Ruso and the Root of All Evils

by Ruso

  ‘I’ve got bigger things to worry about. They’re not children.’

  She took another gulp of water. ‘I am sorry. You have enough troubles with that man wanting money.’

  ‘Not any more.’ He explained about Severus’ fatal visit.

  She sighed. ‘This is worse. Everyone will think it was you.’

  Ruso hesitated. At the moment, Tilla was a patient, and a patient should be kept away from unnecessary anxiety. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he assured her, dabbing the sponge into the bowl. ‘I’ll tell everybody what happened to him, and it’ll all be sorted out. Now, where exactly did you last see my sisters?’

  23

  Alone in the Medicus’ bedroom, Tilla put the smelly sponge back into the bowl and forced herself to pour yet another cup of water. Further down the corridor, the Medicus’ brother and his wife were quarrelling. It was hard to grasp what the argument was about. She could hear the raised voices, but the words were muffled by the walls. Only the occasional phrase from Lucius broke through: ‘… comes back here and makes a mess of everything!’ was followed by an indistinct reply. Moments later, ‘What do you mean, I always take the easy way out?’ was clear enough. He was demanding, ‘… any idea how hard I work?’ when there was a scream of ‘The girls! They’re home!’ from Arria, followed by the sound of footsteps running along the corridor.

  Wincing at the pain in her head, Tilla wrapped herself in the sheet and climbed down from the bed. She made sure there was nobody in the corridor before crossing to the window that looked out over the garden and adjusting the shutter so she could peer through the gap by the hinge without being seen. Marcia and Flora were marching up the path towards the house, looking furious. Arria hurried down the steps to fling her arms around them, crying, ‘Where have you been? Are you all right? I should never have left that woman to look after you. I told you I didn’t trust her.’

  ‘We don’t know where she went,’ grumbled Marcia, slapping straw off her skirt. ‘We’ve been looking for her for hours.’

  ‘But she’s here!’ exclaimed Arria. ‘She told us she’d come home to fetch the cart for you.’

  ‘We didn’t know what to do,’ said Marcia. ‘We just turned round and she’d gone. We waited at the Augustus gate for hours and hours, but nobody came.’

  ‘We had to beg a lift home on one of Lollia Saturnina’s delivery carts,’ said Flora.

  ‘Lollia? Oh, whatever will she think of us? And we’ve had to cancel the dinner!’

  Marcia said, ‘Why?’ but Arria was not listening.

  ‘Your brother’s gone rushing off to fetch you. Didn’t you see him on the road?’

  ‘He’s a bit late,’ pointed out Marcia.

  ‘We might have missed him,’ said Flora, picking another strand of straw out of her sister’s hair. ‘We were so tired we had to lie down for a rest in the back of the cart.’

  ‘That woman abandoned you in town, strolled back here without you and lied to us?’

  ‘She probably didn’t know what to do,’ said Flora.

  ‘I expect she just said whatever came into her head,’ said Marcia. ‘It’s not her fault. I don’t suppose her people understand that sort of thing.’

  ‘This is not good enough. I’m going to have to talk to Gaius.’ Arria’s voice grew louder as they climbed the porch steps. ‘You’d think if he was going to bring one home he would have …’ Tilla missed what came next, dodging back into the bedroom as they entered the house.

  Back on the bed, she lay still until the throbbing in her head subsided. She supposed the Medicus would now be hobbling around the city streets in search of two girls who were safely back at home. Nobody else seemed to have thought about that.

  24

  The pain that had nailed her head to the pillow was gone. Tilla opened her eyes, gazed at the cracks in the ceiling of the Medicus’ room and wondered if he was back yet.

  There were no voices outside. No footsteps in the corridor. She managed to time her ascent of the stairs so that nobody saw her slip into her stuffy little bedroom clad in one of the Medicus’ old Army tunics. Inside, she changed into her own clothes. On the landing she bumped into the slave who had slept in her bed the previous night.

  ‘Have you seen the mistress and the master’s sisters?’

  ‘In the bath-house, miss.’ The girl leaned forward to mouth across a pile of folded linen, ‘It is safe to come out.’

