A Coin for the Ferryman

by Rosemary Rowe

  Refusal would be even more injurious to my health, is what she meant.

  ‘I would want to do it in any case, for Junio’s sake,’ I said. ‘And Cilla’s too, of course.’

  The slave girl did not meet my eyes. She looked down at the floor, where she was drawing circles on the earth-dust with her toe. At last she said, ‘I don’t want to push myself forward, master, but you’ve used my help before. If I can do anything to assist you this time, let me know. Slave or not, I’ll do whatever I can.’

  I was about to ask her gently what she thought she could do, but she was too quick for me. ‘You are always saying that there are things that servants can find out that aren’t so easy for a citizen. I could ask questions in the villa, while I’m there.’ She sounded eager. ‘There’s one of the kitchen slaves in particular I used to know well . . .’

  ‘Cilla,’ I said gently, ‘tonight you will be freed. You are invited to the banquet to signify the fact. After that you won’t be a servant any more. You’ll be a free woman, betrothed to a free man – to a citizen, indeed.’

  ‘You mean my friend isn’t likely to confide in me again?’ Cilla sounded shocked, as if this aspect of her new existence had not previously occurred to her. ‘She’ll think that I’ve joined the owner class and treat me differently?’

  It was almost exactly what I’d meant, but I said, ‘You can hardly go wandering into the villa kitchens unaccompanied, in any case. It isn’t the sort of thing an invited visitor can do. And you will be a guest tonight and not a slave – a special guest, in fact.’ I scooped some water up into my hands and rinsed my lower legs.

  Cilla’s usually cheerful, plump young face creased in an unhappy frown. Then all at once it cleared. ‘But I’m not invited till the final course,’ she said. ‘I’m still a slave till then, so I could talk to her. I could even go and show my tunic off. It’s a nice one that my former mistress Julia sent for me – a lady’s tunic, all the way down to the ground instead of stopping at the knees the way servants’ tunics do. My friend would like to see it. When I was working at the villa we always talked about the things we would wear and the colours we would choose, if we could buy our freedom and have any clothes we liked. “Anything but this old greeny-brown,” she used to say . . .’

  ‘Very well, Cilla,’ my wife interrupted. Cilla had a tendency to enliven her reports by imitating the voices of the people she described – she’d captured the adenoidal tones of her friend the kitchen maid quite comically, I thought, but Gwellia, for once, did not seem inclined to smile. ‘You obviously have an interest in the matter,’ she said seriously, ‘and if you can help your master to clear it up, I should be very pleased, for his sake as well as yours. What do you say, husband?’

  It was clearly not a moment for levity. I turned to Cilla and tried to look properly severe. ‘You may question the servants at the villa, if you have the chance. But you are not to go anywhere unaccompanied, or make yourself a nuisance in any way at all.’

  She looked chastened. ‘Very well, master. I won’t let you down,’ she said, and Gwellia rewarded me with an approving nod.

  Great gods, I was in danger of being ruled by women here! I felt the need to assert authority. I clapped my hands and raised my voice a notch. ‘Maximus! Minimus! I need a drying cloth!’

  The result was very soothing. I had hardly got the words out before the boys were at the door, though Cilla had to point out where the clean rags were kept, hanging in a bag beside the wall. Each boy selected a likely piece of cloth, and then came across to kneel beside me, one on either side.

  ‘You should have called us earlier, master . . .’ Minimus began

  ‘. . . we would have washed your feet.’ And as if to prove it they each seized one of my legs, and attempted to outdo each other as they rubbed them dry. I feared they would upset me from my stool, such was their eagerness to prove themselves of use.

  I held up a staying hand. ‘You first, Maximus!’ Deliberately, I presented my right leg to him, and indicated that he should pat that very gently dry, before I permitted his companion to do the other one. Minimus added a light massage to his ministrations. I have never felt so foolish, or so cosseted.

  ‘Will you be changing for the banquet, master?’ Maximus enquired.

  I was just about to shake my head – I was wearing my best toga already – but Gwellia was far too quick for me.

