Vita Brevis (32 page)

He returned a moment later carrying the cloak he had not worn since they were on board the ship, and tucked it around her shoulders. “I thought you might be cold.”

Gazing down at their unexpected patient, she said, “Tell me something, husband. Why, if he likes her and she likes him, do they not just bed each other and be done with it? The other man will not want her then, because your men always like to be the first and only, and they can marry in peace.”

He looked at her with one of those how-foreign-you-are expressions. Like when he had thought she was going to serve him a suppository mixture for lunch. “A normal girl can’t just marry whoever she likes, Tilla. She’ll have to have her guardian’s permission.”

“I am not a normal girl?”

“Not at all.”

She had thought he would bid her good night then, but instead he seated himself on the table with his feet propped up on the workbench so as not to tread on Accius. On the other side of the room the straw rustled as Esico rolled over and mumbled in his sleep.

He said, “I’m beginning to wonder if I’m as bad as they are.”

Not sure who
they
were, she reached up and put a hand over his. “Never.”

“Whether I’m actually guilty isn’t the point,” he said. “It’s the possibility. The fact of the carelessness.”

He was still worrying about that medicine. She said, “You thought you were the only person in the world who never made a mistake, and now you have found out you are not.”

“It’s not funny, Tilla. I was in a rush and instead of making the patient wait, I gave him something I couldn’t vouch for.”

“Whatever you did, you did it to help.”

“I did it to hang on to this practice.”

“You did it for us,” she told him, patting his hand. “I am proud of you. Now go and sleep.”

She felt the cloak being rearranged around her shoulders, then he eased himself down from the table and stepped over Accius. “Don’t wait up too long.”

She waited until she was certain he had gone to bed. Then she crouched on the floor and shook the former tribune by the shoulder. When he started mumbling about parades and morning briefings she said in his ear, “You are not on parade now. You are a drunk who is lying on a floor feeling sorry for himself. Tomorrow I will try to find out if that girl is still silly enough to want to marry you, and if there is any hope of it. But listen to me when I tell you this: No good will come of working with Metellus, nor of using my husband to make an enemy of that Curtius Cossus. I will not let you draw my family into danger like that. We have enough troubles already. Do you understand?”

Of course he did not. Neither would Esico, even if he were awake, because she was speaking in Latin. But as she settled back in the chair and pulled the cloak around herself, she felt much better for saying it.

It was unlikely that Accius understood much of what was said to him the next morning about the violent men who were demanding money from Ruso’s family, but Ruso did not care. The man was so hungover that he would have agreed to anything in order to be left in peace, which was exactly what Ruso wanted.

Unfortunately, Tilla was less obliging. She did not want to go to the safety of Accius’s house. She had already suffered enough malicious nonsense from his housekeeper, whom she had taken to calling the Witch before the first week of the sea voyage was out.

Besides, as she pointed out over the morning porridge, if the undertakers were not due to return until tomorrow, there was no reason to leave now.

“Accius’s house is a lot better than this,” he reminded her. “No neighbors to worry about, plenty of food from the kitchen, Mara can splash in the fountain—”

“And the Witch will want Narina to scrub it clean. So she can stand there watching and making comments.”

“You wanted me to talk to him,” he said. “This is what he’s offered.”

She looked up from making a valley in her porridge with the
edge of the spoon. “Do you know how many places we have lived in, husband?”

Surprised by this sudden change of direction, he confessed that he did not.

“Very many,” she told him, perhaps not certain herself.

The sound of someone knocking at the door raised a fresh groan from the floor of the surgery. To Ruso’s disappointment it was not four strong men ready to bear Accius away in a covered chair, but members of the night watch wanting to know if Doctor Simmias was here. Apparently he had not turned up for last night’s duty.

Back in the kitchen, Tilla was in the mood to make speeches. “A proper family sows seeds in the spring and harvests in the summer,” she told him, “and in the autumn they bring in logs for the winter and then they kill the pig. But our family has no land to plant, and no trees, and no pig. Because every few weeks, you come home and say, ‘Time to go, wife!’ and we put all the things back into the bags and boxes and move on.”

