by Ruth Downie
They walked along the row of tombs that lined the road, serenaded by the warble of an evening blackbird. There were three more little houses, two with low walls around them as if the dead had their own gardens. There were tall square pillars, and simple stones set in the ground, and several wooden posts, and many more mounds with no other marker. All the letters on the memorials spoke unfamiliar names.
“I have been thinking,” said Tilla. “What if Serena took her own life? Is that not the sort of thing honorable Roman wives are supposed to do when they are in trouble over a man?”
He stared at her. “Unless somebody saw her do it, we’ll never know.”
“Perhaps there is a knife lying under the water with all the coins and the curses.”
“Perhaps there is,” he agreed. “But I can’t see anyone dredging the pool to find it. And besides, it could have been thrown in by the murderer.”
“Or it could be a gift from someone asking help from Sulis Minerva.”
“A knife?”
“Our people leave precious gifts underwater for the gods to find,” she assured him. “If you really want to honor a god, why give rubbish like brass coins and lumps of lead with writing on them?”
“If you really want to honor a god,” he said, “why not spend your money on a temple everyone can see, instead of throwing your valuables into a bog?”
He was clearly so pleased with this answer that she decided not to argue.
A string of pack ponies was ambling along the road toward them, and the native boy sitting on the lead pony nodded a greeting. “We are looking for the tomb of our friend,” Tilla told him in his own tongue. “She was called Serena.”
“Sorry.” The boy shrugged. “I can’t read either. You’d have to ask somebody from town.”
The stone of the final memorial glowed golden in the last rays of the sun. Tilla mouthed the letters to herself, making out,
To the spirits of the dead
L VALERIUS FORTUNATUS,
who lived fifty-three years
Centurion in the II Augusta
This memorial was placed by his freedmen.
She supposed Fortunatus had no family here to remember him. The older soldiers would have left their relatives behind across the sea, and not all of them made new families here. Not all of them would have met someone like herself or Virana, or been powerful enough to tempt a Gleva, and there were still many tribes where few people would mourn a lost soldier.
“It’s not that one,” said her husband, who sometimes forgot that she could read for herself now.
“It must be the little house with no name,” she agreed.
Serena had an unfinished tomb but she did at least share the glorious view down over the valley to the river and the hills beyond. It was not, perhaps, such a bad place for your ashes to rest. Although Tilla did not know why, once you were safely in the next world, you would care very much where your ashes lay.
There had been a time when she would have been sure of what happened to lost friends. She would have known how to honor them. But instead of becoming clearer as she grew older, her understanding of the next world had become less certain. Especially since she had begun mixing with foreigners.
Now she knelt on the crushed grass in front of the little house, laying down the bindweed bells she had picked on the way up the hill, and felt lost and helpless. Her husband wandered around the tomb with the wine jug, peering at the roof. “I can’t see anywhere to pour it, can you?”
Since neither of them could see a special opening, he knelt beside her on the grass with the jug still full.
She said, “You should say something.”
“Me?”
“This is your people’s custom, not mine.”
He cleared his throat and seemed to be trying to remember the words. After much thought, he said, “We have traveled many miles over land and sea to bring you these small offerings, Serena. You were cruelly taken from us, and we grieve for you. Hail and farewell.”
She waited for more, but instead he ran a thin stream of wine into the grass outside the oak door and then walked around, encircling the house with the offering. When all the wine had soaked away, he joined her again and sat back on his heels. She expected him to say something else, but he seemed to have finished. It did not seem very much to mark a whole life that had been snatched away.
She said, “May the gods grant you a safe journey and a happy life in the next world, Serena.” Then she sat back beside her husband in the shadow of the tomb.
The sun was nearing the end of his day’s journey now, and a breeze shivered through the grass. Tilla wondered what it was like to live in the next world, and whether you knew what was happening in this one or whether you needed to be told. If you did not know, it would be very annoying to have visitors who only came to say good-bye and then sat around looking respectfully miserable. “Your boys are well, sister,” she said. “We saw them this afternoon. Their grandfather is looking after them and Albanus has come back to teach them, and they are very pleased to see him. While we were there I took some of the dead heads off your roses. I think everyone is too busy to look after them.” She paused, wondering what to say next. She was not going to worry Serena by talking about the redheaded woman who now carried the keys of Pertinax’s house. “Virana’s new baby is not in this world yet,” she said, “but Mara is crawling now and she is starting to learn to speak.”
Casting around for more news, it struck her that there was something any murdered person would want to hear. “Your father wants justice for you, and so do we. We are trying to find out what happened. If there is any way you can tell us who did this to you, we are listening.”
They waited in silence for a word, or a sign. But if Serena spoke, it was in the warble of the blackbird, and in the cold wind moving through the grass. Tongues that mortals could not interpret.
She felt her husband’s hand on her arm. “We have to go now,” she told Serena, “but we will come back and see you.”
She sat for a moment longer in case there was a reply. Then they both got to their feet and, without consulting each other, stepped backward, still facing the silent tomb with the white bells of bindweed outside the door. Without water, the flowers would be brown and dead by morning.
