Vita Brevis

by Ruth Downie

  Sabella was sniffing the air. “You need to change that baby, love. Your first, is it?”

  Tilla nodded. Mara’s history was too complicated to explain. “I didn’t want to wake her.”

  “She’ll get a rash, and then you’ll wish you had.” Sabella pointed indoors at the operating table. “You can do her on there while we get this barrel in. Phyllis, give me a hand.”

  Tilla’s protest that the barrel was not hers was swept aside: It had been delivered for the doctor this morning. “Can it stay out there? It smells.”

  “Make sure you give her a good wash. I’ll see if I can see what’s in here.”

  Tilla, too tired to explain that a midwife did not need to be told about babies and rashes, hauled Mara’s bag up onto the table, wondering yet again why, even though Mara was a fraction of the size of an adult, the bag with her belongings in it was twice as big as all the others. Busy untying the soiled cloths over wails of protest, she was only vaguely aware of figures moving around outside.

  Moments later Sabella was back. “Whatever it is, it’s going off. I’ve put a bag of charcoal on top to try to keep the air sweet, but it won’t last.”

  “We could prize the lid up,” Phyllis suggested. “It’s only nailed on.”

  “I will ask my husband to see to it,” Tilla promised. “Thank you for trying.”

  “You’ll need to move it,” Sabella told her. “You can’t leave it out where the sun’ll catch it. It’s not like where you come from, with all that snow.”

  Phyllis said, “Perhaps we could drag it farther away from the door.”

  Moments later they were back inside the surgery, Sabella wiping her hands on her skirts and Phyllis massaging her own shoulders as if to loosen them after an effort. Tilla braced herself for further advice on the care of babies, and found herself unreasonably irritated when none came. She thanked them again for their help, but the helping was not yet finished.

  “If I were you I’d put an old sheet over it to keep the flies off,” suggested Sabella. “Then wait till dark and dump it a couple of streets away. The cleaning gangs will have to get rid of it.”

  “I will ask my husband to deal with it,” repeated Tilla. She was not going to let someone’s rubbish and a lack of furniture spoil her relief at finding a place to sleep where there were no cockroaches and no obvious sign of mice.

  Just then someone knocked on the door of the surgery. A wiry man in a work tunic was silhouetted against the bright street.

  “The doctor’s gone away,” Sabella announced before Tilla could answer.

  “But the new doctor will be back soon!” Tilla called. “Will you come in and wait? I am a healer also. Perhaps I can help.”

  The man peered in at the three women and the baby having her bottom washed on the operating table. He mumbled something about coming back later and disappeared.

  “Ha!” said Sabella. “We saw him off!”

  “That is not the idea,” Tilla told her.

  “You can’t go letting strange men in when you’re here on your own,” Sabella pointed out. “You’re not in Germania now, girl.”

  “What if he is ill?”

  Sabella was unrepentant. “That one won’t pay you. You should see what he owes on his bar bill.”

  At the back of the surgery, half a dozen laundered bandages hung from a line slung between the rafters. Tilla reached out, hoping for something cool to press against her forehead, but they were stiff and dry.

  “Such a beautiful little girl!” Phyllis reached out and gave Mara a tentative pat on the knee.

  “The gods have been kind,” Tilla agreed.

  “You’re too late for the market,” Phyllis told her. “And the bakery. I shall bring you some bread. And tonight we will pray to Christos for you and your family and for Kleitos and Delia and the children.”

  Tilla thanked her.

  “And I shall pray to Diana!” declared Sabella.

  Phyllis was hardly out of the door before Tilla felt a hand on her arm. “You need to watch out for that one,” Sabella told her. “Especially around the baby.”

  “Has she no child of her own?”

  “They act friendly to draw you in. That’s how it starts.”

  “Who?” Tilla knew only too well the ache of a woman with no child: something Sabella would never understand. “How what starts?”

