Vita Brevis (21 page)

He paused and bowed his head as a last mark of respect to the patient he had known all too briefly, then tried to make his way past the couch as unobtrusively as possible. He was almost at the street door when he felt a hand on his arm. He turned to see Firmicus, who mouthed, “Thank you.”

He was glad for Horatia’s sake that there was someone as capable as Firmicus to take charge. “I’m sorry.”

“You did all you could, Doctor.” The steward shook his head, dislodging his own fine shower of ash. “Something’s not right about this. He was a healthy man.”

Ruso was saved from replying by the sight of Lucius Virius floating in through the entrance hall. The undertakers might be slow to pick up an unclaimed body, but they had lost no time responding to a wealthy household in the late hours of the night.

The doorkeeper let Ruso out in silence, head bowed. The heavy oak door clunked into place behind him, and he surveyed the outlines of the predawn street. Everything was gray, mirroring the numbness of his mind. His senses registered that the aroma of frankincense had faded and been replaced by baking bread and fresh ox dung, but it was as if everything were taking place behind a thick pane of glass. A cart rumbled past. He turned left, walking in the direction of Accius’s house. He had one last duty to perform before he had to stop acting the competent medic and face up to whatever it was he might have become.

The patient had collapsed on the way home from a dinner party, as middle-aged men who ate and drank too much sometimes did. There was rarely anything anyone could do to save them. While the rest of Rome was waking up, washing its face, and preparing to deal with the new day, the family would be mourning their loss. The doctor who had been called from his bed in a hopeless attempt to hold the patient back from the next world should have been catching up on some sleep.

Instead, he was blundering around the surgery picking up containers and examining them, and opening half-empty bottles of medicine to sniff what was inside.

“Have you lost something?”

Tilla had to repeat the question before he noticed she was there.

“It’s all old,” he muttered, not looking up. “Useless.” He upended a jar. Several black lumps thudded into the waste bucket.

“What are you doing? Is that the cyclamen root?”

“It needs replacing.” He picked up another jar. Its contents too ended up in the bucket.

When he reached for a third she stepped forward and seized his hand. “Husband, what are you doing?”

He shrugged. “Having a clearout. Might as well do it sometime.”

She wrested it out of his hand and put it back on the shelf. “You should sleep.”

“I’m not tired.”

She peered at him, reaching up to push a strand of hair off his forehead. “Either you are very tired, or some god has made you ten years older during the night. Go and rest. I will call you if we need you.”

He opened his mouth as if he was about to argue, but then seemed to change his mind and put his arms around her, resting his chin on her shoulder. She felt rather than heard the depth of his sigh.

Just at the wrong moment, Esico wandered in from the kitchen with a jug of water. Behind her husband’s back, she gestured frantically to him to go away. The door closed again and they were alone. “You did your best,” she said softly.

“It looked as though he hit his head on the curb.”

“Then what could you do?” she asked, surprised at how upset he seemed. Of course it was always bad to lose a patient, but he had met this one only two days ago, and the man was not young. It was not like her husband to mourn the loss of someone just because he was rich and powerful. “I know he was very important,” she continued, “but I am sure nobody could have done any more for him. Not even Doctor Kleitos.”

The grunt could have meant
yes
, or
no
, or
stop talking—it is not helping
.

“We will manage without him,” she promised. “We know lots of people here now.”

He said, “I’ve been to tell Accius. I’m not sure what’ll happen now.”

“What did he say?” If it was Accius who had upset him, she would go over there and tell him what she thought. She had given up trying to be a Good Roman Wife now. It was very confusing having to say one thing and mean another all the time.

“He’s gone straight over to see Horatia.”

“That is very good of him.”

He released her and leaned back against the bench. “Did I tell you he brought her a birthday present back from Britannia?” he said. “One of those jet bracelets they make over on the east coast.”

“Did she like it?”

“I should never have left the Legion.”

She had always thought that when he finally admitted it, she would say,
I told you so
. But now she took him by the arm and steered him toward the back rooms of the apartment. “Just sleep. I will see the patients and call you if we need you.”

“Don’t use any of those medicines. Only use what we brought with us.”

