"This cart seems to know where it's going," I muttered. "Let's just keep down!"
It was an arthritic waggon pulled by an asthmatic horse, eratically steered by the oldest gardener in the world; I guessed they would not be going far.
We hid until we came to a stable, then the old man unhitched the horse and pottered off home. He left a guttering taper, despite the risk of fire, so either he was utterly drunk or the horse was afraid of the dark.
We were alone. We were safe. There was only one problem: when we looked outside we were in a public garden. It had eight-foot-high railings and as he left the man had locked the gates.
"I'll cry for my mother," I murmured to Helena. "You climb out and fetch help!"
"If we can't get out, no one else can get in…"
"I am not bedding down with a horse!"
"Oh Falco, where's your sense of adventure?"
"Where's your sense?"
We bedded down with the horse.
XLVII
In the stall next to the horse was some straw which various ticks and fleas had decided was clean. I spread out my toga, framing an apology to Festus, though that glad spark would have found this a huge joke. In less respectable company, I might have giggled myself.
I undipped my belt, threw my sandals aside, hurled myself back on the straw and watched Helena Justina straighten my shoes tidily alongside hers. She distanced herself with her back turned, pulling out her ivory hairpins in despair. She dropped the pins into her shoe while her hair untwined in one loosened tangle down her back. I decided against reaching out for a friendly tug. You have to know a woman very well before you pull her hair.
She sat hugging her knees. Without her mantle she was obviously cold.
"Here our quaint national garment can make a cosy bedspread. Snuggle up and get warm. Hush! Who's to know?" I dragged her back beside me, pinned her with one elbow and rapidly flung the long ends of my toga round us both. "My own theory is, warming up women was what the founding fathers had in mind when they invented this…"
The senator's daughter had landed in my ceremonial cocoon with her head just below my chin. She was too chilled to resist. She shuddered once, then lay stiff as a post in a wattle fence. As soon as she realized she could only escape with a great deal of effort, she fell diplomatically asleep. She does hate fuss.
I lay awake; she could probably hear my brain creaking as I turned over the night's events. I settled into what I now realized was my favourite position for thinking: leaning my cheek against a peaceful woman's head. I had never discovered this before; Libyan dancing girls wriggle far too much.
Dancing girls had actually become a trial to me in several ways. In a manhunt a bare-wasted panicking dancer would be death. They have their place; they give avidly though they take with equal enthusiasm, as my banker could confirm. Associating with dancing girls had cost me more than loss of face tonight. One way and another, I had had my fill of them.
Once Helena Justina was asleep, I gradually relaxed.
She was no great weight, but I could hardly forget she was there. She fitted perfectly into the crook of my arm, and by turning my head I could breathe warm draughts of the scent which lingered in her hair. Fine, clean, shining hair that resisted the curling irons and soon dropped into smoother folds than maids in charge of fashionable women like to see. She was wearing Malabathron again. Her black swine of a husband must have given her a mighty great pot unless of course this girl of strange surprises was saving it for me… (A man can dream.)
I was too exhausted to achieve much by thinking, even when I felt so comfortable. I nuzzled Helena's scented hair, ready to doze off. I may have sighed, in the slow, sombre way of a man who has failed to solve his problem despite half an hour of thought. At the point when I gave up the struggle it seemed perfectly natural to be lying in a bale of straw with my arm around Helena Justina, and since by that time I had settled close enough to manage it, and since she was asleep, it also seemed natural to kiss her very gently on the forehead before I drifted off myself.
She moved slightly.
It struck me she had been awake all the time.
"Sorry!" M Didius Falco was quaintly embarrassed. Thought you were asleep."
I was whispering, though there was no need since the constant shuffling of his fidgety hooves said the damn horse was still wide awake too. Probably half Rome knew what I had done. I heard Helena murmur in her sceptical way, "Is a goodnight kiss on the forehead a service your ladies find on your expenses sheet?"
