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litters, Fulvus called back, “Full dress uniform tomorrow. Mustn’t let the Praetorians outshine us.”

Chapter Four

    Late that night Pliny peeped into his wife’s bedroom. It was hot and she had thrown off the covers. She lay on her back, her chestnut hair spread out on the pillow, the swelling curve of her belly a gray outline against the pale lamplight. Old Helen slept on a cot at the foot of the bed.
    He made scarcely a sound but Calpurnia awoke and sat up in the bed. “Dearest, forgive me…” She took pride in always waiting up for him.
    “Don’t be silly. Helen was right to make you go to bed.”
    “Was it a fine dinner? I wish I could have gone.”
    “I am inexpressibly happy that you did not. Go back to sleep like a good girl. We’ll talk in the morning.” He kissed her forehead and felt a surge of tenderness run through him.
    In his own bed in the adjoining room Pliny tossed fitfully. One could have said, before tonight, that if ever a man was pleased with himself, comfortable with his certainties, satisfied with his circumstances, and confident of his future, it was he.
    Now doubts assailed him. He had attended dinners at the palace before but nothing like tonight’s grotesquerie. Was the emperor going mad as some in the Senate whispered? And if so, then where did duty lie? Could a good man serve a bad emperor and keep his own hands clean? Pliny was on the horns of a dilemma. He was a good man. But he was also an ambitious one, and he could not put out of his mind the emperor’s words to him: a chance to emulate his uncle, that paragon of learning, virtue, and dedication.
    He tossed and turned, but sleep would not come. He counted the hours until dawn, when he must rise and present himself for the opening ceremony of the Roman Games, a festival that occupied two weeks in the middle of September—not September—“Germanicus,” he must remember to say! For many senators and lawyers, with the cessation of public business, the Games, which only the priests were strictly required to attend, meant a fifteen-day vacation from the sweltering cesspit of Rome to their estates in the hills. But no such respite for him this year. And all because this wretched Verpa had got himself killed.
    Pliny had known the man only by sight and reputation. The world of senatorial society was large enough that he could avoid meeting people he found disagreeable, and Verpa had never shown any interest in meeting him, the gods be thanked! The man had been a notorious informer all the way back to Nero’s reign.
    Informers were a cancer on the Roman Senate. Every emperor began his reign by denouncing the evil, but sooner or later succumbed to the temptation of listening to the vicious innuendo spread by the informer against his fellow senators and their families. Condemnation was certain, and the informer divided the victim’s property with the emperor.
    Verpa had begun by denouncing a woman of senatorial family for treason because a slave saw her undressing before the emperor’s image, and, on another occasion, he condemned a man for carrying a coin with Domitian’s portrait into a privy. But he had outdone himself when he denounced Clemens, the emperor’s own cousin, and his wife, Domitilla, on a charge of atheism and performing Jewish practices. Verpa had brought this charge openly in the Senate. Pliny had been there to hear him. It was indeed a shocking revelation, but Verpa had incontrovertible evidence to back it up, and the emperor went nearly insane with anger. Clemens was swiftly strangled and his wife banished for life to an island. Sextus Ingentius Verpa was riding high; that is, until someone butchered him in the night. Tomorrow Pliny must poke a stick into this anthill and turn it over. The thought of it revolted him.
    When at last he drifted off to sleep, naked black children invaded his dreams, hanging on his arms and legs, dragging him somewhere he did not want to go.
    Pliny was not the only one whose