Deadly Election (17 page)

‘So you told yourself, “This is the life”?’ asked Vibia, coolly. ‘Streets full of pretty women?’

‘Well, I made sure I found out who this one was.’ Faustus turned to me, aware I was glowering. ‘Pull your claws in. Of course I did not follow you about.’

‘Scary!’ I agreed. ‘And I believe it’s a crime … So you love exercising your powers?’ I nudged, lightening the subject. He made no reply. ‘No, that’s unfair. You want Sextus to take up the torch because you believe in the city being well run, its neighbourhoods tidy and safe, its people content because they live in a decent environment, its gods honoured through good management.’

‘Tiberius is extremely capable and he needs to have something to do,’ Vibia declared. ‘His uncle has never employed him enough in their business. You know I am right,’ she told Faustus firmly, as he prepared to argue. ‘Now you have stepped away from him and learned to enjoy responsibility. You will not want to go back to having him control you. Either he must change or you must break away.’

‘We shall reach some accommodation.’ Faustus was squirming.

‘You will. You’re ready for it. And the point is,’ Vibia told him, ‘I have known you for a long time, and never seen you happier.’

Manlius Faustus bowed his head and looked embarrassed.

He was spared a further lecture because a maid came in, seeming anxious: she said the master was awake. Marcella Vibia jumped up and went to attend to her husband, as if frightened what would happen otherwise. On her way out, she ruffled the aedile’s hair fondly.

Left alone, Faustus and I sat in tricky silence.

Smoothing down his hair again, he said, ‘Vibia is a good woman. She worries about her husband constantly. He finds his condition frustrating and I slightly suspect his loss of mind and memory makes him lash out. She only rarely lets herself relax as she did just now.’

I realised that this was why Faustus had taken so much upon himself with the election. Yes, he and Sextus were old friends but neither of the parents could be much use at the moment: the father would never regain his capacity and the mother was run ragged. So Manlius Faustus had stepped in.

All the more reason why the candidate’s wife ought to have been at his side.

Hmm!

I
felt more sympathetic now about Faustus’s support for Sextus, but it was time-consuming. I knew he was privately fretting about his duties and offered to polish the speech so he could go over to the Aventine and work.

‘Go and rake some fines in. Inspect baths. Order pavement repairs. Register more prostitutes, so our rivals may have recourse to them and we can point that out … Don’t worry,’ I said grimly. ‘I know Sextus won’t like to think an informer has written his rhetoric. I can ask one of his parents’ scribes to produce a fair copy to my dictation. He need never know.’

Although he screwed his mouth up, Faustus accepted I was right. ‘You think of everything.’ He also knew I did not blame him for his friend’s prejudice.

He went off. I finished the speech. I borrowed a secretary, who wrote out the final version then promised to give it to the young master to learn that evening.

It was hard-hitting. We were a good team. Faustus had created a draft with structure and attack; I edited the skeleton into a strong piece of work. It read so fluently Sextus could not fail to remember his lines or to speak them naturally. No one who heard this would imagine he had had speech-writers. Even he might convince himself it was all his own work.

I wondered if that was what had happened when those two were schoolboys. Did Tiberius complete their teacher’s projects while Sextus plagiarised him, moved a few sentences around, then pretended it was his own composition?

I bet their teacher knew.

I sat on by myself in the campaign salon, thinking.

I was glad Faustus had trusted me with the speech. He ought also to have realised what I might do, left alone at the Vibius household. I was determined to make the acquaintance of the candidate’s wife, the elusive Julia
.

Faustus would have been furious at me nosing. That did not stop me.

It was mid-afternoon on a baking hot day. Most people were resting. The ground-floor apartment, so handsomely furnished, lay almost silent as everybody tried to conserve energy while waiting for the sun to sink lower so the temperature would drop. The slaves were at rest. Wherever Marcella Vibia was sitting with her husband, he had probably nodded off again, calmed by her presence; she, too, might have allowed her eyes to close in relief as she patiently guarded him.

Sextus had not appeared since I arrived. He could be upstairs in his own apartment, yet I took a chance.

