Ruso and the Root of All Evils

by Ruth Downie

  Ruso squinted at the sky. It must be past the eighth hour by now. The sun was well over the zenith, and it was appallingly hot. His eyes felt gritty. The kerchief he had tied over his nose was slipping down. He pushed it back into place, wrinkling his nose in a futile attempt to hold it there and finally yanking it down out of the way and swearing at it. He had never intended to hurtle across to Arelate at this speed. As usual, he was having to clear up somebody else’s mess. And as usual, instead of talking things over in a sensible manner, Tilla had decided to make his life far more difficult than it was already. Sometimes he wondered whether she did it on purpose. A one-woman rebellion against Rome.

  Severus’ horse, out of condition from its enforced rest, was already beginning to tire. He would have to pick up a fresh animal halfway – and since he was not on active duty, he would have to pay. In the meantime, he slowed to a canter and swerved to overtake a heavy-goods vehicle, not bothering to wonder what might be under the tarpaulin at the back. Nobody facing a journey of over twenty miles would travel by ox-cart: it was quicker to walk. He was just urging the horse past a panniered donkey when it struck him that Tilla might well be doing what he least expected in order to avoid detection. On the other hand, if he paused to inspect every vehicle he might not catch up with them before the light began to fade and the town gates closed.

  There was no sense in looking over his shoulder, but he did it all the same.

  As he had expected, there was no blonde head poking out from under the receding tarpaulin. Instead, the wagon was being overtaken on both sides. Two more riders were pounding towards him, evidently staging some sort of race.

  The road ahead was clear to the next rise. Fields dotted with the orange roofs of small farms stretched away into the distance on both sides. He wondered if the shepherd had managed to regroup his flock before those two idiots thundered past and scattered it again. As he topped the rise to see more empty road ahead, he could hear the racers’ hoofbeats. He nudged his own horse aside to let them pass.

  Two men with kerchiefs over their faces drew level with him, one urging on a black horse and the other a big roan. Both men looked old enough to know better. The roan was much too close.

  ‘Move over!’ he yelled, just as the roan barged him. Ruso’s horse leaped sideways. A front hoof slipped on the side of the ditch and he was sent lurching over its shoulder. The horse managed to scramble up and Ruso righted himself, wishing he had a cavalry mount and a decent saddle. He was still trying to calm the horse when he realized the men were turning back.

  ‘I’m all right!’ he yelled, holding the animal steady in the middle of the road, well away from the ditch in case it decided to spook again at their approach.

  They were coming too fast. Both shouting. He saw the odd movement of the hand. The flash of metal in the sunlight. For a moment he stared, unable to believe what was happening. To have survived Britannia, only to be attacked by bandits here at home.

  His fingers fumbled with the safety strap. They were almost on him now: the one on the black with knife raised, the other reaching forward, ready to seize the reins of his horse.

  No time for his own knife. He urged the horse towards the gap between them, ready to barge the roan whilst hooking at the knifeman’s arm with the end of his walking-stick. He had to get away from them and go to warn Tilla.

  It would have worked. It would have worked beautifully. In fact it was on the way to working when his own mount stumbled on that front leg. He heard the rider of the roan cry out as the two horses collided. Ruso’s lunge towards the knifeman became a wild wave in mid-air as the grey horse gave way beneath him and they crashed to the ground in a crunching confusion of hooves and tail and elbows and gravel.

  Ruso’s first instinct was to curl up, hands protecting his head. Only when the thrashing about had stopped did the pain start to burn its way through the shock.

  Someone was nudging his shoulder. He wanted to say, don’t just poke the casualty, talk to him! but then he remembered in whose company he had fallen. He lifted one arm – at least that much was working – and found himself staring into the whiskery nostrils of Severus’ horse, which was examining him with an air of puzzled concern.

  He rolled over on to his back. A shadow fell over him and an oddly shaped fist clutching a knife filled the centre of his vision. Beyond it, he managed to make out that the other man had unrolled some sort of document.

  ‘In the name of Senator Gabinius Valerius,’ announced the reader, ‘I order you to come with us. Put it away, Stilo. He’s got nowhere to run.’

