Ruso and the Root of All Evils mi-3

by Ruth Downie

  8

  The latest hug turned out to be less enthusiastic than the one from his sister-in-law. When they had clung to each other for what Ruso felt was a decent length of time, they held each other at arms’ length. Ruso politely informed the middle-aged man that he was looking well.

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘No, you’re not,’ agreed Ruso, relieved that he had not been the first of them to say it. ‘I got your letter.’

  ‘Gaius.’ Lucius’ breathing was audible, as if the lungs were weighed down with the bulk of the paunch. ‘This is very bad timing.’

  ‘I couldn’t get here any faster. I know you had to be careful, but you might have given me some idea of what the problem was.’

  Lucius glanced behind him and closed the door. ‘How many people know you’re home?’

  ‘How long has this legal business been going on?’

  Lucius smoothed the top of his thinning hair. ‘We could probably keep it quiet. The staff won’t talk. Did you see anyone you knew on the road?’

  Ruso frowned. ‘You didn’t say anything about coming home in secret.’

  Lucius subsided on to the chair that Ruso still thought of as belonging to their father. ‘I don’t know what we’re going to do now. Not now that you’ve turned up.’

  Ruso stared at him. ‘But you’re the one who wrote and asked me to come home!’

  The tired eyes that reminded him of his own seemed to be displaying equal bafflement. ‘No, I didn’t. That’s the last thing I would have done.’

  Ruso pondered the remote possibility that the letter had said, DO NOT COME HOME. Surely he could not have misread it? Tilla’s views were of no help since Tilla could barely read her own name. But Valens had interpreted it as COME HOME too. ‘It was in your writing.’

  Lucius shook his head. ‘The only things I’ve written to you about lately are Cass’s brother being drowned, and Marcia’s wretched dowry.’

  ‘That’s not the letter I got.’

  ‘No, you’d probably already left by the time it arrived. Are you sure this COME HOME was addressed to you?’

  ‘Of course I am! And it looked exactly like your writing. You don’t think I’d travel a thousand miles on crutches because of a letter to somebody else, do you?’

  ‘I suppose not.’ The tone was reluctant rather than conciliatory.

  Ruso sat on the trunk, propped his stick against the wall and scowled as it slid sideways out of reach and clattered on to the floor. ‘This is ridiculous.’

  ‘Did you bring this letter with you?’

  ‘I burned it. So if you didn’t send it, who did?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I wish they hadn’t.’

  Ruso shrugged. ‘Well, I’m here now.’

  ‘Yes.’ Lucius cleared his throat. ‘I suppose we’ll have to make the best of it. You’re looking well, anyway. How was Britannia?’

  ‘Messy. Is it true someone’s trying to bankrupt us?’

  Lucius leaned back in their father’s chair and folded his arms. ‘If I were to say no,’ he said, ‘and ask you to go straight back to Deva for the good of the family, would you do it?’

  ‘I can’t,’ Ruso pointed out. ‘I had to wangle months of leave to get here.’

  ‘So you can’t go back to the Legion.’ Lucius managed to look even more depressed.

  ‘Arria says somebody’s applied for a seizure order.’

  Lucius let out a long breath. ‘There’s a law somewhere,’ he said, ‘that says you can’t take out a seizure order against someone who’s away from home on public service.’

  Ruso began to grasp the nature of the problem. ‘Does that apply to an ordinary man in the Army?’

  ‘The last thing I would have done, Brother, was to ask you to come home.’

  ‘So it’s true, then? We have a legal problem?’

  ‘We do now,’ said Lucius.

  9

  Finally, Tilla was alone with her headache. The Medicus’ nephews and nieces had been rounded up by their mother. The older girls had grown bored with her and gone about their own business, and the cook, eager to get this stranger out of his kitchen, had handed her a cup of water and suggested that she go and sit in the garden.