On the way down the hill, Tilla picked at the grass seeds that had caught in the fine wool of her wrap and said, “I feel sorrow for Serena’s father.”
“The whole thing is a mess.”
“He has lost his child and he is in the clutches of that Gleva, who cannot be trusted. And now we have come to trouble him.”
“As he said, we’re just like all the rest of them.”
“But we are not,” she said. “Because Valens and Serena are our friends.”
She heard a growing rumble and squeak of wheels and the clop of hooves on the hillside above them. They paused to watch an official carriage speed past, swaying with the bumps in the road. She said, “How long before the governor gets here?”
He said, “With luck, Pertinax won’t get an audience with him until after the feast of Sulis Minerva. That’s happening the day after tomorrow.”
It was not long enough. She said, “The man Serena’s uncle saw with the knife. He could be somebody else who used the same bath oil as Valens.”
“He may not have existed at all. But we can’t prove that.”
“It was a strange thing to make up. I will ask Virana. She was in the oil shop when Valens came to town.”
“The trouble is, with both of them having served in the same legion, Pertinax will have plenty of dirt for his lawyer to sling at Valens in his speech.”
“It is not a crime to be a neglectful husband and to flirt with lots of other women,” she pointed out. “What the lawyer needs to show to your governor is that Valens is the person who killed Serena.”
“From what I hear of court cases, that’s not how it works.”
She frowned. “How else can it work?”
“The
art, as I understand it, is to give a speech making Valens sound like such a monster that everyone believes he’s guilty of killing Serena and probably half a dozen other people as well.”
Tilla shook her head. Romans were sadly muddled in their thinking. No wonder they had to write down all their laws and then pay men to argue over them. “If Valens does not go to the trial,” she said, “will this man still make his horrible speech?”
“If Valens doesn’t turn up for the trial, I imagine the governor will assume that he’s guilty and he’s exiled himself. He’ll never get the boys back.”
As they made slow progress down the path that threaded between the houses to the main street, she said, “Do you think Serena’s father really believes Valens did it? Or is he saying that so he can keep the boys?”
“As long as I’ve known Pertinax, he’s always said exactly what he meant. It’s a wonder he got promoted as high as he did.”
They turned right into the street and headed back toward the temple and the baths. Her husband glanced behind him a couple of times and then pulled her into an alleyway and made her wait with him, listening. After a few moments he was satisfied that Pertinax had not yet sent anyone to follow them.
She said, “Gleva is big and strong. She could have killed Serena to get her out of the way.”
He paused to consider it, and then said, “If she did, what happened to the boyfriend?”
“I know,” Tilla agreed. “Gleva should be the one, but if she was, the rest of it makes no sense.”
19
Back at the courtyard the sound of chanting was drifting out through the archway. Ruso glanced in to see five or six barefoot figures dressed in white being escorted up the temple steps. Tonight’s complement of sick and injured, he supposed, preparing to sleep in the presence of the goddess, her attendants, and her holy dogs, and hoping for a miracle.
When they reached the Mercury, Tilla went straight upstairs to make sure Mara and Neena were settling in. Ruso slipped into the Traveler’s Repose next door under the cover of the dusk and ran up the stairs to see Valens and Esico.
Safely in the room of the still-unshaven Valens, Ruso sent Esico next door to borrow a mirror from Tilla and instructed him to pick up food from the bar on the way back.
As soon as the door was shut, Valens said, “Do I really have to have him? It’s bad enough being stuck in here without having an audience.”
“You do,” Ruso told him. “I can’t be in and out of here all the time. Pertinax is threatening to have me followed to find you. Esico can bring you whatever you need and he can take messages.”
“It would help if he had more Latin. I have to say everything three times and even then he looks clueless.”
“You can teach each other.” It always surprised Ruso how many years his comrades could spend in Britannia without picking up the language. Still, he supposed, if you had a Roman wife instead of one who came with a host of stubbornly monolingual relatives, and who insisted on speaking to your daughter in her native tongue unless you were there … He opened the door to make sure there was no one listening outside, then held it shut. “Now, quickly, while he’s out: Tell me exactly what happened with Serena.”
“Again?”
“Start from earlier. Tilla’s got some ideas about this woman who’s moved in with Pertinax. Is it true she and Serena were enemies?”
“Gleva.” Valens sighed. “I knew nothing about her till Serena wrote to say her pa was entranced by some mad native priestess who was after his money. Serena couldn’t get any sense into him so she wanted me to come and talk to him. But I’d only just wangled the posting to Isca and I couldn’t get the leave. Besides, I’m the last person he’d listen to.”
“So you didn’t come.”
“You sound just like—” Valens stopped and took a long breath. “I didn’t simply ignore her,” he said. “I wrote and explained why I wasn’t coming and told her not to worry, it was probably just a passing affair and he’d get over it. I mean, can you imagine Pertinax turning up at a centurions’ dinner with some wild dancing barbarian on his arm?”
