Cast Not the Day (4 page)

‘Yes, of course; the bishop.’ And for a moment a cloud of resignation crossed his heavy face.

Albinus shrugged and turned. ‘Goodbye, little warrior,’ he said with a snide smile. Then he left. I could hear him laughing to himself all the way through the anteroom.

I set out with Balbus.

As we made our way along the route, he pointed out the shops and trades of the men he knew, greeting them with loud good-natured friendliness and pausing for a word; Lampadius the ship’s chandler, Maltius the cooper, Arminus and Phason the sailmakers, and Gabinius the coppersmith, who had a wide yard behind the street, full of men working.

From the alleyway that led to the docks there came wafting up on the damp air the smell of caulking and rope, fish and stale wine. But instead of turning that way we continued to the city wall, and out through the eastern gate, to an open place of wagons and mule-carts. Here a driver, one of my uncle’s men, was lounging beside a gig. He leapt up when he saw us, but Balbus waved him aside, saying he would drive himself today.

‘See those ships?’ he said as we set off.

I looked out across the grassy flatland. Some distance away, at a looping bend in the river, a line of merchantmen lay berthed.

‘Yes, sir. But why do they not come to the city dock?’

‘They cannot – not the biggest freighters. Their keels are too deep. So they put in there. It is where I have my warehouse.’

At the wharf, a line of bare-chested stevedores were unloading a ship, passing crates from hand to hand, chanting a Keltic worksong, and from high up on the poop a shaven-headed foreman stood barking instructions – ‘Careful with that, you ditch-born whore . . . You! Yes, you! Pick up that crate, don’t stare at it.’

‘What of my cargo?’ called Balbus.

‘One crate broken, sir, and one in the river. I sent the bastards in after it.’

My uncle glared at the water. ‘Careless fools. The wealth of Croesus must lie in this mud. One day someone will dredge it all up and make his fortune.’

In the warehouse, men were unpacking crates of glassware, separating each delicate piece from its straw lagging and setting it down on a long bench, where a clerk was busy marking each item off against the manifest. Balbus picked up a flask of cherry-coloured glass and turned it in the light, nodding to himself and making satisfied grunts.

‘Good, good,’ he said, showing me. ‘Fine work; no blemishes. One can never be sure nowadays, with the barbarians marauding over Gaul, and all the good craftsmen leaving. There is always a market for quality pieces like this.’

He set it down and moved on to inspect the rest: embossed dishes and wine-cups; a wide-brimmed fruit-bowl of clear crystal; a pair of fine worked lamps of yellow glass, decorated with garlands. When at last he was satisfied we walked on into the body of the warehouse, between the aisles, and he pointed out bales of wool from Spain, dusty slabs of veined Tuscan marble, tall red-earth amphoras filled with wine from Italy or Sicily, or fish sauce shipped around the coast from Cadiz.

I stared, and touched, and asked him what he would do with it all.

‘Most,’ he explained happily, ‘I shall sell to my contacts in the province. I have agents in York, Lincoln, Colchester and in the cities in the west.’ He tapped his nose and smiled. ‘But the best I keep for my own shop in the forum.’

He seemed pleased at my interest, and taking up a stick he sketched a map in the dust. ‘We are here,’ he said, indicating the western corner by my foot, ‘and here is the Middle Sea. That is Rome, and over there – yes there! that’s right – is Arabia.’ Mostly, he explained, he imported from Gaul or Spain or Italy. ‘But if I can bring a spice cargo from the East, it will be worth more than all the rest put together.’

I crouched down, staring in wonder, and asked how long it took to sail so far.

‘Twenty days, with fair weather.’

He traced the route with the stick: Alexandria in Egypt, through the Middle Sea by Africa or Sicily, past the Pillars of Hercules and then up along the treacherous coast of Spain and Gaul.

‘Soon,’ he said, ‘I shall have funds for such a trip, and it will make me rich.’ His eyes flashed as he imagined it.

As for me, I gazed at the whorls and sandy curves at my knee, seeing oceans and painted ships and magnificent cities. Here was something I could dream of. I asked him how often he went to these places.

‘Go to them?’ He looked surprised. ‘Why, not at all, why should I? I am much too busy for that.’ He knew only Britain, he said, and Gaul, and that was more than enough for him.

Back outside, a wide-girthed troopship had come up with the tide, high in the water, unladen. The crew were furling the great sail and preparing to throw the lines.

The shaven-headed foreman stepped up. ‘How many more?’ he said, eyeing the ship with a frown. ‘The Saxons know an unguarded house is easiest robbed, even if the emperor has forgotten.’

