Tabula Rasa: A Crime Novel of the Roman Empire

by Ruth Downie

  The change in the weather had lifted everyone’s spirits. The cobbler was whistling a tune, hammering nails into a sole in time to the rhythm. The baker called to her across the counter as she passed. He grinned and held up a raisin pastry. It was a way of saying he hadn’t forgotten.

  She thanked him, slipping the pastry into her bag.

  “Don’t tell Ria,” he said. “She’d have sold you one.”

  “I shall sneak it past her.” The baker and Tilla’s landlady were brother and sister, but business was business. “How is your little girl?”

  “No more trouble so far.” His tone was still wary. “It’s been near enough six weeks.”

  “I am sure it was just the fever,” she assured him, wondering if he and his wife ever used the word fit in private or whether they were afraid that speaking the name would somehow bring one on. A family who had lost two babies at birth had no illusions about how easily a surviving child could be snatched away into the next world.

  He began to pile the loaves from one half-full basket into another. “I hear your man’s busy, eh?”

  “He is always busy,” she agreed.

  His hands stilled. “Did you not hear? Where have you been?”

  She hurried back to the lodgings feeling faintly ashamed. A woman who had just been told that her husband was taking part in a tricky rescue should be fearful for him, or proud of him, or probably both. Instead, she was cross with him for taking such a risk.

  On any other day she might have been proud and worried, but today was different. He had promised.

  One night was not much to ask. She had put up with his relatives for a whole summer. Apart from meeting her cousin and her uncle a few years ago, she had asked nothing of him—except for tonight. And he had given his word, even though he was plainly uneasy about it. But now he had found some sort of crisis, and as usual it seemed nobody else could deal with it. He would be late, if he turned up at all, and she would have to explain why her Roman was not there, and how was she to know whether they would understand? She hardly knew them herself. They were not real relatives.

  They might have been, though.

  It was a peculiar thought that she might have been the old man’s daughter. If Mam had not broken her promise and run away with her father instead, Tilla might have spent her whole life here, milking cows and growing vegetables, grumbling about the Romans and refusing to speak Latin. Thinking a trip to market was exciting, a journey to the seaside a once-in-a-lifetime adventure. Knowing and being known by all the neighbors and never wanting to leave. Or maybe desperate to get out? Neighbors were not always kind.

  Instead here she was, trailing about after a foreign husband. Living in temporary lodgings, having to eat meals from snack bars, while half their possessions were stored miles away in Deva. Soon she would leave behind most of the people she had grown to know here over the summer. Probably she would never see them again, because you never knew where a soldier would be sent next, and if you wanted any sort of marriage, you had to go with him.

  The shutters that formed the entrance of the snack bar had been opened up to let in what was left of the autumn sun. A group of dark-skinned men dressed in rich colors were seated outside, chatting over the remains of a meal in a tongue Tilla did not recognize. She wondered what they made of the drab décor of the only bar in town. Ria looked up from stacking cups behind the counter. “I hear your man’s a hero.”

  “I will tell him you said so,” Tilla promised, feeling guilty. At least he did not beat her, and he was not a maid chaser like the centurion at the fort, whose kitchen girl had come to her in tears begging for some charm or potion to keep her from falling pregnant.

  Ria leaned across the counter, jabbed a bony finger toward the men outside, and whispered, “From Palmyra. If you want any silk, let me know.”

  “Not really.”

  “Pity,” she observed. “I could have got you a good deal.”

  Someone in the back room was humming a tune Tilla had heard the soldiers singing on the march.

  Ria observed, “Your girl’s in a good mood.”

  “She doesn’t like silence.”

  “She’ll be glad enough of it after the baby comes. What can I get you?”

  “I’ll put my bag away first.” Tilla made her way past the empty tables and into the dimly lit storeroom where Virana slept, and where a sturdy ladder provided access to the privacy of the loft room she and her husband were renting.

