"What if I really want you to squeeze the story out of me?"
"Child's stuff. You are far too serious," I proclaimed piously. "I love you because you and I never have to descend to such games."
"Didius Falco, you are an aggravating swine."
I smiled at her fondly. Whatever she was doing, I trusted her. For one thing, if she really wanted to deceive me, there was no way I would ever have noticed that anything was happening; Helena Justina was too clever for me.
I had my work. It tended to be a solitary occupation. She helped when it seemed appropriate-and sometimes when it was so dangerous I felt terrified that she was involved-but she deserved stimulus of her own. Even when our lives were separate, I would always seize any chance to extract her and take her apart so that we could lose ourselves…
Part of our early courtship had taken place in the countryside. It seemed a nostalgic treat to roll around with her while hard lumps of vegetation were sticking in our backs. Still, nostalgia is a dish for the young.
"Ow! Jupiter, let's just concede that we have a bed at home. Fun's fun-but we're grown up now."
Helena Justina looked at me tenderly. "Didius Falco, you will never be grown up!"
Nux, tied up to the cart, started to howl.
***
Anyway, it was later than it might have been when we found the farm. It was a neat smallholding that looked well run, though barely capable of supporting more than the people who were living there. They had rows of summer salad crops, occasional poultry pottering about in a soft fruit orchard, a couple of cows, and a large friendly pig. Two geese wandered out to greet us; I could have done without them.
The farm dogs sniffed out the presence of Nux within minutes. Tying her up would only have made her a sacrificial victim. I tied them up instead. Then I carried Nux, preserving her canine chastity however fiercely she tried to squirm. Helena said it would be good practice for when our daughter grew up.
This smallholding seemed designed as a Roman intellectual's retirement home, after the patronage ran out; from here he could write bucolic notes to his friends in town, praising the simple life where his table was set with just runny cheese and a lettuce leaf (while hoping some civilized visitor would bring him gossip, memories of sophisticated women, and a decent flask of wine). However, if Laelius Scaurus was, as I supposed, in his thirties, it seemed early for him to be giving up on city life.
We found a bent-backed aged retainer who pushed a hoe about. He looked happy to see us, but we got no sense out of him. All my prejudice against the country was rising fast. First my peculiar uncles, and now a rural slave who left his brains behind on a shelf when he went out of doors. Then things looked up. A girl appeared.
"Well!" I grinned at Helena. "I can manage on my own now if you want to go and rest in the mule cart."
"Forget it!" she growled.
The smallholding girl had a round face, with a big mouth, and swiftly emerging dimples. Her smile was willing; her figure fulsome; her nature friendly and open. Her eyes were dark and promising and her hair was tied up with blue ribbon. She wore a loose natural-cream gown that had a few unraveled sections in the seams through which her burnished skin was clearly visible. Wherever could Scaurus have found her, leading his austere life as a flamen's son?
"He has gone to Rome."
"Can't be parted from the Forum?" I asked.
"Oh, he goes to and fro. Last time he sneaked a visit to his sister. This time he had a letter from his wife." At least she knew about the wife. I would not have liked to think this shining young lady was the victim of cruel deception. "He could have gone yesterday, but he held back because it was a legal day, and he was afraid they might make him sign something."
"Like what?" I smiled. Her friendliness was extremely infectious.
"Oh, I don't know."
"And you are?" enquired Helena, rather sternly.
"I am Meldina." Very nice. I managed to hold back the comment that she had a pretty name. It always sounds like a trite old pickup line, however genuinely meant. I was in a difficult enough situation, trying to hold on to a skillfully wriggling dog who had hopes of a country romance.
From then on, I let Helena take on the questioning while I just controlled Nux and watched admiringly. (I mean-of course-only that I was admiring the skill of my dear girl's questioning.) "How long has Laelius Scaurus lived out here?"
"About three years."
"As long as that! And have you lived here all the time?"
"Mostly." Meldina gave us an especially big smile. "It's very nice out here."
