by Ruth Downie
“In a moment.” He bent to plant a kiss on a clean patch of hair before slaking his thirst with watered wine. Watching the babyminder applying a damp cloth to his protesting daughter’s face and hands, it occurred to him that he and Tilla had rather neglected their responsibilities as parents over the last couple of days.
“I’ll take her,” he offered, and the babyminder wiped away a last smear of mush before handing her over.
“We’re going for a walk,” he told Mara, lifting her and tucking one arm around a pleasingly dry small bottom. “Come and see where your pa was brought up.”
The cook watched them go with a fond smile. As they left, he overheard her say something to the babyminder about him being a devoted father. “Anybody would think that child was his own.”
The cook might have been less impressed if she had known that the tour would give him a convenient excuse to visit Verax in the bathhouse.
The first stop on the tour, though, was the vineyard. “This,” he told Mara, “is where your uncle Lucius grows the grapes to make our wine.” He pointed to a tiny cluster of green nodules. “What do you think? Will it be a good year?”
When Mara did not offer an opinion he said, “No, I don’t know how you tell either. Let’s find your aunt Flora.”
He tramped the length of the rows of vines, but there was no sign of Flora: only a couple of farm hands in rough brown tunics moving about in the dappled shade. One of them thought he had caught a glimpse of mistress Flora down in the olive grove. Meanwhile they politely referred a decision about pruning to Ruso, just as they would have to his brother. Lucius would have known the answer. As the slaves must be well aware, Ruso barely understood the question. He played along by asking them what they thought was best, and then agreed with them, leaving them to resume their work with everyone’s dignity intact.
“Your ma was a slave when I met her,” he told Mara. Not because she would understand, but because there were some things it was important not to forget. “You can never tell how things will turn out.”
There was no sign of Flora amidst the bright scatter of poppies that bloomed beneath the gnarled olive trees. Nor was she down in the shade of the woods. He was making his way up to the house when he heard the scream of a child in pain.
Pressing Mara against him, he raced back down the slope. “Who’s there? Where are you?”
A small nephew broke cover just ahead of him and fled into the trees. A second nephew staggered forward, clutching his face. Blood was dribbling out between his fingers. “My eye!” he howled. “My eye’s gone!”
Mara began to cry. Ruso crouched in front of the boy. “What happened?”
“My eye!”
“Let me see.”
Finally the wailing of “My eye!” subsided into frightened sobbing and the protective hand was lifted.
“Well done,” Ruso told him, relieved that Mara had stopped crying in his ear. “Now let’s have a look and see what’s going on.”
A small voice said, “Will he be all right?”
Ruso glanced up. The fugitive had returned and was standing white-faced, well out of reach.
“I didn’t mean it,” the boy continued. “He said, let’s throw stones. So I did.”
“Not at me, stupid!” wailed his brother. He shrank away as Ruso reached to wipe away the blood. “Will I die?”
“No,” Ruso told him, glancing at Mara and wishing he too could make everything better by shoving his thumb in his mouth. “We’ll go back to the house and I’ll clean you up and sew you back together like I do with the soldiers.”
“Will it hurt?”
He used his, “Not much,” reply: the one that was a compromise between telling the truth and not frightening the patient. “I’m an expert,” he added: something he would never have said to an adult. “You’re lucky I’m here.”
Leading his patient by the hand up the dusty path toward the house he said, “I was looking for your cousin Flora. You haven’t seen her, have you?”
From behind them the smaller nephew’s voice put in, “She said not to tell—” just as his injured brother said, “Flora went for a walk.”
“Where did she go?”
The younger child’s voice rose. “She said we mustn’t—”
“Shut up, you!” snapped his brother. “You’re in enough trouble.” Then, to Ruso, “She’s gone for a long walk. She said we couldn’t come and we don’t know where she went.”
Two stitches, a cup of milk and several honey cakes later, it was apparent that the eye was in no danger. It was also apparent that the boys genuinely didn’t know where Flora had gone. Ruso had a horrible suspicion that she might have headed back to Sabinus’s estate, believing Verax still to be chained up over there. Well, this time she would have to manage without him. He couldn’t go to retrieve her until Tilla returned from town with the family’s one vehicle.
Meanwhile, though, there was someone else here who was eager to know the truth about the murder of Titus. Ruso left the boys to be fussed over by the kitchen staff while he and Mara resumed their interrupted tour of the estate.
“We’ll go and look at the baths,” he told Mara, heading down the corridor that led to the side door of the house. “Don’t expect anything very grand,” he warned her, pointing across the courtyard. “See that building over there with the render falling off and the weeds growing round the furnace? That’s it. And the key is—” He stopped. The rusty nail banged into the door frame was empty.
For a moment he feared that his stepmother had ordered someone to open up the baths despite his unlikely invention of the collapsing floor. That thought was pushed aside by the more alarming possibility that Flora had gone in there for some reason, found her lover and run away with him. But a firm shove on the bathhouse door confirmed that it was still safely locked. A passing slave suggested he might ask the stable lad.