"All I could reach." I fell back on bluff. "When I land a lady in a garden stable her kiss is complimentary of course."
The senator's daughter lifted her head, leaning up on her elbow as she turned, close above my madly pounding heart. Still holding her lightly, I skulked down into the straw, trying to ignore my fierce consciousness of her body lying against me. She must have felt the tightening of my chest. She looked different with her hair loose. Perhaps she was. I had no way of knowing whether I had stumbled upon some new person, or the woman Helena Justina had always been. But I knew the person she was tonight was someone I liked a great deal.
"And how often does this happen, Falco?"
"Not often enough!"
I glanced up, anticipating hard words, but found her face unexpectedly soft. I smiled ruefully. Then, as my smile began to fade, Helena Justina leaned forwards and kissed me.
I had my free hand tangled in her hair to stop her if she tried to move away, but she did not try. After an aeon of blissful disbelief I remembered to start breathing again.
"Sorry!" she teased gently. She was no more sorry than I was. I tightened my grip to bring her back, but found her already there.
Until then my encounters with women had relied on strategic wine jugs and heavy-handed wit, followed by an elaborate ballet I choreographed to arabesque me and my partner offstage into some convenient bed. The experiences of Didius Falco had been less frequent, and far less interesting, than constant allusion may suggest, but to my credit I did usually manage to supply a bed.
Now, without seriously intending it, I was kissing Helena in the way I had been wanting to kiss her for so long I had no idea when the yearning began. She looked at me quite calmly, so I went on kissing her just as I ought really to have kissed her at Massilia, and every night for a thousand miles before while she kissed me back until I knew this time neither of us thought it was a mistake. I stopped.
"We're embarrassing the horse…" One of the first facts of life a man understands is that you never tell a woman the truth. Yet I told this one the truth; I always had done and I always would. "Helena Justina, I gave up seducing women." I held her face between my two hands, keeping back her hair.
She considered me gravely. "Was that a vow to the gods?"
"No a promise to myself." In case she felt insulted, I kissed her again.
"Why are you telling me?" She did not ask why the promise, which was just as well because I did not really know.
"I want you to believe it."
Very carefully, Helena kissed me. I turned one palm against hers; her cool fingers interlaced with my own. One of her bare feet was making friends with mine as she asked, Ts this a promise you want to keep?"
I shook my head in silence (she was kissing me again).
Various connected circumstances forced me to admit: "I don't think… I can." It was so long since I wanted a woman so intensely, I had almost forgotten the pain of acute physical desire. "Tonight I don't want to anyway…!"
"Marcus Didius Falco, you are not seducing me," smiled Helena Justina, as she solved my moral dilemma with the sweetness I had for so long failed to recognize in her. "I am trying as hard as I can to seduce you!" I had always known she was a forthright girl.
I have no intention of describing what happened next. It is private between me, the senator's daughter, and the gardener's horse.
XLVIII
It was two hours before morning and most of Rome lay asleep. All the waggons and c
arts had retreated to their berths. Late diners had braved ambush at street corners to straggle home; prostitutes and pimps were dozing on the rushes among their sordid snoring clients; the lights in the palaces and mansions were dim. It was cold enough for a fine mist to have curled among the valleys between the Seven Hills, but when I woke I was warm physically and felt the slow, strong, welling emotion of a man who had convinced himself the girl in his arms would be the woman in his life.
I stayed completely still, remembering. I watched her sleeping face, at once so familiar to me, yet in deep slumber strangely unlike itself. I knew I must not expect to hold her, or watch her sleeping, ever again. Perhaps that was what made me feel I could not bear to let her go.
She woke. Her gaze at once dropped. She was shy not because of what we had done, but in case she found me changed. Her hand stirred against me, in a somewhat private place; I saw her eyes widen, startled, then she settled again. I smiled at her.
