A Coin for the Ferryman (15 page)

‘And what becomes of them?’ Junio had been listening. I knew that, like me, he was wondering if this might be relevant to our mystery.

She looked surprised. ‘Occasionally, if they are good-looking, I can sell them on as slaves, and then at least they have a roof above their heads. But the rest of them . . .’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I have to turn them out. I suppose they beg, or work as prostitutes – and I have to find a substitute, sometimes jolly quickly too.’

‘And you have plenty of suitable candidates?’ I said.

‘Suitable candidates?’ She laughed. ‘And unsuitable as well. We had a smelly peasant turn up the other day – grimy and graceless as it’s possible to be.’

‘A peasant?’ I was paying close attention now. Gwellia, behind me, clutched my hand, and I realised that she, too, was listening to every word.

‘Pudgy face, thick ankles, rawhide boots and a plaid robe she obviously hadn’t changed for years,’ the chaperon said. ‘About as flexible as a chest-plough and as erotic too – her hair was bleached with that awful lime you people use, and it hung in stinking braids right to her waist.’

‘Really?’ I was genuinely surprised. Celtic warriors at one time used to lime their hair, and wear it in thick spikes to scare the enemy, but it was hardly a thing that females often did – any more than they wore earrings or moustaches. Anyway, the lime paste smelt disgusting, as the woman said.

She nodded. ‘I think she must have been dimwitted, but she’d heard about the troupe – swore she had been promised that I would take her on, and she had dreams of going to Rome with us. Of course, I told her in no uncertain . . .’ She faltered to a stop. I realised that the cart had halted too. I had been so interested in her story that I hadn’t noticed it.

‘Well, citizen, are you getting down or not?’ the cart-driver shouted, and Junio and I scrambled off and assisted the two women to get down after us.

Gwellia leaned towards me as I helped her down and held her close. ‘So, husband, your peasant was probably a young girl after all.’ She gave me a quick squeeze. ‘Now I must go inside. It is getting late and there are household tasks to do.’ And with that she disengaged herself and went into the house, together with Cilla and the slaves, while I stood thoughtfully watching the wagon lumber off. Suddenly, it seemed, there was a lot to think about.

The dancing woman, however, saw me lingering and was determined to complete her tale. She leaned over the rear plank of the cart, and shouted after me, ‘You know she even offered me a bribe to take her on? If people want to join us, they are prepared to pay.’

Bribe? I was thinking about the coins we’d discovered in the skirt, but the cart was already disappearing down the lane. I did, however, have the wit to call, ‘What did she try to bribe you with?’

Her voice came floating back to me as the cart lurched on. ‘Looked like a gold
aureus
, but I don’t suppose it was. More likely a forgery – where would a peasant get a coin . . . like . . . that?’

They turned a corner and the cart was gone.

‘Master . . . I mean, Father?’ Junio had been standing at my elbow all this time. He peered at me in the darkness. ‘It must be, don’t you think . . .? The person who owned the dress?’

I nodded. ‘It gives us a description to go on, anyway. In the morning, perhaps we can find out who she was. In the meantime, I should talk to Cilla, briefly, in case she found out anything of use. No doubt she will be bursting to tell us if she did.’ I led the way into the roundhouse as I spoke.

But Cilla had disappointingly little to report. None of the villa staff had anything to say about the corpse, except that they wished it buried before the coming festival, and no one had seen a stranger calling at the house.

Of course, Cilla being Cilla, she was anxious to expand and would have given me a word for word account, but by this time it was very late indeed. Gwellia was making signs to me that it was time to go to bed and the boys were doing the last chore of the day, raking some of the ashes round the baking pot so that the yeast cakes could cook in the embers overnight.

‘We’ll talk again tomorrow, Cilla,’ I said with a yawn. ‘It’s been a long, exciting day and an exhausting one.’

She nodded and went out to the servants’ hut where she still had a bed.

Gwellia had already lain down and gone to sleep. I took my sandals and my toga off, snuffed out the taper and did the same myself.

When I awoke next morning it was long past dawn – perhaps Marcus’s rich food and wine had had some effect on me. Gwellia was obviously already up, and so was the rest of the household by the look of it – the roundhouse was empty, and two rapidly cooling yeast cakes were standing on a plate, all that remained in a platter full of crumbs. Yet the fire was burning brightly – someone had blown the embers into life again and brought in fresh kindling to make a cheerful blaze. Somehow I seemed to have slept through all of this.