  The man backed away. As he sheathed his knife, Ruso saw that someone had done an untidy amputation of the last two fingers. He sat up and began to inspect himself for damage. He said, ‘You’re the investigators.’

  ‘Calvus and Stilo,’ said the knifeman, who must be the one the gatekeeper had described as the muscle. ‘I’m Stilo.’

  Ruso wiped the blood off a scrape on his elbow and decided the rest of him was only bruised. Mercifully he had done no more damage to his foot. ‘Why didn’t you say so before?’

  ‘If you didn’t know who we was,’ countered Stilo, ‘why was you running away?’

  Ruso unstrapped the bottle that the stable lad had filled for him. Evidently he had not bothered to rinse it: the water tasted disgusting. ‘I wasn’t running away,’ he said. ‘I need to catch up with somebody.’

  ‘A lot of people need to catch up with somebody when we want to talk to them.’

  ‘Get back on your horse and come with us,’ said Calvus, gingerly easing his shoulder backwards and forwards with the opposite hand and wincing as he did so. He was slightly built and several inches shorter than Ruso: a man who might be irritated by his bluff companion but who would need his bulk as backup.

  Ruso stifled his professional curiosity about the state of Calvus’ shoulder and moved on to examining the grey horse.

  He stumbled as a hand shoved him from behind. Stilo said, ‘He said, get back on.’

  Ruso retrieved his stick and urged the horse forward a few paces. Its gait was not dissimilar to his own. He swore quietly. There was no way he was going to catch up with anyone on this animal. ‘I’m trying to get to a friend,’ he said, without much hope. ‘She’s in danger. I need to borrow a horse.’

  The answer was in the looks on their faces. The best he could do was to get home and try and persuade someone – Lollia Saturnina? – to let him borrow a fresh mount. ‘This one’s lame,’ he said, ‘and so am I. It’ll take me hours to walk anywhere.’ He glanced from one to the other of them.

  ‘Get on Stilo’s horse,’ ordered Calvus. ‘The exercise will do him good.’

  The glare that accompanied Stilo’s handing over of the black horse’s reins suggested that Ruso would be sorry for this later.

  Chapter 51

  Ruso had hoped to leave out parts of the truth. Omission was easier than lying. As he and Calvus rode slowly back along the road with a resentful Stilo leading the lame horse, it seemed that he might get away with it.

  He summarized the circumstances of Severus’ death, adding that Claudia had since confirmed that her husband was not in the best of health.

  ‘Yes, I hear you’ve been to see the widow,’ observed Calvus. ‘Twice.’

  ‘We used to be married,’ said Ruso, noticing the heavy ring on Calvus’ right hand and wondering whether a stone that size was there to add a sharp edge to his punch.

  Calvus said, ‘What was Severus doing at your house?’

  ‘We were both involved in a court case.’

  ‘He was going to wipe you out, and you’re telling me he just dropped by for a chat?’

  Ruso suspected the investigator would not believe that Severus had come to discuss a settlement, and he was right.

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  They were approaching the ox-cart they had overtaken a few minutes before. The driver looked them up and down, noted the lame horse and passed by with the barely concealed superiority
of one who had known that too much rushing about never came to any good in the end.

  Ruso said, ‘It’s complicated. There was a falling-out between the women in both families.’

  ‘And Severus let it affect his business decisions?’ It was obvious that Calvus was not convinced.

  ‘Judge for yourself,’ suggested Ruso. ‘You’ve met Claudia.’

  ‘Somehow,’ said Calvus, ‘I don’t see a man like the Senator choosing an agent who’s told what to do by his wife.’

  ‘Severus made some remarks about my sister,’ Ruso explained. ‘Apparently he meant it as a compliment, but my brother took it as an insult, and my stepmother reported it to Claudia, who gave him a very bad time about it. He was angry with my family for stirring up trouble in his marriage, and since – according to him – we owed him money, he decided to make things difficult for us.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Only later on, he realized things had gone too far,’ said Ruso. ‘We’d just done a deal to straighten things out when he was taken ill.’

