A Coin for the Ferryman (4 page)

I understood his fears. We were approaching the second Roman Festival of the Dead, the Lemuria, when kinless, hungry, homeless ghosts of those who had not received a proper funeral were said to prowl. These Lemures are known to be malevolent spirits anyway, ravenous and dangerous if the proper ceremonies are not observed – so much so that the temples close, and marriage is forbidden during the festival. But their worst spite is said to be reserved for those who unearth their buried bones.

It was such a bad portent that even I could feel a shiver of alarm, and I was not raised in a Roman household, as Junio had been. To him the threat was very real. I could see that he was looking shaken and alarmed.

‘Was it a grave?’ I echoed.

Kurso shook his head. We had slowed to let a donkey squeeze past us on the road – narrowly, since it was laden with wicker panniers full of quacking ducks – so he managed to answer more coherently. ‘N-n-not a proper one. J-just a shallow ditch. J-Julia says we’ll have to f-f-find out who it is, and get the f-f-family to bury it. Otherwise it will c-c-curse the h-h-house for ever afterwards.’ Then we went lurching on again, and we abandoned speech in favour of clinging to the wagon-sides and praying that the bone-juddering torment would soon be over.

After what seemed like a lifetime, but was probably closer to an hour, we joined up with a proper highway once again – a paved spur from the military road which led towards the villa. My roundhouse was near the junction and I expected we would stop, but the cart-driver did not draw up outside my gate. Through the palisade of woven stakes which formed my outer fence, I could see the new area which the villa slaves had cleared: one or two land-slaves were still working with an adze, grubbing out some bushes which were growing near the road. Clearly, however, the project had been largely abandoned, for the moment anyhow.

I was about to call to the cart-driver to stop, but Kurso saw what I intended and said hastily, ‘They’ll have t-t-taken the body to the v-v-villa now. If no one c-c-claims it in a day or two, the s-s-slaves will make it ready for the f-f-funeral pyre. J-Julia said you w-w-wouldn’t w-w-want it in your house.’

I nodded. I was sincerely grateful. The presence of a dead body in my roundhouse, just when I was bringing home my son, would have been an omen that even I could not ignore, though I am not very superstitious about these things as a rule. At Marcus’s spacious villa, on the other hand, there were a dozen places where it might decently be put, without impinging on the family’s living space and bringing evil luck. There was even a special room out in the stable block where dead slaves could be taken and laid out, and a cremation site out on the villa farm. Most of the servants were members of the Guild of Slaves, of course, which would arrange to give them a decent funeral – Marcus, like all good masters, paid their dues himself – but there were always one or two who had not yet enrolled, or poor freemen labourers who died on villa land, and Marcus always saw that they got at least the basic rites.

Clearly Julia intended to deal with this corpse in the same way, if we couldn’t find its family to perform the rituals. That would do a great deal to appease the vengeful Lemures, I told myself, hoping that the body had not been hidden for so long that we were already past the half-moon after death which – tradition said – was the maximum permitted before a funeral, if one wished to keep the ghost from haunting afterwards.

I was still thinking about this when we reached the villa gates and the cart did stop at last: I scrambled down, with Junio and my slave, and was immediately accosted by the gatekeeper. I knew the man, a swarthy rogue called Aulus, who always carried a faint scent of onions and bad breath.

He greeted me as though I were a friend. ‘Well, pavement-maker, here you are at last. We’ve been expecting you. The mistress will see you in the atrium – I’m to find a slave to take you to her straight away, she says.’

I was about to protest that I knew my way around the villa very well and did not need a slave, but a young pageboy was already hurrying out to us. Obviously they had been watching for my arrival from the house.

The page was not a servant I’d seen before. Marcus’s usual pageboy was a more flamboyant lad. I looked at Aulus. He knew everything.

He gave me another of his leering grins. ‘Pulchrus was sent to Londinium a day or two ago – the morning of that last important feast it must have been – to make arrangements for the master and his wife to start their trip to Rome. You must remember, citizen. I’m sure you’ve heard about that.’

