Deadly Election

by Lindsey Davis

  ‘You made them up.’

  ‘That’s oratory.’

  ‘Be sensible. Go back to Trebonius. He’s too masculine?’

  ‘A brute!’ Faustus was fired up. ‘For comparison, I read up on Catiline – once the evil hard man of Republican politics. Cicero said Catiline made himself able to endure cold, hunger, thirst, lack of sleep – but then there was an argument against him that he was too dangerous to trust.’

  ‘My father rails against him for trying to overthrow the Republic, using the plight of the poor for his selfish advantage. Many of the poor still admire him, but those fools won’t be voting. Senators who actually remember who Catiline was will think of him as attacking the aristocracy. They will shudder and vote against that, hopefully voting for Sextus.’

  ‘Cicero calls Catiline an enigmatic figure,’ mused Faustus. ‘A good leader, but lustful and self-serving.’

  ‘Enigma is always viewed as dangerous. Mind you, some senators probably think lust is commendable in a strong politician.’

  Faustus laughed. ‘I cannot call Trebonius ambiguous. He’s transparently ambitious for personal power.’

  ‘Say that, then. And don’t forget to mention how Trebonius and Arulenus dined out the bankers so they could make promises to increase interest rates. Many of the Senate are struggling in debt. That will rile them.’ Faustus made more notes. ‘Now, doesn’t that heartless swine Dillius have a vicious lawsuit against his dying grandfather? He cannot wait for his inheritance because he is desperate for more money for his exotic Greek wines.’

  ‘Greek?’

  ‘Bound to be. Unpatriotically ignoring Italian vintages.’

  ‘Well, it’s not him,’ I said. ‘Latest information puts that charge against Gratus, so you won’t want to use it.’

  ‘Ah! … Pity.’

  The only candidate against whom we had no ammunition was Ennius Verecundus, the loner who went around smiling too much, with his mother running his campaign. Faustus remarked, ‘A candidate’s mother, if she is alive, should back him, though a man needs visible male supporters. Since Rome reveres strong mothers, we cannot call that reprehensible. But we may insinuate that if they elect Ennius Verecundus we’ll have a woman running a magistracy.’

  ‘So unacceptable!’ I scoffed fiercely.

  ‘Depends on the woman, in my opinion,’ Faustus answered. ‘But this idea will terrify the greybeards. Many are scared of their own mothers, and they will have seen Ennius being led around virtually on a leash by his fierce mama. When Sextus speaks, the frightful woman only has to stand there glowering and she will make our point herself.’

  Having seen the mama, I allowed that. ‘I hate the way Ennius Verecundus smiles all the time. And I wonder, Tiberius, where are the rest of his family? Does he have other relatives? If not, be careful, or he and his mama will turn into the brave lone widow and the poor fatherless boy she lovingly does her best for … I’ll try to find out. If he does have relatives, are they too nervous to be near his domineering mother? I doubt if I can prove he lives a wild life – he doesn’t look as if she has ever let him out of doors to enjoy life at all.’

  Faustus wrote that down.

  We had reached the end of what we could achieve, and at that moment we were joined by the mother of Sextus Vibius. The grey-haired elderly woman had brought home-made mint cordial for us, with her own hands carrying in a tray and delicate little cups.

  I had not properly met her before. She was well dressed but looked worn. She had a mentally ailing husband. He was regularly brought out to support Sextus, but never left the litter. I found myself wondering about those mortgages Sextus had had fetched from store; did his father really have legal capacity to sign financial documents? Was he truly aware of the resources being spent on his son’s campaign (was he even aware of the campaign)?

  Marcella Vibia spent all day looking after him, rarely out of his company. An old-fashioned wife, she took his care upon herself, even though they had domestic staff. I had often heard him fretting and her soothing him. She looked like someone who spent her days fearing the worst.

  Now she sat down with us as if glad of other company; she said the old man was asleep for once. She fanned herself gently with her hand, feeling the heat. I leaned over and served out the cordial. Then, as Marcella Vibia only smiled and sipped, I took up what had caught my attention earlier and asked, ‘Have you enjoyed being aedile yourself, Tiberius?’

  He nodded, but did not elaborate. Vibia spoke up. ‘It has changed him visibly, Flavia Albia, in only a few months. The magistracy has helped this young man finally discover what he is made of.’

  I could see that, having no mother of his own, Tiberius was sometimes taken under this kindly woman’s wing. She talked freely about him and he let her do so. ‘You mean,’ he said, ‘I was an idle scamp but I have learned to be useful.’

  ‘We were all a little surprised!’ she teased. ‘That is why we wanted to see Sextus follow in your footsteps.’

  I wondered whether that meant his parents saw Vibius as an idle scamp himself … Personally, if we managed to have him elected, I could not see it turning out so well.

  Then, more seriously, Vibia spoke to me: ‘I have known Tiberius Manlius from childhood; his family had the next estate to ours near Fidenae and the boys went to school together. We were so upset when his parents died – such lovely people − both carried off by the same summer plague. That meant his uncle took him, which of course was for the best, I would never say otherwise, but Tiberius went away to Rome at that early age and we almost lost sight of him.’

  ‘Well, we are all together in the city now,’ Faustus soothed her.

  ‘But Tullius has you up there on the Aventine, so far away from everyone!’

  Faustus chuckled. ‘Not everyone. Flavia Albia lives there too.’

  ‘Obviously a great attraction,’ responded Marcella Vibia, only a little sarcastically. ‘I hope you don’t haunt the streets looking for girls to follow about, Tiberius.’

  Faustus liked to tease stern women – I had seen him do it before, with my mother. Possibly he even did it to me. ‘Perk of the job! I still remember when I spotted Flavia Albia, trotting to and fro on her business. It brightened my day.’ That startled me. I liked him, but not the idea he had regularly tailed me. I could not believe it. Surely I would have noticed.

  ‘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!

  23

  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.

  24

  Closing 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.