral held very quietly. Terentia is to be looked after and guarded, eventually no doubt at her own home, though my guess is that as a first move she has been taken in by Laelius Numentinus, perhaps out of some regard for his dead wife. She has been living in a guestroom, though when I turned up to search she had to be packed off hastily to the Vestals’ House, out of the way. As she is one of their own, the Virgins would agree to tend her.”
“Would her presence explain why Numentinus did not want the vigiles to come in after the child disappeared?” Anacrites asked.
“You heard about that?”
“I keep in touch,” he bragged.
“The vigiles might have sniffed out the scandal. And this explains the nonsense Laelius Scaurus told me about his aunt wanting a legal guardian. As an ex-Vestal, she would not need one, but arrangements are essential now. She must have been declared furiosa-not to be prissy, a raving lunatic. Somebody has to be her custodian.”
“Can she choose her own?” Aelianus asked.
“If she has moments of lucidity, why not?”
“But is she still dangerous?”
“After the way Ventidius was killed, she must be. That was not just an angry wife, lashing out with the nearest cooking knife. You cannot say it was a sudden act that she will never repeat. She planned it; she took the implements to the Grove; she dressed up in religious style; she murdered the man, and then carried out an extraordinary sequence of actions with his blood…”
Aelianus shuddered. “Remember the cloth I saw covering the dead man’s face? Now I know about the rituals involved, I think it must have been one of those veils priestesses wear when they attend a sacrifice.”
“And Vestals,” I said.
“Vestals,” said Anacrites, picking holes as usual, “never actually cut throats.”
“Looks like this one learned to do it, once she got herself a husband.”
“A warning to all of us?”
“Oh?” I asked coldly, thinking about Maia. “Are you considering marriage then, Anacrites?”
