As if to illustrate my gloomy thoughts the drizzling rain turned suddenly to a determined shower. There was a little temple to the local river god nearby: not a large place, but it had a portico, and I hurried – together with the turnip-seller and a half a dozen other passers-by – under the shelter of its columns. I huddled up against a plinth and tried to think.
There was one obvious strategy to try, except that I sadly lacked the wherewithal. The purse that I carried at my belt, although containing all the money I possessed, was woefully light. My few miserable silver coins might have been enough to purchase information from a tavern-keeper, or buy a few extra moments with Marcus from a willing guard (which was why I had taken the precaution of bringing them) but I would need a good deal more than that for any serious attempt at bribery. Official doors were closed behind me now, and it would take a very wealthy man to prise them open even a crack.
But I had to do something for my patron if I could. The charge of murdering Praxus had been bad enough, but this new twist was more serious again. Suspected of a plot against the state! I could not, for the moment, see how Praxus’s death could be conceived of in this way, but I am not an expert in the law. Perhaps because his new appointment was an Imperial one, or simply because he was commander of the local force? Balbus would presumably know: not only was he schooled in civil law, but he must be familiar with military law as well – after all he had a brother who was a senior officer in Gaul and a candidate for senatorial rank in Rome. So there must be some legal foundation for the charge, or Balbus would never have permitted it. The cost of failure was too terrible – Marcus was an influential man.
If the case held, on the other hand, there were great rewards. A plot against the state was effectively three crimes at once, and any informant bringing a successful case was entitled to a share of the guilty party’s estate. I could see why Balbus would resort to it – or Mellitus, or anybody else.
As well as straightforward treachery, there was maiestas – offence against the Emperor’s majesty – one of the most effective tools for bringing any senior figure down. Also, since Commodus had officially declared himself a god, there was sacrilege as well. Any one of those crimes might carry the penalty of death, even for a man of high birth like my patron – or at the very least exile to a waterless island, which often came to the same thing. And our beloved Emperor was not noted for his clemency, especially towards those whom he suspected of plots against himself.
And it was all my fault. Why, oh why, had I opened my big mouth? If it had not been for my ‘perceptive observations’ the death of Praxus would surely have passed as an unhappy accident. Unfortunate for Marcus, as the host – acutely politically embarrassing – but nothing like as dangerous as what had happened now. And for the life of me I could not see how anyone but Marcus had had an opportunity to kill Praxus at the feast.
I was so wrapped in my own thoughts that I paid scant attention to the cloaked figure on the pavement opposite, not even when he stepped down from the kerb and headed towards our little group huddling underneath the portico. There was really no room for anybody else but still he came, picking his way fastidiously across the paving of the road, where the rain was already splashing up around his hems, and elbowed his way into what little space there was. There was a general murmuring but that was a military cloak and no one was disposed to make a fuss. I too kept my head down and shuffled up a bit, and it was not until he dropped his hood that I looked up in earnest and his eyes met mine.
It was the little secretary I had seen earlier.
I half opened my mouth to speak to him, but before I could utter a word he gaped at me, looked away, pulled his cloak-hood up again and was hastening away into the rain with the tic in his face twitching like a newly landed fish.
After a startled moment, I went after him. He was so keen to get away that I was sure he knew something he didn’t want to tell. He was a younger man than I was, and he was hurrying, so he had reached the Apollo fountain outside the fish market before I managed to catch up with him.
‘Officer!’ I panted, as I reached his side. He did not deserve the title, but a little courtesy never went amiss.
He stopped. I thought for a moment he would hurry off again, but he simply stood there in the rain and refused to meet my eyes. ‘What do you want? Why are you following me about?’ he said.
I did not manage an answer straight away – I was out of breath – but he scarcely gave me time in any case before he was saying with a righteous air, ‘If it is about your patron, there is nothing I can do. I told you what the garrison commander said.’