Now that I was learning about this family, I saw that the parents’ ground-floor apartment, so busy during the campaign, must have been extremely quiet at other times. That gorgeously veneered table would stand with an empty urn on it, unused. Marcella Vibia and her husband occupied only a small proportion of the gracious spaces they presumably rented. A bedroom where he fitfully passed the night while she only let herself doze in case he woke up and wandered. A dayroom where they had comfortable chairs and a couple of side-tables. Little else in regular occupation, as far as I had seen.

The neat but barely used central courtyard had a stairwell in one corner, leading to upstairs accommodation. I had noticed Sextus Vibius taking those stairs sometimes, so I made my way up. The treads were clean natural stone, spaced evenly and well designed. Small windows lit them. A handrail, so rare in Rome’s ramshackle tenements, made the climb easier. These steps would be safe for Vibius and Julia to allow their two small children to visit their grandparents (I was sure Marcella Vibia was the kind who kept small toys and a supply of daily pastries).

Those children, I was certain, must be up and down here all the time. They would bring treasures to show their grandparents, while Vibia would find their visits a welcome break in her lonely routine of caring for her husband. It was odd that I had not yet seen them.

Well, I might do now.

The pleasant Clivus Scauri building was about four storeys high. Only this first-floor apartment was accessed from the courtyard, as if designed for an extended family. Other, less elegant, rooms had more basic stairs from the street outside. Sextus’s apartment was secure, protected by his parents’ door porter downstairs. Perhaps for this reason he had not bothered to lock up. I know, because when nobody answered my tentative knock, I gently tried the handles on the decorated double doors.

I went in and stood just inside those doors, pulling them to behind me. I cleared my throat. When that produced no reaction I called out, with the same result.

Where were the slaves? In a home like this there would normally be people everywhere. There were certainly plenty in the ground-floor apartment. When, or if, he became an aedile, Sextus Vibius would also rely on his duties being covered by an extensive team.

So where were the people who cared for Sextus and Julia?

They must all be busy or taking a siesta. Then the deep stillness of the upstairs rooms told another story. Nobody was here.

I felt emboldened to look around. My father had taught me, never miss a chance.

There were five rooms and a couple of service lobbies. The rooms were finely painted, with creamy white moulded-plaster ceilings. Rugs lay on the wooden floors, all centred, no creases. Couches and side-tables were pushed back tidily against walls. None had been left askew after somebody had pulled them out for use. Cushions were plump. There was no mess.

There was no sign of life at all. I found no used dishes; nor was there fresh fruit in the endearingly battered basket that lived on a sideboard. Nobody had left an unfurled scroll or an open inkwell. Nobody was coming back to drain their unfinished goblet. Nobody had been practising the lyre in a few spare moments. Certainly there was no evidence of children.

I deduced that Sextus did sleep in the master bedroom. The bed was made, though the cover and pillow were slightly less neat on one side than the other. I could not believe Sextus had tidied his own bed, but whoever came and did it for him had only pulled the coverlet straight. On one side-table stood a beaker for water; it was empty, dry in the bottom, accompanied by no flagon or jug. A masculine tunic was hung up with a pole through the shoulders. Spare male sandals lay under a stool. When I lifted lids on two similar clothes chests, one had a man’s belongings and paraphernalia (why do all men think they need four identical belts and a folding knife set with a camping spoon?). The other was empty. A faint trace of a woman’s perfume could be detected. I found no jewellery in the room, no silly shoes nor wispy scarves, no chatelaine with household keys, no dainty ring hung with tweezers, nail cleaner and cosmetics grinder. Neither creams nor cosmetics. No hand mirror. No comb.

One of the other bedrooms contained two little beds but it was so neat it felt like a guestroom.

Back in the reception room, I stood listening to the silence. I tried to gain some feeling of the young family whose home this supposedly was. Only one thing struck me. I would not be meeting Julia today.

I saw now how things were working. Sextus either ate his meals with his parents or he dined out. While he was campaigning, Faustus was constantly taking him to canvass people so it was easy to disguise what happened at home. Sextus slept alone up here, or at least he did sometimes. It would not surprise me if otherwise his mother let him stay downstairs in whatever room he had had when he was younger.