As they approached the stables, an irregular series of thunks and clatters told him someone was chopping wood. They rounded the corner to see the stable lad swing the axe down. The halves of the log skittered away in opposite directions. “I do the baths now, master,” the lad explained, pausing to wipe the sweat from his forehead. “The key should be in the house. On the nail by the side door.”
“But it isn’t,” Ruso repeated, understanding now that the lad was building up wood for the furnace. The Petreius household was not one where slaves could be kept for one task only and idle away the hours in between.
“Mistress Arria’s probably taken it,” suggested the lad. “Did you want to inspect the floor, master? I could ask her for the key and come with you.”
“Not yet,” Ruso assured him. “I’m just taking my daughter on a tour of the farm. Oh, and Tilla will be home later with the cart.”
He pretended not to notice the look of alarm when the lad realized who would be driving. The beauty of having well-trained slaves was that no matter how bizarre they might find your behaviour, they never questioned it. At least, not to your face.
Ruso carried Mara into the shade of the open barn where the family carriage had once been kept. He peered up into the gloom of the cobwebbed rafters and placed a wooden box under the third beam along. Then he surveyed the dried mud floor in a vain search for somewhere clean to put the baby down. How did women manage this sort of thing? He could hardly ask the stable lad, and it seemed ridiculous to send for the babyminder. So instead he adjusted his grip, said “Hold tight!” and stepped up onto the box. Reaching above his head, he ran one hand along the dusty beam. To his delight his fingers met the rough surface of a complicated metal object.
The stable lad’s eyes widened as Ruso stepped down and held out what he had found. Even with the rust and the cobwebs, it was recognizably a key to the bathhouse.
“Been up there for years,” Ruso explained, proud of having proved some point he could not quite define.
The key turned with impressive ease, and Ruso pushed the door shut behind him. Empty benches stretched away into the
gloom. A lone wooden bath-sandal lay in the corner and the shelves held a pile of limp-looking towels and a jumble of oil flasks and scrapers. Even on a warm day, everything smelt of damp. “This is the changing room,” he told Mara, not quite sure why he was whispering.
He pushed open the next door and carried her further in, his footsteps echoing around the painted walls of what would have been the warm room if the furnace had been lit. He dabbled a couple of fingers in the cool water of the pool, sending ripples that reflected the window-light onto the painted ceiling. “There’s a man in here somewhere,” he whispered to Mara. “We’ve got some good news for him. Where do you think he is?”
The answer came in a faint snore from beyond the next door. Ruso grinned at Mara, who smiled back, displaying her latest new tooth. “Shall we go and wake him up?” He stepped up onto the stone sill, pushed the door open, and stopped dead.
For a moment he could make no sense of it. There was the naked form of Verax, revealed by the greenish light from the thick glass windows above. He was asleep face down on the wide wooden bench, and there were too many legs. Then there was sudden movement, and at the other end of the naked tangle Ruso found himself staring into the horrified face of his youngest sister.
“Aah!” The cry echoed around the walls as Mara smacked his arm and bounced with excitement.
“Wake up!” Flora slapped her man on the back. “Wake up!”
Verax mumbled something and snuggled deeper.
Flora’s voice rose to a shriek with, “Go away, Gaius!”
Ruso stepped forward and grasped the furthest shoulder with one hand, rolling Verax off the bench. The young man yelled out in alarm and crashed onto the cold tiles.
Flora cried, “Don’t hurt him!” as she scrambled for a towel to cover herself.
Mara stiffened in Ruso’s grasp, opened her mouth and began to wail.
“Gaius, go away!”
Ruso took a deep breath. There were so many things he wanted to say that he did not know where to start.
If only Tilla were here. Tilla would know what to do. Meanwhile, the way that his sister’s gaze lingered on the muscular nakedness of the young man reaching across the floor for a discarded tunic made him want to punch them both.
Finally he spluttered, “Put some clothes on, both of you!” and strode out of the room.
17
Mara was safely in the care of the babyminder again after a more educational tour than her father had intended. On the way back to the bathhouse he went to the gate to search in vain for any sign of Tilla’s return, but it looked as though Marcia’s costly and unnecessary messing around in town meant he was going to have to deal with this by himself. He was on the way to face it when he heard the words, “Gaius, dear!”
His stepmother was possibly the last person he wanted to see.
“Cook says the boys have been fighting again and the stable lad says you came home without Marcia!”
“The boys are fine,” he assured her. “And Marcia’s in town with Tilla.”
“On her own? How will she get home?”
“Tilla’s driving.”
“Oh, Gaius!”
“I came home early to inspect the bathhouse floor,” he told her, waving the key in the air.
“Are you sure it’s safe? Should I come in with you?”
“No!”
“All right, dear. There’s no need to be tetchy.”
“Sorry,” he said. “I’m just worried about this business with Flora.”
“Oh, I know. Poor Flora. Verax always seemed such a nice boy.”
Back in the bathhouse poor Flora, no longer naked, glowered at him from one end of the hot room bench. The nice boy, on Ruso’s orders, was standing at the other end. His face was blank and he was staring straight at Ruso, which was especially annoying because he was clearly doing it to show off in front of his girl. Wishing he had put them in separate rooms, Ruso said quietly, “You promised not to go near my sister.”
