A Coin for the Ferryman (11 page)

The new robe suited her. It was of a pale rose-madder pink, which showed off the natural darkness of her hair and eyes. She looked magnificent.

‘Gwellia?’

She looked round. I had half expected a rebuke for being at the villa for so long, but she was smiling as she turned about, and twirled to show her
stola
to best effect.

‘You like it? You don’t think the colour is too strong?’

I thought of the painted dancing girls and smiled. ‘It is beautiful. And so are you.’

She looked away and picked up a silver pendant that I had given her, and made as if to fasten it round her neck. ‘There was trouble at the villa? You were away such a time. I was beginning to get concerned for you. It is not so long since you were very ill.’ It was her way of offering a mild reproof.

I sat down on the three-legged stool beside the fire, and began to unlace my sandal straps. ‘It’s quite a story,’ I said. I told her briefly what had happened at the house.

She listened, the pendant still dangling from her hands. ‘A murdered man? Just where the new house was going to be? Poor Junio! And . . .’ She stopped, shaking her head and looking seriously at me.

I put my feet into the bowl. The water was cold and not especially clean but it was very soothing. ‘Poor Julia, as well. She is convinced it is an omen for their journey overseas.’ I wriggled my toes to rinse the dust from them. ‘She even asked Marcus if they really had to go.’

Gwellia made no direct response to this. She motioned towards Cilla with a warning frown. It was meant for me, but the girl took it as a signal to do the pendant up: she stood on tiptoe and reached to fasten it, but it took her several tries to fix the clasp, even though my wife leaned forward to make it easier. I saw that the poor girl’s hands were trembling.

I realised then what Gwellia had been signalling to me. ‘I’m sorry, Cilla. Of course the new roundhouse is to be your home as well.’

She glanced at me and I saw that her eyes were wet with tears. ‘Oh, master,’ she burst out. ‘This corpse. They’ll be sure and bury it before Lamuria, won’t they? Even if they don’t know who it is?’

Gwellia raised her eyebrows and looked across at me. ‘I expect they’re hoping that they’ll discover very soon. I’m sure they want your master to find that out for them and that is what has kept him all this while?’ It was only half a question.

I nodded and she sighed.

‘I wish they would not go on making these demands on you,’ she said. ‘It is not good for your health. But, I suppose, since it is Marcus who is asking you . . .’

Refusal would be even more injurious to my health, is what she meant.

‘I would want to do it in any case, for Junio’s sake,’ I said. ‘And Cilla’s too, of course.’

The slave girl did not meet my eyes. She looked down at the floor, where she was drawing circles on the earth-dust with her toe. At last she said, ‘I don’t want to push myself forward, master, but you’ve used my help before. If I can do anything to assist you this time, let me know. Slave or not, I’ll do whatever I can.’

I was about to ask her gently what she thought she could do, but she was too quick for me. ‘You are always saying that there are things that servants can find out that aren’t so easy for a citizen. I could ask questions in the villa, while I’m there.’ She sounded eager. ‘There’s one of the kitchen slaves in particular I used to know well . . .’

‘Cilla,’ I said gently, ‘tonight you will be freed. You are invited to the banquet to signify the fact. After that you won’t be a servant any more. You’ll be a free woman, betrothed to a free man – to a citizen, indeed.’

‘You mean my friend isn’t likely to confide in me again?’ Cilla sounded shocked, as if this aspect of her new existence had not previously occurred to her. ‘She’ll think that I’ve joined the owner class and treat me differently?’

It was almost exactly what I’d meant, but I said, ‘You can hardly go wandering into the villa kitchens unaccompanied, in any case. It isn’t the sort of thing an invited visitor can do. And you will be a guest tonight and not a slave – a special guest, in fact.’ I scooped some water up into my hands and rinsed my lower legs.

Cilla’s usually cheerful, plump young face creased in an unhappy frown. Then all at once it cleared. ‘But I’m not invited till the final course,’ she said. ‘I’m still a slave till then, so I could talk to her. I could even go and show my tunic off. It’s a nice one that my former mistress Julia sent for me – a lady’s tunic, all the way down to the ground instead of stopping at the knees the way servants’ tunics do. My friend would like to see it. When I was working at the villa we always talked about the things we would wear and the colours we would choose, if we could buy our freedom and have any clothes we liked. “Anything but this old greeny-brown,” she used to say . . .’