I looked at him. It was a risk, of course, and might easily result in my own arrest, but I had noticed his manner at the garrison. This was a nervous and unhappy man. I decided it was worth a try. I moved closer to him, slipped my hand beneath my toga-folds, and took out a denarius from my purse.
‘Nothing?’ I held up the coin.
He looked at it contemptuously – at it, I noticed, not at me. ‘Nothing.’
I added a second coin to the first. ‘Not even a message to His Excellence?’ I said. Another risk. It is never a good idea to increase a bribe – it only makes the price go up again – and even if it succeeded this time there might be other men to pay.
‘Don’t you understand plain Latin, citizen? There’s nothing I can do. Now, will you go away? I have an official errand to complete, and interfering with it is an offence against the law.’
But he was weakening. I could see it in his face.
‘Perhaps there is just one thing I could say . . .’ He tried to keep his face expressionless, but his eyes were on the coins.
I hesitated. This could be a trap. ‘And that is?’ I took out another coin and placed it, with the others, on the side of the water trough as if in sacrifice towards the god. Such offerings are not entirely unknown, and that way it was not officially a bribe. The secretary looked from me to them, balanced invitingly on the wide stone edge, and ran his tongue around his lips. He took a step towards me, and as he did so the corner of his cloak sent one of the coins rolling in the trough.
That did it. He stooped and snatched the others in his hand. ‘Go away,’ he hissed. ‘Right away if you know what’s good for you.’ He looked at me, his little sly eyes bright. ‘Now, that’s all I’ve got to say. It’s dangerous for me to talk to you. Leave me alone before I call for help, and have you taken into custody.’ And with that, he turned and trotted off in the direction of the centre of the town.
And there was nothing for it but to let him go! Three precious denarii wasted and I had got myself soaked through to no avail. I dared not even fish into the fountain for the missing coin. The rain had eased and people were coming back into the street. Bribery was clearly not among my skills. Junio would have made a better job of it.
Junio! I must go to him. He must be wondering where I was by this time, or even whether – with Marcus under lock and key – I had succeeded in getting myself arrested too. Well, I would go and find him at the workshop and then we would go home and consider what to do. I pulled up my toga-folds to form a hood, turned towards the centre of the town, and hurried on, past the forum and basilica, and out of the north gate on the farther side.
My little shop was there, beyond the walls, in the straggling suburb which had grown up on the marshy river margins to the north-west of the colonia in the last hundred years: a swarming assortment of muddy narrow lanes lined with ramshackle buildings, many let out as poky rooms and workshops such as mine. In fact mine was more tumbledown than most, since rioters had recently set fire to it and attempted to burn the building down. Fortunately my expensive contribution to the fire watch had brought buckets and beaters quickly to the scene, and most of the lower floor was saved, though it was a different matter in the upper room which had once been my sleeping quarters. The beams up there were badly charred, the roof had fallen in, and the access ladder had entirely gone. It was almost impossible to live there now, even without the imm
inent danger of collapse: that was one reason why my wife and I had been so glad to have the roundhouse to rebuild, and why we’d moved out of town.
None of the damage to the shop had made any difference to the rent, of course, despite my representations to the landlord. He was a wealthy man, who’d had several of these tenements thrown up; a city magistrate, so there was no point in taking him to court. A contract was a contract, he declared: I had agreed to rent ‘from ground to sky’ – and that was exactly what I had possession of, even if the ‘sky’ began a little closer now. Nor would he make any repairs, although he did agree that I could have some done. Entirely at my own expense, naturally.
I was thinking rather bitterly about all this as I turned into the lane where the workshop stood, sandwiched between a candle-maker’s and a tannery. It was a narrow thoroughfare, always full – as now – of slaves and tradespeople: men with donkeys, boys bent double under piles of smelly skins, and blowzy women touting hot greasy pies from trays. The gutters streamed with mud and all the effluvium of trade. Not an area where citizens in togas often came – I usually wore a humble tunic here myself. Already I was attracting curious stares.