  “Mistress!” Virana’s large form was precariously balanced on a stool in front of a high shelf.

  “If you’re going to do that,” Tilla told her, “find something safe to stand on.”

  “Oh, I’ve finished now.” Virana clambered down clutching a honey pot. “How is Cata? Is it true her boyfriend broke her jaw?”

  Tilla delved into her bag. “Share a pastry?” She would have died rather than reveal anything about her patients to Virana, but sometimes she wondered why she bothered to keep her mouth shut. Nobody else around here did.

  Virana picked out a raisin and popped it into her mouth. “Is the master back yet?”

  “No.”

  “He is very brave. Did his clerk come back?”

  “Yes. And no.”

  “Shall I take your bag up?”

  “Virana, you’re supposed to be . . .” Tilla paused. She could hardly say resting, since the arrangement for Virana to work in Ria’s snack bar suited everyone very nicely, including Virana, who saw it as a chance to meet the legionary of her dreams. “I’ll take it,” she said. “You’re supposed to be careful. And don’t drop crumbs or you’ll be sleeping with mice.”

  By the time she came back down, Ria had left the bar and was clattering about in the kitchen. The outside table had now been taken over by a group of local women. The loaded baskets suggested they had been shopping over at Vindolanda; the fact that they were here suggested they were in no hurry to go home, but not daft enough to pay Vindolanda prices for drinks.

  She had not intended to eavesdrop, but as she carried her beer across to the last patch of sunshine slanting in through the doorway and across a table, she realized she was in an ideal position to listen: hidden from view but able to hear every word.

  “So she said to them,” declared a voice with a familiar lisp, “ ‘Why d’you have to march straight through my cabbages?’ So the one in charge pointed up the hill, and he said, ‘We’ve got orders to go up there.’ So she said, ‘Well, you should go around! Can’t you see I’ve got things growing here?’ and he said—this is what he said, without a word of a lie—‘The Twentieth Legion do not go around.’ ”

  “The Twentieth Legion do not go around!” repeated the others, rolling this new outrage about on their tongues as if they were enjoying the flavor.

  “So I said to her,” continued the woman with the lisp, “you want to do what my cousin did when they kept letting his sheep out.”

  Tilla took a sip of beer and waited, an invisible member of the audience. The woman was local: She remembered the thick brows and the eager front teeth. “He moved the sheep up to the common,” the woman said, “and he put the bull in there instead.”

  Her audience seemed to like that.

  “I was there when the next lot came. You should have seen them run! Tripping over each other and everything falling out of their packs.”

  There was general laughter, and Tilla could not resist a smile.

  “See? The Twentieth Legion do go around after all.”

  The talk drifted to people she did not know. Across the road, a cat was picking its way delicately along the roof of the leatherworker’s shop, untroubled by the puddle that covered half the street below.

  Had she done the right thing about Cata? The mother had plainly been hoping she would use her influence with the Medicus to have the man disciplined. That was the problem with being honest about having married an officer: People wanted her to pass messages to the Legion. But at least this way she could not be accused of betraying anybo
dy. Everyone knew from the start not to tell her things that the Romans were not supposed to know. And if there were times when that made her lonely, well, that was how life was. One of her mother’s favorite sayings was Nobody likes a girl who feels sorry for herself. Which was very annoying but true.

  Virana passed by her with a tray of drinks and then returned to the back room. Outside, the woman with the lisp said, “You know about that one, do you?”

  Tilla held her breath. They had been offered a room here after Virana had given a sob story about her baby’s father being dead. “Well, he might be,” Virana had insisted when Tilla challenged her about it later. On the other hand, there were plenty of candidates for fatherhood still very much alive and serving with the Twentieth Legion, and Tilla had known she could not keep it quiet for long.

  “They all live together over the bar here, you know.”

  “No! Really? I thought he lived in the fort.”

