In the Shadow of Vesuvius Read online

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  For Erica, Gunther, and Xander.

  I loved Menandering with you.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Myriad thanks to …

  Charlie Spicer, my fabulous editor, who loves Pompeii almost as much as I do.

  My team at Minotaur: Sarah Grill, Andy Martin, Sarah Melnyk, Danielle Prielipp, David Rostein, and David Stanford Burr.

  Anne Hawkins, Tom Robinson, and Annie Kronenberg: always the best.

  Jonathan Santlofer, my dear friend who explained just how important the choice of pencil is to an artist.

  Chiara Comegna, the erudite archaeologist and guide who shared invaluable insights during my exploration of the excavations at Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Oplontis.

  My son, Alexander Tyska, for his moving and precise translation of Virgil’s words.

  Brett Battles, Rob Browne, Bill Cameron, Christina Chen, Jon Clinch, Jamie Freveletti, Chris Gortner, Jane Grant, Nick Hawkins, Robert Hicks, Elizabeth Letts, Carrie Medders, Erica Ruth Neubauer, Missy Rightley, Renee Rosen, and Lauren Willig. Love you all.

  My elegant and amazing stepdaughters Katie and Jess.

  My parents. How I wish my dad could have read this book.

  Andrew, my touchable dream.

  Of the many misfortunes that have occurred in this world, no others have given posterity such joy.

  —JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, WRITING ABOUT POMPEII

  1902

  1

  Some corpses lie undisturbed longer than others. We expect that our own mortal remains, shrouded in silk, buried in mahogany coffins, and marked by granite stones, will be left untouched for eternity. So, too, did the Egyptians, whose mummified bodies now entertain the ghoulish among us at unwrapping parties. Their elaborate tombs offered no protection. Why should our fate be any different? Even the victims of the unexpected eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly two thousand years ago, blanketed by impossibly deep layers of ash and pumice, have reemerged. Plaster casts, formed by archaeologists, allow tourists in Pompeii a glimpse of the terror and heartache of their final moments. None of us is safe from exposure after death.

  Standing in the ruins of an ancient dining room, a triclinium, as the Romans called it, we—my husband, Colin Hargreaves, Ivy Brandon, and I—had gathered around a group of these casts. Three walls remained, each covered with bright frescoes. The fourth side of the room, marked with columns, opened into a charming garden, in the center of which stood a fountain.

  “They would have dined here in the summer,” I said. “The chamber is positioned to take advantage of the angle of the sun at that time of year, flooding it with natural light. The columns frame the outdoor features beautifully, and—”

  “I never would’ve thought the Romans wore sideburns,” Ivy said, crouching next to one of the casts. “This gentleman looks as if he stepped off the streets of London last week.”

  Ivy, who since we were children had tried to provide a tempering influence on my more outrageous iconoclastic impulses, was not prone to interrupting anyone. From the earliest days of our acquaintance, I had observed her effortlessly perfect manners, but had never managed to emulate them. Her patience was unmatched. Once—from a safe distance—I watched her listen for more than half an hour, an expression of rapt attention on her face, to a dull MP drone on about some speech he had given in the Commons that afternoon. She never tried to get in a single word.

  My husband struggled not to laugh. “Emily, you’d best stop lecturing,” he said. “No detail about ancient dining rooms can compete with the gruesome pleasure of the mortal remains they contain.” I turned back to the casts. Two of them, a woman and a male slave, identifiable by her hairstyle and his thick belt, curled in fetal positions, she covering her face with her arms, he frozen for eternity with one hand stretched toward the sky. The third, which Ivy was examining, lay with his arms at his sides, one knee bent, the other straight.

  “Did you say sideburns, Ivy?” I asked. “The Romans didn’t wear them. Not like that.” I forced myself to kneel beside my friend. I like to believe that, after more than a decade spent investigating heinous murders, I am capable of remaining undaunted in the face of violent death. I have observed a multitude of bodies in a variety of hideous states and, while always grieved that any human should suffer such an end, I can compartmentalize these emotions in order to pursue justice for the dead. Yet almost from the moment I stepped into the ruins at Pompeii, the tragedy of the site overwhelmed me. I could hardly bear to look at the casts, let alone scrutinize them. Their humanity was all too palpable.

  Colin squatted on the other side of the man. “This doesn’t look right.” He pulled a penknife from his pocket and began to dig into the plaster.

  “Don’t!” I reached to stop him. “This is an archaeological site. You can’t—”

  “This man is no Roman, at least not an ancient one,” he said, his deep voice calm as he continued to remove bits of the cast from the man’s arm. Chalky flakes fell away under his blade, revealing a patch of grayish-blue skin. “I shan’t go any further. If he were a victim of Vesuvius, we would find hollow space beneath the plaster, not flesh. Our friend here has not been buried long enough to decay. I’d wager he hasn’t been dead more than a few weeks.”

  Ivy’s brown eyes widened and the color drained from her rosy cheeks. She turned away from the cast, struggled to her feet, and was sick behind a convenient cypress tree.

