by Ruth Downie
By the time the Italian mountain-men had finished their show and sold snake products to the eager crowd, several of the stallholders had begun to pack up for the day. The shoppers drifted away, heading for home or the baths, several pausing to slake their thirst in the shade of the nearest snack bar. The two Marsi, their skin already tanned to leather and their eyes as dark as those of the unblinking snake still draped around the older man, seemed not to notice the heat. The younger one was stacking up boxes that could have contained the performers or the remedies that were made from them. The older man looked up, lifted a fat coil of reptile from his shoulder and gave Ruso a gap-toothed grin before asking in a rough country Latin how he had enjoyed the show.
Ruso, unable to identify the species of snake, stepped forward to just outside striking distance. When he introduced himself as a medicus, the man’s smile widened.
‘Medicus, eh? We got what you want!’ The man gestured to his son to bring one of the boxes across. ‘A live helper of Aesculapius!’
Ignoring Ruso’s protests, he lifted the lid from the top of the box to reveal a set of dark coils with no discernable markings. ‘You’ve heard the stories. Get your hands on the real thing.’
‘I’d rather not,’ said Ruso.
‘Take a look. He don’t bite.’ The man slid one skeletal hand into the box by way of encouragement.
‘I think some of my patients would be frightened off.’
The man chuckled and tied the lid back over the snake. ‘So what else can we do for you?’ He lifted one of the pots stacked beside him on the pavement. ‘Snakeskins boiled in wine, good for earache and toothache.’ He placed it in front of Ruso and reached back for another pot. ‘Roast viper salts,’ he announced, showing the pot to the snake before placing it beside the other. ‘Recommended by Dioscorides himself. Sharpens the eyes, releases tight tendons, reduces swollen glands.’
Ruso bought a pot of the boiled skins, hoping they would not only cure earache but loosen the man’s tongue. ‘Perhaps you could help me with something else,’ he said.
‘Perhaps,’ agreed the man. ‘Who knows?’
The younger man had paused to listen.
‘I had a difficult patient the other day. Confusion, aggression, odd feelings around the mouth, vomiting, diarrhoea, loss of vision –’
‘What happened to him?’ demanded the younger man, stepping forward.
‘He died.’
‘And you want my father to tell you what it was?’
‘What can you suggest?’
‘What I suggest,’ said the youth, ‘is that you take your skins and clear off. We’re honest traders. We got nothing to do with that sort of thing.’
‘I didn’t mean to imply –’
‘That the Marsi know all about poisons? So why did you ask?’
‘Stop!’ The older man’s hand rose to silence his son. ‘The Medicus didn’t mean no harm. He’s here to learn. He reckons his patient got bit by a venomous beast.’
‘Exactly,’ said Ruso, although Severus had denied being bitten, and he had found no trace of a puncture on the body.
The youth glowered at him and said nothing.
The old man’s smile was not as broad this time. ‘We can’t help,’ he said. ‘We don’t know no snakes what give them symptoms.’
‘Perhaps it wasn’t a snake,’ said Ruso. ‘Do you know anyone I could ask?’
‘No, we don’t.’
‘I’d pay.’
‘And I’d take your money,’ said the man, ‘but I still wouldn’t know nobody.’
Ruso sighed. He was not going to argue with someone wearing a large and unidentifiable snake, even though he was certain that the man was lying. At the moment, he couldn’t run fast enough.
Chapter 34
Galla was over in the shade of the stone barn, eating with the other farm workers. Tilla had followed her across as soon as the horn was blown, picked up a wooden platter from the pile and joined the queue for bread and the strange stuff these people thought was cheese. Then she had turned to find there was no obvious place to sit. Galla, her sticky feet now dark with the dust of the barn floor, was already sharing a rough bench with the stable lad. They were too busy chatting to notice Tilla. She recognized the odd word of Gaulish, but they were speaking fast, and she could not pick out the meaning. The other workers, some asleep, were sprawled across all the available space in the shade. One or two of the men were staring at her with more interest than was necessary, but no one offered to move. No one smiled and said, ‘Come and eat with us!’ Nobody showed any concern when she wandered away.
Safely alone in the quiet of the winery, she laid the platter on the corner of the juice trough, settled down beside it and tried to tell herself she was not miserable.
She could not expect to fit in here. She was not a servant. It was obvious that the staff knew that, even if Arria refused to understand it. She was not a member of the family. She was not the Medicus’ wife. She was neither a Gaul, like the farm workers, nor a Roman, like the Medicus. She was not a Gaul pretending to be a Roman, either, which was what most of the people in the town seemed to be. In every imaginable way, she was an outsider here.
She supposed the only barbarians these people had come across were either slaves or the naked figures she had seen carved on some of the funeral monuments lining the road out of town. Warriors with wild hair and long moustaches, being beaten down and trampled under the march of Roman progress. Perhaps the sight of a free Briton wandering about the place made them nervous.
She took a mouthful of bread and eyed the unappetizing green slop in the trough beside her. It had never struck her until now that the Medicus, who had been so rude about British beer, preferred a drink in which strangers had trampled their sweaty feet.
