The Fateful Day

by Rosemary Rowe

  Junio frowned. ‘Minimus had the feeling that something was amiss, ever since the moment that we found the gate ajar. He swore that when he worked here Marcus would never have permitted that. He thought it was just slackness by the staff because their owner was away – but it made him very nervous all the same. He was quite concerned at coming to the house at all.’

  ‘But came in any case.’

  He gave me a wry grin. ‘We were fairly sure that you were in the house, and it was you we’d come to find.’ This brave concern for my welfare was rather humbling, but before I could say anything my son was rushing on. ‘Of course, we went to the front door first, but nobody was there either. However, Minimus knew about a servant’s side-gate in the wall, so we hurried round that way, trying not to make ourselves conspicu-ous. He thought there might be trouble if someone spotted us. He had no right these days to be going that way at all – and nor had I, of course, though as a citizen I might have got away with it.’

  ‘You need not have worried,’ I put in. ‘There was nobody about. Though I suppose you didn’t know that.’

  ‘We were soon aware of it. In fact, we could not find a trace of any living soul until I spotted fresh footsteps on the gravel near the gate. So I went in that direction, and there you were, indeed!’

  ‘Though you almost made me die of shock,’ I said. ‘I was sure that a murderer was bursting in on me.’

  ‘I was a bit alarmed about what I might find, myself,’ he said. ‘That’s why I sent young Minimus the other way, in the direction of the servants’ block. He used to know most of the slave-force in the household here, so they are likely to be friendly to him if he does find anyone. They might even talk to him and explain to us why everybody else has disappeared.’ He looked around again. ‘It is odd, isn’t it? The place is positively eerie.’

  ‘I might have believed your theory about the slave-market,’ I said, ‘if it wasn’t for the presence of that grisly corpse.’

  ‘Dear gods!’ Junio exclaimed. ‘The gatekeeper! I have just realised the force of what you said. “Someone” strung him up, you said – presumably meaning that he didn’t do it himself? I was somehow supposing that he’d taken his own life – perhaps out of despair or something because the household was being broken up. But you don’t think so?’

  ‘Nor would you, if you had seen him,’ I replied. ‘His hands are chained behind his back. He could not have arranged the noose around his neck.’

  Junio was goggling at me. ‘No wonder you were talking about murderers,’ he said. ‘That does seem proof that something criminal’s afoot. Yet the land-slaves have gone off to work as usual, apparently thinking that it was an ordinary day?’

  I nodded. ‘I don’t imagine that they knew there’d been a murder here – and that is something which I can’t understand. I know they don’t all sleep in the same slave quarters as the domestic staff. There are so many of them now that Marcus has converted a barn on the estate for them just opposite the rear entrance to the house. But the overseer comes in, and still they get food from the kitchens and all that sort of thing. So how could this have happened without their knowing it?’

  ‘Unless the killer is a member of the household, possibly? Took the food across to them and managed to convince them that things were just as usual. In that case, is it possible he’s still somewhere about?’ He glanced uncomfortably round the room. ‘I don’t like this, Father. Let’s get out of here ourselv—’ He broke off suddenly and looked into my eyes. ‘Dear gods!’ I saw the horror dawning on his face, just as I felt it rising in my own. ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’

  ‘Minimus!’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘I have sent him off searching the back court on his own! Come on!’ He was already leading the way towards the door. ‘We’d better go and find him before someone else does.’

  I hastened after Junio as fast as my old legs would carry me – through the vestibule, into the peristyle garden and out towards the back. This time we did not stop to skirt the rooms but hurried directly down the central path.

  Past the fountain, through the inner gate and out into the courtyard where the slave quarters stood. I led the way inside and looked around. ‘Minimus?’ I shouted.

  But it was already clear that nobody was here.