“You married a soldier,” he reminded her. “That’s what soldiers do.”

“You are not a soldier now,” she told him. “You promised that if Kleitos did not come back, this place with no cockroaches would be our home. Kleitos is not coming back, and I am not leaving here just because some man with a squeaky voice wants money.”

“I know I said that,” he admitted, wishing he hadn’t. “But things have changed. Apart from Phyllis’s husband telling her to stay away from you and Sabella’s husband wanting to evict us, three big ugly men are coming here tomorrow to collect more money than we’ve got. We can’t expect the Christos people to be around next time, we can’t afford to hire guards, and we’ve been offered a safe place for Mara. We should take it.”

When she did not reply he said, “If you don’t want to go there, Narina can take her.”

“But she is my baby!”

“Do you want her here, then?” he asked. “When those men come back?”

She flung the spoon down in the bowl. “It is not fair!”

“No,” he agreed, wondering why she had imagined that it might be.

More than once, he had watched his wife lavishing the attention on Mara that she had at least occasionally lavished on him in the past, and wondered
Why did I agree to this?
But then when he looked down at Mara’s wispy hair and vulnerable little face he realized that it didn’t matter why he had agreed to parenthood: He was just going to have to keep on doing his best at it until he found a young man good enough to take over the job of protecting her in marriage. And the gods alone knew where one of those might be found. He said, “I’m not going to order you to go, Tilla. But I may order Narina to take Mara.”

She bowed her head and pinched the bridge of her nose as if her head was aching. He supposed that back in Britannia, when women went out armed with spears and swords there was always some grandmother or aunt left behind to mind the little ones. Then he remembered a terrible account he had read somewhere of a battlefield where a hungry baby was found crying at its dead mother’s breast, and wondered if he was wrong.

Outside in the street there was a burst of laughter that rapidly deteriorated into a cough. Ruso held his breath, waiting to see if the cougher would call in for some medicine. The noise faded into the distance. With every sniffle and limp that passed the door, he was becoming more convinced that patients were deliberately passing them by because of gossip about the goings-on here.

“At home,” she said, “the children are often there when the soldiers come.”

It was true. He had seen children caught up in raids on civilian property. Whatever the troops did, it was messy. If they showed mercy it could be exploited as weakness. If they didn’t, the Britons had yet another cause for seething resentment.

“They have nowhere to hide,” he said. “We have somewhere. And Squeaky and his men aren’t soldiers with an officer to keep them in check.”

“If we go there,” she said, “Those men have won.”

“I don’t care! I’m not putting our child in danger just so we can keep living in this apartment.”

She said, “My people are always asking themselves this question about their home. Do you not remember the song?”

“Remind me.” The best part of most of Tilla’s ancestor songs was when they ended: a moment that was usually far too long coming.

“Some of my people wanted to leave when they knew the Legions were coming. But the rest of the people said, ‘No, we will stay here, because here is all we have. The soldiers will come. They will steal our crops and take many of our lives, but if we are patient, they will also go. The winter will pass into spring, and when the peace comes, there will be a home for our children and our children’s children.’”

“Wife, your people are hundreds of miles away across the sea.”
And
, he wanted to add,
you cannot base a rational decision on a song full of ridiculous bravado
. Especially one with a tune that reminds you of autumn nights with old friends, when you were warmed on the outside by the bonfire and on the inside by too much beer.

“We stand our ground,” she declared.

“Kleitos knew more about what’s going on here than we do, and he ran. Now it looks as though Simmias has run too.”

“Kleitos was not Brigante.”

“And this isn’t Britannia,” he reminded her, regretting his promise not to order her to go. He had hoped the concession would persuade her to see sense. “Besides,” he added, “refusing to move hasn’t always worked too well for your people.”

“We stand our ground,” she repeated.

“Whoever composed that song was just guessing at how the story will end. The soldiers haven’t gone. They’re still there.”

She lifted her chin. “And so are my people.”

He sighed. Since her brief flirtation with being a Roman wife, Tilla seemed to have become more stubbornly British than ever.

