Jonathan stared at the doctor. He knew that most doctors resorted to bleeding as a matter of course, but in this case that would be madness.
‘My assistant isn’t back yet,’ said the doctor to Helen, ‘so I’ll need someone to go and find some cobwebs. I’ll also need someone to hold the wounds shut while I sew them up. Oh, and bring me a sea-sponge soaked in vinegar,’ he added.
‘Get a bowl of vinegar,’ said Helen to Persis, ‘and the sea-sponge from my bedroom dressing table.’
The doctor called something after the girl in Greek and then spoke to Flavia in Latin. ‘You’re his daughter, aren’t you? Will you help me wash his wounds?’
Flavia did not reply. Jonathan saw a look of horror on her face.
‘Nubia, why don’t you sponge the wounds?’ he said, and turned to Flavia. ‘You go find some cobwebs.’
Flavia nodded and wandered out of the room in a daze.
‘Go with her, Lupus,’ said Jonathan, and turned back to the doctor. ‘I can assist you,’ he said. ‘My father’s a doctor and I’ve helped him before.’
The doctor stared at him for a moment, then gave a curt nod. Up close, Jonathan could see particles of food in his beard.
Lupus followed Flavia out of the room and a moment later Helen’s slave-girl returned with a sea-sponge floating in a ceramic bowl of vinegar. She set the bowl down on the small table beside the wall, then carried the table to the bedside. The doctor was showing Nubia the wounds that needed sponging. There were two gashes on the captain’s left arm, one on his left side, and a wound in his chest, above the heart. The slave-girl gasped.
‘Your name is Persis, isn’t it?’ Jonathan said to her.
The girl nodded, not taking her eyes from the captain’s wounds.
‘Could you bring a bowl of warm water, Persis?’ asked Jonathan.
As Persis nodded and backed out of the room, Jonathan turned to the doctor. ‘My father always washes his hands before he works.’
The doctor glared at him, but when Persis brought in the bowl a few moments later, he broke off trying to thread a bronze needle in order to wash his hands.
Lupus and Flavia re-appeared in the doorway. Lupus stepped into the room and carefully wiped his ball of cobwebs on the doctor’s leather instrument pouch. He ran off to look for more, but Flavia lingered near the doorway, a dazed look on her face.
Jonathan had just dried his hands on the linen towel draped over the slave-girl’s arm when he heard the doctor curse in Greek. The man was still struggling with needle and thread.
‘Here, let me,’ said Nubia, and deftly threaded the needle.
The doctor grunted his thanks, and indicated the first wound to Nubia, the one on the captain’s chest. When she had gently sponged it, he placed some cobwebs into the open wound and indicated that Jonathan should push the edges of the flesh together. Then he took the threaded needle and began to sew. On the bloody mattress, Captain Geminus stirred and groaned softly. Flavia made a strange choking noise and ran out of the room, followed by Helen and Persis.
Jonathan heard Nubia take a deep breath and he glanced up at her. Was she going to bolt, too?
She looked up from sponging the wound, her eyes golden in the lamplight, and she gave a small nod in response to his encouraging smile. Then they returned to their work, and from that moment Jonathan lost track of time.
They found Flavia in the purple twilight before dawn.
She was lying on one of the dining couches out in the garden. Helen rose from the foot of the couch when the three friends came through the ivy arch. A crescent moon touched the tops of the pines to the east and somewhere in the distance a cock was crowing. The wind had died.
‘She wouldn’t go back inside,’ said Helen, ‘so I got Persis to bring her some blankets and a cup of hot wine.’ She looked at Jonathan and he saw her eyes were swollen from weeping. ‘How is Marcus?’ she asked.
Jonathan sat on the couch opposite and sighed. ‘Still unconscious. We cleaned his wounds and put cobwebs inside and sewed them up. The doctor says he needs to rest in a quiet place for a week or two and that he must not travel.’
Helen nodded. ‘Now that you’ve finished, I’ll have my slaves move him down to my private triclinium. It’s the quietest room in the inn and looks out onto the herb garden.’ She looked towards the lavender sky in the east. ‘I’d better get the slaves to clean up all that blood.’ She sighed. ‘Why don’t you go back up to your rooms and get some sleep?’