"Helena…" I studied her closed, cautious face. A sculptor might have quibbled, but to me she was beautiful. Anyway, if sculptors knew anything they'd take up a more lucrative line of work. "Nothing to say?"
After a time she replied, with typical honesty, "I suppose last night was how it is meant to be?"
Well; she had told me something about Pertinax. My answer was equally subdued.
"I imagine it must be." Which, if she was interested in past history, told her something about me.
I started to laugh: with her, at myself, at life, helplessly. "Oh Helena, Helena!… I learned some wonders about women with you last night!"
"I learned some about myself!" she answered wryly. Then she closed her eyes against my inner wrist, reluctant to let me see anything she felt.
Despite her restraint, or because of it, I wanted her to understand. "It's like studying a foreign language: you pick up a smattering of grammar, some basic vocabulary, a terrible accent that just gets you understood; you struggle for years, then without warning everything flows, you grasp how it all works"
"Oh don't! Falco She stopped; I had lost her.
"Marcus," I begged, but she hardly seemed to hear.
She forced herself on: "There's no need to pretend! We found a comforting way to pass the time' O Jupiter! She had stopped again. Then she insisted, "Last night was wonderful. You must have realized. But I see how it is: every case a girl, every new case a new girl"
All this was what a man expects to think. In a leaden voice I raged, "You are not some girl in a case!"
"So what am I?" Helena demanded.
"Yourself." I could not tell her.
I could hardly believe she did not realize.
"We ought to leave."
I hated her sounding so unapproachable. Oh I knew why; dear gods how I knew! I had done this to other people. The hardened attitude so ungracious, but oh so sensible! A brisk departure, in deep anxiety that one hour of passion might be held against you as the excuse for a lifetime of painful commitment which you had never pretended to want…
Now here was an irony. For the first time in my life I felt everything I should, everything most women believe they need. The only time it mattered, yet either Helena simply could not believe it or she was frantically trying to evade me. I locked my grip on her.
"Helena Justina," I began slowly, "what can I do? If I said that I loved you, it would be a tragedy to us both. I am beneath your dignity, and you are beyond my reach"
"I am a senator's daughter," she interrupted in a busy tone of voice, "you are two ranks below. This is not illegal; yet it will not be allowed She struggled restlessly but I would not let her go. "There is nothing for us"
"Perhaps! Lady, you and I are as cynical as one another about the world. We will do whatever we must, but don't doubt me. I wanted you very badly; I had wanted you for a long time as much as you wanted me!" I saw her gaze become unsteady. Quite suddenly I hoped, and made myself believe, that her view of me had been better than I thought, not only last night, but perhaps long before. I threw myself into the hope, knowing yet not caring that I was a fool. "And now…"
"Now?" she repeated. A tiny smile twitched in the corner of her mouth. I realized she was answering a smile of mine; she was still with me after all. Fighting for her friendship, I watched her melt back to the intimacy we so unexpectedly found last night. More sure of myself, I soothed that tender spot on the nape of her neck where I had undone the catch of her necklace many hours before. This time I dared let myself notice the flutter on her skin where she was touched. This time I understood that she realized how every nerve in my body was aware of her.
For the second time I told her a truth she must have known already.
"Now I want you again."
XLIX
Afterwards, awe-struck, I felt her racked by half a dozen sobs, releasing tensions which even in her arms last night I had only half realized were there.
"Marcus!"
I fell asleep, shedding all other senses as Helena Justina spoke my name.
I had called her my darling. Any self-respecting informer knows better than that. We were both fairly preoccupied at the moment when it escaped, and I told myself that she probably had not heard. But in my heart I knew I hoped she had.
When they eventually unlocked the gates, we walked out past the stiffly sprouting banks of acanthus while the gardeners, with their floppy hats on their big daft heads and their flat dirty feet in the dew, gaped after us. Still, I dare say it was not the first time they had found uninvited visitors nesting in their patch. Before I took her home I bought Helena some breakfast, something hot from a shop. It was a sausage shop. Fortune defend me, you are dealing with a man who once fed a senator's daughter a peppered calf-meat rissole wrapped in a laurel leaf. Fortune defend my lady, she ate it in the streetl
I ate mine too, though cautiously, for my mother brought me up very strictly to eat indoors, respectably.
