Vita Brevis (33 page)

There was a pause while Lucius Virius might have been weighing up the damage that Squeaky’s behavior could cause to the reputation of his business. Or he might have been wondering what sort of price Ruso might fetch if he were nailed up inside a barrel. Finally he said, “Excuse me one moment, Doctor,” and flowed out of the room as if propelled by a strong current.

Ruso was left alone with a large sum of money and a display of dried flowers. He tried to concentrate on what he should say next,
but was unable to push away thoughts of the conversation Lucius Virius might be having at this moment, and what Squeaky’s response might be, and what sort of instruments might be stored here for the entirely legal disciplining of slaves.

There were footsteps crunching toward him across the yard. The door opened and the room shrank as Lucius Virius was followed in by Squeaky.

“Doctor,” Lucius Virius began with uncharacteristic vigor, “let me say how grateful we are to you for coming here to reassure us in person.”

Squeaky was looking from one to the other of them.

“My employee and I have discussed your kind offer,” Lucius Virius told him, “And I must apologize for the misunderstanding. It seems someone had been wrongly informed that a payment was owing.”

Ruso swallowed. They were going to cancel it? Just like that, after one meeting? After all the trouble he and Tilla had gone to?

“However …”

No, they weren’t.

“… my employee was given some very worrying information about a slander that, if it were allowed to pass unchecked, might affect our reputation and the renewal of our contract with the city authorities.”

“It didn’t come from me,” Ruso told him.

“Yes, it bloody did!” put in Squeaky.

Lucius Virius put a hand on his arm. “My young friend is very keen to defend the reputation of the business. I’m afraid he’s been a little overenthusiastic. But you see, we can’t have slander circulating unchecked. And our source was very reliable.”

“Simmias made it up to get you off his back,” Ruso told Squeaky. “He doesn’t want a home visit from you any more than Kleitos did.”

Lucius Virius glanced at Squeaky. “Someone visited Doctor Kleitos?”

“That was Birna,” put in Squeaky, “but Kleitos had gone.”

Ruso added, “Simmias tried to deflect everything onto me.”

“Doctor Simmias?” Lucius Virius sounded as though he could not believe it. “I must have a word with him when I see him.”

Squeaky shuffled uncomfortably. “It wasn’t him who told me this one was trouble.”

Lucius Virius got there first with “Then who was it?”

Squeaky scratched his head and looked embarrassed. “I’ll tell you later, boss.”

Ruso said, “I think I have a right to know who’s been spreading lies about me.”

Lucius Virius held a hand out between them. “Doctor, I’m sorry you have been inconvenienced. Whoever it is, I will see they are spoken to. Now, please allow me …” He held out his other hand, which contained a fat purse not unlike the one Ruso had been about to hand over. “Perhaps you would allow me to make a small gesture on behalf of the business, with my apologies to your wife and neighbors. Can I hope the matter will now be forgotten?”

Ruso took a step back. “I don’t want your money,” he said, not sure what was being bought. “I want you to promise me that from now on this man and his friends will stay away from my family.” Then as an afterthought, he added, “And from Simmias.”

Lucius Virius inclined his head. “I think we can promise that, can we not?”

Squeaky said, “We were defending the business, boss.”

“But, as I’m sure you’re delighted to find,” Lucius Virius told him, “the doctor is not an enemy.”

“I’m very delighted, boss.”

Ruso said, “Simmias didn’t turn up for work last night. Do you know where he is?”

Lucius Virius raised his eyebrows toward his chastened employee. “Do we know where he is?”

But Squeaky did not. Or so he said.

Horatia still looked pale, but her hair had been combed and her dark mourning clothes were neatly arranged. She said she was pleased to have a visitor. “Yesterday it was everybody, now it’s nobody,” she confided. Tilla noticed the jet bracelet hanging from the girl’s thin wrist as she pointed to the seat beside her. As Tilla joined her under the bower, Horatia declared she was chilly and sent the round-faced slave girl to fetch her stole. As soon as the girl was gone she whispered, “Quick, tell me! Is he all right?”

“Accius?”

“They told me he was ill. I’ve been so worried! All this talk of poisons! I should have told him to be careful.”