‘May we stay here with our friend?’ asked Nubia.
‘Of course,’ said Helen. ‘I’ll send a girl with some more blankets and I’ll make sure you’re undisturbed. Unless something happens,’ she added, and Jonathan saw fresh tears fill her eyes as she turned away.
As he watched her weave her way out of the dim garden, he felt the brand on his left shoulder throb painfully, as it always did when he was tired. His eyes felt gritty and his right ear tickled. He rubbed it and recoiled when he saw the dried blood on his fingers. It must have come from when he had rested his head against Captain Geminus’s chest, to listen for the heartbeat. He glanced at his friends. Nubia had stretched out beside Flavia. Lupus was curled up on the central couch, his knees drawn up to his chin and his eyes already closed.
Jonathan bent and dipped his hands in the cold water of the ornamental pool and washed his face and ears. When he rose up, dripping, he saw Persis placing three folded blankets on the end of Lupus’s couch. She gave him a sad smile and ran back towards the inn. Jonathan spread a blanket over Lupus and took one for himself and lay down on the remaining couch.
As soon as he closed his eyes he saw an image of Aristo standing over the captain’s body.
He opened his eyes. ‘Why did you do it, Aristo?’ he whispered. Immediately another image came into his head: Aristo in the woods outside Ostia, bending to cut off an ostrich’s head with a single clean stroke of his knife, a sharp iron blade with a bronze boar’s-head handle.
The knife! Aristo had dropped it on the bedroom floor and nobody had bothered to pick it up.
Another cock began crowing nearby as Jonathan pushed off the blanket and ran back through the ivy arch into the colonnaded courtyard and up the stairs. He found Helen overseeing the clean-up of the Orpheus room. Persis and a fair-haired slave-girl had pushed the bed and candelabra against the wall, next to the small table with the night-lamp. They were on their hands and knees, drying the varnished wooden floor.
Helen looked up eagerly as Jonathan came in. ‘Oh,’ she said, and her face fell, ‘I thought it was Fortunatus and Syriacus coming back.’
Jonathan needed a moment to catch his breath. ‘The knife,’ he said. ‘Aristo dropped his knife. Have you found it?’
Helen frowned and said something to the slaves in Greek.
They tipped their heads back in the Greek manner and one of them held up the bloody sandals.
‘These sandals are the only thing they found on the floor,’ said Helen.
Jonathan went to the doorway of the room which led off from the Orpheus room.
‘What’s in here?’ he asked, taking a torch from its bracket and looking in. It was a small room with black walls and frescoes of sea nymphs. It had two small windows but no other entry or exit. There was barely enough room for a low bed, a cedarwood chest, an oak table and a bronze and leather armchair.
‘That’s where Marcus sleeps,’ said Helen. ‘He likes this room because it’s quiet.’
‘But you have to go through the Orpheus room to get out,’ said Jonathan. ‘Didn’t he mind the lack of privacy? Didn’t it disturb him when people stayed here?’
‘The Orpheus room is actually part of a suite,’ said Helen. ‘Flavia requested it for Aristo, because of the frescoes. Your tutor was only going to be here for one night, and Marcus said he didn’t mind sharing. So we moved the table and chair in here from the Orpheus room, and we brought a dining couch in there for Aristo to sleep on.’
‘Interesting,’ murmured Jonathan. ‘So
nobody has come in or out of this room since the attack?’
‘Nobody,’ said Helen. ‘I’m sure of it.’
‘I’m going to have a quick look for the knife, if you don’t mind.’
‘Of course not.’
Jonathan fixed the torch in a bracket on the wall of the inner room and opened the bronze shutters of both windows. The windows faced east and a pearly predawn light flooded the room, making it easier for him to see. On top of the cedarwood chest was the Captain’s cord belt and money-pouch and beside the bed his red leather sandals. Among the writing things on the table was a knife. It was a souvenir Flavia had brought her father from Rome two months before, a folding knife with an iron blade and a bronze handle in the shape of a gladiator. But this was obviously not the weapon used to stab the captain; its blade was shorter than Jonathan’s thumb.
‘Nothing?’ said Helen, seeing the expression on his face as he emerged from the bedroom.