  Tilla frowned into her beer and wondered if she should walk away. Or perhaps stand up and let herself be seen. She did neither, despite another of her mother’s favorites: No good comes of listening to gossip.

  Someone asked a question she could not catch. “Enica says the wife is barren,” said the woman with the lisp. “But she says he’s had more luck with the slave, as you see.”

  Tilla struggled to stifle her spluttering as the beer went the wrong way. Enica was a member of the family she would be introducing to her husband tonight—if he managed to turn up. She had explained when they first met that Virana’s child was nothing to do with her husband, who was not a maid chaser. And Virana had said so too, and Enica had said . . . It did not matter what Enica had said, because it was clear now that she had not believed either of them.

  Somebody said, “I heard they picked that one up in Eboracum and she isn’t really a slave at all.”

  “Hmph. I’m surprised the wife puts up with it.”

  “The wife’s probably grateful to be taken in,” said another voice. “I heard he rescued her from the Northerners.”

  “That is just what she says,” said someone else. “Did you not know? He bought her. She was in a brothel down in Deva.”

  “That can’t be right. Isn’t she a Roman citizen?”

  Tilla wanted to shout, I was only lodging in the brothel! Why didn’t you just ask me? Instead she took a large gulp of beer.

  Somebody said, “And the old boy’s really invited them?”

  “That’s what Enica said. Because she looks like her mother. You can imagine what Enica thinks about that. Conn too.”

  “Ah, but Conn is a miserable offering these days, don’t you think? Not a bit like his father. Or his brother, may he walk in peace.”

  “They all end up that way, girl. Look at mine.”

  “What? Dead?”

  “No, he just looks it. Bad-tempered.”

  “Mine too,” chimed in another voice. “Never happy unless he’s complaining.”

  “Still, it’s a bad sign if he’s like that already at his age. You want something better at the start, no?”

  And they were off into discussing the reasons why the son of the man whose hearth she would be sharing tonight had slumped from being a fine young man to a miserable offering.

  She could not argue: The one time she had seen him, Conn had certainly worn the face of a man who had found a dead rat in his dinner. Perhaps it really was because his once-betrothed had been raped by a soldier during the troubles and refused to get rid of the soldier’s baby, and perhaps it wasn’t, because these women would believe any scandalous nonsense they were told. They deserved to be shamed. To be set straight. To be made to say they were sorry for being so spiteful. To be made to feel sorry.

  The trouble was, anything she said now would leave them with even more to gossip about than before. And nothing would make this evening any easier.

  She drained her beer, clapped the cup down on the table, and strode across the bar toward the back door. It would have been better if she had not knocked over a bench on the way, but she was not going to turn around and pick it up. Nobody was going to see how pink her face was.

  Chapter 5

  “Not bad, considering.” Medical Officer Valens finished his examination of Ruso’s handiwork, moved the lamp away, and let the damp cloth fall back into place over the wound. He surveyed his sleeping father-in-law for a moment, then turned to the orderly. “I’ll be here all night. Call me if there’s any change or if he wakes up.” Standing in the gloom of the hospital corridor, he murmured, “What do you think?”

  “He was already weak when I got to him.”

  Valens said, “Anyone else would be dead by now.”

  “Has Serena been sent for?”

  “Of course.”

  For a moment Ruso felt bad for doubting it. But the way Valens added, “He is her father,” suggested he too had considered leaving his wife in ignorance back in Deva. “It’s strange. I always imagined the old boy was indestructible.”

  Ruso said, “You don’t have to cover for me tonight if you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t mind,” Valens assured him. “This way I can tell the wife I did something useful.”

  The room by the hospital entrance was just the right size to be an office, a pharmacy, or an overflow storage space—but not, unfortunately, all three at once. It was certainly not big enough to store anything that was not supposed to be there, and Ruso felt firmly that a dead hen fell into the latter category. It lay in the deflated way that dead hens did, with its head flopped over the side of the desk that should have been occupied by Ruso’s clerk.