We all looked around. It was a picture of country perfection. If you were talking in terms of perspective, the foreground was particularly fine, due to the presence in it of Meldina's large-scale charms.
"Let me guess," Helena said gently, in a tone that was unlikely to give offense. "You would have been a Laelius family freedwoman?"
"Oh no!" Meldina sounded horrified. "I had nothing to do with that lot. My mother was a freedwoman of his aunt's," she corrected. This rather complicated definition implied that there had been no pressure on her to move here with Scaurus; freeborn herself, she had come of her own choice. Nonetheless, I wondered whether the aunt had encouraged her; such an attractive girl might have been too much of a favorite with Auntie's husband, maybe.
"Did you know Scaurus before he moved out to the country?" Helena was seeking to discover whether it was his friendship with Meldina that had caused Scaurus' estrangement from his wife.
"No, afterwards. Still," said the smiling girl (who never really stopped smiling), "we are pretty settled now."
"No chance of him divorcing his wife, presumably?"
"Never. His father has forbidden it." As we thought.
"Excuse me asking all these questions," Helena said.
"Oh, that's all right. I'll talk to anyone." What a refreshing attitude. I wondered how far Meldina's accessibility went. It seemed unlikely that she stinted much. Helena was giving me a stern look, for some reason. "What did you want to see Scaurus about?" Meldina asked, also throwing a look my way. I was a man of the world; I could handle that. On the other hand, I might not be able to handle Helena after this incident.
"We wanted a word about his young daughter-little Gaia. We had an encounter with her that left us feeling concerned."
"Funny little tot," said Meldina, with a delicious frown. "I've met her a few times. His aunt brings her out here to see him."
The aunt had featured sufficiently for Helena now to fix on her. "When you say his aunt, that wouldn't be Terentia Paulla, I suppose?" I was surprised by this, until reminded of a conversation at Helena's parents' house about this woman; she had been the sister of the late Flaminica: "My grandmother knew her from the Bona Dea Festival," Helena explained. "Terentia is a Vestal Virgin, isn't she?"
"That's the right aunt. But she's not a Virgin anymore!" Meldina was giggling. "Didn't you know? She retired at the end of her thirty years-then upset everyone by marrying!"
Retired Vestal Virgins could do that, in theory. It rarely happened since it was thought unlucky for a man to marry an ex-Virgin. Since she would probably be past childbearing age, a bridegroom would have to place a higher than usual premium on virginity to think it worthwhile. Any quick thrill from bedding a Vestal would be outweighed by then gaining a tyrant who came with thirty years' experience of ruling the roost.
"Good heavens!" exclaimed Helena, with spirit. "Grandmother never told me that!"
"You are shielded from anything scandalous," I intervened.
"Oh, he can speak!" trilled Meldina.
"Far too much," said Helena, sneering. "I only bring him out with me to carry the lapdog. Well, retired Vestals are allowed to take husbands, but people do always look askance… I cannot say Grandmama liked Terentia much," she tried.
"Oh, didn't she?" The girl continued to look bright and helpful, though she was definitely deflecting the question this time. She was being loyal. To whom? I wondered.
"Yes, Scaurus said his wife came up with that."
"He has given his consent?"
"I suppose so."
"I just wondered if that was why he went to Rome today?"
"Oh no. His aunt wants him. He said it was to help with her affairs."
Helena paused. "I'm sorry; I must have misunderstood something. I thought you said Laelius Scaurus went to Rome after receiving a letter from his wife, not his aunt?"
Meldina's smile became broader than ever. "Well, that's his lot all over, isn't it? His auntie wants him, but his wife wrote and told him that his father had decided Scaurus was not to know anything about it." She grinned. "Scaurus has gone to Rome to kick up a right stink!"
XXI
We stayed overnight with my relatives. The beauteous Meldina had promised that if Scaurus returned, she would send him to talk to us. She said this with a frightening air of certainty. I was used to being won over with much subtler maneuvering but I could see that a man brought up in an atmosphere of repression might welcome a girl who was so firm. The poor wimp would feel secure.