  * * *

  We had arrived in Pompeii four days earlier, traveling at Ivy’s invitation. She had recently made the acquaintance of two Americans, a brother and sister, Benjamin and Calliope Carter. He, a moody painter, and she, an enthusiastic archaeologist, were preparing to leave London to work for an American called Balthazar Taylor at what many consider the world’s greatest ancient site. My friend’s gentle kindness endeared her to everyone she encountered, and soon after meeting the siblings, she hatched a scheme to follow them to Italy. Knowing of my passion for the ancient world, she invited me to join her.

  Inseparable in our youth, Ivy and I had not seen much of each other of late. My work and her devotion to motherhood—at last count, she had a brood of six—meant that our paths no longer crossed with regularity, but this was not indicative of a loss of affection between us. When she asked me to accompany her on her excursion abroad, I rejoiced at the chance to rekindle our friendship. Colin, whose discreet work for the Palace now included special attention to King Edward VII’s personal protection, was harder to bring around, but was at last convinced by a sly move on the part of Ivy’s husband, who could not abide the idea of his wife traveling with only a solitary female companion. I adore Robert, but his views can be rather old-fashioned.

  On this occasion, I was profoundly grateful for his outdated morals. When Colin hesitated, Robert went straight to the king, who went straight to my husband, bursting into our library in Park Lane before our butler could announce him. Har
greaves, old chap, you can’t let the ladies down. They need a chaperone, and there’s none better than you, His Majesty had said. Colin knew the futility of arguing with Bertie (I would never be able to think of him as Edward, the Seventh or otherwise), but that was not what persuaded him. Robert—and the king—had appealed to his sense of duty, something Colin would never shirk. And so, by the next morning, my husband was organizing the details of our trip. I suspect he took no small measure of delight in leaving London. A gentleman driven by honor and principle, he had never held the king in high regard. Bertie, during his tenure as Prince of Wales, had proven more interested in gambling, mistresses, and cruel pranks than in useful occupation, and as a result, Colin had nothing but scorn for him.

  The only disappointment that stemmed from our trip was the knowledge that another mutual friend, Margaret Michaels, was unable to join us. After a decade of marriage to an extremely even-tempered Oxford don, she was not-so-eagerly awaiting the arrival of her first child and had expressed in no uncertain terms how unfair it was that she be excluded from the adventure. The baby, she said, was sure to be a delight, but if she could have hired a servant to give birth in her place, no sum would have been too great to pay.

  Colin found for us a charming villa south of modern Pompeii, only a few miles from the excavations with sweeping vistas of the Bay of Naples in one direction and of Mount Vesuvius in the other. After an uneventful journey, we were soon comfortably settled and ready to tour the ruins. The Carter siblings proved able guides, giving us a splendid overview of the site.

  “You must call me Callie,” Miss Carter said, when we first met her under the brick arch of Pompeii’s Marina Gate. “Calliope is such a mouthful, ironic for the muse of epic poetry and eloquence, don’t you think? Dear old papa loved the classics. I’m fortunate he didn’t decide to call me Polyhymnia or Euterpe.” She was considerably shorter than I, but gave the impression she could command an army battalion without visible effort. With Titian hair and a voice so melodious she would have sounded as if she were singing if she didn’t speak with such an assertive rhythm, the name suited her. Her alluring figure was more like that found on an ancient depiction of Aphrodite than the pigeon breast silhouette favored by the current crop of fashionists, and although her face, with a spattering of freckles across her nose, could not be described as beautiful or even pretty, it was undeniably intriguing. Her eyes, hazel, with flecks of green that would perfectly suit some legendary Irish queen, flashed with intelligence.

  Her brother, Benjamin, bore almost no resemblance to her, at least not physically. His features were as unremarkable as hers were beguiling, but his fiery temperament mirrored Callie’s. He explained that his expertise was not in archaeology, but as an artist. He had exhibited his work at two small shows in New York before they came abroad and now hoped the Italian landscape would inspire him to the greatness that, so far, had eluded him.

  “Callie insisted I take this position so she might have access to Mr. Taylor,” he said. “She was convinced—rightly so—that, faced with the force of her personality, he would take her on as well.” His sister’s tenacity impressed me; it was not so easy in those days for a woman to earn a place in an archaeological expedition.

  The excavations at Pompeii go back hundreds of years. We have records of accidental finds from as early as the late fifteen hundreds, but it was not until the eighteenth century that digging began in earnest. The Kings of Naples, especially Ferdinand IV, who had the questionable taste to commission a sculpture of himself as Minerva (still on display at the museum in Naples; you may judge for yourself the value of this work), were responsible for the first large-scale exploration of the site. They were motivated not by the quest for knowledge, but for treasure, and were little better than the charlatans who pillaged Egypt in the early part of the nineteenth century. Desirous of acquiring personal collections that could rival those of other European monarchs, they ordered their minions to ruthlessly cut paintings from walls, destroyed items they deemed not valuable enough, and, when faced with a group of sculptures of similar subjects, would keep the one in the finest condition and smash the others. All responsible scholars shudder at their methods.