“He wasn’t ill,” said Tilla. “He was drunk. He seemed all right this morning.”

“You’ve seen him? What did he say?”

“He is never going to drink wine again.”

“Anything about me?”

But before Tilla could reply, the servant was back to wrap the stole around her mistress’s shoulders.

“Do stop sniffling, Gellia!” Horatia snapped. “It is not your
father who has died! If I want miserable-looking people around the house I will send for the mourners!”

The girl apologized, but the sniffling carried on. Horatia sent her to stand farther away. “Another week of nothing but glum faces to put up with before the funeral feast,” she said. “And then a whole twelve months dressed like this. I feel like a Vestal Virgin that’s been buried alive.”

Tilla asked if there were anything she could do to help, but Horatia’s only suggestion—that she should send the new guardian back home—was impossible. “It’s not as if he’s ever shown any interest until now. He hardly recognized me, even though we’re cousins. He thought I was still about ten. And now he’s in the study with Creepy Cossus, going through all the records of the business, and Firmicus is walking around like a thundercloud because he always takes charge when Pa’s away—I mean when he was … Oh, dear.” She twisted the bracelet around her wrist. “Sorry. And the bodyguard’s run away. Not that it matters. Pa doesn’t need him now, does he?”

Across the courtyard, the round-faced girl was still standing to attention. The tears were trickling down her cheeks and dripping from her chin. There were dark wet blobs on her gray mourning tunic, under which the thickening of her pregnancy was beginning to be visible.

“I won’t marry him, you know,” Horatia said suddenly. “I’ll kill myself first.”

“Have you said this to your cousin?”

“He says I’ll get used to it. I can stave them all off until the mourning period is over but by then Creepy Cossus will have his fingers so deep into the business that there’ll be no way to prize them out.”

Tilla said, “I am so sorry.”

“Everyone is sorry!” Horatia cried. “Why don’t they just do the one thing that would cheer me up, and let me marry Accius?”

Tilla said, “I don’t know. Things are not done this way where I come from.”

“I tried your husband’s lettuce,” Horatia’s voice was calmer now. “I don’t think it did any good, but I washed it down with a lot of wine, so who knows?”

“You look stronger today than you did in the funeral procession,” Tilla told her, “but your slave girl is still very upset. Would you like me to talk to her?”

“Give her some lettuce,” Horatia suggested.

Tilla was getting to her feet when she heard Horatia say, “Is it true there are medicines that are also poisons if you use too much of them?”

“There are,” Tilla agreed. “But if you ask me about them, I will have to tell your cousin. And Accius.”

“I thought you were on my side!”

“I am.”

“You don’t understand. I can’t marry that man. If they try to make me—”

“I understand this,” Tilla interrupted, “but no man is worth dying for. And there are far worse things than being married to a man you do not love.”

“How would you know? You don’t do things this way where you come from.”

So then Tilla sat down again and spoke softly, and as busy slaves flitted in and out of the garden around them she told of the raid on the family farm, and how the leader of the men who had killed her family took her as a slave and used her for his pleasure. “All this is past and gone,” she said. “I do not speak of it often. There are more and more days when I do not think of it at all. But when I was there, I saw no end to it. I wanted to die and join my own people in the next world. And then I thought, if I die, this man has won. So I waited. And then one day the gods smiled on me again and I escaped. So, no, I do not know how things are done here. But do not tell me that I do not understand.”

Horatia gulped.

Wondering if she had said too much, Tilla added, “I cannot tell you what to do. Your guardian thinks he can, and there are a lot of powerful people here who will agree with him. If they try to force you to do something you don’t want to do, you will have to choose how to answer them. But none of it is worth dying for. Now before I go and talk to your slave, if I see Accius, is there a message?”

Horatia sniffed. “Tell him …” She looked up. “They can’t make me stay at home, can they? I’m not a prisoner. Will you
make certain you see him?” When Tilla promised to visit him she said, “Tell him I shall have finished my book at the eighth hour today.”

“I will.”

“And tell him … Tell him I will be all right.”

The girl called Gellia had stopped crying now and was sniffing and wiping her nose on the back of her hand. On hearing that the mistress had sent Tilla to talk to her, she looked very alarmed. Tilla steered her to the side of the fountain as the only safe place to talk in a house that was crawling with servants, and handed her a cloth. When the girl had finished wiping her nose Tilla said, “Is it your master’s child?”

