‘Is Spartacus a hero of yours?'
'Anyone who fights the Establishment is a hero of mine.' None of this was the point at issue so I sounded terse. 'Well, what is this merry jaunt about?'
‘A chance to speak to you privately-'
'Barnabas?'
'Yes and no. I met him yesterday,' Helena confessed, her restraint admonishing my harshness. 'It was perfectly civilized; we sat in the garden, and I had honey cakes. He wanted to see me. He has no money, for one thing-'
That angered me. 'You were divorced from his patron. He has no right to sponge off you!'
'No,' she said, after an odd pause.
'You never gave him cash? I accused.
'No.' I waited. 'The situation is complicated,' she told me, still in that washed-out voice; I continued to stare her out. ‘But I may be short of funds myself-'
I could not envisage Helena in financial straits. She had inherited land from a female relation, then after her divorce her father had given her part of the dowry her ex-husband had returned. Pertinax himself had bequeathed her a small fortune in precious spice. So she was richer than most women, and Helena Justina was not the type to squander it on tiaras or to give away thousands to some seedy religious sect.
'Unless you want to flirt with a very demanding ballet dancer, I can't see you strapped for cash!'
‘Ah well…' She ducked the issue stubbornly. 'Now you tell me something. What happened at the Villa Poppaea that upset you so bitterly?'
'Nothing that matters.'
'Something about me?' she persisted.
I could never resist Helena's earnestness; I let out abruptly, ‘Do you sleep with Aemilius Rufus?'
'No,' she said.
She could have answered, 'Of course not; don't be stupid.' It would have sounded much stronger, though I would have believed her less.
I did believe her. 'Forget I asked. Look, next time you take honey cakes with Barnabas, I'll be behind the pergola.' Her silence jarred me 'Lady, he's a fugitive-'
'Not now. Let me deal with him. Somebody has to bring him back to the real world-'
I was overwhelmed with fondness for her dogged way of doing things. 'Helena Justina, you cannot take every problem in the Empire onto yourself!'
'I feel responsible…' Her face remained strangely remote as she argued with me. 'Don't you harass me, on top of all my other troubles-'
'What troubles?'
'Nothing. Do your work for the Emperor, then we can attend to Barnabas.'
'My work can wait; I'm looking after you-'
'I can do that myself?' she suddenly exploded, astonishing me. 'Always. I shall have to – as I fully realize!'
I felt my jaw harden. 'You're talking nonsense.'
'No, I'm speaking the truth! You know nothing about me; you never wanted to. Lead your own life how you choose – but how could you say what you did about Rufus? How could you think that?'
I had never seen Helena so hurt. I was so used to insulting her, I had failed to notice that for once her tolerance had snapped.
'Look, it was none of my business-'
'Nothing about me is any of your business! Go away, Falco!'
'Well that sounds like the sort of instruction I can understand!' I felt so helpless I lost my temper too. I thundered blackly, 'You hired me because I was good – too good to waste my time on a client who will never confide in me.' Helena made no answer. I walked over to the donkey. 'I'm going back. I'm taking the donkey. Are you coming with me sensibly, or staying on this mountain by yourself? More silence.
I unhitched the animal and climbed aboard.
'Don't worry,' I said unpleasantly. 'If a wild boar steps out of the undergrowth, just roar at him the way you roar at me.'
Helena Justina neither moved nor answered me, so I started down the mountain without looking back.
LIX
I rode downhill for three minutes at a steady pace. As soon as the track widened, I reined in the donkey and drove him back again.
Helena Justina was exactly where I left her, with her face out of sight. Nothing had attacked her: only me.
When my heart steadied I walked over, then reached down and rubbed the top of her head gently with my thumb.
'I thought you had left me,' she said in a muffled voice.
'Is that likely?'
'How should I know?'
'I thought I had left you,' I admitted. 'I'm the sort of fool who would think that. If you just stay in the same place so I can find you, I shall always come back.' She choked on a sob.
