by Ruth Downie
Valens shook his head. “I saw her just before you got here. The apprentices will call me if anything happens, but she’ll probably be hours yet. It’s a first baby. What was it you were saying?”
“I said, I don’t know anything about finding missing tax collectors.”
“Don’t worry. You’ll get the details this afternoon.”
“I haven’t said I’ll do it.”
The brown eyes widened. “You aren’t going to let me down, are you? That would be horribly embarrassing. I’ve just been telling the procurator’s assistant what a marvelous chap you are.”
“Why would he employ a medic to conduct a manhunt?”
“Well, you wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice, obviously.” Valens glanced at the slave in the corner and nodded toward his cup. The boy stepped forward and poured more wine. “But I said you helped me work out who murdered that soldier up on the border, and—”
“I helped you?”
Valens shook his head. “There you go again, being picky. And I told him you’d had a good go at finding out what happened to those bar girls in Deva—”
“I did find out.”
Valens paused. “Really? I don’t remember. Anyway, I managed to convince him that you’re just what he’s looking for.”
“A surgeon.”
“If it would have helped to tell him you were a surgeon, I would have. But he wanted an investigator. And you can’t resist poking your nose into things, so you are a sort of investigator, aren’t you? Admit it, Ruso. Find something that intrigues you and you’re like a dog with a bone.”
There was another wail from upstairs. Valens frowned. “Shouldn’t the lovely Tilla be here by now? I promised the woman a midwife would be here any moment.”
Ruso had barely finished saying, “They must be taking a long time to unload,” when there was a commotion out in the hall and the door crashed open. Valens removed his feet from the table and swung around to see a figure stagger into the room carrying a jumble of bags and bundles.
“Tilla!” Valens sprang up from the couch. Tilla, evidently not wanting to drop the luggage, was unable to move until he released his embrace. “Dear girl, you shouldn’t be carrying all that. Didn’t he get you some help?”
Ruso said, “I thought you’d get the driver to bring it in.”
“That driver is a clumsy oaf,” explained Tilla. Ruso guessed that he had not treated the crockery with sufficient respect.
Valens stepped back and gestured to his slave. “Give her a hand, will you? Into the guest room.”
As the boy began to ferry the bags back into the expanse of the hall, Valens turned to Tilla. “You have no idea how glad we are to see you. The young woman upstairs will be even happier. I’m sorry to ask you to take over the moment you arrive, but we chaps aren’t much good at this delivery business. And you speak the language.”
Tilla looked both weary and confused. “Your wife is having a baby?”
“Emergency patient,” Valens explained. “A long way from home, can’t find her husband, and her waters popped in the middle of the tax office. I’m sure she’d rather see you than any of us.”
The tone of Tilla’s yes suggested she had more to say but she was saving it for later.
“Still a bit thin,” Valens observed after she had gone, “but charmingly freckled. The Gaulish sunshine’s done her good.” He flung himself back onto the couch. “I practically dropped the letter when I read that you’d married her, you know.”
Ruso could hardly believe it himself at times. He was still not sure how a destitute British slave with a broken arm had managed to slip past the defenses of an educated and civilized man—especially a man who had been determined not to repeat the mistake of his first marriage. It was not as if Tilla had deliberately set out to lure him. She had consistently refused to embrace the qualities one might seek in either a slave or a wife. She showed neither obedience nor respect, and both he and Valens had given up hoping that she would ever learn to cook properly. Yet he had found that he was much happier with her than without her. Back at home, with their relationship under the dubious scrutiny of his family, marriage had seemed the natural—even the honorable—thing to do.
“But then I thought,” Valens continued, “what harm can it do? And I’m delighted to see you both. Not to mention that rather promising amphora I notice has arrived with you. You, me, Tilla—it’ll be just like the old days in the Legion.”
Ruso, noting the absence of mold on the walls and beer stains on the furniture, said, “Not quite.”
“Well, no, we’ve come up in the world since then. At least, I have. Did you notice my rather lovely consulting rooms on the way in? Once word gets around that you’re a personal physician to the famous …” He smiled and spread his hands in a gesture that was somewhere between a modest shrug and an attempt to demonstrate the enormity of the good things that had come his way since they both left the army. “Anyway, let’s hope young Firmus likes you. Then who knows how high you might go?”
Ruso frowned. “Who’s Firmus?”
“Some sort of junior relative who’s in charge while the procurator’s laid up.” It was not a ringing endorsement of Firmus’s competence as an employer. Ruso suspected that Valens, having failed to find him a job despite all the breezy assurances in his letters that it would be no problem, had now offered his services to the first person who looked open to persuasion.
“Tell me about him.”
“Looks as though he’s cracked a couple of ribs, and he’s seriously shaken up. Not to mention embarrassed. Between you and me, I’d imagine that when the governor’s away on tour he’s supposed to be sitting in his office running the province, not gallivanting around chasing wild boar. Especially a man of his age.”
“I meant Firmus,” explained Ruso, who was not interested in the accident that had temporarily disabled one of Hadrian’s two top men in Britannia.