  Sabella stepped away and adjusted one of the pins in her hair. “I’m not one for passing on gossip,” she said. “I’m just saying, be careful. And if you want a decent meal tonight, we do a good salt pork stew. Very filling.” She paused in the doorway, surveying the surgery. “It’s not like Delia, you know, going away like that and not saying a word. I don’t know what my husband’s going to say about it. What about the rent?”

  Tilla, hoping Delia and her family were gone for good, thanked her again for helping. The rent was like the barrel: something that could be dealt with later.

  Now it was Sabella who moved close. “If you do get any trouble with debt collectors,” she said, “send them next door. We’ll tell them Kleitos has done a runner and none of this is his stuff.”

  The street door clamped shut, and the surgery was plunged into gloom.

  “Well!” Tilla spoke British into the sudden silence. “What do you think that was all about?”

  But if Mara had an opinion, she was keeping it to herself. Tilla carried her through into the kitchen, laying her on her fleece on the tiled floor. Then she went through all the bags until she found the box with the dried leaves from the oak tree outside her family’s house, and the bronze figure of Mercury that came from her husband’s home in the south of Gaul. Taking the little wooden horse from her purse, she placed them all in the shrine by the hearth, leaving the doors open so they could watch over her while she set up her new household.

  10

  “The master will see you now.” Firmicus, despite being a muscular man in possession of striking eyebrows and greater than average height, had a steward’s talent for being unobtrusive. “Come with me.”

  More loud paintwork. More columns. More statues: one of a satyr doing something deeply undesirable to a goat. It occurred to Ruso that if he were Horatia’s father, he would have put that somewhere she couldn’t see it.

  A second, more private, courtyard garden, where the cooling splash of a fountain into a basin full of fish and the chirruping of caged sparrows sweetened any residual noise from the street. Meanwhile the high walls hid any reminder of the tenants who paid for it all.

  The man who had swept past Ruso on the porch earlier was sitting on a marble bench near the fountain, under the dappled shade of a leafy arch. It was difficult to see any resemblance to his daughter. The bald head squatted on a thick neck, his chest seemed to have slumped into the folds of his toga, and he sat with his knees spread to accommodate his paunch. Ruso was obliged to stand in the sun as the steward introduced him and was then ordered to leave.

  Ruso was aware of movement in the shadows and realized that other attendants had been present. As far as he could see only one figure remained: a hard-faced man with a club stuck into his belt, who was watching them from the far corner. Out of earshot, but close enough to intervene if there was trouble.

  Ruso waited for his patient to speak. Balbus was overweight, but his stride had been vigorous and his complexion was healthy. Whatever was troubling him was not obvious.

  Balbus picked an invisible piece of fluff off his toga. “Doctor Kleitos,” he said, “has looked after me and my people for twenty years. For twenty years, I’ve looked after him in return.” He dropped the fluff beside him. “Today he left Rome without having the courtesy to consult me.”

  “I believe he had a family emergency, sir.”

  “So I’m told.”

  Whatever snub Kleitos had offered his patron, it had nothing to do with Ruso. “How can I help, sir?”

  Balbus’s deep brown eyes looked into his own, and Ruso had the impression of a man who was far more perceptive tha
n he looked. “I like to do business with people I know.”

  “Doctor Kleitos asked me to fill in for him, sir. Publius Accius can vouch for me. I served under him in Britannia.”

  “Hm.”

  Ruso wished he had waited before sending that hasty summons to Tilla. This man was Kleitos’s patron: He could make things very difficult if he decided he did not want a stranger running Kleitos’s practice.

  “Ruso,” said Balbus. “Didn’t I find you an apartment?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How was it?”

  If he was honest, he might end up back there. If he lied, he might retain the job. Either way, the vermin would retain control of the apartments. “A bit of a problem with cockroaches, sir.”

  Balbus grunted. “Bloody nuisance. We do our best, but you only need a couple of tenants who don’t clean up after themselves, and they’re back again. It’s hard enough stopping the buggers from burning the place down with cooking fires. We can’t stop them from taking food in.”

  Ruso assumed the buggers were the tenants rather than the cockroaches.

  “You were doctor to Publius Accius out in Britannia?”