She wondered what he was doing. What he had said to the old wife. Whether he was still with her now. It occurred to Tilla that she did not know a great deal about the old wife, except that she was the one who had left and demanded a divorce. The Medicus had never seemed to want to talk about her. He had not wanted to mention the widow next door again, either, until she had asked.
She tried to cut a slice of the cheese. It stuck to the knife. How could these people be so pleased with themselves? They could not even make cheese!
She was wiping the blade with one finger when she heard movement outside the doors. Whoever it was, they must not see her alone in here feeling sorry for herself. Licking the finger, she hid behind a stack of the big two-handled baskets the men had been using that morning to carry in the grapes. She slipped her knife silently back into its sheath. She would not give them cause to say that barbarians hid in corners clutching weapons, waiting to pounce.
By the time she peered around the back of the stack and realized the visitor was the Medicus, the scrape and bang of the great door closing out the sunshine drowned the sound of her greeting.
A man who was shutting himself into a farm building in the dark was likely to want to be alone. Therefore a person who found herself hiding barely four feet away from him should immediately call out to warn him of her presence. But before she could speak, the Medicus had hurled his stick to the floor. He raised both fists and pounded the air, filling the building with a prolonged roar of something that sounded like, ‘Aaaargh!’
Perhaps this was not the time to reveal herself.
‘Aaaargh!’ bellowed the Medicus again. ‘Holy gods almighty! Jupiter’s bollocks! Give me strength!’
This unusual prayer ended with the slamming of a fist into the nearest suitable object. Tilla could not hold in the shriek as the stack of baskets landed on her and knocked her backwards against the wall.
For a moment he glared down at her as if she were a rat he had just caught trying to steal his dinner. Then, without speaking, he grabbed her arm and pulled her up.
She stood rubbing the bruise on the back of her head while he limped across to haul the door open. When he returned he said, ‘What are you doing in here?’
&
nbsp; ‘Is your foot hurting?’
‘Never mind my foot. What are you doing in here?’
‘You should sit down and rest. It is making you cross again.’
‘I’m not angry because of my foot, Tilla! I’m angry because of everything else!’ He bent to retrieve the stack of baskets. ‘I’m angry because –’ The baskets creaked and complained as he flung them back into the corner. ‘Never mind. It’s too complicated.’
The Medicus was not the most patient of men, but she had never seen him quite this exasperated before. She was not sure what to do to calm him. ‘I have bread,’ she tried, pointing across to the platter still propped on the corner of the trough. ‘And cheese. The cheese is not set and it smells bad, but you can share if you want.’
‘Not now. I have things to do.’ He reached down for the walking-stick, but she was faster.
With the stick behind her back, she said, ‘If you go now, you will do the things badly.’
‘I haven’t got time to play games.’ He held out his hand. ‘Give it to me.’
Instead she took the outstretched hand in her own. ‘Sit and eat this strange cheese, my lord.’
He let out a huff of exasperation, glared at her, then gave in and let her lead him across to where they could sit side by side with their backs against the trough. When he had stretched out his legs between the broad shoulders of the two nearest jars buried in the floor, she handed him a chunk of bread.
He said, ‘D’you know, you’re the only person who’s offered me anything to eat since breakfast?’
‘Did you see her?’
‘Remind me why I thought it was a good idea to come home.’
‘She is not your wife now. You do not have to listen.’
‘It’s not Claudia,’ he said, ‘it’s all the others.’
She held out the platter so he could pull off a blob of cheese. ‘Tell me about the others.’
As far as she could understand, a difficult meeting with the old wife had been followed by a useless trip to town, where he had been kept waiting for hours, practically accused of murder, heard alarming rumours about his sister and found his name was ‘slapped up all over the bloody walls’.
No wonder he was upset. Clearly gossip travelled just as fast here as at home. ‘You should write something back!’ she said. ‘It is not your fault that man died.’
‘The writing’s got nothing to do with Severus,’ he said, adding, ‘at least, not yet. But if I don’t find out who really poisoned him, they’ll soon think of something worse to put up there. It’s because of the election.’
She said, ‘The what?’ but he had moved on complain that he had barely closed the gate on his return when he heard Marcia and Flora shrieking at him from their bedroom window that Arria had locked them in and was trying to starve them, and he must get them out right now.
Inside the painted entrance hall he had found Cass and a gaggle of small loud people begging him to make Arria let Galla back into the house to look after them. When he tracked down Arria she would not talk about any of these things unless he would agree a new date to have dinner with the widow next door. Then he escaped to the yard and found the farm slaves pleased to see him because the brother had gone out somewhere, and they wanted someone to tell him it was all wrong to have women treading the grapes.
‘Actually…’ He paused, as if he had only just noticed, ‘Why are you in here? You haven’t really been treading grapes, have you? You don’t have to listen to Arria.’
‘I am here because Galla is made to work in here,’ she explained. ‘And it is not fair. You must tell your stepmother.’
‘Ah.’ The Medicus closed his eyes. Then he laced his fingers together and placed them behind his head. ‘I think,’ he said slowly, ‘I am becoming a god.’