  The room was exactly as I’d seen it earlier – neat and ordered and empty as the skies. I glanced at Junio, who was staring at the rows of tidy sleeping-spaces on the floor – obviously surprised to find the place so undisturbed. ‘No one left here in hurry,’ he observed. ‘But there’s no sign of Minimus.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s in the courtyard – in one of the other outbuildings, maybe?’

  We hurried out again, scouring the empty stables, the barns, the storage sheds, and still calling Minimus at every step. I even went back into the inner yard and checked the open amphorae in the ground. But there was no sign of him and no answer to our shouts. The echoes mocked us, bouncing off the walls.

  I was about to suggest to Junio that we go back into the house, in case the boy had followed him inside and we had somehow missed him as we left, but I was suddenly conscious of a distant sound behind the right-hand boundary wall. I glanced at Junio and raised a warning finger to my lips. It was ridiculous. A moment earlier we had been shouting loudly for a slave! But it suddenly seemed vital that we did not make a noise.

  There was a little gateway that led out of the court into the orchard which adjoined the house. When I looked at that gate earlier the bolt had been secured, but I could see from where I stood that it had been opened since. I gestured to Junio, who followed the direction of my pointing finger with his eyes.

  He saw the bolt and nodded. He repeated my finger-to-the-lips routine, held up a hand to indicate I should stay where I was and started to inch silently towards the gate. He had been born to servitude and had acquired the knack – which as a slave myself I’d never quite achieved – of moving absolutely silently. I could only watch him and admire his stealth, though my heart was in my mouth as he placed one noiseless hand upon the latch and the other on the gatepost. Then with a sudden motion he released the catch, pushed the gate wide open and burst into the orchard in a single lunge.

  Nothing happened. No one set upon him. No one cried out in surprise. From where I was standing I saw him hesitate and crane his neck in all directions to look around the field. I was about to go and join him but he shook his head at me.

  ‘I think there’s something moving over there,’ he mouthed, pointing with a tapping motion at the farther wall. He peered a little longer and then came back to me and murmured, too softly to be overheard by listeners-in, ‘There’s certainly something, though I can’t see what it is. You stay here. I’ll go and have a look.’

  I was about to protest but he shook his head again. ‘One of us had better stay here in case Minimus turns up,’ he insisted with a firmness that wasn’t usual for him. ‘Besides I’m better at moving quietly – and if there is any problem and I don’t come back, it’s better if one of us can go and call for help. Stay where you are, and make sure you are out of sight behind the wall.’ And before I could reply he was through the gate again and had disappeared from view among the orchard trees.

  I’m not accustomed to my former slave dictating what I do and I was inclined to bridle inwardly – but I did as I was bid. I knew that his assertiveness was born of care for me, and it had to be admitted that he was no doubt right: I am not as young and agile as I used to be. If there was any danger he was better placed to flee, or even to put up a struggle and defend himself. But I did not enjoy the moments that I spent listening to the silence, cowering by the wall and wondering what Junio was doing on the other side of it.

  After several moments there was another rustling – this time coming very close to me – and I could hear someone breathing heavily. I was half inclined to make a lumbering run for it and try to get into the slave quarters and hide, when Junio came bursting through the gate again.

  ‘T
hat’s the second time today that you’ve half frightened me to death …’ I was beginning, with a chuckle of relief. Then I saw the expression on his face.

  ‘You’ve found something! Tell me it isn’t Minimus!’

  He shook his head as if attempting to dispel a dreadful dream. ‘Oh, I’ve found Minimus all right and he is still alive – but I couldn’t bring him back. He wasn’t well enough. There’s something in the orchard. You’d better come and see.’

  FIVE

  Before I could say anything at all he was leading the way back through the still half-open gate into the orchard field. I followed him, but as I glanced around I could not see anything particularly out of place. The trees – apples, walnuts, damson, sloes and pears – had just begun to sprout their new spring buds, but otherwise the branches were quite bare, making it possible to see through the tangled trellis of their twigs right to the other corner of the field, but I could see nothing unusual at all, except what looked a random pile of coloured cloth against the further wall.

