Murder on the Appian Way by Steven Saylor Read Free Book Online Page A

that if I possibly could. And Clodia could have done so, quite easily, simply by entering through that side door. She could have avoided the crowd completely. Am I right? Her litter could have deposited her and Metella and her nephew Appius at the foot of the steps, and they could have gone up to the landing and into the house without anyone even knowing they'd arrived."
    "I suppose so ..."
    Diana picked up the thread from her mother. "Instead, she went through the thick of the crowd in that huge litter - the one with the red and white stripes that everyone knows is hers — with a veritable army of big redheaded gladiators."
    Bethesda nodded. "Where everyone would be sure to notice her arrival."
    "And talk about it long afterwards," said Diana. "What is your point?" I said, looking back and forth between them.
    "Well, Papa, only that grief was not the only thing on Clodia's mind."
    "Exactly," said Bethesda. "Making an entrance - that was the point."
    "Oh, really!" I shook my head. "If you'd been there, if you'd felt the mood of the place, the despair, the anguish -"
    "All the better to heighten the drama," said Bethesda. "I don't doubt Clodia's grief But you see, she must have considered the circumstances ahead of time. She realized that she wouldn't be allowed to appear publicly alongside her brother's body when it was shown to the crowd. That privilege was reserved for Fulvia."
    "So Clodia made an impression in the only way she could - by making a grand entrance," said Diana.
    "I see. You're saying she wanted to upstage her sister-in-law."
    "Not at all." Bethesda frowned at my obtuseness. "She only wanted what was hers."
    "To claim the portion of public grief that she feels belongs to her," Diana explained.
    "I see," I said, not at all certain that I did. "Well, speaking of doing things for show, of course I was quite struck by the inconsistency of Fulvia's behaviour —"
    "Inconsistency?" said Bethesda.
    "What do you mean, Papa?"
    "I told you how stiff she was in the inner room, how she showed virtually no emotion, even when she put Clodia in her place about cleaning the body. And then her hysterical shrieking in front of all those people when they showed Clodius to the mob!"
    "But where's the inconsistency, Papa?" Diana looked at me curiously, as did her mother. I almost thought they were making fun of me.
    "It seems to me that a woman should grieve in private and show restraint in public, not - the other way around," I said.
    Bethesda and Diana looked at each other and wrinkled their brows. "What would be the point of that?" said Bethesda.
    "It's not a matter of having a point -"
    "Husband!" Bethesda was shaking her head. "Of course Fulvia didn't want to show her grief to you, a stranger, in the intimacy of her home, and especially not in front of Clodia. She comported herself with dignity to make her mother proud, to show her little daughter how to be strong, to confound her weeping sister-in-law. And for the sake of her husband as well, since you Romans believe that the lemur of a dead man may linger for a while in the vicinity of its vacant corpse. So for you she put on her most dignified manner.
    But the crowd outside, that was a different matter. Fulvia wanted to stir them up, as much as she could, just as her husband had stirred them up so many times before. She could hardly do that by standing next to his bloody corpse and behaving like a statue, could she?"
    "Then you think her display of public grief was calculated and disingenuous?"
    "Calculated, most certainly. But disingenuous? Not at all. She simply chose the most suitable time and place to release the grief that was inside her all along."
    I shook my head. "I'm not sure you're making sense. I'd rather try to figure out what sort of schemes the politicians in the anteroom were up to."
    Bethesda and Diana shrugged in unison to show that the subject bored them. "Politicians are usually too obvious to be very interesting," said Bethesda. "Of course, it may be