  ‘He will change his under-tunic. I have had his white one cleaned. So you can help him strip and wash from head to toe. Empty the bowl, and he can stand in it. There is a jug of fresh water by the door that you can pour over him.’ She saw my look of slight unwillingness – Junio had washed me just the day before – and as they hastened outside with the bowl she turned smilingly to me. ‘Marcus is bestowing a compliment on this house – on Junio and Cilla in particular, of course, but on us as well. Any Roman would have bathed and changed and you must do the same. And, Cilla, your master has said that you may ask the servants questions if you like, but even if you learn something of interest, you’ll wait till afterwards to tell him what it is, and not interrupt the banquet. Ah, husband, here’s your wash.’

  I stood up and rather reluctantly took my tunic off and stepped into the empty bowl the boys placed at my feet. I mustered what dignity I could – a naked man is always at a disadvantage in a situation of this kind.

  ‘Remember, Cilla, it is vital that this evening goes off without a hitch,’ I said, addressing the girl over Minimus’s head, as he clambered on the stool with the big jug in his hand and formed a sort of human screen between us. ‘Any breaking of the rules and the ritual will be spoiled. You might not get your freedom after all. It might be regarded as another bad omen, too. So don’t get so interested in your quest that you fail to join us at the proper – aargh! – time.’ The water was extremely cold.

  Cilla nodded. ‘I’ll be very careful.’ She turned her attention to her mistress’s hair.

  ‘In any case there probably isn’t very much to learn,’ I said, the words coming in little jerks as Maximus rubbed my back with energy. ‘If there were rumours at the villa I’d have heard when I was there, but there were none at all, not even when they thought the body was a simple peasant girl. One of Julia’s servants said as much to me.’ I seized the cloth that Maximus held out and wrapped it round my vitals as I spoke, waiting for lanky Minimus to climb down from his perch and rub the rest of me.

  However, the expected pleasant friction did not come. I looked round. Both the boys were gazing at me in astonishment.

  Minimus, as usual, was the first to speak. ‘You’re talking of rumours at our villa, master?’ He clambered off his stool.

  The older boy added, incredulously, ‘A body, did you say?’

  Chapter Nine

  It was only then I realised that the two boys didn’t know about the corpse.

  It had not occurred to me – but of course they were in Glevum when the discovery was made, and they had not spoken to anyone from the villa since. Kurso and I had not said anything to them when we arrived, and they had obviously been too busy with their knucklebones to listen at the door while I was telling the story to Gwellia and her maid. Even now they had only caught the very end of it and they were goggling with curiosity.

  ‘You want Cilla to question the villa servants?’ Maximus enquired, and Maximus added doubtfully, ‘Does that mean you want her to question us as well?’

  I was about to say it didn’t, when it occurred to me it should. Of course these two might have some information of their own – perhaps without knowing that it was relevant. I looked at them sternly. ‘You don’t know anything about a body, I suppose? No rumours of a missing young man or peasant girl who might have been murdered a day or two ago?’

  They glanced at each other in what looked like pure surprise, then – both together – raised their shoulders in a helpless shrug, spread their empty hands and pulled down the corners of their mouths like a pair of tragic masks. The effect, however, was quite comical. Marcus
’s expensive dancers could not have moved in more perfect unison.

  As usual the younger boy was the first to find his tongue. ‘I don’t believe so, master. The only bodies we saw today were the ones that they were taking to the paupers’ pit . . .’

  ‘. . . His Excellence sent us to move them off the road, when he and Lucius wanted to drive through with the gig, on their way to the basilica this morning,’ Maximus added.

  ‘You probably saw them for yourself,’ Minimus put in.

  I nodded. I had indeed encountered the soldier with the mule and its grisly cargo – a pair of dead, broken bodies hanging upside down, their red hair dangling in the dust. Roman law did not permit the disposal of bodies within the city walls – not even those of beggars and common criminals – and these corpses were obviously on their way to be taken out and tipped without ceremony into the common pit.

  ‘A pair of Silurians, by the look of it,’ I said, then wished I hadn’t. The red hair and a smattering of Celtic now and then suggested that these two boys had Silurian blood themselves.

  Minimus, however, seemed eager to assist. ‘I spoke to the mule-driver when I moved him on. A couple of brigands who’d been punished by the courts for robbery with violence on the Isca road.’