  It was, but now that she had the temporary freedom of the house, Tilla could not think of a single place within it where she would feel at ease. She went across to the window. Nothing was moving in the regimented garden, which was still baking in the late afternoon sun. Beyond the wall, a tall grey horse was tethered in the shade of the stable building. There was some sort of compress on its foreleg. Feeling they were fellow sufferers, she went downstairs to talk to it.

  When she got there, the stable lad was busy replacing the compress. His morose expression defied the jolly tangle of curls around his temples.

  She said, ‘This is a fine horse.’

  ‘He is, miss. Pity he’s not ours.’

  She took the animal’s head to distract it from investigating the stable lad’s curls. ‘What is the matter with him?’

  ‘He’s not looking too happy on the nearside foreleg.’ Glancing up, he saw she was interested. ‘It’s an old injury. I’d have rested him for a day or two more, myself. You don’t want to mess about with a good animal like this.’

  ‘Your master has taken the mule-cart?’

  The lad nodded. ‘That’s all there is now, miss. We don’t have horses here no more.’

  She supposed they had been sold.

  The lad tucked in the ends of the bandaging and added, ‘I wouldn’t have been cleaning the harness if I’d known he needed it.’

  ‘You had the harness in pieces when the master wanted the cart?’

  ‘I made him late.’

  She said, ‘So did I. But he was very late anyway. Was he cross?’

  Instead of replying the lad straightened up and slapped the horse on the shoulder. ‘Good boy.’

  ‘When the master is feeling better,’ she said, ‘he will thank you for taking such good care of this horse.’

  The ‘Yes, miss’ was not enthusiastic.

  ‘He is always in a bad temper when his foot hurts. He is not usually rude to people who do not deserve it.’

  The lad paused to consider this for a moment, then said, ‘Fair enough, miss.’

  ‘The master has many things on his mind today.’

  ‘Could you ask him what he wants done with the horse, miss? I don’t want to be in more trouble. Only nobody asked about it, and I didn’t like to interfere.’

  Tilla must have looked baffled, because he explained without prompting that the guest who had died – ‘You heard about that, miss?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It was the horse he come over on. I was going to give it a rest and take it back in a day or two.’

  Tilla felt sorry for the lad, who was obviously desperate to get his hands on a high-class animal again.

  ‘But if the master thinks it ought to go back now, I could walk it over. I don’t want to get him in no more trouble.’

  ‘You think he really is in trouble?’

  The stable lad reached up and pulled a section of mane straight. ‘I wouldn’t know, miss.’

  ‘Did you see the man who died yourself?’

  The lad explained that he had heard the dog barking and realized nobody was around. He had opened the gate himself to let in the visitor and his horse and gone to fetch someone – Mistress Cassiana was the only one he could find – from the house.

  ‘I’ll say the man was ill when he got here if that’s what the master wants me to say, miss,’ he offered, ‘but it’s not true. Like I told the master, the horse was lame, but I didn’t notice nothing wrong with the man on top.’

  25

  ‘Want, want, want!’ exclaimed the cook, waving a vegetable knife towar
ds the kitchen ceiling. ‘Always somebody wanting something. You don’t need a cook, you need a magician.’

  ‘That’s the nature of cooking, I believe,’ said Ruso. He had arrived back from town hot and tired and banished the protesting Marcia and Flora to their room. He was not in the mood for another argument.

  ‘First mistress wants a grand dinner,’ exclaimed the cook. ‘With what, I’d like to know? I can’t show my face in town till the bills are paid. Then after I’ve gone to all the trouble she decides everyone’s too upset to eat it, and she just wants a tray in her room.’ The knife sliced down through the air and stabbed into the tabletop, narrowly missing the startled kitchen-boy. ‘How can I work if nobody makes their minds up? The fire’s gone out …’ In case Ruso could not see this for himself, the point of the knife was now jabbed towards the dead coals under the grill. ‘And we’ve washed up. If you’ve changed your minds again, it’s no good. It’s too late.’

  ‘All I’m after is something simple and quick to eat,’ said Ruso, leaning back against the doorpost and folding his arms, ‘and some information about what happened to our visitor this afternoon.’

