‘Now my steward is a cautious type of chap. He’s Libyan, you know, and they’re instinctively suspicious. He wondered whether this might be a ruse, to find out who lived there with a view to burglary, or perhaps casing the goldbeater’s opposite. You do know there’s a goldbeater’s opposite?’
‘Opposite where?’
‘The point is,’ he continued amiably, ‘my steward, being Libyan and extremely quick off the mark, realized at once that the description of this mystery woman fitted you down to the ground.’
‘Rubbish. He’s only seen me once.’
‘Once, Claudia, is enough,’ said Orbilio. ‘So I’ll ask you a third time. How much are you in for?’
Claudia’s eyes narrowed. ‘Mind your own business,’ she replied, sweeping out of the bath room.
‘That much, eh?’
She pulled up sharp by the family shrine and drew out a handkerchief. ‘With my dear, sweet husband,’ she sniffed, ‘still warm in his grave—’
‘Claudia. You married Gaius because he was old and filthy rich, and unless he’s interred over a volcano, it’s unlikely his ashes have stayed warm for seven whole months.’
There was, she decided, an unseemly twinkle in his eye for a man addressing the recently bereaved.
Claudia let the handkerchief fall. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t. ‘Orbilio, I do not go into debt lightly.’ (Hell no, I sail in fully laden.) ‘At the moment I admit, I have a short-term cash-flow problem.’ (When I die, it’s finished with.) ‘So while we’re in the business of repeating things, I’ll say it again. Mind your own damned business.’ The lanterns flickering from their bronze and silver stands brought the painted songbirds to life. Greenfinches. Goldfinches. Goldcrests. An oval fountain splashed and danced, a marble athlete considered his next throw of the discus and in a vase on a podium, two dozen Syrian tulips found their slender stems could not support the weight of their rose-red heads.
‘I was offering to help,’ he said, scanning the crocodiles and papyrus plants on the great Nile fresco which covered the east wall of the atrium.
Any second now, Leonides, Cypassis or one of a dozen lesser servants could come wandering out of the slave quarters and Claudia did not want eyebrows raised at the lies she would be required to tell. As Orbilio turned his attention to a yawning hippopotamus, she swept the vase of flowers on to the floor.
‘I don’t need your bloody patronage.’
His shoulders stiffened. ‘That’s entirely your prerogative,’ he said, and though the tone remained mild there was no laughter left in his eyes.
‘Damn right,’ she snapped. ‘Just because I gave some bloodsucking usurer the wrong house number doesn’t give you the right to come tramping in and out of my home whenever you’ve the odd hour to kill.’
‘You know, Claudia,’ Orbilio sighed and leaned down to collect a single rose-red tulip, ‘for once,’ he sniffed in vain for a scent, ‘you may be right.’
With a farewell salute, he tucked the flower into his bloodstained tunic and stepped over the debris to disappear into the night.
The atrium seemed bigger, suddenly. The ceiling higher, the columns colder, the galleries darker, and the finches and the warblers were no longer three-dimensional. Claudia hurled the libation jug at the Nile fresco and an ibis turned red with the wine. Bugger Egypt. Bugger Rome, come to that. And—she threw a votive cake at a po-faced sphinx—bugger you, too, Marcus Casual Liaisons. I hope you’ve got concussion.
‘Has he gone, then, the man in the frock?’
Jovi’s arrival made her jump. Well, so what if he’s gone? Who gives a shit?
‘Was there a fight in this room, was it the man in the frock?’
A miracle, thought Claudia, no one else heard the crash and came running.
‘Did he chase off some burglars, were they trying to kill you?’ Jovi held up the pies in his fists. ‘What’ll I do with these, can I eat them?’
‘Maybe one,’ she said absently.
‘I don’t think they’ll give me the burps, not like those honey cakes, so can I have both? Ple-ease?’
Claudia peered down at his scrubbed and eager face. ‘What are you? A gannet?’
Jovi fell on to his knees. ‘No, I’m a bear.’ He stuffed the last corner of the pie into his mouth and scampered round the floor. ‘A big, brown mountain bear—watch me. Grrr!’
