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  RIVALS

  OF THE

  REPUBLIC

  — A BLOOD OF ROME NOVEL —

  ANNELISE

  FREISENBRUCH

  For Julian

  CONTENTS

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  A HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  XIII

  XIV

  XV

  XVI

  XVII

  XVIII

  XIX

  XX

  XXI

  XXII

  XXIII

  XXIV

  XXV

  XXVI

  XXVII

  XXVIII

  XXIX

  XXX

  XXXI

  XXXII

  XXXIII

  XXXIV

  XXXV

  XXXVI

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I WOULD LIKE TO THANK MY BRILLIANT AGENT ARAMINTA WHITLEY AND also Peta Nightingale, Jennifer Hunt and everyone at LAW for all their hard work in helping me bring Hortensia to life. I am equally indebted to the legendary Peter Mayer, who saw Hortensia’s potential and whose sage advice has made this a much better book. My friends Katie Fleming, Daniel Orrells, Aude Doody and Miriam Leonard are an unfailing source of support and I’d like to thank Aude for reading an early draft and giving helpful advice. Helen Lovatt generously read the book with a Classicist’s eye when she had better things to do – any historical errors that remain are entirely my own. Bridget Cowan told me she loved the sound of the story when I first mentioned it – thank you, Bridget, that was more encouraging than you probably intended at the time. To the staff, parents and pupils of Chafyn Grove School and Port Regis School – where I have successively taught Latin as this book has taken shape – my thanks for your understanding and support. I am very lucky to have parents who positively encourage me to borrow money off them and eat all of their food – the ideal support system for a writer. Finally, I want to thank Gabriel and Fabia (the 21st century one) for letting me practice my cooking on them at weekends, and above all Julian, who proves John Irving’s maxim that all you really need is a good, smart bear.

  A HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

  ROME HAS RECENTLY SURVIVED A PERIOD OF BLOODY CIVIL WAR AND the embers of conflict and thwarted ambition are still smouldering. Rivals of the Republic is set in the year 70BC, four decades before the end of the ostensibly democratic era of the Roman Republic and the beginning of the age of one-man rule, when emperors such as Augustus, Claudius and Nero would make their colorful mark on ancient history. It is a period of high drama in Roman politics. In principle, the Senate holds the reins of power in trust for the people. Two consuls are annually elected by popular vote to share executive powers, standing down after they have served their year in office. But new rivalries and antipathies are emerging, most notably that between the year’s two serving consuls, the wealthy Marcus Licinius Crassus and the military titan Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus – better known to history as Pompey the Great. Meanwhile, an ambitious young politician named Julius Caesar waits in the wings.

  With its themes of betrayal, conspiracy and blood rivalry, the story told in Rivals of the Republic reflects the currents of conflict that would eventually culminate in the rise and assassination of Caesar, and the death of the Roman Republic.

  Rivals of the Republic is the first in The Blood of Rome series of historical crime novels.

  DRAMATIS PERSONAE

  THE HOUSEHOLD AND FAMILY OF HORTENSIUS HORTALUS

  Hortensius Hortalus. Flamboyant king of the Roman law court.

  Hortensia. His precocious daughter.

  Lutatia. His downtrodden wife.

  Quintus. His disappointment of a son.

  Lucrio. A gladiator with a mysterious past.

  Elpidia. A slave woman.

  Rixus. A gardener with a taste for the dramatic.

  THE HOUSEHOLD AND FAMILY OF SERVILIUS CAEPIO

  Caepio. Hortensia’s delightful second cousin.

  Cato. His moralizing brother.

  Servilia. His seductive sister.

  Brutus. His nephew. A boy with a future.

  Eucherius. A loyal young slave.

  THE POLITICIANS, THE LAWYERS AND THE MILITARY.

  Lucilius Albinus. A member of the Roman Senate.

  Caecilius Metellus. An elderly member of the powerful Metelli clan.

