Mary Reed: Seven for a Secret

John’s foot touched something heavy and unyielding.

As his eyes adjusted to the dimness, he realized it was one of several pieces of broken statuary-legs, a wing, and a horn such as the fabulous beasts described by Aristotle and Pliny might have displayed.

He started down the steps.

There was a movement in the darkness below.

Something pale. A mist. A phantom. It floated up toward him as he descended until it had resolved itself into a human form.

It was John’s reflection in water.

He stopped abruptly at the edge of the gleaming surface. The water stretched back past the rows of columns, smooth as a black basalt floor in the Great Palace.

His heart had begun to race harder than when he had been pursuing the boy.

He was not surprised to find himself in a cistern. It was a common enough use for the basements of abandoned buildings.

However, he would have preferred to confront an armed man, or even more than one wielding weapons. He could never look upon deep water without remembering a freezing stream in Bretania and a familiar face staring up at him from beneath its surface, eyes fixed and unseeing.

John fought the urge to flee back up the stairway.

A sword in the back, a knife slashing one’s throat-those were deaths he could face, but to drown was a horror past imagination.

Was that why he had been led here? To be overpowered and held under the water?

He would not go down to death without a struggle.

He looked around, gripping his blade tighter.

Little more than an arm’s length away a figure rose from the water.

This time John recognized it as statuary immediately. It was a stern Greek goddess, sculpted from green porphyry.

A few steps and John could see another statue, this one of reddish stone, lying face down, barely submerged, at the feet of the goddess.

John shuddered.

He felt an urge to turn the statue over, to remove its face from the terrible water.

It was a remarkably life-like work. Even in the dim light, the subtlety of the musculature in the naked form was apparent. And the sculptor had chiseled every strand of hair.

Long, red hair which spread out and floated on the water’s surface.

John bent and put his hand on the supine figure’s shoulder.

He felt cool flesh.

Carefully, he turned the woman over.

The water was so shallow at the cistern’s edge she might have escaped drowning, but she was dead nevertheless.

A welt circled her neck. John hoped she had in fact been strangled first, before her face was battered into an unrecognizable mask. The cheekbones had been smashed inwards, the nose crushed. The mouth was a gaping, twisted, toothless hole in the red stained ruin.

Yet she was not covered in blood.

Even had the woman been washed clean by immersion in the cistern, John knew, only too well, the color and smell of blood.

The woman had been dyed red from head to foot.

Why?

To conceal her identity?

The beating she had been given would have been more than sufficient to accomplish that.

John took hold of a delicate wrist and lifted it out of the water.

He saw what he had feared.

If he had not been looking for it, he would never have noticed because the dye had almost entirely concealed the tattoo. Only a faint shadow remained visible. Enough for John to recognize the scarab, overlain by a crude cross.

The same strange tattoo he had glimpsed the morning before, when she had raised her arm to push aside her veil.

The dead woman was Zoe.

Grass and weeds obscured many of the graves in the tree-shaded cemetery which lay outside the inner wall of the city. The somnolent sound of insects overlaid by the cooing of doves resting in plump rows along the twisted boughs of ancient yews did nothing to disturb the slumbers of those buried beneath unmarked mounds or elaborate memorials.

John and Cornelia paced slowly along a narrow path to the outer side of the sacred space and came to a halt in a sun-dappled corner half hidden by a tangle of bushes. Several monuments were chiseled with pious sentiments and hopes for the departed.

“All is vanity,” Cornelia read. “John Chrysostom wrote a homily on that. Peter once ventured to quote him at me.”

“He’s a favorite of Peter’s. It’s obvious from his writings he wasn’t too fond of Lord Chamberlains.”

“Ah yes. Eutropius. There was a Lord Chamberlain who would never have eaten his breakfast at the kitchen table. Unlike some.”

They stood at the foot of a bare earthen mound. The anonymous woman buried there would not have been accorded even so modest a grave in a decent cemetery except that John had ordered it.

“It was kind of you to have her buried here when you don’t even know who she was,” Cornelia said after a time.

“I intend to find out both her identity and who murdered her,” John replied.

An image of the red dyed corpse face down in the cistern floated to the surface of his thoughts, momentarily displacing the peaceful, sunlit surroundings.

Cornelia looked up at him, concern in her face. “Was she really the girl in the mosaic, the one you call Zoe?”

“She was the model for her. I’m convinced of it.” He paused. “I know it worries Peter when he hears me talking to the mosaic, but Zoe and I have had many conversations. She knows more about my thoughts than anyone else.”

“More than I do after our being apart so many years! Naturally you want to find out the truth of the matter.”

“Beyond that, I suspect she was murdered because she spoke to me. And that means someone is concealing something which makes it even more important I discover the reason behind her death.”

“Are you certain that’s what’s making it so important to you, John? How likely is it you’ll be able to find out who she really was? Half the city is dead of the plague, and those left won’t want to talk to a man from the palace. The only answer you get is liable to be a blade between the ribs one moonless night!”

“Ambushes take place everywhere in the city. Probably least of all on moonless nights when you’re expecting them. In fact, I notice there’s a pair of boots sticking out from behind those bushes.”

Cornelia’s eyes widened as she looked in the direction John indicated. “I see them and they’re moving.”

“Indeed they are,” came a voice from the bushes. “And who dares to disturb the dead?”

At first glance, it might have appeared the man who stepped out from the vegetation was referring to himself. He was little more than a skeleton wrapped in rags. His eyes were milky and his skin pallid. He was however alive enough to wave a sword before thrusting its point into the middle of a patch of ivy wreathing the foot of a monument. “I don’t get many people visiting this corner of the little kingdom I watch over. Who might you be? Family members?” His wheezing voice sounded suspicious.

“No-” John began.

The pale apparition hefted his weapon again. “Is that so? Couples think nobody sees what they’re up to in the long grass.” The man leered. John doubted the pale eyes could distinguish errant couples or anything beyond shadowy shapes.

“We were wondering about the person buried here,” Cornelia said.

“Her?” The man spat on the bare mound. “Well, them that put her there said t’was by order of the Lord Chamberlain to the emperor.”

He laughed, precipitating a fit of coughing that shook his gaunt frame. “Given what he is, it’s much more likely she’s some courtier’s fancy woman. I’m already getting complaints from families whose relatives are buried here.”

Cornelia gave the man an angry scowl and began to reply. John laid his hand on her arm and shook his head.