  ‘I see. Blame the staff, eh?’

  ‘Information,’ repeated Ruso. ‘And put the knife down first.’

  ‘I don’t know a thing about it.’ The knife flashed towards the kitchen-boy, who was cowering in the corner. ‘He doesn’t know a thing either. It’s no good asking him.’

  ‘The knife?’ Ruso reminded him, wondering if the man was genuinely deranged or just an out-of-work actor.

  The cook looked at the knife as if it had just appeared in his hand, turned it over to inspect it, then wiped it on his apron and put it back down on the table beside the sharpening-stone. ‘We don’t know anything. We were getting ready for a dinner. We didn’t have time to hang around gawping. Try asking the cleaning girls.’

  ‘When the visitor arrived this afternoon, someone gave him a drink.’

  ‘That one with all the children – Mistress Cassiana. Not us.’

  Ruso frowned. ‘She must have got the crockery from here. Where is it now?’

  The cook gestured to the kitchen-boy, who stepped forward and pulled a stool out from beneath the table. He clambered on to it and reached up to a shelf that housed a set of slender glasses and a matching jug wisely stored out of harm’s way. He retrieved the jug and one glass.

  ‘You’ve washed them?’ asked Ruso.

  ‘Straight away,’ said the cook. ‘The man dropped dead. I’m not letting somebody else drink out of that glass without washing it first. If they dropped dead too it’d be my fault, wouldn’t it?’

  Ruso turned to the kitchen-boy. ‘I suppose you washed the jug as well?’

  His pessimism was justified. Apparently keeping the crockery clean was all part of maintaining standards in the modern kitchen.

  Ruso examined the glass and the jug. He sniffed them. He ran his forefinger along the smooth inner surfaces, peered at the finger and then gave it a tentative lick.

  ‘Clean?’ demanded the cook, as if he were daring Ruso to say otherwise.

  ‘Pristine,’ agreed Ruso, unhappily. His household’s cavalier attitude towards evidence was not going to look good. ‘What was in it?’

  Apparently the visitor had wanted nothing but water. The boy had been despatched to the well to fetch a cool supply, but he had not seen the visitor. Mistress Cassiana had taken it to the hall herself.

  ‘So there must have been a time when she was waiting here for the water and Severus was alone?’

  The cook looked as if this was a trick question. ‘I don’t know. I’ve got enough to cope with in here, without worrying about everybody else. It’s not my fault.’

  ‘I didn’t say it was,’ said Ruso, wondering how many times he had heard that phrase since he arrived home. He put the glassware back on the shelf and helped himself to some sort of pastry from a baking-tray on the table. ‘Sorry about the mix-up over dinner. We’ll try not to have any more visitors drop dead. In the meantime, what else is there to eat?’

  The cook looked around at the barren surfaces of the modern tidy kitchen. Then he lifted the lid off a clay pot. ‘Testicle?’

  *

  ‘I hope he came cheap?’ inquired Ruso, meeting Lucius in the corridor outside the kitchen. ‘What happened to what’s-her-name?’

  ‘Part exchange,’ explained Lucius. ‘What’s-her-name went to the contractor as payment for the paint job in the dining room. Don’t look at me like that, Gaius. She was quite happy to go.’

  ‘I’d rather have what’s-her-name in the kitchen than a bunch of cupids dancing round the walls of the dining room. Can’t we sell him and get somebody more suitable?’

  Lucius sighed. ‘Gaius, when was the last time you bought a cook? Have you any idea how much a good one costs?’

  ‘No,’ conceded Ruso, who had only discovered what Tilla’s cooking was really like when it was too late to get rid of her.

  ‘He’s perfectly all right if you don’t upset him,’ said Lucius. ‘You haven’t been in there accusing him of poisoning Severus, have you?’

  ‘No,’ said Ruso. ‘And now I’m going to go round not accusing everybody else. Including you. Did you see or hear anything of Severus between the time he arrived and the time he was taken ill?’

  ‘I was busy in the winery. I didn’t even know he was here. Cass dealt with him.’