Ma and Great-Auntie Phoebe were vying with each other in exclaiming dolefully that this might be the last time they ever saw one another. According to these two tough old birds, feeding a bone to Charon's dog in the Underworld was just a day away for each of them. Myself I gave them both another decade. For one thing, neither could bear to depart life while Fabius and Junius were still providing them with disasters to deplore.
Fabius, the present homeboy, had been told about my new position as Procurator of the Sacred Poultry. "Oh, you must come and see what I am doing with our chickens, Marcus. This will interest you-"
My heart sank. While my great-uncle Scaro lived here, he too was full of crazy schemes and inventions, but Scaro had the knack of convincing you that when he showed you some weird piece of carved bone that looked like a potbellied pigeon, he had discovered the secret of flight. Any prototype produced by Fabius or Junius was bound to be of a more meager dimension and their mode of expressing enthusiasm had all the vigor of a very old rag rug. Whichever one backed you up against a manger for a lecture, the result was torture.
My grandfather and Great-Uncle Scaro (both long passed away) had built the original hen yard, a large enclosure which they had covered with nets and lined with coops, and where in good times they had nurtured upwards of two hundred birds. A woman and a boy lived alongside in a hut, but my uncles were the world's worst managers of staff (either seducing them, feuding with them, or totally neglecting them), and so the birds were badly managed too. Reduced to forty or fifty in total during the recent reign of Uncle Junius, the flock had lived pleasantly, hardly ever troubled by having eggs removed or birds killed for the family pot. Now that Junius had run off somewhere, Fabius had plans to change all that.
"I am fattening them for sale scientifically. We are going to be thoroughly organized." Nothing about my uncle was scientific or organized, except when he went fishing. His note-tablets of tedious data on fishes caught, location and weather, variety, length, healthiness, and bait used took up a whole shelf in the kitchen food cupboard, forcing Phoebe to keep her pickles at the back of the bucket store. Otherwise, Fabius could hardly put on a pair of boots by himself; he would get stuck after the first one and worry what to do next.
Fabius now had a large clutch of hens in a dark building where they were individually confined, some in cribs along one wall, some in special wicker containers with a hole fore and aft for the head and the tail. They were lying on soft hay, but packed so that they could not turn around and use up energy. Here the hapless fowl were being crammed with linseed or barleymeal kneaded with water into soft pellets. I was informed it took just under four weeks to bring them up to a good marketable size.
"Is this regime cruel, Fabius?"
"Don't talk like a soft townie."
"Well, be practical then. Is their flavor as good as that of the ones who run free?"
"People don't pay for flavor, you know. What buyers look at is size."
This astuteness must be why the Romans thought so highly of their agricultural forebears. In mine, I was descended from true masters of the land. No wonder Ma, like that smelly old peasant Romulus, had escaped to the city life.
Against the constant clucking of the birds, Fabius relentlessly detailed his financial projections, which led him to the conclusion that in two years he would be a millionaire. After an hour of tosh, I lost my temper. "Fabius, I have heard this before. If every get-rich scheme that came out of this family had worked, we would be a legend among the Forum banking fraternity. Instead, we just go downhill from year to year-and our reputation stinks."
"The trouble with you," said Fabius, in his maddeningly grave way, "is that you never want to take a risk."
I could have told him that my life was based on hazard, but it seemed cruel to boast when his own was grounded in hopelessness.
I always liked visiting the country. It reminded me why my mother had been so keen to get away that even marrying Pa had seemed worth it. It refreshed my view of the joys of city life. I always went home a true Roman: full of my own superiority.
XXII
The day before the Nones of June: the festival of Hercules the Great Custodian. A voting day.
At first, it looked as if Laelius Scaurus would not show. That's a common drudgery in the world of informing. I had spent half my life waiting for time-wasters who made no attempt to keep appointments.