But Claudia wasn’t watching. Her eyes remained fixed on the vestibule door, where the image of a man with still-damp tendrils round his forehead remained imprinted on her retina and whose sandalwood ungent lingered persistently. She heard again the gentle drop of the latch as he left, and the street sounds he’d momentarily admitted—the plod of an ox, the rumble of a barrel being unloaded
echoed repeatedly inside her head.
Oh, sod it.
‘Call that a bear?’ she said, turning to Jovi. ‘I’ll show you bears.’ Looping up her arms, she made claws of her fingers and chased him round the fountain. ‘Arrrrr!’
I have a wine business, I have a house, I have a villa and vineyard in Etruria. What more, Claudia asked herself, diving round the pedestals and podiums, could I possibly want?
*
In a dingy garret boasting ill-fitting shutters and a damp patch on two walls, a stinking tallow burned low. There was no incense to sweeten the air here, no joyful frescoes, and the only window faced a blank wall. Because you had to really crane your neck to see the street below, it was easier to lift your eyes to the roofs all around you. You could see whose tiles were missing, who had sparrows under their eaves, who was superstitious enough to grow houseleeks to ward off Jupiter’s thunderbolts.
The man in the garret rarely looked out. The sounds rising upwards didn’t touch him—not the rattle of chariot wheels, nor the crank of the building cranes. Hunched in his creaky chair, he dipped the nib of his reed pen into the inkwell and wrote carefully.
He did not wish to blot.
Satisfied with his efforts, he paused and looked round his walls. In pride of place over his bed—where else—he had nailed the original. Every day he dusted it, lightly, with an ostrich feather stolen from the market, and every day he examined it for signs of deterioration. If the paper curled, he would push a small tack in, but already the edges were ragged; brown marks were creeping relentlessly. Not that there was anything wrong with the ink. Top quality, imported from India, it withstood the test of the elements. The words, and he knew them by heart, still stood out clear. But he could not take chances.
He had only received the one letter from Claudia Seferius. He had no intention of losing it to mishap.
Pursing his lips in concentration, he returned to his work and the only sound he heard was the scratching of the nib. He did not smell apples baking in the apartment below, he did not hear the giggles of the newly-weds next door, he did not feel the damp from the Tiber meet the damp from the low clouds and creep its way into his bedding.
Satisfied the copy was perfect, right down to the angle of the serifs, he sat back and admired it for several minutes then picked up his hammer and four nails. Where should he put it, this precious document? Here? Over here? What about—yes, what about over there, just above the door and to the left?
Next door the newly-weds laughed at their neighbour’s ritual. They had been married but a month, yet every night at precisely the same hour came the hammering of four solitary nails. Sometimes they listened out for it, a signal to blow out their own lantern and dive under the covers.
Once, she had met her neighbour on the stairs and asked him what it was he stuck on the walls every night, but the look he gave her shrivelled her to the spot and she averted her eyes whenever she saw him after that.
She would have moved house altogether, had she known that his walls were plastered with more than two hundred such reproductions of Claudia’s letter.
IV
Darkness in Rome did not signal an end to the working day; for some it was merely a beginning. Come dusk, wheeled traffic, which was not permitted during daylight hours because it clogged the narrow streets, began rumbling along, nose to tail. Low-sided wagons carrying everything from crated hippos to Phoenician cedars clanked along ruts made by centuries of ox-carts before them. There’d be salt brought in from the flat coastal plain, wool from Campania, hemp from the Rhone and Corsican pitch. By the light of a thousand flickering brands, carts would roll through the arches and up at the Collina Gate, the northernmost gap in the city walls. The thirtieth of March was a night like any other.
Now spring had arrived and the seas became navigable, luxury goods from the Adriatic ports travelled the Via Salaria and the guards marvelled at great tusks of ivory, peacocks from Samos and glittering sapphires but, since the road from the Sabine Hills also ended here, mostly it was the common stuff. Venison, boar meat and barrel upon barrel of thick olive oil, because everyone knew Sabine oil was the best, but my word, the price of it! Night after night you’d see them, two dray horses pulling a cart loaded with one large barrel, which sat right behind the driver, plus three smaller ones to even up the weight. The gatemen knew the drivers, the drivers knew the gatemen, the banter was as constant as it was cheerful.