“Husband, what is the matter?”

“Nothing.”

When she got him to bed she said, “Do you want herbs to help you sleep?”

“No!”

She sat beside him on the bed. “What happened out there?”

“Nothing. I lost a patient. That’s all.”

When she lifted her hand from his shoulder, he rolled over and curled up like a small child.

“We will talk about it when you wake up.”

“Yes.”

“It will be all right,” she promised, but she had no idea if it would be, because she had never seen him like this before. She had seen him exhausted and anxious and sad and confused, but never like this. Despondency was a new enemy, and most of the gods who might have been persuaded to help them were a very long way away.

He looked much better when he wandered out of the bedroom. Still rumpled, but some of the bleariness in his eyes had gone. In response to Mara’s greeting of “Ah!” he crouched in front of the fleece and bent to kiss her on the forehead. Mara rewarded him with a smack on the ear and a giggle.

“There is porridge,” Tilla told him. “Or if you wait, Narina has gone out for bread.”

“I’ll wait.” He picked up a towel that had been slung over the blue curtain, crossed the room, and stopped with his hand on the back door. “Has anyone called?”

“The woman with the bad veins came again. I said does she want to think about surgery but she said no, so I showed her how to do the bandaging herself.”

“Did you tell her not to make ridges?”

“Of course. Then I talked to the pregnant girl from across the court, and cleaned and dressed a dog bite.”

“Serious?”

“He was lucky. The dog ought to be got rid of: They said it was not the first delivery boy he has bitten, but he belongs to a rich
man so nobody dares. Oh, and Sabella and lots of other people wanted to know if it is true about Horatius Balbus.”

“Uh.”

Moments later he was back from the courtyard, rubbing his wet hair.

She said, “I said you would go and see Accius when you wake up.”

He stopped rubbing and looked up from under the towel. “He came here?”

“It was only a message. Have something to eat first. He does not know you are awake.”

She had thought he might rush off anyway, but instead he sat down at the kitchen table and said, “I must find Kleitos.”

She went to check that Esico was standing out by the front door. Narina was still not back with the bread. Certain they were alone, Tilla sat opposite her husband and said softly, “Are you worried about that medicine you made?”

“You think I should be?”

“You did boil it up very quickly,” she said. “And there was all that fuss going on outside about the body.” Catching the stricken expression on his face, she reached for his hand. “But there was nothing in there to cause harm.”

“I’m sure it was fine,” he agreed, patting her hand as if he were the one offering reassurance.

When people really were certain about something, they just said it. They did not bother to tell you how sure they were. Nor did they say, “Don’t say anything about it to anybody, will you?”

“Of course not.” What did he think she might say?
My husband is afraid he might have poisoned one of his patients?
“I am sure there is nothing to worry about.” There: She was doing it herself now.

“The jar definitely said
poppy
on the outside.”

“You always check.”

“I tried some. It tasted right.”

She said, “I will try it myself.”

“You can’t,” he said. “I used the last of it. Then I told Esico to scrub all the empty containers clean. None of them has any writing. I’ve looked.”

She took a breath. “Lots of men that age fall down and die, husband. What were you treating him for?”

Instead of answering, he got to his feet. “I’ll go and see what Accius wants,” he said. “Might as well get it over with.”

He was halfway to the door when he paused to say, “Those men who wanted to sell Kleitos’s things might have been telling the truth. If they come back, ask them in and tell them they need to wait and talk to me. I need to track him down. He’ll know what was in that jar.”

Accius, as far as his doorman was aware, was still at the house of Horatius Balbus. As he set off in search of him, Ruso realized he was feeling calmer. Tilla had been right: The sleep had done him good, and a brisk walk through the sunny streets was helping him put the night in perspective. He could now see that he had overreacted. Somehow in the darkness and the panic, his mind had pulled together the body in the barrel, his hasty inclusion of an ingredient he couldn’t vouch for, Balbus’s odd fear of being poisoned, and that conversation with the old woman in the bathhouse. Now that he thought about it, she was bound to try to surround her knowledge with mystique and issue dire warnings about the dangers of amateur dabbling. Poisons and antidotes were sold by fear. There had been nothing dangerous in that mixture.