  Claudia. His garrulous wife.

  Marcus Licinius Crassus. The richest man in Rome.

  Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus (‘Pompey’). Rome’s greatest general.

  Mucia Tertia. His third wife.

  Sertorius. A renegade Roman general.

  Metellus Pius. Conqueror of Sertorius (with Pompey) and high priest of Rome.

  Tiberius Dolabella. A sinister one-time soldier from Pompey’s army.

  Publius Dolabella. His arrogant young nephew.

  Gaius Verres. A former governor of Sicily.

  Cicero. Hortensius’s legal rival.

  Terentia. His sharp-eyed wife.

  Gaius Julius Caesar. A rising young orator and politician.

  THE TEMPLE OF VESTA

  Fabia. An intrepid Vestal Virgin.

  Cornelia. Chief Priestess of the Temple.

  Felix. A young slave boy.

  OTHER CHARACTERS

  Drusilla. A wronged wife.

  Marcus Rufio. Her unpleasant husband.

  Petro. A wily forger.

  Didius Flavius. A scribe.

  Pernilla. His wife.

  Laelia. His daughter.

  RIVALS OF THE REPUBLIC

  I

  The house of Senator Lucilius Albinus on the Palatine Hill, Rome.

  It is the spring of 70BC, in the year of the consulship of Pompey Magnus and Marcus Licinius Crassus.

  THERE WAS A LONG SILENCE AS THE ELDER OF THE TWO MEN READ the letter that had been handed to him. He raised pink, rheumy eyes to the face of the man sitting opposite him and spoke in a tone of bewilderment. “But why now? He said there was no rush to repay the debt.”

  His visitor tilted his head to one side, the glow from an oil-lamp on the table between them illuminating furrows of deep scarring on the left side of his face. A grey cloak was swathed about his shoulders and a bitter green scent tainted the air around him.

  “If all men of business ran their affairs like a charity, Senator, I venture to suggest they would have no business left to speak of.”

  “But it’s six hundred thousand sesterces … I don’t have that kind of money – it’s more than my house is worth. I promised him my support in the election, he said that was payment enough …”

  “I am not sure your colleagues in the Senate would see it that way.”

  The old man slumped in his chair and re-read the letter. His visitor waited, his eyes watchful as a cobra’s.

  “How long do I have?” the old man finally asked, a rasp in his throat.

  “I would say a few days. He has some … projects looming which require urgent cash flow.”

  “Why has he sent you?” asked the old man roughly. “Why not some debt-collector, one of his ruffians from the Subura?”

  The man in grey appeared to weigh the question carefully.

  “I think he thought it would be better coming from a friend.” He smiled as though in rueful sympathy but there was only malice in his voice.
/>   “A friend … I see.”

  “There is an alternative, Senator, as I believe the letter in your hand explains. I have previously tried to persuade you of the benefits … your loyalty does you credit, though I believe it is unwarranted.”

  Carefully, the old man placed the letter on the table in front of him. He hauled himself up from his chair, limped over to a cabinet in the corner of the room and fumblingly extracted a key from his tunic pocket. A moment later, he dropped a small silver-embossed box in front of his visitor.

  “You may tell him that this is all there is for now. I will have the rest for him later, and … I ask for his patience.”

  Lifting the lid of the box, the man in grey inspected the pile of coins inside before closing it again with a snap and tucking it into the crook of his elbow. “I shall pass on your message,” he said as he got to his feet and lunged toward the doorway, his grey cloak swinging gently about him. He paused to glance back at his host, who was now staring at some spot on the ground, and the watchfulness in his expression was replaced by satisfaction. “A very good evening to you, Senator,” he said softly, before withdrawing.