  She glanced both ways down the long stone porch that shaded the front of the house. There was no sign of the man whom she called the Medicus, everyone else called Ruso and now his family — confusingly — seemed to know as Gaius. She supposed he was somewhere talking to the brother, finding out at last why they were here.

  She crossed the porch and went down the steps into a garden where roses and lavender grew in beds corralled by little clipped hedges, as if they might otherwise make a dash for freedom.

  The path led under the dappled shade of a long wooden frame that she thought might be called a pergola. The word was one of the many new things she would have to learn here. She already had the word for the insects hiding up amongst the leaves. Cicadas. The Medicus had promised her she would grow to love the song, but so far the terrible grating screech made her feel as though she was having her back teeth sawn off.

  Tilla sank on to a stone bench that looked out over a cracked concrete pond. The water had evaporated long ago, leaving a black flaking coat that might once have been algae. She gazed at a plinth, where a rusted bracket reached for a statue that wasn’t there, and tried not to think how far she was from home. Everything was as the Medicus had described it: the sunshine, the olive grove outside the gates, the tall vines, the winery … but her mind had taken his words and painted its own pictures. In those pictures nothing was quite as big, or as hot, or as foreign. Or as badly maintained.

  The people were not what she had been expecting, either. The fine fleece that had taken much of the journey to spin would stay bundled up in the luggage. She did not want the humiliation of presenting it as a gift and having to watch the stepmother find something polite to say about it.

  While they were travelling she had tried to understand exactly how the Medicus’ family had managed to get itself into such debt, but his attempts to explain how loans worked had only caused more confusion.

  ‘Imagine,’ he had said, ‘that you borrow a cow for a year. You drink the milk every day. When the time comes to give the cow back, you give back the cow, and the calf it’s produced, as thanks for having had the use of it.’

  She had said, ‘What if there is no calf? What if the cow dies?’

  ‘That’s the advantage of money,’ he said, looking as though he thought he was clever. ‘It doesn’t deteriorate.’

  ‘Then what is the problem?’

  He had scratched one ear as he did when he was thinking and admitted that borrowing money could not really be explained in terms of cows. ‘Basically, you have to make the money make more money,’ he said. ‘Instead, Arria and my father chose to spend the money on a temple to Diana and Home Improvements.’

  ‘So it is as if she slaughtered the cow before it calved, ate the meat and boiled the hooves down for glue, and now she has no meat or a calf to give back.’

  He had pondered that for a moment before agreeing that it was near enough.

  Now that she had seen the house, she understood at last what Home Improvements were. Mosaics on the floor. A hall for welcoming guests that was painted with pictures of pale women with skimpy clothes and vacant faces and muscular men leading bulls to be sacrificed. Cupids dancing around the dining room. Then there was the carved head of the Medicus’ father set on top of a lump of marble, and lots of silly little polished tables with spindly legs. What could you do with things like that? You could not milk them or eat them. They would not keep you warm in winter. She could not understand how anyone had the energy to bother, or indeed why.

  The water was cool in her throat. She dipped her fingers into the cup and wiped them across her forehead. Then, since nothing seemed to be moving out here except a few bees, she tipped the rest over her head, unpeeled the tunic that was stuck to her damp back and stretched out along the length of the be
nch. She put her fingers in her ears and closed her eyes. She wished she could close her nose to the smell as easily. The scent of the flowers could not disguise the fact that something seemed to have gone wrong with the drains. Just as the children’s excitement at her arrival could not make up for the shock of realizing that nobody here knew who she was. In Britannia, she had thought that she was an important part of the Medicus’ life. Now it was plain that, even though she had been in the room with him when he wrote many of his letters home, not one of them had mentioned her.

  Letting one hand trail down, she ran a finger over the parched lichen that had formed on the stone leg of the bench. She found herself picturing the brittle thorns she had seen by the roadside, offering nothing but crops of white snails so maddened by the sun that they climbed up nearer to it to bake themselves under the brilliant sky. She pushed the picture away. It was making her feel hotter. Instead she tried to imagine herself paddling in the willow-fringed shallows of the river at home. It did not help.

