The Venus Throw Read Online Free PDF

sure.”
    “You can’t remember?”
    “Yesterday I dared to take a walk outside, disguised as you see me now, and bought some bread in the market.” He shook his head. “I should have bought more to eat this morning—but of course someone could have poisoned it while I slept . . .”
    “Then you’ve eaten nothing at all today?”
    “The slaves tried to poison me at the last place I stayed! Even at the house of Titus Coponius I can’t feel safe. If one man’s slaves can be bribed to kill a houseguest then so can another’s. I eat nothing unless I see it prepared with my own eyes, or unless I buy it myself in the markets where it could not possibly have been tampered with.”
    “Some men have slaves to taste their food for them,” I said, knowing the practice was especially common in Dio’s Alexandria, where the inbred, rival monarchs and their agents were forever attempting secretly to do away with one another.
    “Of course I had a taster!” said Dio. “How do you think I escaped the attempt to poison me? But the problem with tasters is that they must be replaced, and my stay in Rome has exhausted my resources. I don’t even have money to make my way back to Alexandria once the weather warms and the sailing season begins.” He stumbled again and almost fell against the brazier.
    “But you’re faint with hunger!” I protested, gripping his arm and steering him toward a chair. “I insist that you eat. The food in my house is perfectly safe, and my wife—” I was about to add some extravagant estimation of Bethesda’s culinary skins, but having just been praised as a seeker of truth I said instead, “My wife is not at all a bad cook,especially when she prepares dishes in the Alexandrian style.”
    “Your wife cooks?” said Trygonion. “In such a grand house as this?”
    “The property’s more impressive than my purse. Besides, she likes to cook, and she has a slave to help her. Here she is now,” I added, for in the doorway stood Bethesda.
    I was about to say more by way of introduction, but the look on her face stopped me. She looked from Dio to Trygonion, then back at Dio, who in his faint seemed hardly to notice her, then at me, all with a scowl that after thirty years of living with her I could not account for. What had I done now?
    “Diana told me that you had visitors,” she finally said. Her old Egyptian accent asserted itself and her tone was even haughtier than usual. She scrutinized my visitors so harshly that Trygonion nervously dropped his eyes, and Dio, finally taking notice of her, blinked and drew back as if he had looked into the sun.
    “Is something wrong?” I said, secretly grimacing at her with the side of my face. I thought this might make her smile. I was mistaken.
    “I suppose you want to eat something,” she said in a flat voice. The way she twisted her mouth would have spoiled the looks of a less beautiful woman.
    Ah, that was it, I thought—she’d been in the doorway longer than I’d realized and had overheard my qualified endorsement of her culinary skills. Even so, a mere lifting of her eyebrow would have sufficed to express her displeasure. Perhaps it was the fact that I had packing to do for a trip the next day and was leaving the work to her while I entertained visitors in my study—and dubious visitors at that. I took another look at Dio, with his rumpled stola and clumsy makeup, and at Trygonion, who played with his bleached hair and nervously fluttered the folds of his toga under Bethesda’s harsh gaze, and saw how they must appear to her. Bethesdaacquiesced long ago to the parade of disreputable characters through our house, but she has never hidden her disdain from those she dislikes. It was dear that she thought very little of the Egyptian ambassador and his companion.
    “Something to eat—yes, I think so,” I said, raising my voice to capture my visitors’ attention, for they both seemed spellbound by Bethesda’s stare. “For you,