Secrets of the Dead by Tom Harper Read Free Book Online Page A

grateful for anything that proved she still existed to the outside world.
    How pathetic am I? she wondered as she tore it open.
    It wasn’t a demand from TV Licensing. It was a single sheet of paper, with three lines of text typed in the centre.
    Jenny Roche
    36 Bartle Garth
    York

VI
    Constantinople – April 337
    A LIFETIME WITH Constantine has allowed me to form certain opinions. One is this: that the secret of greatness is escaping the past. The past is a fog, always trying to smother you, a chorus of cavilling voices counselling caution, restraint, moderation. A reproachful ‘No’ with the full weight of history.
    A great man is dissatisfied with the world and impatient to improve it. The past’s a messy impediment. A great man wants to rationalise the world, to remake it in the image of his own clarity.
    That’s why Constantine never liked Rome. Too much history. Too much mess. Temples built of mud and reeds, palaces overshadowed by tenements. In our youth, when we were taught how Julius Caesar grew up among plebeians in the Subura, I could see this jumbling of the natural order appalled Constantine. Grandeur and disease, divinity and squalor all tangled together. Too much history, too many ghosts.
    I don’t like Rome either.
    Constantinople gave Constantine a blank canvas to start afresh (not literally – there had been a town here for a thousand years, Byzantium – but another aspect of greatness is the ability to see only what suits you). And so the new city, Constantine’s city, fits his vision of how the world should be. It stands on a promontory, not a marshy river basin. It progresses in orderly grades along the peninsula: plebeians out by the land walls; then the middling sort, merchants and curiales , as you head east towards the Philadelphion; then the grades of Senators, the spectabiles and the clarissimi , their grand houses queuing towards the hippodrome like fans on race day; and, finally, the imperial palace at the tip of the point. Beyond that, the only neighbour is the sea.
    Or that’s the theory. In practice, the city’s only five years old and already it’s beginning to deviate from Constantine’s plan. Weeds have sprouted in the tiered garden he laid out: a tenement block somehow growing in the space between two villas; a grand house sold and converted into apartments; jumped-up merchants muscling in on an upscale neighbourhood. I imagine it causes Constantine more grief than barbarians or usurpers ever have.
    I walk up the Via Mesi towards the palace. In my hand I clutch a paper scroll, a list of the men who were in the library that afternoon, as much as the porter could remember them. I’ve spent the last two hours interrogating the men who were still there and not learned a thing. Nothing seen, nothing heard. No one recognises the monogram necklace. A part of me whispers this might all be some elaborate hoax.
    But the blood on the desk was real enough, and there are names on my list I haven’t yet seen. Starting with that notorious hater of the Christians, Aurelius Symmachus.
    Aurelius Symmachus was here. He left not long before I found the body .
    Aurelius Symmachus lives suitably close to the palace, as befits his impeccable status. His doorman looks at me in disbelief when I announce myself: he can’t believe I’ve come alone. He cranes his head out so far looking for my retainers he almost falls into the street. Of course, he’s too well schooled to say anything. He admits me through to a peristyle garden surrounded by colonnades. White carp sit motionless in an oblong pool, watched over by a quartet of stone nymphs. In the shadows under the colonnades, I glimpse painted scenes of reclining gods. Dark heads watch me from the alcoves. Everything’s exquisite and strangely dead.
    Aurelius Symmachus emerges from a door, glancing over his shoulder as if midway through a conversation. He’s a short, stout man who walks with a stick. He’s almost bald, though white hair sticks