  ‘We’ll need to talk to whoever witnessed the agreement.’

  ‘There wasn’t anybody,’ explained Ruso. ‘There wasn’t time to get things organized. I was more worried about his state of health.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I know this doesn’t sound very likely.’

  ‘Did I say that?’ asked Calvus.

  ‘You didn’t say that,’ confirmed Stilo across the horse.

  Ruso said, ‘Severus was a bully and a liar. We can’t have been the only people he tried to swindle.’

  ‘The first rule of investigating,’ said Calvus. ‘Never trust a suspect who tries to blame somebody else.’

  ‘I’m trying to help.’

  ‘If Severus went round swindling people,’ put in Stilo, ‘where’d he hide the money? The wife says he didn’t have a bean.’

  ‘All I’m saying is, he might have had other enemies. People with fewer scruples.’

  ‘We’ll bear it in mind,’ said Calvus.

  ‘If we get desperate,’ said Stilo.

  ‘It could be somebody who knew he was coming to see us and who deliberately tried to blame us for his death.’

  ‘Talks a lot, don’t he?’ observed Stilo to his partner. ‘I reckon it was him.’

  ‘Before we jump to conclusions,’ said Calvus, frowning at Stilo across the back of the lame horse, ‘go through again exactly what happened when Severus fell ill.’

  Ruso’s account was as accurate as he could make it. So accurate, indeed, that, as he explained the process by which he had eliminated all the causes he could think of, Stilo began to yawn. ‘So you’re saying he was definitely poisoned, right?’

  Ruso said, ‘I think so.’

  ‘Well was he, or wasn’t he?’

  ‘I can’t think of anything else that would make sense of the symptoms.’

  ‘Is that yes or no?’

  ‘Probably.’

  Stilo sighed. ‘You’re all the same, you medics. It might be this or it might be that, or it might be some other bloody thing altogether. Do you have a special school where they teach you how not to answer questions?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Calvus said, ‘What were his last words?’

  ‘Somebody’s poisoned me,’ said Ruso.

  ‘Hah!’ Stilo raised his free hand to the sky as if imploring the gods to listen to this idiot.

  ‘Somebody has poisoned me,’ repeated Calvus slowly, as if he were speaking to a foreigner who was just learning Latin. ‘I’d say that was a clue, doctor, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Hmph,’ put in Stilo. ‘For a minute there I thought we were going to get a straight answer.’

  ‘He might have been wrong.’

  Stilo muttered something that sounded very much like ‘Smartarse.’

  Ruso had a feeling that, had their positions been reversed, he would have felt the same way. The most convincing part of his story was the censored version of Severus’ last words. All the rest – the conveniently unwitnessed offering of a truce, the victim’s sudden collapse in the lone company of a man equipped with medicines and a motive – pointed in entirely the wrong direction.

  ‘It wasn’t me,’ said Ruso. ‘If I were going to murder Severus, I’d have found a much cleverer way of doing it. I’d have used a poison that wasn’t so obvious, or I’d have found a way to blame somebody else right from the start.’

  ‘I see,’ said Calvus.

  ‘It can’t be him, boss,’ said Stilo. ‘It weren’t clever enough, see?’

  ‘I see,’ said Calvus again. ‘Tell us how you would have done it, then, doctor.’

  Chapter 52

  Ruso surveyed the household lined up along the porch in an awkward parody of the welcome he had received only a few days before. This time nobody was looking cheerful. Lucius was striding up and down and muttering to himself despite being ordered to stand still. Arria and the girls looked bewildered, Galla pale and even the nieces and nephews were temporarily overawed by the presence not only of Calvus and Stilo, but of four grim-faced men armed with clubs. Ruso recognized a couple of them as Fuscus’ men. Try as he might, Ruso could not imagine Fuscus had sent them to protect the family of his dear departed friend Publius Petreius.

  Evidently the staff did not like the look of the Fuscus thugs either. The cook was clutching a saucepan as if it were a weapon. The kitchen-boy and Arria’s maid seemed to be trying to hide behind him. The bath-boy was a picture of drooping misery, and the cleaning girl and the laundrymaid were standing with heads bowed, each seemingly examining the reddened hands clasped in front of her for some explanation of why this was happening.

