By now the close family were waiting to gather the ashes; it was time for other mourners to depart. Before we left, I forced myself to approach Sosia Camillina's bereaved papa.
"Publius Camillus Meto."
It was the first time I had seen him since that day with Pertinax. He was a man you forget: the smooth oval face that carried so little expression, the remote gaze with a hint of justified contempt. This was almost the only occasion, too, when I saw him with his brother. Publius seemed older with that bald head, but today it was covered while he officiated here and, as he turned to avoid me, I noticed a handsome, decisive cast to his profile which my man Decimus lacked. When he moved off he left a faint haze of myrrh, and he wore a gold intaglio ring with a substantial emerald, slight touches of bachelor vanity which I had missed before. Noticing these things, which were so unimportant, added to my awkwardness.
"Sir, I expect this is the last thing you want to hear from me I could see from his expression that I was right' Sir, I promise you as I promise her -I will find out who killed your child. Whatever it costs and however long it takes."
He stared at me as though he had forgotten how to speak. Julia Justa, his brother's wife, briefly touched my arm. She flashed an irritated glance at me, but I stood my ground. Publius was a man whose grief caught him smiling gently, but the gentleness only hid a hardness I had never seen before.
"You have done quite enough for my daughter!" he exclaimed. Take yourself off! Leave us all alone!" His clipped voice rose nearly to a shout.
It jarred. Well, the star of the morning had dimmed for us both and here was I, battering him. He knew no one else to blame; the man blamed me.
Yet that was not the reason. It jarred because Publius Camillus Meto looked like someone whom grief steers into rigid self66 control; like a man who would break, but not yet; break, but not in public; not today, not here. He had previously been so persuasive this loss had shaken him.
I mourned his vibrant child as honestly as he. For her sake I ached for him. For her sake I addressed him with an open heart.
"Sir, we share"
"We share nothing, Falco!" He strode away.
I watched the senator's pale wife, who had taken it on herself to guide her husband's brother through this appalling day, lead him towards the pyre. Servants were scooping up the smaller children. Family slaves huddled together. Important men, about to leave, clasped the senator's hand and followed his brother with sombre eyes.
I knew I could make contact with the senator. With his younger brother Publius I was grasping air, but Decimus and I could always talk. I waited.
The two brothers had shared Sosia's life; they were sharing her departure. Decimus was presiding now. Publius would only stare at those threads of bone on the pyre. While Sosia's father stood apart, alone, it was her uncle who prepared to pour the wine to douse the embers. On this cue, mourners were moving off. Decimus paused in his task, waiting for privacy.
In the manner of a man at a funeral going through the polite motions of permitting strangers to present condolences, Decimus walked over to Petronius Longus decent officialdom. Three paces from us, the senator spoke in a heavy voice. His weariness clove to mine.
"Watch captain, thank you for coming. Didius Falco! Tell me if you are willing to go on with the case?" No fuss. No reference to me severing our contract. No escape.
I answered with real bitterness.
"I'll go on! The magistrate's team have run into the ground. There was nothing in the warehouses. Nobody saw the man, nothing to identify his pen. But the silver pigs will lead us to him in the end."
"What will you do?" the senator asked, frowning.
I sensed Petronius shift his weight. We had not discussed it. Until that moment I had been unsure. She was gone now. My mind cleared. There was an obvious course. And there was nothing for me in Rome. No place, no pleasure, no peace.
"Sir, Rome's too big. But our thread starts in one small community in a province under strict army control. Hiding knots out there must be much more difficult. We have been fools. I should have gone before."
Petro, who had hated the place so dismally, could no longer keep quiet. "Oh Marcus! Dear gods"
"Britain," I confirmed.
Britain in winter. It was already October; I would be lucky to get there before the sea passages closed. Britain in winter. I had been there, so I knew how bad it was. The fine mist that tangles sticky as fish glue in your hair; the cold that leaps straight into your shoulders and knees; the sea fogs and hill blizzards; the dreadful dark months when dawn and evening seem hardly separate.
