I sat there, living through what must have happened. It was the nearest I could come to helping her. It was the only way I could comfort her for dying so alone.

I know who it was. He must realize that. One day, however carefully he protects himself, the man will answer to me.

She found him there, writing (that was evident). Writing what? Not a tally of the silver bars, for she was wrong, there were no bars, though we turned the deserted warehouse over for days. But he was writing, because lampblack from the wet ink stained her white dress around the wound. Perhaps she knew him. When she found him, he realized she needed to be silenced, so he stood up and rapidly stabbed her, a rising blow through the heart, once, with his pen.

Petronius was right. Sosia Camillina could not have expected that.

I rose. I managed neither to stumble nor break down.

“Her father…”

“I’ll tell them,” stated Petronius drably. A task he so hated. “Go home. I’ll tell the family. Marcus, just go home!”

I decided after all to let him tell them.

I could feel his eyes watching me as I walked away. He wanted to help. He knew there was nothing anyone could do.

XIX

I went to the funeral. In my line of work, this is traditional. Petronius came with me.

According to custom, they conducted the ceremony out of doors. They came in procession from her father’s house, bringing Sosia Camillina in an open bier with garlands in her hair. The cremation took place outside the city near the family mausoleum on the Appian Way. They dispensed with professional mourners. Young men who were friends of the family carried her funeral bed.

There was a blustery wind. They brought her through Rome in daylight, with flute music and lamentation, disrupting the city streets. At the pyre, built of untrimmed wood like an altar and with dark leaves woven round the sides, one of the young bearers stumbled. I stepped forward to help, without looking. The bier was so light it nearly flew from our hands as we swung it up.

Her father’s oration was short, almost perfunctory. That seemed right. So too had been her life. What Publius Camillus said that day was simple, and simply the truth.

“This was my only daughter, Sosia Camillina. She was fair, reverent and dutiful, snatched from the world before she could know the love of a husband or child. Receive her young soul gently, O ye gods…” He seized one of the torches and, with formally averted gaze, he lit the pyre.

“Sosia Camillina, Hail and Farewell!”

Surrounded by flowers, small trinkets, sweet oils, she left us. People wept. I was one of them. Scented flames crackled up. I glimpsed her once through the smoke. She was gone.