  Fortunately, after the unification of Italy in the 1860s, a man called Giuseppe Fiorelli took charge of the site. A remarkable individual and an archaeologist beyond reproach, Fiorelli grasped the importance of his role. He mapped the city, numbering every block, building, and door, and insisted that private residences and shops, as well as the spectacular public structures, be excavated. He sought information, not merely art, and cunningly began to create narratives about the lost city and its inhabitants that resonated with the public, ensuring widespread support for his work. He founded a national school for archaeology, and his perfection of the system used for creating the plaster casts of the volcano’s victims forever preserved the memory of the city’s ancient citizens, drawing droves of tourists to the site. I cannot condemn them as I do those who unwrap mummies in their parlors. Humans have an infinite capacity for morbid curiosity, but Fiorelli’s casts give us something more: a glimpse into individual personalities that we rarely see in the ancient world.

  Even so, they troubled me. Looking at those faces, frozen at the moment of their deaths, engulfed me in a deluge of emotion through which I could not wade. But now, faced with a fresh corpse instead of one two thousand years old, I found myself once again able to compartmentalize.

  “I’ll send for the police,” Colin said, handing Ivy a clean handkerchief after she’d finished being sick. He turned away while she cleaned herself up and ran a hand through his tousled curls. “Perhaps you, Emily, would be so good as to inform the archaeologists of our find?”

  AD 79

  2

  These dark days, engulfing me with gloom and hopelessness, have inspired me to write my story, the narrative of a woman silenced while simultaneously being one of the best-known poets of her time. In Pompeii, at least. But that is the fate of slaves, is it not? Even after they purchase their freedom. I must go back in time now, and explain how all this came to be.

  I am officially Quinta Flavia Kassandra, my first two names taken from the man who owned me, Quintus Flavius Plautus, but I have always been known only as Kassandra. My father, Aristeides, named me for the doomed princess of Troy. Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy, but when she refused to become his lover, he cursed her, condemning her to a fate in which no one would ever believe her predictions. Hence my father’s choice. I was born a slave, destined to have a voice that would never be heard.

  He was a scholar and philosopher, born in Athens, the most glorious city in the world. At least to hear him tell it. My mother hailed from Macedonia, the land of the great Alexander, and gave me her golden hair and lapis blue eyes. Pirates attacked the ship meant to carry them to Ephesus, and they soon found themselves in Pompeii’s slave market, my mother heavy with the child they had years ago given up hope of ever having. Plautus’s steward, a man of uncommon kindness, bought both my parents. They might have had a happy life in their master’s house, if she had not died bringing me into the world during our city’s last great earthquake.

  Greek to the core, Father railed against all things Roman, but even he could not deny we had landed in circumstances not altogether horrendous. Well educated and wealthy beyond measure, Plautus installed my father as the tutor of his children and gave him charge of the family’s substantial library. I grew up alongside my master’s daughter, Octavia Lepida, born on the same day as me, and although my station required that I do whatever she asked, we were more like friends than mistress and slave. Her mother, Claudia, the quintessential Roman matron—noble, capable, loyal, and beautiful—never allowed her children to treat their inferiors badly. I was educated with Lepida and her brothers until the boys went off to school. After that, Lepida focused on the skills essential to a good wife, spending hours at her loom and assisting her mother with the household accounts and management. My duties expanded to include dre
ssing Lepida’s silky raven hair and learning how to artfully apply cosmetics to her smooth face, but I always preferred reading aloud to her, from the enormous collection of scrolls in the library.

  The habit had started when we were quite young. Lepida plagued me with questions about Greece, a place I had never been and of which I had no real knowledge. All I could do was recount for her the myths my father had told me, charming her with my use of the gods’ Greek names. As a Roman, she was taken with all things Greek, confident in her belief that, while there was no place better than Rome, there was no culture superior to the Greeks’. We would sit in the peristyle garden, doric columns around its perimeter, our bare feet in the fountain, the flowers of Citrus medica trees fluttering above us as we lamented the tragic fate of Orpheus and Eurydice, Hero and Leander, Pyramus and Thisbe.

  I adored all things Roman and argued frequently with my father about the merits of the empire. He admonished me to remember my heritage; I was a Greek. But how could this be, when I had been born under Roman rule and had never set foot in the land of my ancestors?

  By the summer of my fifteenth year, Lepida and I had grown out of telling myths, replacing them with poetry. I read Homer to her—she insisted—and then Virgil. We would hide from her mother and exclaim over Ovid’s Amores and Ars Amatoria, half-delighted, half-horrified. We take no pleasure in permitted joys. / But what’s forbidden is more keenly sought. We wondered if we would ever fall in love. Lepida wanted a soldier, because the great poet wrote lovers are soldiers, but I was more taken with another of his lines: Let love be introduced in friendship’s dress.

  We stretched out on couches at the family’s villa beyond the city walls, our eyes drawn to the endless blue of the Bay of Naples below us and speculated about the men we would love. Lepida would have a husband, but I, a slave, could not officially marry. Not until my father had saved enough money to buy our freedom. I knew he would, eventually, and then I would be on my way to becoming a Roman matron in my own right.