  The old man slowly returned to his chair and continued to gaze into the distance. Eventually he summoned a slave and gave orders for a bath to be prepared in his private quarters. Picking up a pen and drawing a piece of papyrus toward him, he began the letter, “To my dear Pompey, greetings …” and scratched out a few lines in small, swooping letters. Slipping a seal-ring off his finger – embossed with the head of a griffin – he fastened the seam of the roll with wax and placed it on the table alongside the ring. Next he shuffled down the passageway toward his private bathing room and dismissed the waiting slave with instructions that he would not need anything else that night and to see that the letter on his desk was dispatched first thing in the morning.

  His hands shook a little as he fumbled with the buckle on his belt. Dropping it to the floor with a clatter, he peeled off his tunic and stood naked in the steam. His skin hung in wrinkled folds from his shoulders, and his belly draped like a sack over his genitals. With one hand against the wall for support, he lowered himself gingerly into the water and for several minutes he lay there, staring up at the tiled ceiling as though committing it to memory. Then he picked up the small silver knife which he had placed on the shelf next to him, pressed the sharp tip to his wrist and dragged it across the delicate purple skin. The spoiled limb fell back into the water with a splash. Blood spiraled into the bath in blossoming threads. The old man’s head slipped a little to one side, and he sucked in shallow breaths of steam.

  Through a crack in the doorway, the man in grey stood watching from the shadows of the corridor. He softly retraced his footsteps along the corridor to the vacant study and picked up the sealed roll left on the table. Breaking the seal, he read the contents and smiled slightly before holding up the corner of the document to the glowing wick of the terracotta oil-lamp. It curled and blackened in the flame before it was dropped, still smoking, into a deep clay pot against the wall. The same treatment was given to the letter which he himself had delivered earlier, and which had been left open on the table. Then he produced a loose coil of papyrus from inside the sleeve of his grey cloak and unfurled it. It was covered in a small, swooping script closely reminiscent of the old man’s handwriting. Re-rolling it into a tight cylinder, he anointed the seam with a dab of red wax from the pot on the table and pressed the imprint of the griffin seal-ring to it. He placed it on the table and blew out the dancing flame of the oil-lamp.

  Returning to the bathing room along the corridor, he frowned to see the senator sitting up with a confused look on his face and trying to clamber out of the bath. The water lapping at his wrinkled stomach was tinted a gentle vermilion.

  “Amateur,” the man in grey muttered to himself, and beckoned toward the shadows, from which three figures emerged. The old man’s eyes flickered as he tried to focus on the four men entering his bathing room.

  “Hold him.”

  The senator’s cry drowned in his throat as his head was forced underwater. His frail right arm was extended and presented like a side of meat for inspection. The man in grey picked up the knife and ran his finger along the blade. His strange amber eyes glinted as the sound of threshing and gurgling echoed around the tiled room.

  “Too blunt. That’s where you went wrong,” he said, addressing himself conversationally to the face staring up at him wide-eyed through the water. “Human flesh is tougher than those little slivers of fattened bird your slaves chop up into mush for your evening meal. A mistake too, the way you were cutting. You have to go down the vein, not across. Like so, you see?”

  Blood spattered across the tiles. The old man stared helplessly, his mouth open in a silent scream as the man in grey continued to cut. One of the slaves holding him lost his footing on the newly slippery floor. Then the threshing stopped and the water ceased to churn. Wisps of silver hair fanned gently around the old man’s head. His visitor stood up and let the knife drop in the lurid crimson water with a splash.

  “Honorably done, Senator,” he murmured, before pushing the griffin seal-ring back on the dead man’s finger.

  II

  Capua, southern Italy.

  THE APPIAN WAY WAS ALWAYS FULL OF TRAFFIC AT THIS TIME OF YEAR AS Rome’s wealthy elite began their annual exodus out of the stifling heat of the city toward the cooler coastal resorts of Campania. But the promise of a spectacular day of gladiatorial games and entertainment to be hosted at Capua by Rome’s richest man – and one of its two ruling consuls – had swelled the number of carriages and carts on the road. Angry voices barked out expletives as drivers traveling in opposite directions refused to yield the right of way and the debris of numerous accidents could be seen along the route. Such mishaps did not affect Hortensius Hortalus, Rome’s great orator and king of the law court, whose capacious wheeled carriage swept past more cumbersome vehicles like a gilded trireme.