I dropped on my haunches and wrapped both arms round her. I held her tight but after a few hot tears had trickled away under the neck of my tunic she grew quieter. We sat there, perfectly still, while I sent my strength flowing into her, and the strain I had been feeling for so long it had come to seem natural went running away too.
Eventually Helena mastered her misery and looked up. I hooked two fingers into her neekchain and pulled out my old silver ring. She coloured faintly. 'I used to wear it…' She tailed off in embarrassment.
With both hands I snapped the cham apart; Helena gasped and caught the little circle of silver as it fell into her lap. I glimpsed the inscription: anima mea, 'my soul'. I grasped her left hand and replaced the ring myself. 'Wear it! I gave it to you to wear!'
Helena seemed to hesitate. 'Marcus, when you gave me your ring to wear – were you in love with me?'
That was when I realized how serious things were.
'I made myself a rule once,' I said.
‘Never fall in love with a client -' She rounded on me in distress, then saw my face. ‘Sweetheart, I've made a lot of rules, and broken most of them! Don't you know me? I am frightened you will despise me, and terrified other people will see you doing it – but I'm lost without you. How can I prove it? Fight a lion? Pay my debts? Swim the Hellespont like some lunatic?'
'You can't swim.'
'Learning is the hard part of the test'
'I'll teach you,' muttered Helena. 'If you fall into any deep water, I want you to float!'
The water was pretty deep here. I stared at her. She stared at the ground. Then she confessed, 'That day you left for Croton, I was missing you so badly I went to your apartment to look for you; we must have passed one another in the street.
Overcome, she ducked her head onto her knees again. I cackled with laughter, bitterly. 'You should have told me.'
'You wanted to leave me.'
'No,' I said. My right hand was cradling the back of her head, exploring a hollow which seemed purposely made to fit the ball of my thumb. 'No, my darling. I never wanted that.'
‘You said you did.'
'I'm an informer. All talk. Mostly inaccurate.'
'Yes,' she agreed thoughtfully, raising her head again. 'Didius Falco, you do say stupid things!'
I grinned, then I told her some more.
Above the Bay, the sun broke free of that vaporous cloud cover, and a band of light ran swift as silk across the coastal plain and up the mountain where we were. Warmth flooded over us. The elegant ellipse of the coastline brightened; at its open end the Island of Capreae emerged as a dark smudge complementing the folds of the Lactarii range. Below us the small, white, red-roofed buildings of Herculaneum, Oplontis and Pompeii crouched along the shore, while on the linenfold slopes of the distant hills villages and farms tantalized the eyesight among the natural rocks…
'Hmm! Just the sort of spectacular vista where you bring a beautiful woman, and never once look at the view…'
As the sunlight hit us, I levelled Helena on her back and stretched myself alongside, beaming down at her. She started stroking my ear as if it was something wonderful. My ear could take more of that; I realigned my head so it was more readily available while I basked in her scrutiny. 'What are you looking at?'
'Oh, a thatch of black curls which never look combed -' I happened to know Helena liked my curls. 'One of those long, straight, superior noses off an Etruscan tomb painting. Eyes that keep mo
ving, in a face which never reveals what they have seen. Dimples!' she scoffed (driving her little finger into one of them).
I jerked my head; trapping the finger in my teeth, then pretended to eat it.
'Excellent teeth!' she added crossly, as an afterthought.
'What a wonderful day!' I had always liked warm weather. I had always liked Helena too. It was hard to remember there had ever seemed much point pretending otherwise. 'My best friend's happy getting drunk with his wife, so I can forget him. I'm lying in the sunshine up here, with you all to myself, and in a moment I shall be kissing you…' She smiled up at me. A shiver ran all down my neck. Alone with me now, she seemed completely at peace. I too had relaxed to the point where I was ceasing to relax… Helena began to reach for me, just as I gathered her closer and kissed her at last.
Many seconds later I looked up gravely at the sky. 'Thank you, Jove!'
Helena laughed.