I nodded. Julia, like me, did not enjoy the sea, and had refused to contemplate the long ocean voyage from Glevum, so Marcus had decided to send the boy ahead with messages and imperial travel permits, requisitioning their passage on a naval ship from Londinium to Dubris, and from there on the shortest possible sea crossing to Gaul.

This substitute was a good deal younger, seven or eight years old perhaps, but he was fair-haired and pretty and desperate to please. He spoke in a piping, eager voice. ‘If the two citizens would follow me,’ he said.

Junio looked at me and grinned. It was the first time anyone had called him ‘citizen’. He followed me (walking with some difficulty, true – togas are not easy to manage if you are not used to them, and his was showing a tendency to unhitch itself) and we were shown into the atrium. We had hardly reached it before Julia arrived. That was an indication of how distressed she was. There was none of the usual fashionable delay, intended to make lesser mortals like myself appreciate the honour of an interview with her.

She was attended, as usual, by a pair of maidservants, and was looking as lovely as she always does. Her
stola
and over-tunic were of the softest pink, and she had woven ornaments into her hair. But her face was strained and tense. She managed a smile for Junio, and then turned to me. ‘Libertus, I am very glad to see you. This is an unhappy business, I’m afraid. I’ve had my land slaves take the body to the stable block – the room where we prepare dead slaves for burial – and I have sent some servants out to make enquiries, to see if anyone is missing in the area.’

‘Recently dead then?’ That was a surprise.

‘It seems so. But my slavemaster thinks that you should come and take a look at her yourself.’

‘It is a female?’ I was quite surprised. No reason why it should not be, of course, but most people travelling the forest – off the paths – are men.

‘A girl. Quite young, from what I understand, and dressed in peasant clothes, though obviously I haven’t been to see.’ She swallowed. ‘They tell me that she is not a pleasant sight. I understand the face is battered in, and there are other injuries. When they reported that they’d found her, I just instructed them to bring her here.’

I nodded. Nobody would expect a lady of her rank to concern herself with an unlucky corpse at all, let alone a bruised and battered peasant one. ‘So you sent for me?’

‘And now I’m doubly glad I did. The chief of the land slaves came to ask for me, not half an hour ago. He seems to think there’s something slightly odd about the look of it.’

‘Odd? Apart from having a battered face, you mean?’ All kinds of pictures were flitting through my brain. ‘In what way odd?’

She shook her head. ‘She’s dressed like a poor peasant, as I said, but when they came to put her on a board, and carry her over to the stable block, it seems he noticed that her hands were very soft. The nails are clean, he said, and nicely shaped as if they’d been rubbed with a pumice stone or something of the kind – not black and broken as a peasant girl’s would be. And, he tells me, the feet are much the same. It made me wonder . . .’

I whistled. ‘Perhaps she is not the pauper she appears to be?’

She smiled. ‘Exactly. Libertus, I knew you’d understand. Supposing this is a wealthy girl, found on what is still officially our land? It makes it rather awkward for Marcus and myself, when we are due to go to Rome in less than half a moon. What was she doing in the forest, on private property?’

I found that I was nodding once again. ‘Some wealthy citizen’s daughter, perhaps, attempting to escape a marriage that she didn’t want? It has been known for such things to occur. If she disguised herself as a peasant to meet someone in the woods, it is possible that she was attacked and robbed.’

Julia met my eyes. ‘I thought of that myself. But I have not heard of any young lady missing in the town. And surely, you’d think, we would have known of it? A wealthy father would have called on Marcus for a search, and got the town guard looking for the girl. It’s not as though there’s not been time for that. The body had not been dead for very long, but clearly it has been there for at least a day or two.’

Junio, emboldened by his new rank of citizen perhaps, dared to join the conversation. ‘Pardon me, madam – Father – but there is another thing – if I might speak.’ We signalled our assent, and he went on, ‘If it was a failed elopement, why smash in the face? It can’t be to prevent the family from identifying it. Surely they would lay claim to an uncovered corpse at once, if they were looking for a missing daughter anyway? And they would recognise the fingers, if your land slave did.’

I nodded. ‘And having made the corpse unrecognisable, why bury it at all – especially in such a shallow ditch as I understand this was? Yet clearly it did not get there by itself. Someone put it there. The body of a wealthy girl, dressed in peasant clothes. Your slave is right, it does seem very odd.’