Gellia looked as if she had just been hit with a plank. “What?”

“You are making a good job of hiding it, but they will find out before long.”

This brought on a fresh flood of tears, and, “Don’t tell them. Please don’t tell them. The housekeeper will tell Firmicus, and he’ll have me whipped.”

“I am not going to tell them.” Holy mothers, another spare baby. There was something very unjust about the way the gods sent new lives into the world.

“It wasn’t supposed to … to happen like this.”

Tilla delved into her bag for a dry cloth, handed it to Gellia, and waited, watching the fish dart and glide in the basin of the fountain.

“He saw it in a dream. He said he would marry me.”

“Men say these things.” But not all women were stupid enough to believe them. Slaves were not allowed to marry. Surely Gellia knew that?

“No, he really did have a dream. He told me about it ages ago. He dreamed he was walking in a sunny meadow and he saw a mare giving birth to a foal. And he went to an interpreter who said he would be free when his son was born. Only it made no sense because he had no hope of a son. But then later on when I told him I was with child he said it was all coming true. He said he would be free soon and then he would buy me from the master and marry me. He said our son would be born a citizen.”

“Because of the dream?” said Tilla, still trying to work out who
he
was.

“And it has come true, hasn’t it? He’s free all right. But he can’t buy me now, can he?” She paused to blow her nose and wipe it with the cloth. “Firmicus says Latro ran away out of shame because he didn’t save the master but I don’t believe it. Anyway, the master didn’t deserve saving. Balbus promised him his freedom in his will and then it turned out to be a lie.” She screwed up the cloth and tucked it away in the folds of her tunic. “So, I’ve got to look after myself now.” She indicated Tilla’s healer bag. “You know about these things,” she said. “You can help me get rid of it. Then they won’t find out.”

Tilla took a deep breath. There had been a time when she would have helped. She had once been given the same help herself. How could she deny it to others? But now that she had Mara…

“It is very late for that. It will be dangerous for you.”

“I don’t care.”

“There are people who will help you, but I have not been here long enough to know them.” It was cowardly, and she knew it. “I am sure someone in the household will know.”

“But then I’d have to tell them!” The girl covered her face with her hands. “I don’t know what to do!”

“Try to stop crying,” Tilla told her. “Otherwise you will be in trouble sooner than you have to be. Make yourself useful to the family and maybe they will keep you.”

“I could say someone took me by force and I was too frightened to speak of it.”

“You could,” Tilla agreed. “But it will have to be someone who is not here to be punished for it.”

Gellia’s voice hardened. “I know just the man. Lying bastard.”

On his return to the surgery Ruso was delighted to find a youth who had got into a street fight when somebody insulted his girlfriend, and who had a bent nose and a cut over one eye that needed a couple of stitches. For a few moments that were doubtless more pleasant for him than for his patient—or for Esico, who turned green at the sight of the needle—he was faced with a simple and useful job that he felt competent to perform.

The patient paid without a quibble. Ruso watched him swagger off down the street on the arm of the proud girlfriend. He washed his hands before sharing with Esico—the only member of the household at home—the good news that Squeaky and his friends weren’t coming tomorrow after all.

Esico’s joy was restrained: Evidently he was not convinced that his master knew what he was talking about. Ruso hoped Tilla would be more appreciative. The sale of the crockery and his kit and the unexpected reprieve from Squeaky meant that instead of being bankrupt, they had more ready cash than they had seen for a very long time. He fought down a pang of regret about the kit, reminding himself that it had been sacrificed to save his family. Squeaky had been dealt with. For a few brief moments
Ruso could be the youth with the swagger, and Tilla could be the girl on his arm.

That was the good news. Less pleasant was the fact that he couldn’t find Simmias, either to apologize to him or to repay his savings. The stranger working in the treatment room at the night watch could tell him only that nobody had seen Simmias since yesterday morning when two women and a baby had come to visit, and that the absence was completely out of character. Some of the watch, fearing the worst, had gone up to the top of the stairs and taken an axe to the door of his apartment, but had found it empty.