It did not matter. None of that mattered to me. The more uncivilized the better. Nothing mattered any more.
PART II
BRITAIN
Winter, AD 70-71
XX
If you ever want to go there, I advise you not to bother.
If you simply cannot avoid it, you will find the province of Britain out beyond civilization in the realms of the North Wind. If your maps king has grown ragged at the edges you will have lost it, in which case so much the better is all I can say. Getting away from Britain must be the reason why old Boreas keeps blowing his fat cheeks out, tearing off south.
My cover ran that Camillus Verus had despatched me to bring home his daughter Helena Justina from the visit to her aunt. Actually he appeared to be more fond of his youngest sister, the British aunt. When we spoke, he had murmured, "Falco, escort my daughter if she agrees, but I leave you to decide the details with Helena herself."
From the way he said it, I deduced the young woman had a mind of her own. He sounded so uncertain I asked him bluntly, "Will she disregard your advice? Is your daughter a difficult customer?"
"She has had an unhappy marriage!" her father exclaimed defensively.
"I'm sorry to hear it, sir." I was too wrapped up in my own grief for Sosia to want to involve myself in other people's problems, but perhaps personal misery made me more compassionate.
"The divorce was for the best," he said briefly, making it plain that his noble daughter's private life was not for discussion with the likes of me.
I had made a mistake; he was fond of Helena, but looked honestly afraid of her though even in those days, before I achieved it myself, I thought fathering a girl might make any man crack. From the moment the leering midwives place that crinkled red scrap between your hands and demand that you pronounce a name for it, a lifetime of panic drops on you like a blight…
I had coped with headstrong females before. I assumed that a few firm words from me would bring this Helena under control.
I went to Britain overland. Although I hated myself, I could never send anyone the whole distance by sea, between the Pillars of Hercules and out into the wild Atlantic round Lusitania and Tarraconensian Spain. Crossing direct from Gaul is bad enough.
Everything had been done to smooth my outward journey: abundant cash and a special pass. I threw away the money on cloak pins and nutmeg custard. The pass carried a signature so like the Emperor's it caused sleepy dogs in border posts to sit up publicly and beg. My main worry was losing my apartment, but it turned out that during this high-flown mission I could charge a retainer. The senator's smart Greek accountant would organize things with Smaractus – a confrontation I was sorry to miss.
My mother sniffily informed me that if she had known I was going back, she would have kept the tray I brought her as a present from Britain the first time I was there. This item had been carved of a soapy grey shale from the mid-south coast. Apparently the stuff needs constant oiling. I never knew that, so I never told her and the object had disintegrated. Ma thought I ought to find the peddler and demand my money back.
Petronius lent me a pair of socks from his old British gear. He never throws anything away. I had chucked mine down a well in Gaul. If I had known about this unhappy trip, I might have jumped down after them.
On the way there was a lot of time for thought.
But thinking took me no further. Pl
enty of people could want to depose Vespasian. Changing Emperors had been fashionable for the past two years. After Nero's numbing concerts finally lost their appeal for the tone-deaf toffs in the orchestra stalls, he stabbed himself and we suffered a free-for-all. First Galba, a doddering old autocrat from Spain. Next Otho, who had been Nero's ponce and so judged himself Nero's legitimate heir. After him, Vitellius, a bullying glutton who drank himself into and out of the job with a certain ironclad style, and then had a recipe for mushy peas named after him in return.