Julia gave that tight-lipped smile. ‘Exactly so. That’s why I called for you. I very much fear, Libertus, that we may have an inconvenient murder on our hands – probably of someone of good family. And what with the Festival of the Dead and our impending trip – to say nothing of our important visitor from Rome – it has come at a very awkward time indeed.’

I sighed. I knew I’d have had to work out who the body was, if possible, and arrange to give the corpse a decent funeral – for Junio’s sake if nothing else – but the matter was already becoming more complicated than I would have wished. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘you’d better get a slave to show me where she is, and Junio and I will take a look at her.’

I was not really hopeful of discovering very much as my new son and I followed the blond pageboy from the house and through the inner court. If this girl was dressed in someone else’s clothes, I thought, they could have been obtained from anywhere, so there was probably little to be deduced from them. As for establishing exactly who she was, we would probably have to wait until someone came forward to claim the corpse as some missing member of their family, since the face was said to be unrecognisable. However, I was interested to see those hands and feet.

‘There, citizens.’ The pageboy indicated the outbuilding where the body had been put. He was clearly unwilling to go near the place himself, so I took pity on his youthful sensibility and Junio and I walked forward on our own.

The door was already ajar as we approached, and the swarthy figure of Marcus’s chief land slave could be seen inside, standing guard beside a sheeted bundle on a plank. I knew the fellow slightly. His name was Stygius: a big man, strong and powerful from long years in the field, with muscles and sinews that stood out like knotted ropes, and speech as slow and deliberate as his walk.

He came out to greet me with a worried frown. ‘Citizen Libertus, I am glad you’re here. The mistress told me you were on your way. And you too, citizen, of course.’ He nodded in Junio’s direction with a vague, respectful air, twisting his fingers together in front of his leather apron and bowing to us both. ‘The mistress told you what I noticed about the skin and nails?’ He avoided looking us directly in the face. Life had taught him to be subservient.

‘She did indeed, Stygius,’ I said. ‘And I was impressed. It was very intelligent of you to notice it. Many people would not have spotted the significance of that.’

His face was browned with sun and wind, but I would almost swear he blushed. ‘It’s kind of you to say so, citizen,’ he said and stared down at his hands.

I realised that it was probably not often that anyone commended Stygius for his intelligence – it is not something expected of a land slave on the whole. Strong arms, a strong back and an unwavering application to the task in hand, however dreary and repetitive, were the important attributes, even for a chief man like Stygius. I felt a sudden surge of sympathy for him, labouring in the fields from dawn to dusk, at the mercy of all extremes of sun and rain: he was slow of speech and movement, but it was clear his mind was sharp. ‘You did very well,’ I added, and he flashed me a shy smile.

My praise had given him more self-assurance, it appeared. ‘If it was just a peasant I would have left her lying here,’ he said, raising his head to look at me, and lumbering into confidential mode. ‘But I thought that, with it being a wealthy girl perhaps, there should be someone with her in case the parents came. Give her a bit of dignity, at least, by standing guard over her instead of abandoning the body like an empty sack. The mistress did not send a household slave to keep vigil here, so I thought I had better do the job myself. I’ve left my deputy in charge out in the fields.’

He was half apologetic, and I understood. Had I been Stygius, I too would have found it more attractive to be here – keeping guard over a quiet body in a warm dry shed – than bending over the spade and hoe till darkness fell and urging labour out of other weary men. ‘I’m sure your intentions were sincere,’ I said, and followed, with Junio, as he led the way inside.

‘There you are!’ He pulled the door half closed behind us as he spoke, as if to exclude other prying eyes and afford the corpse a little privacy. The room was heavy with the smell of death.

The lack of window-spaces made the place quite dark, even though it was scarcely past midday, and it took me a moment to become accustomed to the gloom. When I did, I knew what I should see – I had been there once or twice before. It was a longish, narrow room, with stone walls and a floor of trodden earth. Sometimes there were boxes of funeral herbs about, but today it was empty except for the makeshift bier on which the body lay, covered with a piece of unbleached linen cloth. A pair of candles burned at head and foot, each supported by an iron spike, and these threw eerie shadows on the shrouded form.