I ignored them and was walking swiftly to my door when suddenly I saw a sight which stopped me dead. Someone was standing in the entrance to the shop, frowning down at my stockpiled heaps of marble chips and stones. It wasn’t Junio. It was a stocky figure in military dress.
Bullface. I would have recognised that profile anywhere.
Almost without conscious thought I turned on my heel and began to walk even more swiftly back the way I’d come. I managed (with an effort) to control myself and neither looked back nor broke into a run, although the temptation to do both was very strong. I expected at every instant to hear a cry or the clanking of armour in pursuit, but I reached the end of the lane without incident.
Even then I did not pause, but turned into an even narrower alleyway, another and then another, till I reached an area I did not know, a world away from the familiar streets of the colonia or from the fine tombs along the Londinium road.
I was in a passage between two disused shops, which was used as little more than a refuse heap. The meaner streets of town are full of middens of this kind, the waste allowed to rot and wash away, or sometimes collected by the enterprising poor to sell as fertiliser on the great estates. No one had collected in this alleyway for years.
The winter sun had not penetrated here and the ground was wet and slippery with frost. I was sure that Bullface would not come looking for me here. But I was taking no chances. I slithered over noisome mounds of rotting kitchen waste – bones, chicken-heads, cabbage-stalks and worse – and only then did I lean against the wall to catch my breath and try to make some sense of what I’d seen.
What was Bullface doing at my premises? It was no social visit, that was clear. Yet I had come more or less directly from the garrison and no one had attempted to detain me there, so there was presumably no official warrant out yet for my arrest. But there was something about the presence of Praxus’s bodyguard which alarmed me very much – more than an ordinary member of the town watch would have done.
I recalled, with a cold tingle on my neck, what that slave-girl of Julia’s had overheard. Balbus had wanted me arrested yesterday, but had lacked official backing at the time. Suppose that, instead of waiting for the proper authority, he had bribed the guard to go ahead and haul me in for private questioning, with the intention of bringing public charges later on?
With Marcus gone, Balbus was the senior magistrate in the area, and the courts would blink an eye at such unauthorised arrest. Though I was a citizen, and therefore technically protected from such things, it was unlikely that my rank was going to help me now. It did not take much imagination to see what Balbus hoped to gain. A witnessed statement by a citizen who was Marcus’s erstwhile friend would seal the case, with no troublesome reprisals for the arresting magistrate. And if I could not be forced to sign such a statement of my own accord, as the price of my freedom and release, I could probably be coerced into doing so by force. Twenty-four hours of the kind of questioning I would be subjected to and even a strong man will swear to anything, I had no illusions about that. No doubt all this had been tacitly agreed while I was twiddling my thumbs outside the jail.
I sent up a mental apology to my secretarial friend. ‘Get right away!’ he’d said. Perhaps he had known the guard were after me, and had attempted to warn me that something was afoot.
The more I thought about it, the more likely this explanation seemed. If the murder of Praxus could somehow be interpreted as a plot against the state and Marcus was proved guilty of the crime, there would be a senior position to be filled, and Balbus himself would be a candidate – especially with part of the traitor’s fortune in his purse. The Emperor rewards loyal vigilance. Balbus would bear watching if I escaped from this.
And if I were arrested but did not co-operate? The idea sent shivers down my spine. Who, that mattered in the town, would notice the absence of an ageing tradesman like myself? It would simply be assumed I’d run away, especially now my patron was in jail, and my absence would lend credence to his guilt.
Well, if that was Balbus’s idea, I thought grimly, he would have to catch me first.
I only hoped Junio was safe. It was possible that they were already holding him prisoner at the workshop. That was a disturbing thought. For a moment I was almost tempted to go back, but I forced myself to stay still and let reason rule my head. Junio was relatively safe as long as I was free – the only point in holding him would be to threaten me. My best course was to get myself away, and make my plans when I was safe. But I was not safe here. Perhaps Bullface wouldn’t find me, here outside the walls, but there were other threats.