  Arria’s insistence that she be led away to be fed and watered had probably been kindly meant. The half-sisters had taken the trouble to show her around the umpteen rooms of the house, dutifully pointing out decoration and glass windows, and she had done her best to think of a new way of admiring each one. She had wanted to ask about the farm: are you worried that the soil is baked so dry? When does it rain? How many cows do you have? What else can you grow apart from grapes and olives? But the girls did not seem interested in the farm. When they were not showing off the house they seemed to do nothing but talk about clothes and boys and get in the way of the staff.

  Tilla was reflecting that at least the Medicus had found time to warn her about them, if not the other way around, when she felt a painful jab in her ribs and opened her eyes to see those same half-sisters standing over her.

  ‘She’s awake!’ exclaimed Marcia, who had no right to be surprised since she was the one who had just poked her.

  Tilla blinked as her eyes adjusted again to the glare filtering through the leaves.

  ‘Good news,’ announced Marcia. ‘Mother says you can chaperone us into town tomorrow.’

  ‘It’s not our turn for the tutor tomorrow,’ said Flora, the younger of the two. Then, as if Tilla might not know what a tutor was, she added, ‘In our family you have to learn poetry, even if you’re a girl. And music.’

  ‘It’s a privilege,’ put in her older sister. ‘But we won’t have to put up with it much longer, hopefully. Anyway, after we’ve bathed and had dinner you can spend tonight unpacking, or whatever it is you do for our brother. Then if you get him to give you some money we can all go shopping.’

  Tilla sat up, rubbing her eyes. ‘Shopping?’ she repeated, wondering why anyone would want to tramp around buying things in this heat. Surely the family had enough servants to fetch whatever they needed?

  The girls looked at each other. Marcia said, ‘What did I tell you? She doesn’t understand.’

  ‘Don’t you have shops in Britannia?’ asked Flora.

  Marcia said, ‘They probably don’t have money, either. Come on, Tilla. We’ll show you what a bath-house is before the others get in there and mess it up.’

  10

  Ruso dropped the lid of the trunk and sat on it as if he could keep the family’s troubles trapped inside. He said, ‘I might have guessed the Gabinii were involved in this somewhere.’

  Gabinius Fuscus and his cousin had been friends of their father: the sort of friends who insisted on lending him large sums of money. Their offers were so cordial that Publius Petreius had failed to extract any details about when they would want the cash back, or how much interest they were expecting. Since his death, their unpredictable demands for repayment had been causing the Petreius brothers major headaches. While the brothers had struggled to remain solvent, Gabinius Fuscus had risen to become a senior magistrate on the local city council, and his even wealthier cousin was now a Senator down in Rome.

  ‘Is it just one of them, or both?’ asked Ruso.

  ‘Neither,’ said Lucius, propping his elbows on the worn surface of the desk and cradling his head in his hands. ‘Well, both. Indirectly.’

  Ruso waited, wondering if Lucius’ inability to define the problem might be part of the reason he had failed to solve it.

  ‘At least the Senator won’t be bothering us,’ said Lucius. ‘Not in person. He’s too busy down in Rome, trying to find ways of undermining Hadrian.’

  ‘Good.’

  Lucius looked up. ‘No, it isn’t. In the meantime he’s let a shark called Severus loose to manage his estate.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Some distant relation from Rome, apparently. Everybody reckons they’ve sent him and his sister up here to get rid of them.’

  ‘And this Severus is the one who’s trying to get the seizure order?’

  ‘Severus,’ said Lucius, snatching up a stylus and emphasizing each word with a stab of the point into the desk, ‘is a Devious, Vindictive, Lying Bastard.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘That money was all there, whatever he says. I put it in front of him myself.’

  Ruso decided not to interrupt. If he listened for long enough, Lucius would start to make sense.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Lucius. ‘You’re thinking, why didn’t you wait while he counted it?’