She frowned. ‘It is the wine in the air.’ Or perhaps the smell of the cheese.
‘The last reported words of the Emperor Vespasian.’
She wiped up the last smear of the cheese with the final crust of bread and waited for him to explain.
He said, ‘Do you know what emperors do, Tilla?’
That was easy. ‘Send soldiers to steal the land and make us pay taxes.’
‘They spend half their waking hours listening to people who want things. As, it seems, do gods. Maybe it wasn’t as much of a transition as everyone thought.’
‘They all want you to be a god who comes home across the sea and mends everything.’
‘Apparently, though none of them invited me. How d’you think I’m doing so far?’
‘Terrible. Now I have seen what peace is like, I understand why you come to Britannia.’
‘I wish we’d never left.’
‘You do not have to worry about that man,’ she said, reaching forward to pick a flake of bread-crust from the front of his tunic. ‘I can tell you who poisoned him. It is the father of your old wife.’
He opened his eyes. ‘Probus? What do you know about Probus?’
‘He paid for the ship where Cass’s brother was drowned.’
‘But why would that make him want to poison Severus? I mean, any more than anybody else would?’
She explained what the fish-sellers had said about the ship when they thought there was nobody around to hear them.
The Medicus listened carefully, then said, ‘I can’t see Probus handing over money to a man who knew nothing about choosing a vessel, even if he was his son-in-law.’
‘But –’
‘I’ll look into it, but I’d imagine Severus only borrowed the money. If the ship sank, he’d have had to pay it back.’
‘Perhaps he was killed because Probus was angry at losing his servant Justinus.’
The Medicus did not look convinced.
‘Or perhaps because he did not pay the money back.’
The Medicus shook his head. ‘Respectable bankers don’t go around murdering people who owe them money, Tilla. It’s bad for trade.’
‘Not even to remind the others to pay?’
The Medicus eyed her as if he was not sure where she had heard of such a thing. She said, ‘I understand about borrowing. I am not a stupid barbarian like you think.’
‘I’ve never thought you were stupid.’
She noticed he did not say anything about her not being a barbarian.
‘Probus isn’t like the Gabinii,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t own enough muscle to make trouble and he doesn’t have huge sums of money stashed away. He has to take in cash so he can lend it out. Nobody’s going to trust their savings to a violent man.’
This was something she had not considered.
‘In fact, if Severus was fool enough to send Cass’s brother to sea in a leaky old bucket, Cass had more reason to want him dead than …’ His voice tailed off into silence.
‘She did not know about the ship being bad.’
‘But she was there.’
‘Where?’
‘She was around when Severus came to visit. She knew what he was threatening to do to the family. She gave him the drink.’
This was not what Tilla had intended. It was hard to believe that such a fond mother could be a secret poisoner. On the other hand, how far would a woman go to protect her children? Tilla did not want to think about it. She folded her arms. ‘If you are sure it is not that Probus man, then I think you should be very careful,’ she said. ‘It could be your old wife.’
‘Claudia? Never.’
‘How do you know?’
‘She’s not that sort of person.’
‘Nobody is that sort of person all the time. Her husband is a bad man. We know he steals money from your family and he is no good at choosing a ship, and she has to live with this man every day. You think yours is the only little sister he tries to sleep with?’
‘That’s a reason for divorcing him,’ he said. ‘Not murdering him.’
It was always hard work making the Medicus look at something he was trying to avoid. ‘If a wife wants to keep the husband’s money but not the hus
band,’ she explained, ‘he must be dead. Not divorced.’
Again, he looked askance at her, as if he was wondering how she had thought of something like that. ‘But he didn’t have any money,’ he said. ‘He didn’t own any of the property on the estate and after the ship sank he must have owed a huge amount to Probus.’
That was something she had not thought of. She said, ‘Did you tell her what he said at the end?’
‘Yes.’
‘So now you can tell me. Perhaps I can help.’
She heard him take in a breath. ‘It’s awkward.’
Tilla wound a strand of hair around her forefinger. The little he had told her about the old wife had suggested he was relieved to be rid of her, but the business between men and women was always complicated, and there was no way of knowing whether he had told the whole story.
Nobody here had known that the Medicus had a British woman until she had arrived. Everyone here thought he was single. Claudia, when she found out her second husband was much worse than the first one, could have sent that letter herself, waited until she had the Medicus back in Gaul, and then murdered her husband. Now the Medicus was stupid enough to defend her. It all fitted together, and it made a shape Tilla did not like.
She slid the finger out and let the hair unravel into a ringlet. The shape in her mind twisted into something worse.
‘If a woman poisons her husband, she said, ‘she must pretend that it was not her who did it. So she might wait until he is on the way to see someone else and give him something that will not kill him until he gets there.’
‘Claudia wouldn’t do that to me,’ he said.
The words hung in the heavy air of the winery.
‘She wouldn’t,’ he insisted.
The Medicus was stubborn. The old wife was an untried enemy. Trying to argue him back into his senses might well do the opposite. She said, ‘I am sorry you do not trust me.’