All that in twelve months. It was getting to seem that anyone with half an education and a winning smile could persuade the Empire that purple was just his colour. Then, with Rome vandalized and battered, up cropped this canny old general
Vespasian, who possessed one great advantage in that no one knew much about him for better or worse, and a priceless confederate in his son Titus, who gripped the chance of political glory like a terrier shaking a rat… My man Decimus Camillas Verus believed anyone opposing Vespasian must wait until Titus came home from Judaea. Vespasian himself had been quelling a Jewish rebellion when he scrambled into power. He returned to Rome as Emperor, leaving Titus to complete that popular job with his usual panache. Edging out Vespasian would merely allow his brilliant elder son to inherit the Empire early. His younger son Domitian was a lightweight, but Vespasian and Titus must be swept off their perch together or any conspiracy against them was destined to fail. This meant I had just as long to solve the mystery as it took Titus to capture Jerusalem though from what Festus had told me before he threw away his life at Bethel, Titus would rattle through Jerusalem in two shakes of a centaur's tail. (Titus had commanded the Fifteenth Legion, in which my brother served.)
So there we were. Anyone with the rank and the clout who fancied his own chance as Emperor could be trying to batter the new dynasty out of its olive tree. There were six hundred men in the senate. It could be any one of them.
I did not believe it was Camillus Verus. Was that because I knew him? As my client, the poor duffer seemed more human than the rest (though I had been caught like that before). Even if he was sound, that left five hundred and ninety nine.
It was someone who knew Britain. Or knew someone else who did. A quarter of a century had passed since Rome invaded the province (and incidentally first made Vespasian's name). Since then countless brave souls had tramped north for their tour of duty, many of them men with shiny reputations who might be feeling ambitious now. Titus himself had been typical. I remembered him there, the young military tribune who commanded the reinforcements brought over from the Rhine to reconstruct the province after the Revolt. Britain provided a social fitness test. No one liked the place, but no good Roman family nowadays was without a son or a nephew who had done his chilly stint in the bogs at the back of the world. I could be looking for any one of them.
It could be someone who had served in northern Gaul.
It could be someone in the British Channel fleet.
It could be anybody who owned any kind of ship. One of the merchants who ferried British grain to the military bases on the
Rhine. An importer of hides or hunting dogs into Italy. An exporter of pottery and wine. Or, knowing merchants, a whole sticky consortium.
It could be the British provincial governor.
It could be his wife.
It could be the man I was travelling to meet, Gaius Flavius Hilaris, my senator's brother-in-law, who was the procurator in charge of finance now after choosing to live in Britain for the past twenty years a choice that was so eccentric it implied Hilaris must be running away from something (unless he was completely off his head…).
By the time I reached the Britannic Ocean, I had thought through so many wild schemes I felt dizzy. I stood on the cliffs at the far rim of Gaul, watching the white horses scud over that churning water and felt worse. I set the problem to one side while I concentrated on trying not to be seasick as the boat I was taking attempted to put out across the Strait. Don't know why I bothered trying, I always am.
It took us five tries to clear the harbour at Gesoriacum, and by the time we made open water I only wanted to turn back.
XXI
I was aiming west so my passport booked me east. After seven years in the army that came as no surprise.
I had planned a gentle trip, with a few days on my own in Londinium to acclimatize myself. The harbour master at Gesoriacum must have signalled across to the depot at Dubris the minute he spotted me. Londinium knew I was coming before I left Gaul. On the quay at Rutupiae a special envoy was tapping his fur-stuffed boot, ready to whisk me out of trouble the minute I fell off the boat.
The procurator's envoy was a decurion who had jumped at special duties in the pompous way such heroes always do. He introduced himself, but he was a lard-faced, lank-haired, unfriendly beggar whose name I eagerly forgot. His legion was the Twentieth Valeria, dull worthies who had covered themselves with glory defeating Queen Boudicca in the Revolt. Now their HQ faced the mountains at Viroconium, ahead of the frontier, and the only useful detail I managed to squeeze out of him was that despite the efforts of succeeding governors, the frontier still lay in the same place: the old diagonal boundary road from Isca to Lindum, beyond which most of the island still lay outside Roman control. I remembered that the silver mines were the wrong side of the line.
