by R. S. Downie
Valens had taken the apprentices out on a house call. Serena and the twins were visiting a friend for the afternoon. He found Tilla kneeling beside a freshly dug patch of earth in the garden. Her hands were smeared with wet mud. He crouched beside her, watching as she gently teased apart a web of delicate roots. The seedlings they belonged to looked as though they were clinging together in the last stages of exhaustion.
Finally she had several safely detached and lying limp and pale on the soil. ‘Lettuce,’ she explained, stabbing a grimy finger twice into the earth before reaching for the jug behind her and filling the holes with water. Lifting a seedling by its undersized leaves, she lowered it into position and carefully firmed the mud around the wilting stem.
‘They don’t look too happy,’ he observed.
‘Serena’s neighbour gave her a pot of seedlings,’ she said. ‘She is not a gardener and cook is too busy, so they were left to starve on the windowsill.’
‘Will they survive?’
She shrugged. ‘Lettuce do not like being moved. If they grow, there will be pigeons and slugs and small children. But the kitchen-boy says he will water them, and I am glad they will have a chance.’
He stabbed further holes in line with the ones she had made and trickled in more water. ‘I think I’ve made a bit of a mess of everything,’ he confessed. ‘We did all that running around in Verulamium to get Metellus to take your name off that list. I shouldn’t have thrown him in the river.’
She lowered the next seedling into its new home and pressed the soil down. ‘I wish I had been there to see it.’
‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’ve come to apologize. You had a right to expect better of a husband.’
She looked up. ‘What do you think I should expect?’
He pondered the question. ‘Security?’ he suggested. ‘Protection? Enough to live on and a roof over your head. Now the only way I can make sure you’re safe is to ask you to come back to Gaul with me, and I know you don’t want to live there.’
She sat back on her heels. ‘This is what you think marriage is? Having no enemies and somewhere to put the crockery?’
In the silence that followed, he felt her reach for his hand. ‘What I expected,’ she said as the mud squelched and grated between their fingers, ‘was this man who tries to do the right thing even when it is foolish.’
For a few moments they were so still that a robin flew down and stabbed at the soil in front of them before darting off to safety.
‘Right.’ Ruso got to his feet.
‘You could stay here and help.’
‘I’ll be back soon,’ he promised. ‘You carry on saving lives. This foolish man needs to wash his hands and send out a big pile of letters.’
Author’s Note
Verulamium’s theatre was finally built about twenty years after this story is set, and its remains can still be seen. The site of the Great Hall lies just across the road, but its foundations are buried deep beneath St Michael’s Church, and with them the putative location of the strongroom. Sadly no details of the town Council’s business – unruly or otherwise – survive. The more respectable of the proceedings here are based on bronze tablets recording the constitution of the Roman town of Irni in Seville.
Anyone who shares my delight in obscure facts will be pleased to know that there really was a crackdown on abuses of the transport system in the early years of Hadrian’s reign, including a Survey of British Milestones, although the name of the Procurator who would have been in charge of them is not known. Nor is the location of his office, but it seemed reasonable to place such an important man in one of the grandest buildings in town.
A couple of good books for anyone wanting more detailed background are:
Verulamium: The Roman City of St Albans, by Rosalind Niblett;
The Coinage of Roman Britain, by Richard Reece.
Many readers will already have had the pleasure of visiting Verulamium Museum and park, the British Museum and the Museum of London. For those who cannot make the trip, all have good websites, and at the time of writing the Museum of London’s Online Collections include a fascinating microsite exploring Roman London at: http://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/English/Collections/OnlineResources/Londinium/.
Finally, for anyone lucky enough to stumble across something our ancestors left behind, or who wants to see what others have found, www.finds.org.uk is the place to look.
Acknowledgements
Heartfelt thanks to a veritable army of agents and editors, especially Peta Nightingale, Araminta Whitley, George Lucas, Benjamin Adams, Mari Evans, Kate Burke, Stefanie Bierwerth and David Watson.
For their generous advice and recommendation of sources on Roman coinage and Roman law, I am very grateful to Sam Moorhead, FSA British Museum and Dr Paul du Plessis. For help with the history of their respective towns, I am indebted to David Thorold, Keeper of Archaeology at Verulamium Museum, St Albans Museum Service, and Jenny Hall, Senior Roman Curator, Museum of London.
Fellow scribes Carol Barac, Caroline Davis, Chris Allen, Guy Russell, Jan Lovell, Kathy Barbour and Maria Murphy all slogged through several drafts of the early chapters, and Andy and Stephen Downie nobly read the whole manuscript.
Caro Ramsay kindly saved me from my own ignorance at one point, but all remaining errors, misinterpretations, inventions and bare-faced lies in the preceding pages are my own work.