  The stable lad scurried in through the yard gate and ran up the steps to join the others, trailing a strong whiff of embrocation in his wake. The nine farm labourers, not usually allowed to enter the house, hesitated down on the path.

  ‘And you lot,’ ordered Calvus. ‘Up you go.’

  The men looked variously at Calvus, at Ruso and at Lucius, evidently not sure whom to obey.

  Ruso moved forward. ‘Go and stand next to the other staff,’ he ordered them, counting the line to make sure nobody was missing except the two women who were at this moment heading into unsuspected trouble in Arelate.

  He made his way down the steps and turned to address his household. ‘These men have come to ask us all some questions about the visitor who died here the other day,’ he said. ‘They’re representing the Senator, and I want you to answer them as fully and as truthfully as you can.’

  He turned to Calvus, whose long dark eyes were surveying the family with an expression that reminded Ruso of a predator choosing its next meal. He said, ‘You can use the study when you’ve finished inspecting it,’ and, lowering his voice as he drew closer, added, ‘My people are witnesses. They’ll do their best to help you, but most of them don’t know a thing. They don’t need to be frightened and they certainly don’t need to be hurt.’

  Calvus raised one eyebrow. ‘What an interesting idea.’

  It occurred to Ruso that what the man lacked in height he made up for in arrogance. ‘You didn’t need to bring a bunch of thugs with you.’

  ‘The suspect telling me how to carry out the investigation.’

  ‘It’ll never catch on,’ said Stilo.

  Ruso felt his muscles tense. He made a conscious effort to relax his shoulders before saying, ‘I’m warning you not to do anything you’ll regret later when you find out the truth.’

  ‘Nice of you to care,’ said Calvus. ‘But I’ve been in this business a long time –’

  ‘A very long time,’ put in Stilo.

  ‘I’ve been in this business a very long time,’ repeated Calvus, ‘and I don’t often suffer from regret.’

  Ruso turned on his heel and limped away towards the garden seat. If he did not put himself out of reach of Calvus immediately, he would hit him. And that would do his case no good at all.

  Chapter 53
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  Ruso slammed the gates so hard that they rattled. He shoved the bolt across and turned to the dog. ‘Next time,’ he instructed it, gesturing towards the gate that shut out the departing investigators, ‘bite them.’

  The enthusiasm with which the dog wagged its tail did not inspire confidence.

  Rubbing his sore elbow and feeling ten years older than he had this morning, Ruso turned to limp back towards the stables. Already the shadow of the pergola was stretching its legs across the garden. Tilla and his sister-in-law were somewhere far beyond the safety of the estate, and there was no way anyone could catch up with them before dark.

  The crunch of footsteps announced someone behind him. ‘If my vintage is ruined,’ announced Lucius, ‘it’ll be your fault.’

  ‘Is everyone all right?’

  ‘If you couldn’t keep that bloody woman under control you had no business bringing her here.’

  There was no time to argue. ‘We’ve got to get to Arelate tonight, Brother. Cass and Tilla don’t know what they’re walking into.’

  ‘It’s bad enough you getting us all accused of poisoning. Now my wife’s run off because your fancy woman’s filled her head with rubbish, and you send a slave to come and tell me!’ Lucius kicked open the yard gate, sending a couple of hens fluttering away in alarm. ‘You don’t know how it feels to have to lie to your own children, do you? To tell them their mother’s gone for a holiday and you don’t know when she’s coming back? Did you see the faces on those nosey bastards just now? Even you suspected her of being a poisoner: what must they think?’

  ‘Are the mules fast enough, or can we borrow some horses?’

  ‘I’m in the middle of supervising the vintage, remember? Good old reliable Lucius, here every year –’

  ‘We’ve been through this. We need to –’

  ‘I stay here and work while you float around the Empire picking up women. You don’t have the faintest idea what responsibility really means, do you? Now I’m going to be gone for who knows how long, because somebody who can walk on both legs needs to go and get my wife out of the clutches of that woman so she can come back here and do her duty!’