Nothing in Britain had substantially changed. Civilization simply topped the province like a film of wax on an apothecary's ointment pot easy enough to press your finger through. Vespasian was sending lawyers and academics to turn the tribesmen into democrats you could safely ask to dinner. The lawyers and academics would need to be good. Rutupiae bore all the marks of an Imperial entry port, but once we rode out down the supply road south of the River Tamesis, it was the old scene of smoky round huts clustered in poky square fields, surly cattle drifting under ominous skies, and a definite sense that you could travel for days over the downs and through the forests before you found an altar to any god whose name you recognized.
When I last saw Londonium it was a field of ash with an acrid smell, where the skulls of massacred commercial settlers were tumbling over one another like pebbles in a clogged and reddened stream. Now it was a new administrative capital. We rode in from the south. We found a spanking bridge, clean-cut wharves, warehouses and workshops, taverns and baths: not a stick more than ten years old. I caught smells both familiar and exotic, and heard six languages in the first ten minutes. We passed a bare, black site earmarked for the governor's palace; and another great space later where the Forum would be. Government buildings reared everywhere, one of which a busy finance complex with courtyard verandahs and sixty offices housed the procurator and his family.
The procurator's private suite had depressing British style: closed-in courtyards, cramped rooms, dark hall, dim corridors with an airless smell. White-faced, white-legged people existed here among sufficient Arretine dinnerware and Phoenician glass to make life bearable. There were wall paintings in ox blood and ochre, with borders of storks and vine leaves executed by a plasterer who might twenty years ago have seen a stork and a bunch of grapes. I arrived halfway through October and already there was a buffeting blast from the under floor heating as soon as I walked through the door.
Flavius Hilaris strode out from his study to greet me himself.
"Didius Falco? Welcome to Britain! How was your trip? You made good time! Come in and talk while I have your baggage taken up."
He was a winsome, vigorous man I had to admire since he had stuck it in government service for nearly thirty years. He had crisp brown hair cut to outline a neat head, and lean firm hands with straight-cut, clean fingernails. He wore a broad gold ring, the badge of the middle rank. As a republican I despised the rank, but from the start I thought the man himself was excellent. His mistake was that he did a thorough job and saw the funny side. People liked him, but to conventional judges these were not the signs of a "good mind'.
The room which the public works
officials had designated his private study was in fact used by Hilaris as an extra public office. As well as his own reading couch, shapeless with use, he kept a table with benches where meetings could be held. There were plenty of sconces, all blazing, for it was late. His secretaries had left him on his own, immersed in figure work and thought.
He poured me wine. Kind gesture, I thought, putting me at ease. Then with a shock I realized, maybe putting me off guard!
Our interview was conducted with exhausting thoroughness. Compared with this Hilaris, my client Camillus Verus was just a squashy plum. I had already deleted the procurator from my suspects list (too obvious), but he made a point of discussing the Emperor, to demonstrate where his sympathies lay.
"No better man for the Empire but this is new for Rome! Vespasian's father was a middle rank finance officer, yet now Vespasian's Emperor. My father was a finance officer and so am I!"
I warmed to him. "Not quite, sir. You are the leading civilian in a prestigious new province, with an Emperor who looks on you as a friend! No one but the governor carries more weight in Britain than you. Your father's highest position was as a third-grade tax collector, in a one-ox town in Dalmatia -" The only reason I knew this was because I had delved into his background before I came out. He realized that. He smiled. So did I. "And your father was an auctioneer he threw back at me. My father disappeared so long ago, not many people are aware of that.
"Possibly still is!" I admitted morosely.
He made no comment. A polite man, though one who had made sure before I came out to his province that he knew all about me:
"As for you, Falco, two years' army service, then five more as what the legions would call a scout the type of army agent native tribesmen hang as a spy"
"If they catch you!"
"Which they never did… So you were invalided out, recovered briskly perhaps so briskly it smacks of sharp practice then you took up your present work. My sources say you have a dozy reputation, though past clients speak well of you. Some of the women," he observed, looking down with a prim mouth, "have an odd look when they do!"
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