Ruso could not. Serena, on the other hand, must have been able to picture it clearly enough to beg for help. “What did she say when you told her you weren’t coming?”
“There wasn’t much she could say, was there? She suggested I should write him a letter.”
“And did you?”
Valens shifted uncomfortably. “I gave it quite a lot of thought. But do you seriously believe anything I said would make the slightest difference to Pertinax?”
It might have made a difference to Serena, but no doubt Valens had worked that out for himself by now.
“Anyway, I didn’t hear another thing until I got this one.” He groped under the mattress and produced a thin slice of wood folded in two.
Ruso carried the letter across to the lamp and peered at the neat script.
Serena to Valens
Husband, I had hoped to see you in person but as you are unable to take leave I have to tell you in a letter that I wish to discuss divorce. Our marriage has been a disappointment to us both and as we rarely spend time together I do not expect that its ending will be a matter of great sorrow to you, nor even of great surprise. As you are not in a suitable situation to look after the boys I suggest you allow them to carry on living with me as before. I am sure we can make arrangements for you to visit them so little will change.
I wish you the best of health.
Underneath, squashed into the remaining space, was the sentence
My father will be writing to you about return of the dowry.
Ruso said, “So then you came to see her.”
“I managed to get three days. Came straight across as soon as I could get a boat.”
Valens’s ship had docked at Abona, and, like Ruso, he had hired a horse as the quickest means of reaching Aquae Sulis. He had arrived late in the afternoon, snatched a quick cleanup at the baths, and hurried to Pertinax’s house. Pertinax, to his relief, was out at a Veterans’ Association meeting.
“So, what happened?”
“Well, I spent some time with the boys, of course. Then Albanus took them off for lessons. After that, I think they went out for a walk.”
That confirmed what Albanus had already said.
“I’ve only seen them once since then,” Valens continued. “At the funeral, with Pertinax standing over them like a guard dog.”
“Was anyone else there at the house? That night, I mean.”
Valens thought about it for a moment. “The other staff, I suppose. I’m not sure who they have at the moment. Oh, and her uncle was around, but he didn’t stay. He lives there too.”
“Tell me about the argument you had with Serena.”
“Do I have to? It’s not really relevant.”
“Do you want an argument with me as well?”
Valens lay back on the mattress and put his hands behind his head. “I thought there was a chance to get her to see some sense,” he said, “till I found out that the reason she wanted the divorce wasn’t my fault at all.” His head lifted. “While I was off on the emperor’s service—”
“You don’t have to make the speech to me. I’m not the governor.”
The head went back down. “I want you to make it clear we were only living apart because I was doing my duty.”
“Me?”
“Well, you’ll be defending me, won’t you?”
It had not occurred to Ruso that Valens was expecting him to be an advocate as well as an investigator. “Who’s Pertinax’s lawyer?”
“Some silver-tongued crocodile from Londinium, apparently. I’ve no idea what the name is.”
This did not sound good.
“Pertinax told me about him after the funeral. I think he was hoping to frighten me into confessing. He said admitting my guilt would save the boys from all the upset of a long trial.”
Each side was threatening the other with how terrible the effect of a legal battle
might be upon the boys, but neither was willing to back down in order to spare them.
“Don’t look so worried, Ruso. You’ll have this all sorted out by the time he gets here, I’m sure.”
Ruso cleared his throat, and decided not to think about the consequences if the sorting-out didn’t go as well as Valens seemed to expect. “Go back to the argument.”
“What I was going to say,” Valens continued, “was that this chap had promised Serena that if she were single he would marry her. So I said, ‘But you aren’t single,’ and she said she might as well be, and … oh, you know how these things go.”
Ruso, whose first marriage had been even less of a success than that of Valens and Serena, had a fair idea.
“Apparently I’d failed some sort of test by not supporting her over the business of her father and the madwoman. To be honest, I thought that was a bit rich, under the circumstances. Of course now I regret saying what I said. But at the time—well, wouldn’t you be annoyed? Whatever you think of this Gleva, at least Pertinax is a single man. He’s free to canoodle with whoever he likes.”
They both paused as a board creaked in the corridor outside. Then they heard a door click shut. Ruso checked outside again, then sat on the floor with his back against the doorjamb. “Then what happened?”
“Is all this really relevant?”
“I don’t know.”
Valens lifted one leg and crossed it over the other. “I can’t really remember what order it was all in,” he said. “I know we talked about the boys. She wanted to keep them with her and I said no, and she said that my wanting to take them showed how little I really cared about them.” He looked up. “We would have worked something out, obviously. No was just the sort of thing anyone would say in the heat of the moment.”
“I know.”
“I think that was when she said she was going out.” His voice thickened. “I asked if she was meeting this Terentius and she told me to mind my own business. So I told her she shouldn’t go out alone just as it was getting dark, and she said—” He paused, pulled himself up to sit against the wall, and continued. “She said she was always alone, and it was too late to start running around after her now.”