I felt a little twinge of discontent. Why hadn’t Junio awakened me? And then I remembered – that was over now. He was not my slave. I could no longer count on him to do that sort of thing.

I crawled out from my cover, pulled an extra tunic over the one I had been sleeping in, and sat down on the stool to eat my solitary meal. For some reason I wasn’t hungry, though the cakes were excellent. I decided I must have had too much to eat the night before.

Gwellia would be concerned if I did not eat at all – she had been anxious lately to build my strength again – and the yeast cakes had been made on my account, I knew. I took a listless bite at one of them, but I had scarcely done so before a face peered round the door, and Minimus was grinning in at me.

‘Ah, master, I see you are awake!’ He was carrying a pitcher of fresh water from the stream, and he came over to my side to pick up a beaker and pour some into it. ‘I was told not to rouse you until you’d had your sleep.’ He passed me the drinking vessel with a smile. ‘The mistress has gone out gathering lichens to boil up for a dye, and taken Cilla with her – to show her how, she says. And the young master has taken Maximus and gone out down the lane.’

‘The young master?’ I was about to say, when I realised that he was talking about Junio, of course, so I changed the question to ‘Did he say where he was going?’

Enthusiastic nods. ‘I was to tell you that he was going back to the villa straight away. He knew you wanted to talk to the land slaves Stygius sent out to ask questions yesterday. He thought it would be helpful if he made a start, by finding out which of them it was who spoke to the father of the Celtic girl who ran away with a man to join an entertainment troupe. To see if she matched the description that you had.’ He looked enquiringly at me. ‘I think that’s what he said. Does it make sense to you?’

My spirits had risen, but I tried to sound judicious. ‘I think so. We heard about this girl yesterday from one of Stygius’s slaves.’ I took another bite of breakfast. ‘It didn’t seem very important at the time, because the slaves had been asking about missing girls, and we knew by the time they returned that we were dealing with a man. But we still have to find the owner of the dress, so if Junio can find out where her parents live we can check with them and see if her appearance tallies with what we heard from the dancing woman last night. It may not turn out to be good news for the family, though, if it does.’

Minimus refilled my beaker before I’d even asked. ‘Do you want me to escort you to the villa later on? Your son presumed you’d want to join him when you’d breakfasted.’

I’d finished my first yeast cake now, and I’d found my appetite. I picked up the second and bit into it. It was even more delicious than the first. ‘We can’t be certain that this is the girl we want,’ I said, through a mouthful of warm crumbs. ‘But it is at least a possibility. And with hair like that she should not be too difficult to trace.’

Minimus looked enquiring. ‘Why, master? What was so unusual about her hair?’

Of course, he had been carrying the torch beside the cart last night and hadn’t heard what our informant said, so I outlined the description for his benefit. ‘Long, limed, yellow braids,’ I finished. ‘There can’t be many girls of that description in the locality.’ I had finished my second yeast cake by this time and I held my beaker out expecting him to fill it, but he did not do so, although he had the pitcher in his hand.

I looked at him in surprise. He was frowning vaguely into the water jug as if he might find inspiration there. ‘I think I might possibly have seen that girl myself,’ he said at last. ‘I noticed someone talking to Aulus one day in the lane – the morning before the civic feast, it must have been – and she had yellow hair. Not ordinary yellow, like Julia’s hair slaves have – it was that strange greenish tinge that comes from using lime. I’ve seen Celtic noblemen whose hair looked just the same. She had it in a great long plait that hung down to her knees. It sounds rather like the same person, doesn’t it?’

I pushed my plate away and spoke quite sternly. ‘Why did you not mention this before? I asked you yesterday if you had seen any peasant women.’

I expected a spirited defence, such as Junio would have given. Minimus, however, simply said, ‘I’m truly sorry, master,’ and looked abjectly at me. ‘I didn’t realise . . .’ He stiffened his shoulders as if he expected to receive a blow.

I said, as gently as I could, ‘Realise what? That this might be important? After what I’d said?’

He looked at me apologetically. ‘That she might be a peasant, master. She didn’t look like one. I thought she was a servant on her way to market in the town. She was carrying something in a sack, and she was wearing a colourful sort of tunic thing. I noticed it because it was particularly short.’

‘A tunic?’ I was disappointed now. Perhaps this was a false trail after all.