  I nodded. The road which led from Glevum to the west was still dangerous – not only did the forests harbour wolves and bears, but the route was famous for the brigands who frequented it – some of them disaffected tribesmen from the borderlands, who had never quite accepted Roman rule and harried the supply trains and hapless travellers.

  ‘Six people robbed and murdered this last moon alone. Marcus was telling Lucius, just the other day. Then these two yesterday . . .’ the young slave went on.

  ‘. . . an old man and his daughter, from the sound of it . . .’

  ‘. . . stripped and robbed and cruelly stabbed to death . . .’

  ‘. . . some soldiers caught the robbers almost in the act, with gold and silver in their saddlebags, and the man’s possessions bundled in their packs.’

  ‘Even then they pleaded innocence, at first . . .’

  ‘. . . but the authorities beat a half-confession out of them . . .’

  They were so keen to tell me all this that I had to smile. ‘I heard there’d been a bit of trouble that way recently. But I don’t think Silurian rebels are much help to us. Our body was discovered a great deal nearer home.’ Then the implication struck me and I frowned. ‘Though that makes it more surprising, when you think of it. If our killer had simply left the body on the road, instead of carefully concealing it in a ditch on Marcus’s land, it would have been treated as a pauper, probably – somebody would have picked it up and thrown it in the pit, just like the bodies of the couple who were robbed – and there would have been no questions asked at all.’

  ‘The body was concealed on His Excellence’s land?’ Minimus sounded shocked.

  Gwellia interrupted with a kind of mock reproof. ‘If you will finish helping your master to get dressed, and prevent him from shivering to death, perhaps he’ll tell you all about it from the beginning – with less damage to his health.’

  The boys looked chagrined, and set to at once. I found myself telling the story as they worked.

  They listened, horrified. Although they were very much Celts by birth, they were raised in Roman households and the whole idea of an unburied body at the Lemuria alarmed them terribly.

  When I had finished Maximus turned to his fellow slave and said, ‘This happened about two days ago, so the master says. We were at the villa then – we didn’t leave all day. I didn’t notice anything unusual, did you?’ Concern had interrupted the usual duologue. Gwellia’s rebuke was not forgotten, though – he was making himself busy fetching garments as he spoke.

  Minimus was already standing on the stool, slipping my clean tunic over my head and round my ears, so he sounded rather muffled as he replied. ‘We attended Marcus in the morning, didn’t we? Because Pulchrus had gone off to Londinium with the carts. And then there was that slave-trader who called in later on – the same one that Marcus always uses – bringing that useless, fair-headed little boy. Snowy, or whatever his name is.’ He smoothed the tunic round my neck and got down to tie the belt.

  Maximus watched him critically, then gave the garment-hem a little tug so it hung evenly. ‘That’s right. I don’t know why the master ever bothered with the boy. We’d have done the job much better, if we’d had a chance. Not that I am sorry – I am happy to be here.’ He was waiting with my toga, and as he spoke he began to loop it deftly round me and fold it into place.

  ‘Why didn’t he ask you to attend him, then?’ I put in. Given the choice between Niveus and these two lively boys, I know which option I would have preferred.

  Minimus pulled a face. ‘We aren’t sufficiently pretty for the purpose, I suppose. Marcus likes his pages to be glamorous. And didn’t Pulchrus know it? I often wondered if he chose his name himself.’

  I nodded, with a grin. ‘Pulchrus’ means ‘the beautiful’. ‘I would not be surprised.’ I raised my arms to let the boys tuck in my toga-ends, which they did with practised skill.

  Minimus gave me his cheerful, cheeky grin. ‘“Handsome as Adoneus”, Marcus used to say. You should have seen Pulchrus when he set off the other day . . .’

  ‘That new scarlet tunic . . .’

  ‘And that new fancy hat . . .’

  ‘Just to impress them in Londinium!’

  ‘More to impress Lucius, if you ask me,’ Minimus observed. ‘Marcus had the sewing girls make new tunics for all the household staff, before his cousin came. And a whole new wardrobe for himself and Julia . . .’