On the far side of the Collina Gate, however, it was a different world. Snubbed by traffickers and guards, tired shanties with walls of mud supporting bowing thatches leaned against the greyish-yellow stonework for support. The folk who eked out their short existence in these rank and squalid hovels did not care that this was where the enemy Hannibal once had made his camp. What use was history? Today’s enemy was starvation and fever and snakebite and dysentery and, for all the good it did them, Sabine oil might as well be gold. Oil for lights? For cooking? Do me a favour! When we have to beg for alms, scavenge for our firewood, sell our bodies behind the tombs which line the roads to anyone who’ll give us the price of a loaf? The people here had sores, they had roundworm, they had night blindness, they had rickets.
They also had babies.
‘Well, Captain, any luck?’ A cultured voice called across the plodding stream of wagons.
A thin, wiry individual with a horseshoe scar dodged past a muleteer and shook his head. ‘Not a bloody one, Dino. Not even a girl.’
Lately they’d taken to splitting up to search, this was the meeting spot. ‘Arbil won’t believe this,’ said the younger man, with a laugh in his voice. ‘He’ll think we spent the whole time rabble-rousing.’
‘Not with this pong clinging to us, he won’t,’ the Captain muttered. ‘Croesus only knows what caused that,’ he rubbed at a stiffening stain on his tunic, ‘but it stinks like shit.’
‘Probably is shit,’ sniggered the henchman Vibio, joining up from the east. ‘In which case, I ain’t sitting next to you in the cart home.’
‘Fuck off,’ said the Captain good-naturedly and turned to his well-groomed companion. ‘So then. Is that it for tonight, Dino?’
‘We’re wasting our time here, that’s for sure, and I can see little point in prolonging it.’ Dino rolled down his embroidered sleeves. ‘What’s the tally, Vibio? Just the two?’
‘One,’ replied Vibio, kicking aside a bundle of muddy rags. Too late he realized there was a small child inside, it whimpered as it scuttled into the night. ‘That second bairn was already dead, poor little sod.’
Around them came low moans of pain and the smell of green wood smoking. Somewhere an old woman cackled in mirthless laughter.
‘Save your pity, lad,’ said the Captain. ‘If it grows up here, it’ll have a bloody tough life, lucky to make it into its teens, and then it’ll probably have ulcerated lungs and a rather nasty sexual disease. Better off dead, if you ask me.’
‘Tell that to the boss’s face,’ the henchman retorted. ‘See if Arbil agrees.’
‘I blame Agrippa.’ Dino cut short any arguments. The tally was low, the job was unpleasant, tempers were short. ‘His death, plus those nine days of mourning, have completely buggered up the system.’
They nodded at what they thought Dino meant. That because babies were exposed only on market days—a silent signal for childless couples to search for human treasure—it seemed logical that tonight’s poor catch could be attributed to confusion in the minds of the slum girls following a national emergency.
But this was not what Dinocrates meant. Arbil the slave master had recognized in Dino a sharpness and intelligence from a very early age, and instead of being trained for trade or simply sold on unskilled, Arbil had lavished special care on Dino’s education. Elevated to a position of trust and authority in the organization, and now third in command, wealth and responsibility had not dimmed his native intuitiveness. What he meant—and what the others would not understand—was that the ripples radiating from Agrippa’s sudden and premature death went far beyond commerce and industry. The fragility of life had been rammed home in such a way that Dino believed that for many mothers, parting with their babies would be out of the question. The fight for survival would be stretched just that little bit further…
As they waited for the fourth member of the party to join up, Dino reflected on the Emperor’s reaction to the tragedy. He’d coped well, he thought, with the death of a man closer to him than a brother and his eulogy had left strong men weeping fountains. He had lit the pyre himself, declared public mourning, read Agrippa’s will aloud to the people and when he’d reached the part where his friend bequeathed his aqueduct slaves to Augustus, the Emperor once more proved his worth by turning these twelve score men over to the Senate as public servants. Furthermore, he had promised not only to continue Agrippa’s civil engineering programme, by the gods he would extend it, creating the brand new post of Water Commissioner for a start. Afterwards he had personally supervised the interring of the Great Man’s ashes in that tall, cylindrical structure faced with travertine down on the Field of Mars, the Emperor’s very own mausoleum. What a man!