He nodded. ‘The flimsy sort that slave girls sometimes wear when they are expected to entertain their masters – you know the sort of thing. So short that her hair hung longer than her hems. Probably quite low round the arms and neckline too, but she had a shawl about her shoulders, to cover up the top.’ He frowned. ‘She certainly wasn’t wearing a plaid dress of the kind you talked about – although it might have been in the parcel, I suppose. And she was wearing the sort of heavy boots the woman described. Horrible clumpy shapeless ones – you know, the home-made kind!’

He spoke with the disgust of someone who had always worn custom-made shoes and sandals, cut and sewn to fit, and had never tied pieces of fresh cowskin round his feet – raw side inward, as many peasants do – and been obliged to squelch about until the leather self-cured in place.

I frowned. ‘Rough boots? You are sure of that? Not the sort of footwear you’d expect a household slave to wear.’

He looked at me a moment, and then said in surprise, ‘Of course not, master. I should have thought of that. What owner would supply his maidservant with such awful ugly boots? They made her legs look even thicker and stumpier than they were.’ He grinned. ‘You couldn’t help but notice, because the tunic was so short. I even wondered if she was a . . . well . . . if she wasn’t exactly a servant in the normal sense.’

I nodded. There were several brothels in the
colonia
, just as there are in every Roman town, and the girls in some of them wear tunics, too – at least to start with – if one can believe the advertising paintings on the wall. And some customers have strange fetishes about footwear, I believe. ‘So when you saw her with Aulus, what did you suppose . . .?’ It was my turn to grin.

He did not smile in answer, but said earnestly, ‘I thought that she was lost. She was on foot and she seemed to be asking directions, or something of the kind – I remember Aulus pointing down the lane as if he was showing her the old route into town. The gatekeepers often have strangers asking them the way, if they have tried to take a short cut down the ancient tracks and missed their road. I simply thought that she had lost her bearings in the woods. In fact, I had forgotten all about her till you described the lime-bleached plaits.’ He frowned. ‘But why is she important, master?’

‘She might well be the owner of the clothes the body was dressed in when it was found. The robe could have been in the parcel she was carrying, as you say, and we now know that she, or someone very like her, offered the dancing woman a bribe to join the troupe. And that someone was wearing a plaid garment at the time.’

‘So isn’t it likely she simply sold it on – especially if she hoped to join the dancing girls?’ That bashful grin again. ‘Woollen plaid is not exactly the most erotic kind of dress, but it’s still worth money in the marketplace. Lots of stall-holders would gladly pay to take it off her hands, even if it was a little frayed.’

‘Sell it? With all that money in the hem?’ I shook my head. ‘I wonder if Junio’s been able to find out who she was. The gods alone know where she is by now – alive or dead – but it might yet be possible at least to find out where she went to when she left the villa gates.’ I did a little calculation in my head. ‘Though that can’t have been the same day she disappeared from home.’

Suddenly I was anxious to be at the villa too, making enquiries about what the land slaves knew. There was no time to be lost. I seized the jug and rinsed my face in it, and picked up my warm cloak from the hook beside the door. ‘Let’s go and see what Aulus has to say. Go and tell Kurso where we have gone, and he can pass a message to the mistress when she returns.’

Minimus hurried off to do as I had asked. He was quick and eager and we were shortly on our way. As we walked along I coaxed a fuller story from the lad about what he remembered of the day he saw the girl.

The facts were clear enough. ‘I was sent out by the master with a message for the gate – about where the consignment of larks was to be directed when it came. I was on my own for once, because Maximus was acting as the master’s page – Pulchrus had gone to Londinium by that time, and Marcus wanted someone by his side.’

‘What about Niveus?’ I enquired. ‘I thought he was purchased with that idea in mind?’

‘He didn’t join the household until that afternoon,’ Minimus said dismissively. ‘This was still quite early in the day – only a little while after the luggage cart had gone. Anyway, the master sent me out, but when I reached the gatehouse Aulus wasn’t there. I looked out through his spyhole and saw him talking to this young woman in the lane.’ He gave me a sideways glance. ‘Not just talking either. He was standing close to her, one hand pointing down the road, and the other on her rump. She didn’t seem to mind it, surprisingly. She was smiling up at him as though he were some kind of Greek god. That’s why I wondered if she was a . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Aulus was quite disappointed when I called out to him, and he had to come and pay attention to my message.’