“He didn’t!” Flora pulled her linen wrap tighter around her shoulders in a belated show of modesty. “It was me.”
Ruso ignored her. “Well?”
Verax said nothing.
“It was the boys,” Flora continued. “They were hot. They sneaked in to play in the pool.”
“My nephews know you’re in here too?”
Verax nodded.
This was getting worse by the moment. “What happened? I mean, before—” He gestured towards his sister.
Flora said, “The boys came—”
“I wasn’t asking you.”
Verax swallowed. “I heard someone come in,” he said. “I hid in here and watched through the crack in the door. The boys were playing in the water. Splashing each other. Then after a bit the little one went under and didn’t come up, and his brother didn’t notice.”
“If it wasn’t for Verax,” Flora declared, “you would have a drowned nephew lying out there at the bottom of the bath.”
Verax said, “I told them I wouldn’t tell anybody they’d been in here if they promised not to give me away.”
Of course the subtlety of this deal had been beyond a five-year-old. The little lad who apparently owed his life to Verax had instantly run to tell Flora that he knew a secret.
“His brother tried to tell him to shut up,” Flora took up the story. “But they were both wet, so it was obvious where they’d been.”
Ruso made a mental note to put one of the staff in charge of the boys until their parents came home.
“And then I came over here, and—” She squared her shoulders. “You’re so mean, Gaius! You could have told me he was here!”
“This is exactly why I didn’t.” Ruso turned to Verax. “You’ll have to go.”
“But we love each other, Gaius!” Flora, flouting the earlier order to sit in that corner and don’t move! scuttled across to cling to her man as if she were saving him from being dragged away by wild animals. “We’ll go together!” she assured him. “We’ll go somewhere nobody knows us!”
The wheelwright carried on staring at Ruso with the expression of a man trying to keep his face blank until his mind caught up. “You can find work,” Flora persisted, talking to the underside of his chin. “We’ll get married and I can look after you!”
At least Verax now had the grace to look embarrassed. Ruso opened his mouth to tell his sister not to be ridiculous, but Flora had not finished.
“You can’t stop us now, Gaius. I might be pregnant. Have you thought of that?”
Ruso, who had indeed thought of that, closed his eyes and let out a long breath that was more weariness than exasperation.
When he opened his eyes, Flora was still looking straight at him. “You’ve got to help us.”
He glared back at her. “I was helping you already,” he told her. “But what I think I’ll do now is turn him in and pack you off to marry somebody with more sense.”
18
It was all very well saying that Verax must be sent back, but quite another thing to make it happen when the family’s only vehicle was still in town and wouldn’t be back until Marcia had had her fill of pointless pampering. Ruso could march the wheelwright all the way back to Sabinus’s estate in chains, but he would need a couple of escorts in case the wretched man tried to make a run for it, and he wasn’t sure how far he could rely on any of his own people to back him up: they had known Verax far longer than he had. He could probably borrow a cart from next door, but the last thing he wanted to do was encourage his stepmother’s fantasy that he would one day divorce Tilla and marry the attractive and wealthy widow who lived just beyond the olive grove.
Flora, sensing weakness, refused to leave the bathhouse when ordered, even when Ruso threatened to tell her mother what was going on.
“Tell her, then!” retorted Flora, tossing her dishevelled curls. “She’ll blame you for letting Verax stay here.”
Ruso opened his mouth to tell her not to be ridiculous, then closed it again. She was right.
>
Meanwhile Verax, demonstrating more good sense than he had earlier, said nothing.
Neither of them deserved to hear any good news, so Ruso said nothing about finding out who had murdered Titus. Instead he went outside and told the stable boy to call him as soon as Tilla got back with the cart, and to leave the mules in harness, then went straight back to the hot room. He wasn’t sure what he was hoping to achieve in there, but he was damned if he was going to reward the young lovers by leaving them alone together.
“I don’t see why you want Verax to go back to the estate,” Flora announced as soon as he entered. “You promised me you’d sort this out.”
Ruso leaned back against the wall and folded his arms. If he tried to drag Flora away, would it end in a fight with a younger man that he might not win? Or would the wheelwright be secretly relieved?
He took a deep breath and straightened up. “I promised I’d do my best for you,” he said with what he felt was, in the circumstances, impressive calm. “And that’s what I’ve been doing. So has Tilla. Meanwhile you’re behaving in a way that could see you pregnant by a man executed for murder.”
Verax lifted his chin. “It’s my fault, sir, I—”
“Oh, take no notice of my brother!” Flora shifted along the bench and tugged at Verax’s hand, encouraging him to sit down. “It wouldn’t be that bad. Everyone knows you can get a baby taken away. Gaius is a doctor: I bet he knows how to do it. Don’t you, Gaius?”
Ruso felt his chest tighten. “Nobody knows how to do it safely, you stupid girl!”
“I am not a—”
“Women die!” Ruso snapped. “Of the ones who don’t, some of them can never have children afterwards.”
“Is that what happened to Tilla? Is that why you had to adopt?”