  Of the five occupants of the carriage, none felt as satisfied with their situation as the orator’s sixteen-year-old daughter Hortensia. Twisting her black locks around her fingers, she glanced surreptitiously at her cousin Caepio, sitting opposite her. At twenty-five years of age, with his glossy chestnut hair and laughing brown eyes, Hortensia could not imagine that there was a more handsome man in Rome. Though no one could rival her Papa’s magnificence of course. Famed for the exquisite style of his clothes and elegant mannerisms in the law court, Hortensius had bequeathed to his daughter his striking coloring of black hair and bright blue eyes and at the age of forty still cut a sleek figure, despite his love of fine wines. Noticing Hortensia’s scrutiny, he smiled indulgently.

  “Not far now, carissima.”

  His peacock-blue gaze narrowed once more on Hortensia’s younger brother Quintus, whose skin, delicate as papyrus, was even paler than usual. Travel sickness was making the boy shift in his seat and clutch his belly with his thin forearms.

  “Again. And this time, try to sound a little less like an asthmatic pigeon.”

  Quintus sat up straighter and took a deep breath.

  “If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences. If we look to social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation …”

  He trailed off as a long sigh emanated from the other side of the carriage. Hortensius cooled himself languidly with his fan.

  “It is quite extraordinary. No diction, no clarity of tone whatsoever. Are you sure he’s really mine?”

  The question was directed at Hortensia’s mother Lutatia, sitting between her two children. She was a small, thin woman with watery eyes and sallow cheeks now flushed with embarrassment. But she was saved the necessity of answering by Caepio, who peered out of the open window and said, “I think we’re here. Look, isn’t that Caecilius’s carriage?”

  Hortensia smiled gratefully at him and squeezed her mother’s hand.

  An attendant in blue livery appeared and waited for
them all to disembark, Quintus almost falling out in his eagerness to get out of the swaying vehicle. Hortensius refused to proceed until he was satisfied that his garments were nicely arranged. Then they were escorted past the queues and through a shaded side-entrance in the amphitheater wall to a staircase at the top of which Hortensia could see a perfect oval of blue sky. In the sandy eye of the arena, an extraordinary parade was underway – panthers, lions, bulls, bears and elephants and, at the very back of the line, a leathery crocodile, his muzzle bound tightly shut with rope. Hortensia followed close behind her father along the front row where an elderly bald man with a peevish expression was directing a slave to place more cushions behind his back. Hortensius ostentatiously swatted himself with his fan.

  “You look positively dyspeptic, Caecilius,” he observed in the richly sonorous tone of voice for which he was celebrated. “Are Crassus’s entertainments not to your liking?”

  “Hortensius, good to see you, good to see you.” Caecilius Metellus heaved himself to his feet and extended a liver-spotted hand in greeting to his friend. “No problems on the journey I hope? Those damned Cilicians have been seen on the Appian Way again lately … it’s coming to something when you can’t travel down the greatest road in the empire without fear of a pack of bloody pirates relieving you of your purse. Not sure why Pompey and Crassus haven’t tackled it properly, it’ll be up to you and me when we take over the consulship next year.”

  “Careful my friend, careful. We still have an election to win.”

  “Oh, that’s just a formality. Caepio, in good health I trust? Ah … Hortensia, Lutatia, how charming.”

  Caecilius sounded unenthusiastic and leaned in conspiratorially toward Hortensius. “I didn’t bring Claudia with me. Not sure I approve of it you know. Women at these events.”

  But since Hortensius seemed more interested at that moment in the choice of wine being offered him by one of the slave attendants, Caecilius straightened up and addressed himself in bracing tones to his friend’s son, who was still looking queasy.