Now the misery was aggravated by Helena's mockery: "Meldina fooled you! She looked so desirable, grinning at you as she was bursting out of her tunic-she couldn't possibly be lying, could she?"
I went along with it. "Seems she is so busy being a fertility goddess, she has no time to pass on simple messages."
"Or maybe Scaurus is still stuck in Rome," Helena conceded.
"Oh, I expect he's back here. He just sees me as an interfering outsider: that's a family trait," I said.
"And true, of course."
Having seen both his pallid wife and his sumptuous girlfriend, I reckoned Scaurus would cut short his city visit. In his position, there were better pleasures on the farm. But I kept that to myself. I'm not stupid.
I hung about a while longer, discussing with Phoebe whether she could take in one of my young nephews, one of Galla's brood who needed to be lifted from Rome before life on the streets was the ruin of him. Ma sat in the cart, ready to go, pursing her lips and pronouncing that Galla would never agree to let Gaius leave home, even if it was for his own good. She had a point. I had already extracted his elder brother Larius and left him enjoying life as an artist at the Bay of Neapolis, so my sister now saw me as a child-thief. For some reason, Great-Auntie Phoebe had faith in my talents, so she promised to make preparations to receive Gaius right away. He was a revolting little tyke, but I had faith in her too. If he could be saved, she would do it.
I was collecting my party when Fabius came wandering by. "Listen, Marcus, I have had a thought-"
I managed to restrain my irritation.
"We have to go now!" Ma chipped in loudly. She had had seventy years of trying to bring her brother Fabius to the point. Anyway, she had stuffed our cart with vegetables and wanted to get them to Rome while they were still fresh. (I mean, she needed to leave before Phoebe realized quite how many nets of onions and baskets of young asparagus Ma had decided her affectionate relatives would hand over as free gifts.)
"No, look-now that you have responsibility for the Sacred Chickens, maybe we can work something out," Fabius suggested, looking dangerously keen.
"I don't want to sound pompous, but there is no chance of putting the augury birds into body baskets to fatten them up, Uncle Fabius. The whole point is to give them free movement so they can express the will of the gods in an untrammeled way."
"I can see that, Marcus
," replied my uncle ponderously. "I was thinking about supplying you with new birds from time to time."
"Sorry. They supply their own. We hatch their eggs."
"What, even in the town?"
"Cities are hotbeds of nature, Fabius. Encyclopedists sit on every street fountain making notes of the copulating species they have seen that day and the peculiar spawn they have watched hatch out."
Metaphor and satire were equally lost on Fabius. "Well, it was just a thought."
"Thanks." I forced myself to beam at him. Friendliness was stupid, but I fooled myself I had now escaped.
No such luck: "And what about the guano from the Sacred Geese?" he then asked even more intensely. "Did you know that bird dung is extremely nutritious to crops? The sacred element would be a good catchall advertisement. Have you thought of selling it off for muck-spreading?"
A whole vista of dangerously corrupt subcontract fiddles had opened up with my new rank. Being respectable could be very hard work if I took up every opportunity for graft that people kindly flung my way. Grinding my teeth, I leaped up to the driving seat of my cart.
I was actually whipping the mule out through the gate to the road home when we met head-on with a man on a donkey who turned out to be the missing Scaurus.
***
I knew it was him straightaway. As I had reckoned, he must be in his thirties, though he had the manner of somebody older. Depressingly, he had the same washed-out, defeated look as his wife. Even though he now lived in the country, he looked as if he dwindled in captivity indoors. He was lanky, with a high forehead, his thin shoulders diffidently stooped. He also had the kind of well-meaning attitude that would quickly drive me mad.
"You're Laelius Scaurus!"
When I dragged the mule to a halt, he looked surprised that I knew him. "Are you Falco?"
There must be something about the air on the Campagna that made every woolly baa-lamb out here prone to stating the obvious. Now I was trapped. I had to interview him at a farm gate, with Ma, the baby, Nux, and Helena all looking on. He stuck on his donkey. I stayed on the cart.
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