Valens shook his head. “Frighteningly young, Ruso. As they all are these days. He came trotting in while I was strapping his uncle up and said he had a mad native ranting about a missing husband and stolen money, and now she was about to give birth on the floor of his office and what should he do?” The grin reappeared. “Unfortunately I’d just filled the procurator with poppy juice, so he wouldn’t have cared if Juno herself was giving birth in the office. Young Firmus was looking a bit desperate, and I’d just heard that your ship was coming in on the next tide, so everything fell into place rather neatly.”
“You told him I’d rush all over Britannia for the tax office, hunting down this woman’s missing husband?”
“From what I can gather, all he needs is someone to nip up the road to Verulamium—which is a pleasant enough place, by the way—chat to the locals, and confirm whether this fellow’s really abandoned his wife and run off with all their money. Just come back with a report the lad can hand over when the procurator gets back to work. What could be simpler?”
“If it’s so simple, why can’t he find someone else to do it?”
Valens sighed. “He could, Ruso. Frankly, I should think the next-door neighbor’s dog could do it. But you’re the one with no money and no job. I’ve solved your problem and his at the same time, you see? You might try and be grateful.”
Ruso said, “I’ll do my best.”
Another cry from upstairs penetrated the room. Valens winced. In the silence that followed he said, ‘I hope she doesn’t go on too long, poor woman. You can hear it all over the house.”
Ruso got to his feet. “I suppose if I’m going to look for her husband,” he said, “I’d better try to talk to her while she’s still listening.” It seemed like bad luck to say, While she’s still alive, although given the number of women who did not survive childbirth despite the best of help, it might have been more honest.
4
U PSTAIRS, EVERYTHING WAS going very well.
He was not sure whether this was true, or whether Tilla was just saying so to keep her patient calm.
The air held the spearmint smell of the pennyroyal Tilla had taken from Valens’s medicine shelves. The woman was kneeling on the floor with her back to him, elbows resting on the bed and head bowed in concentration. A thick tail of tangled red hair cascaded down over a cream linen shift that Ruso thought he might have seen before on his wife. A selection of cloths and woolen bandages and sponges had been laid out next to the bowls of water on top of the cupboard. A little figurine of a goddess had been placed on a stool in the corner. In front of it was a lit candle and an offering of some of the olives they had brought from Gaul. Tilla might have started worshipping Christos while they were away, but here she was taking no chances.
He beckoned her out of the room to explain what he wanted, adding, “Don’t tell her I’m a doctor.”
His wife looked askance at him. “Do not think of behaving like one. It is bad enough managing with no birthing stool and no helpers.”
“If you need us to—”
“If I am truly desperate, I will ask you to fetch a neighbor.”
Back in the room, the woman was eager to tell him her troubles. The torrent of words tumbled over one another and at times he had difficulty separating them even though her Latin was good. It seemed that her husband and his brother had left Verulamium three days ago, intending to visit a neighbor on the Londinium road. They had not been seen since. Now the Council were accusing them of theft.
“You must listen!” she insisted, gripping a fistful of bedcover. “Something has happened to them. Nobody will listen to me. That is why I came to the procurator.”
She stopped talking, lumbered to her feet, and walked around to the window. Clinging onto the sill, she bent forward and cried out. Tilla stood behind her, patiently massaging her back and assuring her she was doing very well.
He waited for the contraction to pass, silently absorbing this fresh evidence that women were very poorly designed. He had, without telling his wife, added a book on pregnancy and childbirth to his collection of medical texts. Yet it still remained a mystery to him why Tilla, who knew more about childbirth than most, was so desperate to go through it. Picturing himself carrying a small son or even a daughter on his shoulders gave him an inexplicable sense of warmth and contentment, but had his own part in the procedure been as troublesome—not to mention dangerous—as this, he might have wondered whether it was worth the bother.
Finally Camma let go of the windowsill and whispered, “Another step closer?”
“Another step closer,” Tilla assured her. “Do not worry. My husband will help to look for your man. He is good at this sort of thing.”
As the woman began to describe the missing brothers, he could see his wife counting the time to the next contraction on her fingers.
Julius Asper was a tall man with kind eyes. He was thirty-four years old. His hair was short and brown, with some gray at the temples, and he had no beard. To Ruso’s relief he also had a scar under his right eye, which might distinguish him from hundreds of other brown-haired tallish men of the same age. As for the kind eyes—that would perhaps depend on whether one was a devoted wife or a defaulting taxpayer. The brother was shorter, with darker hair in the same style and—oh, joy!—part of an ear missing. Now that was a useful description. Both spoke good Latin. She had never noticed an accent, but since she had one herself, that might not mean much.
“Please find him!” She clutched at the sill again. “Everyone is lying to me. Aargh! Oh blessed Andraste, make it stop!” Her voice rose to a shriek. “Why did I let him do this to me?”
Ruso left the room quietly, unnoticed and doubtlessly unmissed.
Downstairs, Ruso conceded that he would be going to Verulamium. “Serena won’t mind if Tilla stays here, will she?”
Valens’s hesitant “Uh” hinted at complications.