Jonathan shook his head. ‘I don’t suppose it matters,’ he said. ‘It’s not as if it’s a clue to a mystery.’
‘No,’ said Helen wearily. ‘There’s no mystery about who tried to kill Marcus.’
‘The mystery,’ murmured Jonathan as he turned to go, ‘is why.’
‘Flavia. Flavia, my dear. Please wake up. Something’s happened.’ An accented woman’s voice and a hand gently shaking Flavia’s shoulder.
Flavia opened her eyes and for an instant she was aware of glorious sunlight illuminating bright green pine needles above her. Birds were singing and she could hear doves cooing in their dovecote. Then the memory of the previous night’s events came back like a kick in the stomach. ‘Pater!’ she cried, sitting up on the couch. ‘Is pater . . .?’
‘He’s alive,’ said Helen quietly. ‘He’s alive but he’s in a very deep sleep.’
As Flavia stood up, a wave of nausea swept over her. She sank to her hands and knees and was sick on the grass. Nubia knelt beside her and held her head until Flavia had finished.
‘What’s happened?’ asked Jonathan groggily from his couch.
‘My two slaves have just returned,’ said Helen. ‘I’m afraid they lost Aristo.’
‘What?’ cried Flavia, looking up at Helen. The woman had pinned up her long dark hair and put on a clean stola, but the shadows under her slanting dark eyes made her look tired.
‘Fortunatus and Syriacus were taking him to the vigiles at Cenchrea,’ said Helen, ‘so that they could hold him until the authorities from Corinth could take over. But he escaped.’
‘How?’ asked Flavia. She felt sick again.
‘They think he had an accomplice. A woman. As they were leading him down the road a woman screamed and Fortunatus went to her aid. He assumed she was being molested. Anyway, Aristo chose that moment to attack Syriacus. He knocked him to the ground, then kicked him senseless.’
‘Aristo did this thing?’ asked Nubia.
‘Even though his hands were tied?’ Jonathan raised his eyebrows. ‘And his cloak knotted at the front?’
‘Yes. Syriacus say he fought like a tiger, with the strength of ten men. When Syriacus recovered and Fortunatus returned, Aristo was gone. They tried to find him and they even went to his parents’ house in Corinth but . . .’ Helen shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, Flavia. He got away.’
Flavia sat beside her father in the private triclinium of Helen’s Hospitium. It was a small room, not much bigger than their own triclinium at home in Ostia, and it looked out onto a sheltered north-facing herb garden. A wooden lattice-work screen on rollers could be pulled across for privacy but at the moment it was concertinaed against the left-hand edge of the wide doorway.
Her father lay on a couch placed against the central wall, beneath a fresco of a painted window looking out onto painted woods. On the two side walls were colourful frescoes of paths leading to round shrines, painted with such accurate perspective that at first glance they looked real. Shrubs had been painted in the foreground. On one of them – a rosebush in bloom – sat a nightingale, his beak open in silent song.
Flavia looked away from the painted bird to study her father’s face. He was pale and although his breathing was steady, it was shallow and barely audible.
The light in the triclinium dimmed as Helen appeared in the wide doorway with two men.
‘Flavia,’ she said. ‘I’ve brought Lucius Sergius Agaclytus, the best doctor in Corinth.’
The taller of the two men had a face like a handsome monkey. But he had intelligent eyes and a quiet confidence.
‘You’re Flavia, the victim’s daughter,’ he said in perfect Latin.
‘Yes,’ she stood up and allowed him and his young assistant to approach the couch.
‘I’m Agaclytus,’ he said, ‘and this is my assistant Petros. When did this happen?’
‘Last night,’ whispered Flavia. ‘Around midnight, I think.’
Out of the corner of her eye she saw Helen nodding.
‘How old is your father?’ Agaclytus gently pulled back the blankets and Flavia almost fainted when she saw the swollen, stitched wounds in the flesh of her father’s chest and arm.
She looked away, towards one of the painted temples, and took a few deep breaths. ‘Pater will be thirty-two in a few weeks,’ she said.
‘Who did this?’
‘My tutor, Aristo,’ she said, feeling her eyes fill with tears. ‘He’s been with us for three years. I don’t know why he did it. I always thought he and pater liked each other . . .’ Flavia trailed off, aware of the doctor bending, examining, lightly touching, murmuring in Greek to his assistant, who was taking notes on a wax tablet. Finally he pulled the blanket up to her father’s neck and straightened again.