‘Very well, Cilla,’ my wife interrupted. Cilla had a tendency to enliven her reports by imitating the voices of the people she described – she’d captured the adenoidal tones of her friend the kitchen maid quite comically, I thought, but Gwellia, for once, did not seem inclined to smile. ‘You obviously have an interest in the matter,’ she said seriously, ‘and if you can help your master to clear it up, I should be very pleased, for his sake as well as yours. What do you say, husband?’

It was clearly not a moment for levity. I turned to Cilla and tried to look properly severe. ‘You may question the servants at the villa, if you have the chance. But you are not to go anywhere unaccompanied, or make yourself a nuisance in any way at all.’

She looked chastened. ‘Very well, master. I won’t let you down,’ she said, and Gwellia rewarded me with an approving nod.

Great gods, I was in danger of being ruled by women here! I felt the need to assert authority. I clapped my hands and raised my voice a notch. ‘Maximus! Minimus! I need a drying cloth!’

The result was very soothing. I had hardly got the words out before the boys were at the door, though Cilla had to point out where the clean rags were kept, hanging in a bag beside the wall. Each boy selected a likely piece of cloth, and then came across to kneel beside me, one on either side.

‘You should have called us earlier, master . . .’ Minimus began

‘. . . we would have washed your feet.’ And as if to prove it they each seized one of my legs, and attempted to outdo each other as they rubbed them dry. I feared they would upset me from my stool, such was their eagerness to prove themselves of use.

I held up a staying hand. ‘You first, Maximus!’ Deliberately, I presented my right leg to him, and indicated that he should pat that very gently dry, before I permitted his companion to do the other one. Minimus added a light massage to his ministrations. I have never felt so foolish, or so cosseted.

‘Will you be changing for the banquet, master?’ Maximus enquired.

I was just about to shake my head – I was wearing my best toga already – but Gwellia was far too quick for me.

‘He will change his under-tunic. I have had his white one cleaned. So you can help him strip and wash from head to toe. Empty the bowl, and he can stand in it. There is a jug of fresh water by the door that you can pour over him.’ She saw my look of slight unwillingness – Junio had washed me just the day before – and as they hastened outside with the bowl she turned smilingly to me. ‘Marcus is bestowing a compliment on this house – on Junio and Cilla in particular, of course, but on us as well. Any Roman would have bathed and changed and you must do the same. And, Cilla, your master has said that you may ask the servants questions if you like, but even if you learn something of interest, you’ll wait till afterwards to tell him what it is, and not interrupt the banquet. Ah, husband, here’s your wash.’

I stood up and rather reluctantly took my tunic off and stepped into the empty bowl the boys placed at my feet. I mustered what dignity I could – a naked man is always at a disadvantage in a situation of this kind.

‘Remember, Cilla, it is vital that this evening goes off without a hitch,’ I said, addressing the girl over Minimus’s head, as he clambered on the stool with the big jug in his hand and formed a sort of human screen between us. ‘Any breaking of the rules and the ritual will be spoiled. You might not get your freedom after all. It might be regarded as another bad omen, too. So don’t get so interested in your quest that you fail to join us at the proper – aargh! – time.’ The water was extremely cold.

Cilla nodded. ‘I’ll be very careful.’ She turned her attention to her mistress’s hair.

‘In any case there probably isn’t very much to learn,’ I said, the words coming in little jerks as Maximus rubbed my back with energy. ‘If there were rumours at the villa I’d have heard when I was there, but there were none at all, not even when they thought the body was a simple peasant girl. One of Julia’s servants said as much to me.’ I seized the cloth that Maximus held out and wrapped it round my vitals as I spoke, waiting for lanky Minimus to climb down from his perch and rub the rest of me.

However, the expected pleasant friction did not come. I looked round. Both the boys were gazing at me in astonishment.

Minimus, as usual, was the first to speak. ‘You’re talking of rumours at
our
villa, master?’ He clambered off his stool.

The older boy added, incredulously, ‘A
body
, did you say?’

It was only then I realised that the two boys didn’t know about the corpse.