Probably.

By the time Ruso could hear the sound of mourning drifting out from the courtyard of Horatius Balbus’s house, he had decided that the chance of the death being caused by his own concoction was very small indeed. Firmicus seemed eager to blame someone—hopefully someone other than Ruso—but in truth Balbus could have collapsed from natural causes. A sudden failure of the heart.
A seizure or even a simple faint. In the darkness he might have tripped up without his companions realizing what had happened. There were any number of reasons for a man to fall, but only one result if he was unlucky enough to crash heavily onto the thin bone at the temple as he hit the ground.

Accius responded to his message by leaving the mourners and steering Ruso to the nearest bar, where he requested a private room. “I can’t be seen hanging around a cheap drinking hole dressed like this,” he explained, grabbing fistfuls of his dark mourning clothes to avoid tripping over them on the stairs. “It’s disrespectful.”

The room was not especially clean and was equipped for private meetings of an entirely different kind. Accius surveyed it with a faint expression of disgust, said, “It’ll have to do,” and sat on the bed. “I need your help, Ruso.”

Ruso tweaked the curtain aside to check that Accius’s slave was stationed at the top of the stairs, and then perched farther along the grubby bedspread.

“You wouldn’t believe the chaos back there,” Accius told him. “Poor Balbus is hardly cold and every friend and relation who might possibly be in the will has rushed to offer condolences. The staff are drooping about all over the place, the official mourners are making an appalling racket, and there’s a whole crowd of hangers-on who are just there to gawp. It’s outrageous. I’m sure some people just wander the city looking out for a door with cypress over the top and then call in to see if there’s anything to eat. I’ve told Firmicus he’s got to get a grip for Horatia’s sake, but I don’t think any of them is in a fit state to listen.”

“He’s been up all night, sir.” Ruso scratched an itch on the back of his leg and tried not to think about bedbugs.

“Well, we need to do something about it. I’ve been blind, Ruso. Horatia needs protection. The vultures are circling.” Accius shifted closer on the bed and lowered his voice. “Horatius Balbus is—was—a shrewd businessman and a devoted father, even if he did have terrible taste in statues. But to be honest I always thought he was a little odd.”

“In what way, sir?”

“He was convinced there were people out to kill him. Did you know he took antidotes?”

“He seems to have fallen and hit his head, sir,” Ruso insisted, trying to ignore the sudden churn of his stomach as he remembered the very public handover of the imitation medicine. “His own men were there at the time.”

“Ah, but why did he fall?”

He must tell Accius about that medicine. “Sir—”

“Who had he just been dining with?”

Ruso could see where this was going. What he could not see was a way to stop it. “I believe it was Curtius Cossus, sir.”

“And who exactly is Curtius Cossus? Eh?”

Ruso was not in the mood for rhetorical questions. “He’s a builder, sir. Balbus introduced me to him in case he ever needed a doctor.”

“Really? Well, I imagine he soon will, at his age. He’s not just a builder, Ruso, he’s an entrepreneur who buys up cheap apartment blocks on decent plots and pulls them down to make space for clients who want expensive houses. Only last month Balbus outbid him on a block in the Aventine that has some very fine views.”

“Then why was Balbus dining with him, sir?” The medicine business would have to wait: Accius was leading on a different trail altogether.

“I imagine they were going to discuss some sort of deal. But Cossus wants more than property. He’s had the nerve to turn up and offer to look after Horatia with some mad tale about being betrothed to her!”

“I believe he’s been telling other people the same thing, sir.”

“That he’s betrothed to them too?”

“That he’s going to marry Horatia, sir.”

“What? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It was just thirdhand gossip, sir. I told them he wasn’t.”

“Well, it would have helped to know.” Accius shifted position on the thin mattress. “He’s obviously been plotting this for some time. It all makes sense, once you see it. He invites Balbus to dinner, has a conversation with him that none of Balbus’s people overhear. Balbus conveniently drops dead on the way home, and Curtius Cossus has his own witnesses to say that Balbus has promised him Horatia in marriage.”