  Valens said, “Has somebody brought you a present?”

  “Not that I know of.” Grateful patients sometimes offered gifts, but he had no idea where this had come from. He hoped it did not have lice.

  Valens pulled a thin wooden writing tablet out of his belt. “One of the centurions asked me to give you this.”

  Ruso took it across to the lamp and flipped the leaves apart. A Centurion Silvanus from Magnis, the next fort along the line, wished him to know that Legionary Candidus was no longer stationed there. He had left there a week ago and was now working as a clerk in the hospital at Parva.

  The fact that it was Ruso—now standing in that very hospital at Parva—who had raised the query in the first place, did not seem to spark any curiosity. The whereabouts of a man who was no longer his responsibility was clearly not at the top of Centurion Silvanus’s worry list. Ruso noted bitterly that the message was written in one hand and hastily signed in another. It seemed Silvanus had a clerk of his own—one who had turned up and done his job as expected.

  Valens had seated himself on the pharmacist’s table. Fortunately the pharmacist was on leave and so unable to object. Valens extended one leg, hooked a stool, and pulled it over for a footrest. “Bad news?”

  “My clerk hasn’t reported for duty for three days. Nobody seems to know where he is.”

  “Ask for another one.”

  “It took me two months to get this one. Now he’s vanished.”

  Valens surveyed the teetering piles of writing tablets stacked on every available surface. “He seems to have been very productive while he was here.”

  “He was supposed to be sorting all this mess out. But he didn’t seem to know where to start.”

  The table swayed as Valens leaned sideways to peer over the top of splayed wooden doors that were held together by only a taut length of twine around the handles. “There’s more in here.”

  “Don’t touch that. The staff have taken to calling it Pandora’s cupboard. Open it and we’ll all be sorry.”

  Valens said, “Perhaps he’s fallen on his sword.”

  “I hope not. He’s Albanus’s nephew. I promised I’d keep an eye on him.”

  “Not the one with the pungent bath oil?”

  “That’s the one. Candidus.” They had both been introduced to Candidus some years ago, but the youth had—understandably—been more interested in w
atching passing girls than in meeting old army friends of his uncle. “Albanus wrote and said the boy was having problems settling in at Magnis,” he explained. “I asked for him here hoping he might have taken after his uncle.”

  “And had he?”

  “Well, he looks very much like him, but he’s not what you’d call a natural administrator.”

  Candidus had followed Ruso on his ward rounds, dutifully scrawling on a wax tablet, never once asking him to repeat or spell anything and replying cheerfully, “Yes sir!” every time he was asked, “Did you get that?” It was an insouciance that Ruso had only briefly mistaken for competence.

  “There’s only one Albanus,” Valens told him. “You were spoiled. Neither of my clerks is a patch on him.”

  Ruso looked up. “You’ve got two clerks?”

  “I know. It’s hopeless, really. For the number of beds, it should be at least three if not four.”

  Ruso said nothing. Several months ago, when Valens was short of work and out of favor, Ruso had petitioned the Legion to take him back. Now Valens, who was no more skilled or experienced than he was himself, was in charge of a hospital with deputies and departments and flunkeys and rows of porters who lined the corridors and saluted as he passed. Or perhaps that only happened in Ruso’s imagination. But there was no escaping the fact that Valens had a comfortable post in a base at a major road junction while he himself was stationed at a makeshift unit in the toy-sized fort of Parva, with the added joy of a clinic in a tented camp that was slowly sinking into the mud.

  Another man might have demanded of the gods what he had done to deserve this state of affairs, but Ruso already knew. This was what happened to upstarts who were known to be acquainted with the Emperor. Now that Hadrian had gone back across the sea to Gaul, Ruso was suffering the fate of teacher’s pet when Teacher had left the room. He supposed he was lucky his fellow officers hadn’t stripped his clothes off, tied him to a tree, and made him eat his homework.