The green dress she was wearing was light enough to show that she was wearing nothing else. It was fastened along each elbow-length sleeve with five or six mosaic glass buttons twisted through embroidered loops. I undid one to see what would happen; Helena combed my curls with her fingers, smiling. 'Shall I help?'
I shook my head. The buttons were stiff, but stubbornness and other factors had taken hold by then so I winkled off three, working upwards; then I explored her arm, and since she seemed to like it I carried on unbuttoning to the top of the sleeve.
My hand slid from her wrist to her shoulder then down again, no longer on her arm. Her cool soft skin which never saw the sun shrank, then rose to my touch at her intake of breath; I had to fight to stop my fingers quivering.
'Is this leading somewhere, Marcus?'
'I hope so! Don't imagine I could get you on your own at the top of a mountain and not make the most of the chance.'
'Oh I never thought that!' Helena assured me quietly. 'Why do you think I wanted you to come?
Then, being a practical woman, she undid all the buttons on the other sleeve herself.
A long time afterwards, when I was utterly defenceless, a wild boar strolled out of the undergrowth.
"Grrr!' said the Senator's daughter amiably, over my naked shoulder.
The wild boar snuffled, then turned round with a disapproving snort and ambled off.
LX
When Petronius Longus stopped snoring and roused himself, conflicting emotions fought in his face. He took in the fact we had come down the mountain in a very different mood from when we had left. While he was sleeping Helena and I had finished his wine (though that did not matter at the price here); now she and I were tangled together like puppies in the shade. As a man with a hard grasp of the social rules, Petronius was visibly torn.
'Falco, you'll have to be careful!'
I tried not to laugh. In ten years of watching my contorted relationships, this was the first time Petro had bothered to give me brotherly advice.
'Trust me,' I said. (It was what I had told Helena. I blocked out how at the crucial moment when I tried to restrain my efforts, she had cried out and would not let me go -)
Petro growled, 'For heavens' sake, Marcus! What will you do if there's a mistake?'
'Apologize to her father, confess to my mother, and find a priest who keeps his prices down… What do you take me for?'
My shoulder was aching, but nothing could make me shift. The joy of my life had her head on my heart and was profoundly asleep. All her troubles had been drained away; her tranquil lashes were still spiky from her helpless tears afterwards. I could easily have wept myself.
'The lady might see things differently. You ought to stop this!' Petro advised perversely, now that this expedition up the mountain had ensured I never could.
His wife woke on the bench beside him. Now I watched Silvia interpret the scene: Helena Justina tucked against my side with her knees under mine; Helena's hand clasping my own; her fine hair, crumpled by my arm; the depth of her sleep; my own unsmiling peace…
'Marcus! What are you going to do?' she insisted in a worried undertone. Silvia liked everything to be neat. 'Finish my commission, and put in a claim for payment as rapidly as possible…' I closed my eyes.
If Silvia thought we had started something scandalous she must have blamed me for it, because when Helena awoke the two of them went off together to wash their faces and reorganize themselves. When they came back it was with the secretive, satisfied air of two women who had been gossiping. Silvia had her hair wound on the nape of her neck the way Helena usually wore hers, and they had knotted Helena's with ribbon. It suited her. She looked as if she ought to have been doing something typically Athenian on a black-figure vase. I would have liked to be the free-spirited Helena lying in wait to catch her just around the vase handle…
'This is confusing,' Petro joked. 'Which one was mine?'
'Oh I'll take the one with the topknot, if you like.'
He and I exchanged a look. When one of two friends is married and the other stays a bachelor, rightly or wrongly the assumption is that you operate by different rules. It was a long time since Petro and I had been out together on such easy terms.
Anyone who knew Petronius and his interest in wine also knew that he would seize on this opportunity to make a few purchases for domestic use. True to his usual thoroughness, once he found a crisp white at a few coppers an amphora (with a petillance he described to me lovingly, as connoisseurs do), Petronius Longus acquired as much as he could: while I left him on his own he had bought a adleus. Seriously. A huge barrel as tall as his wife. At least twenty amphorae. Enough to put a thousand flasks on the table if he kept an inn. (More if he watered the drink.)