Faustus, I was absolutely sure, had no inkling about this; Sextus was keeping it from him and, of course, from me. That meant this situation had probably arisen recently. I could not tell where the two children were, or who was looking after them. For Julia, I made an intelligent guess. She must have gone back to her mother – or, according to Roman legal definitions, back to her father’s house. The evidence seemed clear to me: the wife of Sextus Vibius Marinus had left him.

C
losing the doors carefully behind me, I returned to the ground floor. Had this been anybody else, I would have tackled him about it without a second thought. Since Sextus was such friends with the aedile, I had to consider what Faustus would want to do. He would be circumspect. I knew that without asking.

Marcella Vibia came through the colonnade while I was still staring at the courtyard, perplexed. ‘Albia! Still here?’

‘I am leaving now. I had a rest, I hope you don’t mind.’

‘Of course not!’

She walked me towards the exit, as a politeness. I said casually, ‘Marcella Vibia, I do believe I have never seen your grandchildren.’

Did I detect hesitation? But Vibia answered calmly, ‘They go to a little school close to the Capena Gate. Our baby girl is only five; the boy is six, almost seven. Their father will be bringing them home any time soon. Of course they have a pedagogue who escorts them, carrying their tiny satchels and keeping them from harm along the route, but Sextus likes to pick them up himself and spend time with them.’

‘That’s wonderful.’ Actually, it was quite unusual.

‘He takes good care of them.’

There was no mention of their mother. I reflected sadly on little old ladies. Even this warm, civilised woman would lie, by omission at least, if it suited her.

However, she had told the truth in some respects: while we were talking, Sextus Vibius did come home, preceded into the house by two tousled children, full of pent-up energy after their release from lessons. They hurled themselves on their grandmother with joyous hugs, then charged off to a room in her apartment from which they produced toys.

They lived down here. Their grandmother was looking after them. Nothing was said about that.

Marcella Vibia went to fetch drinks for the children and a damson in honey each – ‘One! Lucius, just the one or you’ll spoil your supper.’ The pair sat quietly side by side on a low colonnade wall to drink from beakers under her supervision. They were well behaved. Lively. Cheery. Not visibly upset by their mother’s absence; I compared this to how disturbed we all used to be if Helena Justina was away from home even for a day. Maybe when it came to bedtime they would whimper and miss Julia, but until then they managed well enough.

I wondered what they had been told. Of course, no ethical informer would ever try to get such small children on their own and question them …

They finished eating and rushed off to play. I delayed my departure, keen to see what happened in this family. While we stood and watched the boy and girl, I explained to Sextus why Faustus had left earlier, saying only that I had stayed to attend to ‘notes’. Sextus was intent on his children, clearly a good father. He was popular and natural with them, constantly catching balls they lobbed at him or warning them to be careful when they clambered on balustrades.

Suddenly he turned to me, all smiles. ‘This is the first chance I have had to pry − Tiberius certainly kept you quiet!’

I did not trouble to answer. I preferred it when he was sniffy about my profession.

‘Own up!’ urged Vibius. ‘How long has this affair been going on?’

People were bound to misinterpret our odd friendship; I was none too clear how to interpret it myself. ‘Nothing is going on. We work together sometimes.’

‘Oh, so he has not made his move yet!’ his friend exclaimed, now grinning broadly. I found his attitude annoying. He was so sure Tiberius was my lover; there was no way to persuade him otherwise.

I gathered myself together as I prepared to go home, smoothing my skirts and tidying my jewellery, tucking in a wayward wisp of hair. ‘You have two delightful children, Sextus Vibius. Such a pleasure to see them. I would really like to meet your wife also.’

He was a good politician. He smiled as if this was the most natural thing to ask. ‘Of course!’ he replied, as smooth as almond custard. ‘We shall have to arrange it very soon.’

‘I look forward to that,’ I replied lightly.

If he wondered what I had found out about his wife, Vibius gave no sign. His mother had listened in from nearby without appearing to do so; it was impossible to judge what she was thinking.