They had never discussed it, but Ruso was aware that despite their own friendship, the two women had never been close. Serena was the daughter of a high-ranking Roman centurion. Tilla was not only a native, but, when they had first met, she had been Ruso and Valens’s housekeeper. It was a social distance that neither woman had really managed to bridge. Still, it was surely not so serious that Valens would turn down a request for hospitality. He said, “I don’t think an investigator is supposed to have his wife trailing along all over the place.”
“Oh, absolutely. But if Serena comes home tomorrow and finds somebody else’s wife here with just me, the apprentices, and the kitchen boy, it’ll look a bit odd.”
“You mean she’s not back tonight?”
“Anything’s possible,” said Valens, whose earlier statement that his wife had gone to visit a relative had, now Ruso thought about it, been unusually vague.
Ruso looked more closely at the room in which they were sitting. It was true that the walls were elegantly painted and there were no beer stains, but there were balls of dust in the corners. He saw for the first time that someone had dribbled oil down the lamp stand and not wiped up the pool on the floor, and recalled the dying flowers on the table in the hall.
“So where—”
“She’s bound to be back any day now,” Valens assured him. “She left most of her shoes behind.”
Ruso decided not to pry. He would leave that to Tilla. Instead he tried, “How are the twins?”
Valens brightened. “Oh, fine little chaps. Coming along very nicely. New teeth and new words practically every time I see them. Sorry about the state of the place, but she’s got most of the staff with her. Still, I was thinking we could crack open that amphora tonight and perhaps Tilla might, uh …”
“You want Tilla to cook?”
Their eyes met. For a moment neither of them spoke, each perhaps recalling his own selection of Tilla’s culinary disasters.
Valens said, “Of course we could always …”
“We’ll have something brought in,” agreed Ruso, anticipating the end of the sentence.
5
L ONDINIUM REMINDED RUSO of a child whose mother had dressed it in a huge tunic and announced, “You’ll grow into it.” Four years after his first visit, there was still no sign of the town expanding to fit the massively ambitious Forum. Its red roofs dominated the skyline on the far side of the marshy brook separating Valens’s end of town from the wharves and most of the official buildings.
Joining his own footsteps to the dull thunder of feet on the nearest bridge, he wondered how the hell he could walk away from the tax office without getting Valens into more trouble than he deserved.
He was distracted by snatches of conversation in a blur of languages: words of complaint in Greek, the first half of an old joke in Latin, and something Eastern. As he passed the gaudy bar where he had first discovered that the native brew really did taste as foul as it smelled, he overheard two trouser-wearing slaves arguing in an oddly strangled burble and realized with a shock that it was British. He had spent much of the voyage struggling to wrap his tongue around the complications of Tilla’s native speech, but Tilla was from the North. Now it seemed that if his efforts were to be of any use, he was going to have to perform some sort of mental swerve onto a new track.
He passed the timbered workshop of a cobbler who had once repaired his boots. He nodded to some native god at a street altar, resolving to give proper thanks for a safe voyage as soon as he had time. Moments later he was enjoying the simplicity of Latin as he explained himself to the guards at the grand gatehouse of the Official Residence.
It seemed that the governor had ordered improvements to be made to the Residence in his absence. Ruso followed the guard across the courtyard, through the hall of the main building, and out into what should have been a formal garden area where the great man and his guests could enjoy a grand view of the river. The view was intact but the garden had been converted into a temporary builders’ yard. Their progress was accompanied by the musical clink of stonemasons and the crunch and rattle of someone shoveling gravel. A cargo of roof tiles was being unloaded from a vessel moored agains
t the governor’s private steps. A chain of slaves was passing them along and the last man was stacking them inside the clipped rectangle of a box hedge as if they were some kind of delicate plant.
The guard escorted him past the fish pool and around a pile of timber blocking one side of the walkway. Ruso ducked under a scaffolding pole to see a makeshift sign that read, “Procurator’s Assistant.” Beyond it, he was ushered into the dank chill of a room where the plaster was still drying out.
This wing of the complex might be imposing one day but at the moment nothing was quite finished, and that included the official behind the desk. Firmus was indeed frighteningly young. He had the smooth cheeks of a boy, the nose of a patrician, and the tan of someone who had not just spent a winter in the Northwest provinces. These were arrayed beneath what Ruso supposed was the next fashion in haircuts.
As he approached, a bent slave leaned forward to whisper something in one of the aristocratic ears.
“So you’re Ruso,” the youth began, squinting as he looked him up and down. “I’m told you’ve done some work for the governor’s security chief?”
“Just an isolated case, sir,” said Ruso, hoping Metellus was still safely up on the northern border and had not been seconded to the finance office.
“And you’ve also worked for the Twentieth Legion?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve never met an investigator before,” the youth confessed. “At least, not as far as I know.” The squint reappeared. “You’re not what I expected.”
“I was with the Legion as a medical officer,” said Ruso, wondering what an investigator should look like.
“Ah,” said the youth, nodding slowly. “Very clever. Good cover.”
“I’m not a spy,” Ruso explained. “To tell you the truth, I’m not really—” He stopped.