  ‘I’ll talk to her later.’ Cassiana had gone to fetch the children from one of the neighbours. ‘In the meantime we need to get all the servants except the kitchen staff and the stable lad lined up, and I’ll interview them in the study one by one.’

  ‘You mean I need to get them lined up so you can interview them?’

  It was exactly what Ruso had meant, but only now did he realize how it sounded. He said, ‘This sort of thing seems to be part of my job over in Britannia.’

  ‘Poisoning people?’

  ‘Investigating unexplained deaths.’

  ‘If you’d listened to me in the first place, nobody would be investigating anything.’

  ‘What would have happened if Severus’ own doctor discovered he was poisoned and I’d said he wasn’t?’

  Whatever Lucius might have said in response was lost below a clatter of footsteps along the hallway and Arria’s cry of ‘Oh, Gaius, this is dreadful!’

  ‘We’ll sort it out,’ he promised. ‘We just need to stay calm and –’

  ‘Oh, never mind that! I mean, nobody’s been to tell Lollia we’ve cancelled dinner, and she’ll be getting dressed!’

  26

  Lollia Saturnina’s establishment was a model of neatness. The drying amphorae were laid out in military ranks to catch the late-afternoon sun. The fuel was in stacks of uniform height. Vegetables were standing to attention in their beds, and beyond them, past a row of freshly painted outbuildings, a slave was stationed by the entrance of a kiln that towered above two blackened fire-holes. She was busy emptying a trolley of wide-shouldered amphorae, heaving them up to a man whose voice boomed around the hollow oven in which he was stacking them ready for firing.

  Ruso approached the woman and indicated the house on the far side of the yard. ‘Do you know if your mistress is in?’

  ‘No,’ said the woman, wiping her fingers on her worn brown tunic. ‘I’m here.’

  Ruso swallowed. ‘You’re Lollia Saturnina?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He had not made a good start. Ruso took in the ancient tunic, the battered sandals, the hair tied back with a simple braid. She was wearing neither jewellery nor make-up, but neither did she need them. To his consternation, beneath the pale smears of dried clay was a very attractive woman.

  The woman leaned forward, called, ‘Just a minute!’ into the entrance of the kiln and was rewarded with an echoing ‘Right-oh, mistress!’

  ‘Perhaps,’ she prompted, moving away from the entrance, ‘when you’ve finished staring, you could tell me who you are and why you’re here.’

 
; ‘Ruso,’ he explained. ‘I live next door.’

  ‘Ah, Gaius Petreius, the famous medic! Your stepmother’s very proud of you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Don’t worry, she did warn me.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘That women make you nervous. But apparently you’re a nice chap underneath. So could we get underneath fairly soon, do you think? I’m no good at social chit-chat either, and I need to get this finished and clean up.’

  Ruso cleared his throat. ‘Do you need a hand?’

  ‘No, I do this all the time.’

  ‘I just wasn’t expecting you to be so …’

  ‘Scruffy? Don’t worry, I will dress up for dinner.’

  Ruso bit back the honest but inappropriate ‘attractive’ and substituted ‘forthright’.

  She smiled. The gap between her front teeth only added to her charm. He wondered why nobody had told him and then remembered that Arria had tried: he just hadn’t believed her.

  ‘Now, what did you want to say to me?’

  Ruso had practised various ways of describing the problem on the walk through the olive grove that adjoined Lollia’s property. All explanations of the afternoon’s events sounded either evasive or callous. In the end he settled for: ‘Arria’s sorry, but we can’t do dinner tonight because a man who came to see us this afternoon died in my study.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  It was not clear whether she was expressing regret about the death or the dinner.

  ‘He wasn’t a patient,’ Ruso added, then wished he hadn’t. ‘Not that that matters, of course.’

  ‘No. Who was it?’

  He explained.

  Lollia said, ‘Poor Claudia.’

  ‘Poor Claudia,’ he echoed, silently recalling the bitch has poisoned me.

  There was an awkward pause, then Lollia bent to heave up the next amphora.

  ‘I expect Arria will want to rearrange,’ he said.

  The gap-toothed smile appeared again. ‘I expect so.’

  ‘You might as well know,’ he said, ‘I think he was poisoned. But it wasn’t us who did it.’