  ‘You know what the Gabinii are like.’

  Lucius tossed the stylus aside. ‘When your wife’s in floods of tears and your son’s howling in pain, Gaius, it’s hard to care what the Gabinii are like.’

  Lucius had been sitting where he was sitting now, counting the money for the latest instalment of the loan repayment, when there was a commotion in the entrance hall. News had arrived that Cass’s brother was drowned. While everyone was absorbing this shock Little Lucius, aged four, wandered into the yard, climbed up a ladder and fell off the roof of the stables.

  ‘His arm was bent the wrong way at the elbow. The doctor thought he might have to amputate.’

  ‘Nasty,’ agreed Ruso. ‘Nobody would blame you if you miscounted.’

  ‘I didn’t!’ snapped Lucius. ‘Severus took advantage. We rushed into town to find a doctor and I just stopped off at the estate to dump the cash on his desk. The evil bastard must have been able to hear the child crying, but he left me standing there while he chatted to his steward. When I told him I was in a hurry he took the money and said, “Don’t let me hold you up; I’ll send the receipt over later.”

  ‘Ah,’ said Ruso.

  ‘And he smiled when he said it.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Only instead of a receipt we got a demand saying it was two hundred short, and when I didn’t fall for that, he said he’d take us to court.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I thought the Senator might want to know he’d got a crook running his estate, so I went and told Fuscus what was going on. Fuscus told me to go home and not to worry about it, so I didn’t.’ Lucius cleared his throat. ‘Only he didn’t do a thing. It should never have come to a court hearing, Gaius. Severus was lying. I thought if I called his bluff he’d back down.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Don’t keep saying “Ah” in that tone of voice. You weren’t here. And anyway, you’d think local magistrates would back a decent farmer against some fly-by-night from Rome, wouldn’t you? Especially since half of them used to spend the evenings lolling round our dining tables pretending to be Father’s friends.’

  Ruso was less surprised than his brother seemed to be. Their father had probably borrowed money from most of the local dignitaries at one time or another. Still, no matter how annoyed they might have been, he could not understand how a small squabble had led to bankruptcy proceedings. There was something else that Lucius was holding back. ‘Just tell me the rest and get it over with, Brother. I’ve had a long day and my foot’s aching.’

  The pitch of Lucius’ voice rose, as it always did when he was lying. ‘Tell you what?’

  �
��Whatever it is that turned a row over the cost of a decent amphora of wine into an attempt to ruin us.’

  ‘It’s not my fault, Gaius!’

  Ruso shifted sideways and stretched his leg out along the trunk. ‘I didn’t say it was.’

  ‘Now you’re thinking, why the hell didn’t he just pay up straight away when we lost the court case?’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Because we didn’t owe him the money! I’m not rushing round paying people twice just because they lie to us. What do you think I am?’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Stop saying “Ah”!’

  ‘What do you want me to say, Lucius? “Never mind”? “Well done”?’

  ‘How about, “Thank you”? How about, “Thank you, Lucius, for running the farm and looking after the family while I was off playing soldiers and picking up women”?’

  Ruso leaned back against the wall. Somewhere beyond the study door, he could hear the sound of children laughing.

  ‘If you’d sorted out this dowry business when you were asked,’ persisted Lucius, ‘both the girls would be betrothed by now, and we wouldn’t have had half this trouble.’

  Ruso, wondering why they were now talking about dowries, said, ‘I was waiting till we had some money.’

  ‘By the time that happens, nobody will want them,’ retorted Lucius. ‘If they haven’t already died of old age and frustration, as Marcia points out to me several times a day. And I don’t suppose you’ve brought home any spoils of war apart from the girl?’

  ‘There might have been time to get some if I hadn’t come rushing home to help you.’ Ruso stopped. Arguing with his brother would only waste more time. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Finish telling me what’s going on.’

  ‘You keep looking at me as if it’s all my fault.’

  ‘I’m looking at you in the hope that you’ll get on with it.’