  “I was medical officer in charge of several hospitals for the Twentieth Legion, and I dealt with the casualties during the last rebellion.”

  “But you weren’t his personal physician.”

  “He didn’t have one.” It seemed Ruso had not been summoned here to treat the sick, but to be interviewed for the job of replacing Kleitos. “If he’d been ill, he would have come to us.”

  “So what did he bring you over here for?”

  Ruso said truthfully, “I can’t tell you, sir.”

  To his surprise, Balbus nodded approval. “At least you know how to keep your mouth shut.”

  Since opening it was unlikely to get him any farther, Ruso remained silent.

  “Who else knows you in the city?”

  “Quite a few doctors and patients, sir.”

  Balbus’s sigh was so exaggerated that he seemed about to deflate, leaving the toga collapsed on the bench. “Anyone I’ve heard of?”

  Ruso cast his mind back over the plumber with the crushed foot, the woman upstairs with a bad fever, and the youth who was losing his hearing. Then there was the man who had arrived clutching his back, who explained that he didn’t expect much because all doctors were useless. And all the spectators from outside the amphitheater this morning. “Probably not,” he admitted. Then, just to get it out of the way, “There’s a man called Metellus. He was in Britannia too.”

  “Never heard of him. What do you know about poisons?”

  “I’d recognize the common ones. Anything obscure I’d refer to a specialist.”

  “So,” said Balbus with the air of a lawyer summing up his case, “You know nobody, and nobody knows you, and you don’t know much about poisons, either.”

  “That’s about it.” Which was unfortunate, since both Accius and Tilla were depending upon him to make a good impression. “Kleitos never mentioned poisons.”

  Balbus scratched his chin and appeared to be considering this dire state of affairs.

  His caution was inconvenient but understandable. This morning’s charlatan with the ladder was not alone. Only last week Ruso had listened in amazement as two self-styled experts debated the content of human arteries: one vehemently denying the other’s assertion that they contained milk because, as anyone with any sense knew already, there was no room for milk when arteries were full of air. Neither man seemed ever to have attended an injured patient, nor watched any of Famous Doctor Callianax’s public anatomy demonstrations of nonsqueaking pigs.

  “Well,” said Balbus finally, “that could work to our advantage.”

  Ruso did not dare to ask how.

  “Any family?”

  “A wife and child here,” Ruso told him. “The rest of my family is in Gallia Narbonensis.”

  “I expect absolute loyalty and discretion.”

  “I do my best for my patients,” Ruso assured him, suspecting it was wise to define the difference between absolute loyalty and utter servitude, “and I don’t discuss what I know about them with anyone else.”

  “Not even Publius Accius?”

  Ruso tried to imagine a situation in which Accius might be interested in other people’s fevers and fractures and bunions. Then it occurred to him that the state of Balbus’s health would be of enormous interest to Accius if he succeeded in marrying Horatia. Presumably she would inherit all this wealth when her father died. “Not even Publius Accius.”

  “Good. You can fill in until Kleitos gets back. I’ll see to it that my people look after you and your wife and daughter.”

  Ruso’s “Thank you, sir,” was heartfelt. For however brief a period, he had got Tilla out of that crumbling, verminous tenement.

  “But if you let me down, believe me—I will find out.”

  Ruso did not doubt it.

  Balbus was reaching under the folds of the toga. “To business.” He held out a square green bottle with a dribble of dark liquid in the bottom. “I’ve run out of this.”

  The glass was warm to the touch. There was no label. Ruso twisted out the stopper and sniffed. He could detect several kinds of foulness but could only identify poppy. He held the bottle upside down so the liquid trickled down toward his waiting finger. It tasted bitter and sickly at the same time, and he longed to spit it out and rinse his mouth under one of the streams of the fountain. “What is it?”

  Instead of answering, Balbus raised a hand to gesture around himself. “All that you see here,” he announced, “is the fruit of one generation. My father was a slave, my mother was a slave, and I was born here as another man’s property.” He indicated the purple stripe on his toga. “Now I’m master in the house I served in, I’m a priest in the cult of Augustus, and young Accius isn’t the only eligible suitor with designs on my daughter.”