It was dawn along the Tiber, with a pale sun glimmering. We sat in our ruined finery on a wharf by the river and watched leisurely boatmen ply the silvered water. We had a long good-humoured conversation about whether me thinking all gardeners are daft was another example of my pointless prejudice. There were wonderful smells of dried fish and new bread. It was the start of a bright day, though the air still hung chill in the shade by the waterfront booths. It seemed to me it was the start of more than a bright day.
We looked a pair of grisly desperados; I was ashamed to take her home. I found a small private bathhouse already open. We went through together; no one else was there. I bought a flask of oil at an exorbitant price, then in the absence of a bath slave, anointed Helena myself. She seemed to like that; I know I did. Then she scraped me down with a borrowed strigil, which was even better fun. Later, while we were sitting side by side in the warm-air-room, she suddenly turned towards me without a word. She held me close, burying her face. Neither of us spoke. Neither of us needed to. Neither of us could.
All was quiet when I brought her home. The worst part was persuading her father's dumb pig of a porter to wake up and let their lady in. It was the slave who had refused to recognize me the evening before. He would remember now: as she went indoors, the senator's daughter turned back quickly and kissed me on the cheek.
I walked from the Capena Gate back to the Aventine.
I walked without noticing my journey. Exhaustion and elation were swamping me. I felt I had aged a generation in a single night. I was utterly happy benign towards all the world. Although I was so tired, my maniacal grin glittered from ear to ecstatic ear.
Petronius was hovering outside Lenia's laundry, with the pinkish face and limp hair of a man who had been steaming himself in a laundry for a long time. I felt a deep pang of affection, which he did not deserve and would never have understood. He thumped me in the stomach, then looked at me closely. All the strength had gone from my legs but I accepted the thump with only a faint blink.
"Marcus?" he demanded uncertainly.
Tetro. Thanks for your help."<
br />
"Pleasure. Your mother wants to speak to you about that bag of gold. And this is yours, isn't it?" He handed me my Uncle Scare's ring.
"You tracked down that runt Melitus?"
"No trouble. We know his haunts. I recovered some loot that belonged to your lady her jewels. I took them round to her house this morning; the people said she wasn't there…" His voice faded uncertainly.
"No. She is now. I told her if you managed to return her jewellery a reward would be polite. I suggested something nice for your wife!"
He stared at me. I regarded him with poignant tenderness. What a wonderful friend.
"Look, Falco, about last night"
I chuckled dismissively. "Fate!"
"Fate!" he exploded. "What shit's that?" A simple soul; with a sound philosophy! He was heartbroken to find me in this trouble. (He could tell I was in trouble by my ludicrously gentle smile.) "Oh Falco, you poor excitable devil what have you done?"
Lenia came out. Behind her the dull boom of the washtubs throbbed before she swung her backside to close the door. After a lifetime of swaggering with armfuls of dirty linen, she did this as automatically as she opened the doors with her foot. Her arms were free now, but her lined forehead told me she had a headache from imbibing too much with Smaractus the night before. Her frock clung to her in twisted folds, eternally damp from the steam. For some reason, she had lately taken to flinging thin scarves back over her shoulders, in a travesty of refinement. She weighed up my condition as impartially as a stain on a bedsheet, then scoffed, "Soft as cake custard; the fool's in love again."
"That all?" Petro tried to reassure himself, though as usual when faced with one of my extravagant antics sturdy Petronius did not appear convinced. "Happens to Falco three times every week."
He was wrong. I knew now: until that morning I had never been in love.
"Oh my Petronius, this is different."
"Blossom, that's what you always say!" Petro shook his head sadly.
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