The Debt Was Paid Somewhere I Was Not Looking

As Chief Investigator of Rome in the book with your name, you were up against several tension points at the same time. How did you reconcile your love for Sarah with your resistance to the Christian faith, your understanding of Rome's attitude toward the Christians, and your duties as their chief representative of justice?

I did not reconcile them. That is the accurate answer, and it took me a long time to say it.

What I did was hold them apart. I told myself the investigation was one thing and Sarah was another, and that a careful man could keep the two from touching. That was the first lie, and it was mine, not Rome's. Every hour I spent at her table was an hour I did not report. I called that discretion. It was not discretion. It was a man taking what he wanted from a woman's faith while refusing the faith itself.

On Rome: I believed — genuinely, not as a convenience — that the charge against the Christians was false. Arson, incest, the eating of flesh. I had read the depositions. They were the confessions of men under hot iron, and hot iron produces whatever the questioner wants. So my duty as an investigator and the persecution were already at odds. That part was not a torment of conscience. That part was simply accurate work. Nero wanted a finding. I would not manufacture one. It was the one place where being good at my office and being right pointed the same direction, and I leaned on it more than it could bear, because it let me feel honest while I was not.

The resistance to the faith was separate, and Sarah saw it before I did. I could accept that they were innocent. Innocence is a legal category and I know how to establish it. What I could not accept was that the man they worshipped had been raised. I wanted the Christians acquitted. I did not want them right. Those are not the same wish, and she knew the difference. That is why she refused me. Not because I was Roman. Because I wanted her without wanting her Lord, and she would not be had on those terms.

So — three things pulling. I kept them from tearing me apart by never letting them stand in the same room at the same time. That worked until Pompeii, when they stood in the same room whether I permitted it or not.

How did you feel when you witnessed the forces of Heaven essentially pardoning Agrippina regarding the horrific murder of Sarah?

Sick. That is the first honest word.

I had spent my life establishing what happened and assigning it where it belonged. Agrippina killed Sarah. I know the sequence, the hour, the instrument. That is not disputed and it is not softened by anything that came after. And then Heaven set it down.

My objection was not mercy. I understand mercy as a legal act — a magistrate remits a penalty, and the deed stands recorded. What I could not hold was that this looked to me like the deed itself being unmade. As though the ledger had been not forgiven but falsified. That is the thing I cannot abide, and it was being done in front of me by the authority I had just been forced to admit was real.

Then I saw Sarah standing there. Not appealing the judgment. Not enduring it. She was for it. And that undid the shape of my objection, because I had been carrying the wrong on her behalf, and she did not want it carried.

I have not resolved it. I have only stopped being certain I was reading it correctly. The record is not falsified — I understand that much now. The debt was paid somewhere I was not looking. But I felt what I felt, and I will not pretend the feeling was reverence. It was nausea, and it was anger, and Sarah's face was the only thing that kept me on my feet.