I had been deeply asleep this morning and never would have heard her come and go.
“Do not worry,” Cassia answered. “I remained here. I have no wish to be bashed on the head and pushed into the river. I have others who can find things out for me.”
Cassia had once told me that she knew servants and slaves in most of the large villas around the city, from visits to them with her former mistress. She’d also come to know the servants and freedmen who lived on the Quirinal, including the boy who fetched and carried for the wine merchant downstairs.
She’d know who she could trust to gather information for her, and she, as a scribe, would have authority they respected.
I briefly thought it was a pity women could not become princeps. Cassia would rule Rome with an orderly and sympathetic hand that would make everyone forget about Augustus and his so-called golden age.
Cassia pulled me from this flight of fancy with more information. “It took much convincing and calling upon favors to find the history of the building site,” she said. “Sextus Livius’s information only told me so much. He purchased it from Vestalis’s widow, who’d purchased it from one Vitus Albinus about five years ago. Vitus Albinus is dead now, of old age, nothing untoward. The land had several owners before that, each one selling it off fairly quickly.”
“Maybe it truly is cursed,” I mused.
“Or the ground is too saturated for a proper foundation, or the people who buy that plot do so only for speculation. There could be many reasons a piece of property changes hands.”
Cassia, I’d noticed, would always lean toward the practical solution before she’d concede that magic or the gods had anything to do with a situation.
“You’ve found something else that excites you,” I said. She brimmed with far too much eagerness to be finished yet. “Tell me before it causes you illness.”
Cassia was too animated to heed my teasing. “One of the owners, a little over ten years ago, was a man called Tertius Cloelius Crispus.”
Chapter 19
Cassia sat back after she delivered that detail, eyeing me in triumph.
“Cloelius owned the land?” The brother-in-law of the lanky Vibius, sitting in his rundown villa at the top of the Esquiline. “Why didn’t Vibius tell us?”
“Cloelius’s family owned it.” Cassia deflated a bit. “It was one of their many properties. They, or Cloelius, likely sold it to pay a debt. Vibius might know nothing about it.”
“Why wouldn’t Cloelius mention this to Vibius when Vibius started working on the site?”
I could imagine the arrogant Cloelius clubbing a man dead and ordering his slaves to bury the body under a building’s foundations. His connection to the site would be the last thing he’d mention to someone like Vibius.
Then again, Cloelius didn’t strike me as an athletic man, and he’d have had to fight an agile youth. His sort of anger took the form of sardonic insults and petty vengeance, not violence, which was possibly why Aelia did not fear him.
“It is possible Cloelius himself never knew where the site was,” Cassia pointed out. “Aelia might not have known about it either. A family’s scribes and majordomo often make their business transactions for them.”
“While the paterfamilias strolls his garden and pretends he is still wealthy,” I finished.
“Or he knows he is not good at finance. Like Priscus.”
Livius’s true father, Priscus, had once admitted to me he had no head for business and left it to his servants. Those servants had swindled him, believing he’d never realize it.
“I think Cloelius considers doing his own accounts beneath him,” I said.
“I agree,” Cassia said, her disapprobation returning. “If he cared more, he could find a way to bring in income and maintain his estate.”
I wasn’t so certain. Obtaining money in this wealthiest of cities wasn’t easy. One needed connections and the trust of others in addition to opportunity. According to Livius, not many trusted Cloelius anymore, which his lack of clients attested.
“We should ask Cloelius,” Cassia said. “What he recalls of the site, I mean, and whether he knows anything about the death ten years ago. The dead man could have been a worker there. He might have met with an accident rather than been deliberately killed.”
True, the blow to the skull could have been from a falling stone or section of a wall, or he could have stumbled and landed on one of the formidable ashlar blocks. “Is your idea that the other workers, worried they’d be blamed, buried him?”
“Possibly,” Cassia answered. “I say it could have been an accident. Most people’s reaction to such a thing is either to find someone else to deal with the problem or to run away entirely. Why bury the man when they could simply have left him, the obvious victim of an accident? I will be interested in what Cloelius knows, if anything. And if he has no information, his sister might. If I can be at the site when she comes to reverse any curse, I can speak with her then.”
I shoved aside my bowl. “I planned to bring you with me tomorrow. I do not want you out of my sight, in any case. This afternoon, I’m going to see Marcianus.”
Cassia brightened. “I too, would like to talk with him.” She studied the rolls of papyrus before her and sighed. “Most of these must go back to the libraries from where they came. I knew I could only have them for a short while.”