Silvia was hoping I would dissuade him from this mad bargain, but he had already paid. We all had to wait while he burned his name in the cask then made complicated arrangements for coming back with Nero and the cart, which was the only way be would ever get his culleus away from here. Silvia and I asked how he intended to transport his family home now (not to mention where they would live, if their house was full of wine), but he was lost in euphoria. Besides, we knew he would manage it. Petronius Longus had done stupid things before.
Eventually we rode back.
I had the one with the topknot. She sat in front, intensely quiet. When we reached the villa letting her go was almost impossible. I told her again that I loved her, then I had to send her in.
Petronius and Silvia had tactfully waited at the estate entrance while I took Helena up to the house. When I rode back with the hired donkey they stayed politely silent.
‘I'll see you when I can, Petro.' I must have looked grey.
'O Jupiter!' Petronius exclaimed, swinging down from his mount. 'Let's all have another drink before you go!' Even Arria Silvia forbore to complain.
We broke into a wineskin, sitting under a pine tree in the dusk. We three drank, not too much but with a certain desperation now Helena had left us.
Afterwards I walked up to the house, reflecting that love was as hard on the feet as it was on the pocket and the heart. Now I noticed something I had missed before: a chink of harness under the cypress trees led me to two rough-coated, saddle-sore mules, tethered away from the track with nosebags on. I listened, but caught no other sign of life. If revellers – or lovers – had come up the mountain from the coast, it seemed odd that they should travel so far onto a private estate for their happy purposes. I patted the animals, and went on thoughtfully.
By the time I arrived at the villa again, it was an hour since I had brought Helena back.
Any murderer or coffer-thief could have got into that house. The servants who greeted Helena had long disappeared. No one was about. I went up, confident at least that her bedroom would be well staffed; a safety measure I had insisted on. It meant I myself could only expect five minutes being polite to her but I was looking forward to a silly charade in front of other people, playing her surly bodyguard, all gristle and grim jokes…
Reaching Helena's room I opened th
e heavy door, slipped in and closed it silently. It was an open invitation; I had to fix a bolt on the door. The outer space was dark again, with the same lights beyond the curtaining.
She had company. Someone spoke, not Helena. I should have left. I was asking for every kind of disappointment, but by then I felt so desperate to see her that it carried me straight into the room.
The green dress lay folded on a coffer; her sandals were tumbled askew on a bedside rug. Helena had changed into something darker and warmer with woollen sleeves to the wrist; her hair was plaited on one shoulder. She looked neat, grave, and impenetrably tired.
She had come home so late she had her dinner on a tray. She sat facing the door, so when I batted in through the curtain her shocked eyes watched me frantically absorb the scene.
There was a man with her.
He was sprawled in a chair with one knee over its arm, casually scoffing nuts. Helena seemed more sullen than usual as she chewed at a chicken wing, though she was getting on with it as if the presence of this person in her bedroom was commonplace.
‘Hello,' I stormed angrily. ‘You must be Barnabas! I owe you half a million bits of gold-'
He looked up.
It was certainly the man who had attacked me in the warehouse, and probably the one I had glimpsed harassing Petro in the ox cart on the Gapua Road. Then I stared at him harder. After three months of chasing the man in the green cloak, I finally discovered who he really was. The freedman's old mother in Calabria had been right: Barnabas was dead.
I knew this man. He was Helena Justina's ex-husband; his name was Atius Pertinax.
According to the Daily Gazette, he was dead too.
LXI
He looked healthy for a man who had been murdered three months before. But if I had any choice in the matter, dead was how Atius Pertinax would soon be. Next time I would arrange it myself. And make it permanent.
He wore a very plain tunic and a new jaw-line beard, but I knew him all right. He was twenty-eight or nine. Light hair and a spare build. He had pale eyes I had forgotten and a sour expression which I never would forget. Permanent bad temper tightened the muscles round his eyes and made his jaw clench.
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