Mary Reed: Five for Silver

The plump girl sitting beside him giggled again and tugged clumsily at her half-opened robe.

Her companion smirked. John took a step forward. The Lord Chamberlain realized he was not his normal picture of authority, being rather rumpled and not entirely steady on his feet thanks to the hellish boat ride he had just endured.

“Your name, young man?”

“Me? Why, I’m Emperor Justinian and my companion here’s Empress Theodora. Can’t you see who we are? Perhaps you ought to get out and about more often!”

“There is no-one else here?”

“I’ve already explained that everybody’s busy dying of the plague, so the shipowners have apparently had their wish. Which is to say, the hand of heaven has descended on the tariff collectors. I, Caesar, have thus proclaimed a holiday in celebration.” He lifted his wine over his head and gestured grandly, sloshing its contents on his companion.

“Do you know Gregory?”

The girl looked startled. “You mean the Patriarch? For such we call him. Rather too quick to quote the scriptures, if you ask me, considering he spends most of his time counting coins for the emperor.”

“When was he last at work here?”

“Couple of days ago,” the girl offered.

“Do you have any idea what business he had to attend to in the city that day?”

“The Patriarch tell us where he was going? Not likely!” The young man gave a snort. “Why are you questioning your emperor anyway? Be gone or I’ll call my guards!”

John ignored the young man and addressed the girl instead. “Gregory’s office is where?”

“Smaller of the two rooms on the top floor,” she told him. “He was second in command. Or rather third, counting my emperor here.”

John went quickly upstairs. Two flights of wide granite steps gave way to a much steeper wooden staircase that creaked and groaned under his boots. The wall lamps had been allowed to burn out and the only light available came in through window slits.

Gregory’s office was brighter. It looked toward the Asian shore. The geometric shapes of distant scattered buildings were softened and obscured by mist, giving the view the look of a church mosaic glimpsed through smoky incense. The room smelled, not of incense, but of the sea.

John’s gaze fell on the tortoiseshell-framed wax tablet sitting on Gregory’s desk. It might have been left especially for him to find, since the wax still bore a list of names and addresses in Constantinople. Gregory’s notes to himself? Why hadn’t he taken the tablet with him on his rounds? Possibly he had returned to the customs house having made these calls and gone out again without erasing the list.

In any event, if these were indeed places Gregory had visited during his last hours, they would certainly be helpful in retracing his steps, to discover where he had been, to whom he had spoken, and what those people might know.

It was almost too fortunate a find.

Then again, John had never been indirectly asked by an angel to solve a murder. Perhaps he could expect heavenly assistance.

Lifting the tablet revealed a crinkled piece of parchment on which was inscribed what purported to be a poem, written in Greek:

See yon rock the unlearned call Leander’s Tower?

They say fair Hero threw herself down

at the sight of Leander’s lifeless form.

But who can say,

if customs then were as cruel as customs are today,

did Hero leap because she was bereft

or was she pushed by the emperor’s tariff?

If the dreadful composition was Gregory’s work, whatever other secrets the man’s life might have held, he was not another Homer.

John made his way back downstairs, the prospect of the return boat journey slowing his step. As he crossed the atrium, the youthful clerk yelled at him from the store room.

“You’re still here? What are you up to, scoundrel? I’ll have you arrested!”

John strode in to confront the youngster. He had regained his authoritative bearing and after a swift glance, the girl tugged warningly at her friend’s arm. The young man shook her hand off. “Who do you think you are! No closer! Unless you mean to kiss the emperor’s feet, that is.”

John produced the official document he habitually carried. “Perhaps Caesar has had too many libations?” he suggested. “Especially since you never imbibe wine. Don’t you recognize your own Lord Chamberlain?”

The clerk fumbled through the document John handed him. No doubt he’d seen enough official papers during his employment to recognize the genuine article. “You stole this!” he sputtered.

“Ah,” John said, his mouth drawing into a thin line, “and do you suppose your future would be much brighter if I am not in fact the Lord Chamberlain, but rather a man who has just murdered the Lord Chamberlain and relieved him of this document and his clothing?”

As the truth began to penetrate the clerk’s alcoholic armor, his face became very pale.

The girl leapt up, threw herself to the floor, and grabbed the hem of John’s robe. “Please, please, excellency,” she wept. “We meant no harm. Don’t send us to the dungeons. Not the red hot tongs and all them sharp knives…I’ll do whatever you want…he’ll do whatever you want…”

John pulled away. “That won’t be necessary. Just curb your tongues in future, or you may find them removed.”

***

Peter did not admit John to the house, having apparently put aside his duties for the day after all, as John had advised.

The sun was setting, but the atrium lamps were unlit. The quiet water in the impluvium reflected the dull, rose-tinted sky visible through the rectangular opening above.

John went upstairs. No fragrance of recent cooking emanated from the kitchen, only the dusty odor of last year’s dried herbs. Hypatia was nowhere to be seen, although a scorpion-like clay creature, one of her numerous charms against the plague, squatted on the kitchen table.

Peter must have forgotten to instruct her to assume his culinary duties for the evening.

John took a jug of wine and his cracked cup into his study.

His servants were available only when ordered to be there. John preferred solitude. He did not like people hovering unbidden at his elbow and had never cultivated the aristocratic knack for regarding servants as little more than animated furniture. How could he, he who had once been a slave? Such unorthodox convictions caused him to traverse the streets and alleys of Constantinople alone and unguarded, a practice others considered unthinkably dangerous for a courtier of his high rank.

A Lord Chamberlain was powerful enough to do the unthinkable if he chose.

Besides which, he was no stranger to using a blade when necessary.

He sat at his desk and sipped raw Egyptian wine. Beyond the diamond-shaped panes of the window overlooking the palace grounds and the sea beyond, the sky was fast growing dark. Might one of the myriad distant lights beneath the emerging stars mark the customs house he had just visited?

He imagined Peter working in the study, cleaning the window perhaps, never knowing he was laboring within sight of the building where, at the same instant, the man he knew only as an impoverished former soldier was likely to be warning a wealthy shipowner that a cargo of silks could not be unloaded until the tariff was paid, even if the merchant considered the amount demanded to be larcenous.

Peter, John thought, would doubtless be singing, and tunelessly at that, one of the lugubrious hymns he favored, dismissing dust as Gregory dismissed the disgruntled merchant, who would stride angrily off, his retinue of bodyguards trailing behind.

He’d still have to pay the appropriate tariff.