Vesuvius by Night

Chapter 12

Back in Pompeii, there had been a lull caused by the combination of nightfall and the increased ferocity of falling pumice. No one now ventured onto the streets. Pale ash lay to chest height; it was rising several inches every hour. If, from his resting place at Oplontis, Larius had given any thought to his former subtenant, he might have assumed Nonius would still be tirelessly attempting to rob people. But Nonius had gone. It was what men did, those with an instinct for self-preservation – or those protected by the gods.

The good people of Pompeii had entrusted themselves to many deities’ protection that day. Venus Pompeiana, their town’s chosen dedicatee, whose huge half-built temple towered over the Forum, stared out dramatically to the turbulent sea. Bona Dea, the Good Goddess, received many frightened pleas. Egyptian Isis. The goddess Fortune herself, who leaned on a rudder with which she governed human destiny. Apollo, light-hearted, talented past patron of the city. Giant phaluses that symbolised life, small ones with ridiculous wings or hanging bells. Jupiter the king of all… Despite amulets, signet rings, statuettes, pleadings, vows and prayers, the gods with their heartless, ruthless neutrality lent no help.

Fortune helps those who help themselves, thought Nonius, the cheery villain who had been so tenaciously helping himself to other people’s property.

As the eruption started he had worked, harder than ever in his life, continuing through as much of the day as he could. Treading the ash, peering through the murk, forcing open half-blocked doors as he battered his way in to find secreted riches. Luckily in the best houses, their valuables had been displayed in the atrium, easy to find unless owners had snatched up their treasure and inconsiderately run off with it – ignoring the need to supply Nonius.

Enough was left for him. People had locked up, intending to come home tomorrow. People buried stuff, yet left behind their spades. People dropped things as they ran. As the day had grown worse and those who remained from choice or helplessness cowered in ever deeper hiding places, Nonius coughed and staggered, yet he obtained many delightful sets of silver drinking wares: trays, jugs, pairs of cups, mixing bowls, snack saucers, spoons and ladles, little tripod stands to place your drink upon, even egg cups. He gathered dishes and jugs that were designed for religious offerings. He snatched bags of coins. He took jewellery: chains, ear-rings, bangles, finger rings, pendants, brooches, filigree hairnets. If he found no gold, he did not reject silver, alloys, even iron if it looked to have a value.

Then as the day went on, before ash filled gardens and made doors quite immovable, before he was brought to a standstill, Nonius departed from Pompeii. His sense of timing remained sharp. While roofs and balconies began to collapse all across the town, he was travelling out. He saw fires – and saw the falling pumice quench them. He heard screams and cries for help but he kept going. He was safe by the time the ceilings smashed down in the house where Larius had once worked. By then so much ash had descended, the newly decorated plasterwork landed not on the mosaic floor but on fully four feet of debris that had already poured into the house, the bakery, the garden, the stables full of panicked beasts. The baker’s hog and poultry were still on the cooking bench, definitely overcooked.

While others were trapped inside buildings or buried in the streets, Nonius escaped. While people and animals died in Pompeii, he lived. It could have been different. If Fortune was fair, Nonius would have been stuck in the doomed town. He might even have found salvation. If endings were truly cathartic in real life, he could have carried out some great act of selfless sacrifice. He might have saved someone else, or at least offered comfort to somebody deserving.

Alternatively, if the Fates had taken another view of his despicable past, for retribution he could have been made to suffer. The Fates could have trapped him in a building collapse, perhaps quite accidentally, then left him there to await death – with its coming certainty a painful punishment.

Not him.

Nonius left. Erodion’s raggedy knock-kneed horse took him and a heavy cartload of plunder safely inland. Worse, far worse for those who like justice, Nonius was even at that stage planning to come back. Once the hot slurry cooled in the devastated town, Nonius would be there again. He would find his way amongst the buried buildings, remembering where the best homes were, digging down to salvage statues, stripping out expensive marble, grabbing any portable plunder that remained. Other looters would be killed by further building collapses, but not him.

For him, what did the future hold? One day a man of great wealth would turn up in another town, under another name. Even ‘Nonius’ had never been his own. He had been born somewhere north of Campania, making his way from one town and one scam to another, evading detection, escaping the law, ducking the authorities’ notice, playing the nobody; whenever he could no longer pull it off, he slickly moved on, like any corrupt crook with blood on his hands who never left a forwarding address. He had passed through one location after another, always slipping away at the right moment, until one day in Herculaneum he had seen a benefactor’s statue near the Suburban baths. Master of acquiring power by association, he stole the name as his own validation. On leaving Pompeii he would do the same again, ‘Nonius’ becoming ‘Holconius’.

‘Are you related?’

‘Distantly, I believe…’

He would not return to live amidst ruination. Economic blight never attracts such men. So, after making huge wealth, the compulsive survivor would head towards retirement elsewhere. He left the cart to disintegrate in someone else’s orchard. Towards Erodion’s horse he felt no gratitude; for the wheezing beast there was no rewarding pasture in its old age. He handed it in to a knacker’s yard. Still, rather than being worked to death by Nonius, that horse may have welcomed being turned into pies.

The man himself would live frugally, conserving his cash as those whose wealth does not reside in land tend to do, from fear it may slip from them. He had wondered whether to apply for land, when estates that had belonged to disappeared residents were officially redistributed. There was a killing to be made there, but with his instinct for self-preservation, Nonius/Holconius chose not to subject himself to the narrow-eyed stare of a commissioner sent by a hard-headed Flavian Emperor.

With old age, he would become known as a miser. The sparse number of slaves who cared for him would lead pitiful lives, beaten and barely kept alive. He would never try to bribe them into anything that passed for loyalty, even though he was terrified of being left alone. Suspicion of others’ motives would govern him. After all, he himself had lived as the worst of men, so he expected to be cheated.

But he would stick it out for years. When the time came to take to his bed finally, it would be nothing like the bed he had once shared with Larius Lollius. That had had uneven legs, hard slats for support, a lumpen, flea-ridden mattress, one thin pillow. The retirement bed of Nonius was to be a stately wide antique, with bronze fittings (stolen) and ivory inlays (bought with loot). His mattress would be well-corded and evenly stuffed with fine Campanian wool, his pillows made from softest down, his laundered sheets smooth and his coverlet embroidered.

Nonius would die in his sleep peacefully, there in his own bed.