This area of neglected back lanes on the fringe of town is quite notorious. There are reasons why white-robers don’t venture there alone, at least not without the protection of a slave. Could I try to make a dash for it, and get back to the road? I edged to the end of the alleyway and peered out. An old man with a load of firewood on his back paused to give me a peculiar look.
I was still contemplating what to do, when a hand fell on my shoulder from behind.
VIII
‘Hush, master!’ Junio’s voice was in my ear. ‘Don’t cry out like that. You will alert them that we’re here. There are people trying to arrest you. You’ve seen that there’s a guard outside the shop?’
I was so weak with relief that I snapped at him. ‘Of course I did. And they will have no need of an arrest if you contrive to frighten me to death!’ As he tugged me back into the passageway, I collected my thoughts sufficiently to ask, ‘How did you know I was here? And how did you get here, in any case?’
‘There’s another entrance to this lane, down by the dyer’s shop, and this alley runs right down to the docks. I come this way for water – if you don’t need it clean. It saves queuing at the public fountains and good water is a waste when you only want it to mix mortar with. And I’ve got your fish-heads down here, once or twice, when there were none going cheap at the fish market.’
I nodded. I sometimes use fish-heads to boil up into glue. I need it to stick small mosaics on to backing cloth, so they can be laid as one single piece and then soaked off again. It is a technique which saves a huge amount of time – the fish-head glue soaks off quite readily – though I do not advertise the fact among my customers, who are often delighted by my speed of work.
Junio was anxious to show me how much he knew. ‘There is a quick way through as well – this lane links up with a pathway further on, not towards the colonia and the docks, but upstream of that, the uncommercial part. I’ll take you that way now. It isn’t very pleasant, I’m afraid, but you had better not go back towards the town.’
The uncommercial part. I knew the area he meant. Not the main river with its bustling quays, but the turgid half-silted channel that wound upstream of the dock, its murky waters full of eels and makeshift water craft.
There had been a sort of suburb there some time ago, built up over time as this loop of the river slowly silted up, but that had been mostly abandoned a few years ago after a period when the Sabrina burst its banks each spring and flooded the whole area waist-high. Recently, I was aware, a few hardier souls had crept back to the waterfront again and set up new homes and businesses among the remnants of the old.
I knew the place by reputation only. An area of brothels, taverns and shacks, where shadowy men eked out a living on the fringes of the river-trade and often on the fringes of the law, while those who wished to become invisible flitted between the ruins like living ghosts. People spoke of the ‘Ghosts of Glevum’ with a laugh, touching an amulet to dispel bad luck. It didn’t seem a laughing matter now.
Not a place I care to visit, given half a choice. ‘I suppose we must?’ I said unwillingly. But I was already following Junio. No fancy Roman drains or fine pavements here – just a muddy passageway between high walls – but pretty soon we found the path he’d spoken of. I didn’t like the look of it at all. It wound remorselessly away from the civilisation of the town down to a shady reach of swampy ground, where broken walls were interspersed with encroaching clumps of marsh-grass and reeds. Even the path itself seemed treacherous, threatening to sink at every step.
I felt like a condemned man forced at sword-point out towards the beasts – urged into certain danger by a greater threat. Suddenly it seemed that nowhere was safe, though I reminded myself that I was lucky to be here, especially with Junio at my side.
‘I’m glad you managed to escape that guard,’ I said.
Junio threw me a sardonic glance over his shoulder. ‘There wasn’t one guard, master. There were three.’ He led me over another pile of bones and building waste. ‘I found them at the house when I arrived. They asked for you, and I told them you had business in the town – I said I thought you were intending to visit the barber’s shop after you’d seen Marcus at the garrison, and two of them set off to find you straight away.’
The Ghosts of Glevum Page 7