  Even that was not especially surprising, given that the master and the mistress were away. Most of the cloth that I could see was roughly the distinctive scarlet shade of the house uniform of Marcus’s house-slaves – except for a much smaller heap of greenish-brown a little to one side – so this was presumably drying laundry I was looking at. The diminished household that had been left behind were hardly likely to take their tunics into Glevum to be cleaned or dyed: the fullers gave no credit and the dyers even less. That small amount of laundry would be done at home, just as Gwellia always personally dyed and washed our own – except of course for togas, which required the whitening that only a professional fuller could provide.

  So if a lot of odd items were being dyed to match and the result was not especially critical – which at a quick glance appeared to be the case – then what could be more natural than to spread it out to dry on the long grass beneath the trees, particularly on a windy, bright spring morning like today?

  ‘There’s Minimus. Can you see him? I think he’s being sick.’ Junio broke across my thoughts, indicating the direction with a thumb.

  It was then I realised that the green-brown heap was Minimus – or rather his slave-tunic, which was all that I could see. He was crouching up against the high stone wall, his head bowed away from us and his shoulders heaving slightly as I watched. I hurried towards him, down one of the grassy strips between the trees – and as I grew nearer I got a clearer view – and then looked more carefully at the other pile of cloth.

  What I was seeing stopped me in my tracks. There was no question now of what had happened to the missing slaves. I had been right in thinking I could see their uniforms – what I hadn’t realised was that the owners were still wearing them. The whole household of servants, what was left of them, were lying two deep in a sort of ragged line, some on their fronts and others on their backs, some with their feet towards me, others facing the other way. It was not a tidy pile. Many of them overlapped their neighbour in some way – a leg here over someone else’s shoulder there – and the variation in the famous crimson shade was occasioned not by the recent application of a dye, but by the streams of blood which had soaked into them, and which now had dried in random patches of a darker hue.

  It was not hard to see where all this blood had issued from. The heads were missing. Every one of them had clearly been hacked off at the neck. Some of the bodies had been cruelly stabbed as well (several in the back, I noticed), but some corpses appeared to bear no other mark. There must have been a dozen or so in all – surely the whole of the small staff that Marcus left behind: male and female, young and old, kitchen slaves and pages, even the amanuensis and the steward (easily distinguishable by their longer robes) all jumbled together in this macabre equality of death.

  I turned to Minimus, still retching in the grass. He knelt up to greet me, ashen-faced and with an effort at a sickly smile. ‘Master! I’m sorry. I should have come to you …’

  I held up a hand to silence him. ‘I’m not surprised this has affected you. It would take a man without a heart not to react to this …’

  He gulped. ‘That boy there – the second smallest one – I knew him, I am sure. I helped to train him when he first arrived. He was going to be page, but in the end they made him kitchen-boy. His name’s Pauvrissimus. I recognise him from that scar there on his arm where he tripped and fell into the brazier one day.’ He seemed to feel that he was showing disrespect, so he put one still-shaking hand against the wall and pulled himself upright. ‘And that big, hulking one beside him, I am almost sure, is the second-ranking cook who used to do the baking for the house.’

  I nodded. I had forgotten that these people would be personally known to my red-headed slave. ‘I’m sorry you had to find this on your own,’ I said. ‘What made you come into the orchard anyway?’

  ‘I’d already done as the young master said – looked into the slave quarters and all the other outbuildings and sheds. But there wasn’t anyone …’ he tailed off incoherently, gazing at me with a supplicating look upon his face.

  I tried to help him. ‘So you decided to come and have a look round the estate?’

  Another anguished glance. ‘Well, not exactly that. You see, I noticed that the egg basket was gone …’

  I found that I was staring at him. So was Junio. ‘The egg basket?’ I echoed.

  He nodded. ‘The basket that’s used for collecting the eggs. It hangs on the wall inside the servants’ sleeping-room – at least, that’s where it was kept when I belonged to Marcus.’ It was the first long utterance he had managed since we’d found him here.