  So Balbus was a freedman. That explained the determination to swelter under the hard-earned toga even at home on a sunny morning. Ruso made the expected murmur of admiration and wondered if Accius knew he had competition for the hand of the dimpled Horatia.

  “I have forty-three domestic slaves,” Balbus continued, “and fourteen apartment blocks spread across the city with another three hundred or so slaves and freedmen working in the business. And it’s no secret how I did it.”

  As he paused for effect, Ruso guessed that the next words were unlikely to be fraud or extortion or befriending rich people with not long to live.

  “Hard work.”

  “Very impressive,” Ruso agreed.

  “And providing what people need,” added Balbus. “The property business is all about demand and supply.”

  Ruso, realizing he was expected to comment, said, “Ah.”

  “You’ll see it yourself if you stay long enough. Every year, thousands of slaves freed and thousands of outsiders coming to Rome, expecting to walk under showers of gold. Like you did, didn’t you?”

  Ruso cleared his throat, hoping this was a rhetorical question.

  “And when they don’t,” Balbus continued, “do they go home? No. They stay here, cluttering up the streets, looking for somewhere to live. And that’s where I come in. I know what they say about some of my properties, and I wouldn’t like to live in them either, but answer me this. Where else are those people going to go?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “No. Nobody does. Not a lot of landlords are prepared to put up with what I put up with, especially for what my tenants are paying. And are they grateful? Of course not. You give most of those complainers somewhere decent and it’ll be a midden within a week.”

  Perhaps seeing Ruso glance at the glittering fountain, Balbus continued. “Hard work, Doctor. Hard work. I’ve scrubbed floors and carried loads and tied scaffolding. You do whatever it takes.”

  “Yes.”

  “And now you’re wondering what this has got to do with poisons.”

  “Yes.�
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  Balbus shifted his weight on the bench. “I don’t know what it’s like out in the provinces,” he said, “but here, there are men who don’t like to see another man succeed. Men who think—wrongly—that I’m standing in their path.” He paused, watching the bodyguard pacing the perimeter of the courtyard, half-hidden by rose bushes and trailing vines. “Latro is good. Very good. But he has his limits.”

  Wondering suddenly if the fountain—which worked much better than Accius’s—was there to protect Balbus from eavesdroppers, Ruso turned the bottle on its side. “This is a theriac?”

  Instead of answering, Balbus said, “A lot of people, Doctor, think the secret of success is getting rid of your enemies. They’re wrong. The secret”—he raised a callused forefinger to emphasise his point—“is being one step ahead of them.”

  “Do you have a taster?”

  “I can hardly take a taster out to dinner with me tomorrow. It’s an insult to my host. Besides, they’re no use against a slow-acting poison.”

  The bottle glinted in the sunlight. Ruso said, “Does this have a name?”

  “Not one that I know.”

  “I’ll check Kleitos’s records, sir,” he said, hoping some existed. A sole practitioner who saw the same patients week in, week out would work very differently from a legionary medic who was used to sharing information with a team. Kleitos probably had most of his patient records stored in his memory, and he had seen no sign of any hand-over notes. “You may have to wait until he gets back, though.”

  “I need my daily medicine, Doctor.”

  Ruso swallowed. He certainly wasn’t about to start trying to mix up theriac himself. The universal antidote that had allegedly prevented King Mithridates from poisoning himself—even when he had wanted to—contained at least forty ingredients, several of them highly toxic and some only required in the sort of quantity you could scrape up under a fingernail. The recipe developed by Nero’s doctor contained even more, including a large quantity of roasted and matured vipers’ flesh. He supposed the patient would build up slowly to a full dose.

  At the other end of the scale were the cheaper mixtures sold to nervous travelers venturing away from home. Ruso had no idea which recipe Balbus had been taking. The names Kleitos had given him were of simple herb sellers. Ruso didn’t want to kill his new patient by accident before he found someone who could supply the correct mixture.