‘He has lost a great deal of blood,’ said the doctor. ‘The stitching is rather clumsy but the wounds have been cleaned well and if they do not become corrupted he should live.’ He turned to Helen and said something in Greek. They had a rapid exchange, during which Helen kept glancing nervously at Flavia. The doctor shook his head sadly. Finally he turned his simian eyes on Flavia.
‘According to the landlady here, your father did regain consciousness briefly at around the third hour this morning.’
‘He did?’ Flavia jumped up and clapped her hands together.
Helen turned to Flavia. ‘I didn’t tell you,’ she said, ‘because he didn’t recognise me. He didn’t even know where he was.’ Her dark eyes looked bruised with grief.
‘That’s not surprising,’ said Flavia to her. ‘We’ve only been here a few nights. We don’t really know you that well and pater can be absent-minded.’
‘Your father always stays here when he passes through Corinth,’ said Helen. She lifted her chin a fraction. ‘Marcus and I know each other very well. But today he kept asking for Myrtilla.’ Helen lowered her eyes. ‘Who is she, do you know?’
Flavia felt her stomach sink.
‘Do you know who Myrtilla is?’ asked the doctor.
‘Myrtilla is – was my mother,’ said Flavia. ‘But she . . . she died when I was three . . . seven, no – nearly eight years ago.’
‘Your father might just be confused,’ said the doctor, ‘unless it’s amnesia.’
‘What?’
‘Amnesia.’ When he saw the blank look on her face he said, ‘I’m sorry, that’s a Greek word and I don’t know if there is a Latin equivalent. It means a loss of memory. People with amnesia often completely forget events of recent years, but the past can seem like yesterday to them. It often happens to those who’ve had a blow to the head.’
‘But he didn’t have a blow to the head,’ said Flavia, ‘he was stabbed.’
‘On the contrary. Do you see this lump here?’ Agaclytus gently pushed away some light brown hair on the back of her father’s head.
Flavia’s eyes opened in horror. ‘Yes,’ she whispered, noticing for the first time a lump almost the size of a chicken’s egg on her father’s head.
‘This is probably where he struck his head against the hard edge of the
bed. That’s why he was so still when you found him. Do you see these two bruises on his neck? Look. Right here at the base of the throat. This is where the attacker’s thumbs pressed in.’
Flavia had no words. She hadn’t even noticed.
‘But that means . . .’ she whispered.
The doctor nodded grimly. ‘Not only did that young man stab your father, but it appears he slammed his head against the wooden bed frame and also tried to strangle him. There is no doubt that this Aristo was determined to see your father dead.’
*
‘Flavia?’
Flavia lifted her head to see four figures framed in the wide doorway of the triclinium. The green garden beyond them was flooded with brilliant noonday light and she could not see their faces clearly.
‘Flavia,’ said Jonathan, ‘may we come in?’
She nodded but put her finger to her lips.
Jonathan, Nubia, Lupus and a grey-haired old man stepped into the small dining room and stood beside the bed. They gazed down at Captain Geminus, still sleeping deeply.
‘How is he?’ whispered the man. He had a cheerful tanned face and long frizzy grey hair tied back in a ponytail. His name was Atticus and he was one of her father’s sailors, a cook and carpenter.
‘Pater is still asleep,’ said Flavia. ‘I want to be here when he wakes up.’
Lupus was looking at the frescoed wall beside Flavia, with its realistic path leading to a small round temple. He waved goodbye, pretended to start down the painted path towards the temple, and feigned surprise when he banged into the wall. Flavia did not smile and Lupus shrugged.
‘Flavia,’ said Jonathan softly. ‘We’ve spoken to the doctor, Agaclytus. He says it would be better if you kept yourself busy and let Helen get on with nursing your father. He thinks you need some rest and distraction and—’
‘No!’ cried Flavia vehemently. ‘I’m not going to leave pater! What will he do without me? If he wakes up and I’m not here, he’ll be lost. I’m not leaving him alone so Aristo can come back and finish the job tonight!’
The Roman Mysteries Complete Collection Page 130