  Maximus gave him a warning nudge. It was one thing to gossip about a page, quite another to discuss their former master in this way.

  However, it was interesting to know. It explained my patron’s unusual generosity in providing Junio’s tunic and Cilla’s clothes tonight. As Gwellia had commented when we were in the town, Marcus was happy to be benevolent if the gift did not involve him in actual expense. Not that I was guilty of ingratitude. The tunics in question may have been passed on, but they were of a quality I could not afford and had been worn so little that they looked like new; while Junio’s toga must have been purpose-bought, since even Marcus’s discards bore that impressive purple stripe.

  Cilla was chuckling. ‘Well, Pulchrus managed to impress them in Glevum anyway. I overheard one of the guards at the basilica today remarking that they saw him riding past the gate with Lucius’s hired driver and the wagon train. “Done up like a peacock, and twice as proud,” the fellow said.’ She did her imitation of the Rhineland voice. ‘“Too busy preening for the girls to even look at us.” Mind you, he was speaking to one of Lucius’s attendants at the time, and they are pretty vain themselves, it seems to me. Comes of being reared in the imperial city, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s the same up at the villa,’ Minimus agreed. ‘Won’t mix with any of the household staff – insist on having a special sleeping room. Especially that awful chief slave, Hirsius, with his swanky olive tunic and his sneering ways. Thank Mars he’s gone to Londinium with the luggage now. Pity that stupid bodyguard didn’t go as well. Great stuck-up bully – I don’t know why his master thinks so much of him . . .’ He trailed off and looked anxiously at me, obviously fearing that he’d spoken out of turn.

  ‘Well, he’ll have to be questioned, if I do the job myself,’ I said. ‘No one who attended Lucius and Marcus in the basilica today could have heard the story of the corpse until they got back home. It is possible that one of them has something he could tell.’

  Gwellia had been listening to all this with interest. ‘I think it’s more than possible. They are strangers to the district – and it seems the dead man is too, since there’s no one missing in the area. Perhaps he was coming to visit one of them.’

  It was a good point. I turned to the boys. ‘Which reminds me of my question a little earlier. Apart from the slave-trader who br
ought Niveus – whom Marcus asked to come – there were no unexpected strangers at the villa on that day? No peasant women, or young men who might have walked across the farm, and evaded the attentions of the gatekeeper, perhaps?’

  I sat down to allow Minimus to strap my sandals on. ‘Nothing like that, master,’ Maximus replied, and Minimus looked up to shake his head as well.

  ‘Nobody came in, except the banquet guests. And none of them went missing, or we would have heard.’

  ‘And no one at all for Lucius. He had a messenger soon after he arrived, bringing him a letter from his wife in Rome, but apart from that there has been no one wanting him at all.’

  ‘What happened to that messenger?’ I said without much hope. ‘You saw him leave again? It isn’t possible that he might be the corpse?’

  Minimus grinned and shook his head. ‘Certainly not the one you describe. He was a big, strong fellow – you definitely wouldn’t take him for a girl – and armed with the biggest dagger that you ever saw. I suppose he had to be. Riding for miles and miles like that on unfrequented roads.’

  ‘And he didn’t have soft hands as a local page might have – they were like shovels and blistered with the reins,’ Maximus added.

  ‘Anyway, it couldn’t possibly be him.’ Minimus, as usual, had the most to say. ‘You said the corpse is fresh, but he’s been gone for days.’

  Gwellia signalled to Cilla to stop working on her hair. She was looking thoughtful. ‘That poor girl. I wonder who she was, in any case?’

  Cilla put down the bone comb she was using. ‘The girl who was killed by the Silures, do you mean?’

  Gwellia shook her head. ‘I mean the poor creature whose dress was on the corpse.’

  The maidservant looked baffled. ‘The peasant girl? But there wasn’t one. The clothes were only there as a disguise. Probably purchased by the killer, purposely.’

  ‘But don’t you see?’ I jumped up to my feet, suddenly understanding what had been obvious. ‘Your mistress is quite right. That dress belonged to someone, and it’s likely she is dead. No peasant would have parted with that garment willingly. Not with all that money hidden in the hem.’