“This is our home,” she told him. “Tonight Narina can take Mara across to Accius’s house to be safe. But if anybody wants me out—the neighbors or Sabella’s husband or Squeaky and his friends—they will have to carry me.”

Rather than point out that Squeaky would have no difficulty in carrying her, he went to see if Accius wanted more water. When he returned to the kitchen Tilla was busy emptying the shelves of all their wedding-present crockery. She said, “Promise me you will never tell your family where this went. How much do you think we will get for it?”

Very little, he supposed, since she would have to sell it quickly. He did not say that. Neither did he voice his own suspicion that paying Squeaky and his cronies might encourage them to come
back for more. At least she was not hatching some mad scheme to try to fight them off. He said, “I’m sorry things haven’t turned out the way you’d hoped.”

She paused, caressing the smooth rim of a cup with one finger. Then she put it back on the table with the others. “I have more than I ever hoped for,” she told him. “I have a husband and a baby. These …” She indicated the crockery. “These are just things.”

The hug took her by surprise.

“What is that for?”

“Oh … nothing.” He stepped back, eyeing the skinny girl he had bought in a back street, who had turned into this proud and brave and beautiful and exasperating wife.

“Then don’t interrupt. I want to get this sold, and then I am going to see that poor motherless girl who wants to marry Accius.” She bent down and pulled a fistful of fresh straw out of the hole she had slit in one of the new mattresses, then dropped it onto the top bowl in the box before reaching up to add the next one to the stack.

Just as she finished packing, Accius’s steward arrived with a hired chair. The bearers bundled him in, pulling the curtains shut on him so that nobody in the street would know who was in there groaning.

Ruso could have got a better price back in Britannia, but if he had had the sense to stay in Britannia, he wouldn’t have been selling his kit anyway. He turned away as two smug-faced Praetorians carried the box away down the corridor.
These are just things
. In their place was a second fat purse of coins.

A braver man would have made more of a stand over being blackmailed. Since there wasn’t a braver man available, he would add this to the money from Simmias and the money from the sale of the crockery, and they would have more than enough cash to pay off Squeaky.

Ruso strode away from the barracks and cut south through the gardens on the way to the headquarters of the undertakers.

“Doctor!” Lucius Virius floated into the room with what might be the nearest thing he could manage to a welcoming smile. “So soon.” The smile faded. “Not bad news, I hope?”

“Not for your staff,” Ruso told him. “I’m about to give them quite a lot of money.”

The eyebrows drifted upward. “Really?”

“To be honest,” Ruso confessed, his hopes rising, “I’m not sure
what the lad’s name is. Big frame, small voice. He and a couple of friends came to visit the other day. After I’d been to see you.”

Lucius Virius’s face twitched, as if it was waiting to be told what expression to adopt.

“He seemed to think I’d been making things difficult for you,” Ruso continued. “But I want you to know that I haven’t. So I’ve come to reassure you personally, and to pay the compensation he requested.”

Lucius Virius’s head drifted down into a nod of acknowledgment, but his continuing silence suggested he still didn’t know what Ruso was talking about.

“I was wondering,” Ruso continued, sending up a silent prayer that the man wouldn’t just take the money and have him chased off the premises, “if we could agree a discount for early payment.” He slapped a heavy pouch of coin onto the table. “Since I’ve saved him the trouble of coming to collect it tomorrow.”

The head bobbed up and down with more enthusiasm at the sight of the money. Lucius Virius was certain something could be arranged. How much, exactly, would the doctor consider a fair amount?

Ruso scratched one ear with his forefinger. This was going rather better than he had expected. Whatever Lucius Virius knew about the illegal supply of bodies for dissection, it was clear he didn’t know anything about Squeaky’s attempts at extortion.

The thing was, Ruso explained, his wife and several of the neighbors had been rather alarmed by the first visit and had begged him to make sure there wouldn’t be another. “Your man and his friends are very large and very loud,” he pointed out. “I’m sure they don’t mean to be, but there it is. So I’d be grateful for his and your personal assurance that whatever we agree today is the end of it. Then I’ll be able to promise everyone that they won’t be back.”