  ‘It was clever of you to have noticed it was gone,’ I said gently. ‘I certainly hadn’t noticed it myself.’ Although, now he mentioned it, I had a recollection of an empty hook beside the door and a faint mark on the wall where something had once hung.

  Minimus was still gasping, but I’d encouraged him. ‘Pauvrissimus used to take it out to get the eggs first thing in the morning.’ He glanced at the headless corpses, and glanced away again. ‘Well, I thought that’s what he’d done. You wouldn’t take the basket if you weren’t collecting eggs. And, since there wasn’t any poultry in the yard, I thought they must have been let out underneath the trees to scratch for worms and things – that’s what they always used to do when I was here – though it’s a bit early in the season. I know the chickens that you keep at home aren’t really laying yet. But Marcus breeds several var-ieties of hens, as well as ducks and geese – on purpose to get eggs as long as possible. So I came into the orchard …’ He shook his head again. ‘Poor Pauvrissimus! Who did this awful thing? And what’s happened to their heads?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I told him. ‘But I’m anxious to find out. I’ll discover who did this to your friend, I promise you. And if you can bear to look again at the other bodies, it is even possible that you can help.’

  ‘Me?’ Minimus turned a chalk-white face to me. ‘If it will help to catch the killer, I’d do a great deal more than that.’

  ‘Then look at them and tell me – you know that Marcus only left a tiny indoor staff behind, just enough to keep the villa open while he was away. Apart from the steward and the amanuensis, whom I recognise myself, do you think that this is all of them?’

  Minimus swallowed hard and forced himself to look at the pile of headless bodies that used to be his friends. ‘It is hard to tell exactly who is who – and there’s certain to be some people who were purchased when I’d left – but most of them I’m fairly certain of. That little boy beside Pauvrissimus was a trainee page, I think, here to open the door and deal with visitors. That one there’s the general messenger, and that’s the girl that used to mend the linen and do general sewing work. That couple with the cook will be the other kitchen slaves – someone has to feed the household and the land-slaves too – and that fat lad with them is the boy who fetches fuel to feed the cooking stoves and things.’ He considered for a moment. ‘The other general slaves I�
��m not really sure about. There’d be three or four to clean the villa, I suppose. It looks as though His Excellence has ordered an effort to do that while he’s away – someone has been scrubbing out the storage vats, I see, and there’ll be all the household cutlery and ornaments to clean, so he’ll have left sufficient staff to do it properly. I didn’t have a lot of contact with the more menial staff, so I would not necessarily know them anyway, especially now there is no face to recognise.’ He wrinkled up his nose. ‘The only thing I can’t see is a gatekeeper … I know that there were changes after I had gone, but there’s no one left who looks the build for that.’

  I found myself exchanging glances with my son. There was a little silence.

  ‘Ah, the gatekeeper,’ Junio said, at last. ‘My father’s already found him, so he’s accounted for. It seems that he was in his cell, but dead, when we came in. That is why he didn’t answer us.’

  Minimus was frowning. ‘But there should be two of them. One for the back gate as well as for the front.’

  I glanced across at Junio, who raised his brows at me, ‘Even when the master is away?’ I asked my little slave.

  He shrugged. ‘I don’t think Marcus would have gone and left the back gate unguarded, or permanently locked. All the land-slaves have to come and go that way – if only to deliver crops or tend the animals.’

  I stared at him. Of course, the lad was right. In fact, while the owner of the villa was in Rome and few visitors of rank were liable to call, the rear entrance was probably the most important and frequented one. Marcus’s gatekeepers were invariably selected for their strength and their ability to frighten off unwelcome visitors, so one would expect to find some muscular he-bear of a slave, just like the keeper of the other gate. I knew that my patron had bought a new one, fairly recently. Yet Minimus was right again – there was no obvious candidate among the dead.