It had not occurred to me – but of course they were in Glevum when the discovery was made, and they had not spoken to anyone from the villa since. Kurso and I had not said anything to them when we arrived, and they had obviously been too busy with their knucklebones to listen at the door while I was telling the story to Gwellia and her maid. Even now they had only caught the very end of it and they were goggling with curiosity.

‘You want Cilla to question the villa servants?’ Maximus enquired, and Maximus added doubtfully, ‘Does that mean you want her to question us as well?’

I was about to say it didn’t, when it occurred to me it should. Of course these two might have some information of their own – perhaps without knowing that it was relevant. I looked at them sternly. ‘You don’t know anything about a body, I suppose? No rumours of a missing young man or peasant girl who might have been murdered a day or two ago?’

They glanced at each other in what looked like pure surprise, then – both together – raised their shoulders in a helpless shrug, spread their empty hands and pulled down the corners of their mouths like a pair of tragic masks. The effect, however, was quite comical. Marcus’s expensive dancers could not have moved in more perfect unison.

As usual the younger boy was the first to find his tongue. ‘I don’t believe so, master. The only bodies we saw today were the ones that they were taking to the paupers’ pit . . .’

‘. . . His Excellence sent us to move them off the road, when he and Lucius wanted to drive through with the gig, on their way to the basilica this morning,’ Maximus added.

‘You probably saw them for yourself,’ Minimus put in.

I nodded. I had indeed encountered the soldier with the mule and its grisly cargo – a pair of dead, broken bodies hanging upside down, their red hair dangling in the dust. Roman law did not permit the disposal of bodies within the city walls – not even those of beggars and common criminals – and these corpses were obviously on their way to be taken out and tipped without ceremony into the common pit.

‘A pair of Silurians, by the look of it,’ I said, then wished I hadn’t. The red hair and a smattering of Celtic now and then suggested that these two boys had Silurian blood themselves.

Minimus, however, seemed eager to assist. ‘I spoke to the mule-driver when I moved him on. A couple of brigands who’d been punished by the courts for robbery with violence on the Isca road.’

I nodded. The road which led from Glevum to the west was still dangerous – not only did the forests harbour wolves and bears, but the route was famous for the brigands who frequented it – some of them disaffected tribesmen from the borderlands, who had never quite accepted Roman rule and harried the supply trains and hapless travellers.

‘Six people robbed and murdered this last moon alone. Marcus was telling Lucius, just the other day. Then these two yesterday . . .’ the young slave went on.

‘. . . an old man and his daughter, from the sound of it . . .’

‘. . . stripped and robbed and cruelly stabbed to death . . .’

‘. . . some soldiers caught the robbers almost in the act, with gold and silver in their saddlebags, and the man’s possessions bundled in their packs.’

‘Even then they pleaded innocence, at first . . .’

‘. . . but the authorities beat a half-confession out of them . . .’

They were so keen to tell me all this that I had to smile. ‘I heard there’d been a bit of trouble that way recently. But I don’t think Silurian rebels are much help to us. Our body was discovered a great deal nearer home.’ Then the implication struck me and I frowned. ‘Though that makes it more surprising, when you think of it. If our killer had simply left the body on the road, instead of carefully concealing it in a ditch on Marcus’s land, it would have been treated as a pauper, probably – somebody would have picked it up and thrown it in the pit, just like the bodies of the couple who were robbed – and there would have been no questions asked at all.’

‘The body was concealed on His Excellence’s land?’ Minimus sounded shocked.

Gwellia interrupted with a kind of mock reproof. ‘If you will finish helping your master to get dressed, and prevent him from shivering to death, perhaps he’ll tell you all about it from the beginning – with less damage to his health.’

The boys looked chagrined, and set to at once. I found myself telling the story as they worked.

They listened, horrified. Although they were very much Celts by birth, they were raised in Roman households and the whole idea of an unburied body at the Lemuria alarmed them terribly.

When I had finished Maximus turned to his fellow slave and said, ‘This happened about two days ago, so the master says. We were at the villa then – we didn’t leave all day. I didn’t notice anything unusual, did you?’ Concern had interrupted the usual duologue. Gwellia’s rebuke was not forgotten, though – he was making himself busy fetching garments as he spoke.