But Balbus looked sharply at him. ‘Watch your tongue, Gaius. Do you want to scare the boy with your foolish dockyard talk? Take no notice, Drusus. There have been no Saxons for three years, nothing but a few stray ships, and the garrison commander himself has promised we have nothing to fear.’

‘But I’m not afraid,’ I said.

There was a pause. The foreman grinned at me, showing his black teeth.

‘No one is afraid,’ said my uncle crossly. ‘We gave the Saxons a gift of gold last time, and they promised not to return. Have you no work to do, Gaius? I don’t pay you to stand about gossiping. Come along, Drusus.’

Glancing back for a last look I saw the foreman shrug his shoulders, hawk loudly, and spit into the water. Then he turned and launched a volley of abuse at the dust-caked stevedores, who were calling out and joking with the men on the troopship.

Summer drew on. In the fields beyond the city walls the farmers brought in the harvest, and I adjusted to my exile, like a man who grows used to lameness, because he must.

I spent each afternoon helping my uncle, at his offices, or down at the docks, or at his fashionable shop of perfumes and fine wares under the forum colonnade.

He knew that better-born men looked down on him; but did not care, so long as he grew rich. He had no time for learning, other than what he perceived he could use, and made jokes about my early-morning lessons with Sericus, saying he saw no point in them: I could count, and read a manifest; what need more?

He assigned me tasks, saying I would learn by doing. At first I had thought, if I found myself at a loss, the clerks at his office would help me. But that was before I understood them.

From the outside, they appeared obedient and dull and timid, like a field of sheep. But now I was among them I discovered their lives were riven with feuds, bitter jealousies, and complicated intrigues. When I needed help, they were suddenly too busy, or, worse, they would affect to explain, only to confuse me. It did not take long for me to realize, as I saw them smirking and making eyes at their colleagues, that this game amused them and they wanted me to fail.

All except one. The others, out of spite, gave him the nickname Ambitus, because he worked hard, and because he laughed at their backbiting. But he wore the name with pride, saying that if they wanted to mock him for trying to make something of himself, then that was the least of his concerns.

He was a small-boned youth with a clever monkey-like face and close-cropped black hair. His example held up a mirror to the others’ laziness and stupidity, and they hated him for it. He did not care. He had his own plans, which did not include them.

When he saw me struggling, Ambitus came to me and said that I must ask him if ever I needed help. And so it was that he became my first friend in London.

Some mornings, every small matter – a tiny error in an inventory, a mislaid scroll or tablet, a late delivery – would send my uncle into a fury, making him bang his fist on the long clerks’ table, and rage and curse.

When I asked Ambitus what was wrong he said, ‘You ought to know more than anyone.’

‘Is it me?’

‘No, not you. He likes you. It is
her
. Nothing he does is enough. She has him like this.’ And with his small brown thumb he made a motion of squashing an insect on the bench.

But Balbus’s outbursts were like summer squalls. One waited, and kept one’s head down, and they quickly passed. He was not choleric by nature, and, in his way, he was big-hearted. The same, however, was not true of my aunt.

She perceived slights everywhere, and brooded on them till she had worked herself into a frenzy of incandescent rage. She accused the house-slaves of trying to thwart her, and of laughing behind her back. The Christians claim they are all one another’s brothers and sisters: rich and poor, freeman and slave – even the wild Saxons, who delight in slaughter, and would kill us all. Yet I have never seen one person treat another with such habitual lack of humanity as Lucretia treated those who served her. She did it because she could, because she had power over them; and they, since they had no choice, swallowed her abuse and took her blows meekly.

But they gained their revenge in other ways, making it look like an accident: they overheated the water for her bath, and I would hear her hoarse, enraged voice screaming through the house with impotent fury; they spoiled the food when she wished to impress her friends with a lavish dinner; they spilt water on the charcoal of her pretty ornamental brazier, so that it filled the room with acrid smoke.

Her friends, over whom she lorded it in the most shameless way, she suspected of falseness, and of liking her only for her money. But that year, as Ambitus dryly explained, her main complaint was the house. Balbus dishonoured her, she said, because he was content to live on the eastern side of the city, though he knew very well that she hated it. It was not fashionable; all her friends – Volumnia, Placentia, Maria – lived better, and did he not see how they made her feel it, with their polite comments and tolerant smiles and pitying faces? Volumnia had even commented on the smell, one day when the wind was blowing up the river. How could Balbus cause her to suffer so? The humiliation was making her ill.

In most matters, Balbus accommodated her whims. But in this one thing he was adamant: he liked the house and the suburb; he wished to be close to the city docks, among his friends and fellow merchants, who would not look down their noses at him. He would not move.

At first, when I went out each day with him, Lucretia had been glad to see me go, thinking the lowly work must be a misery and humiliation to me; for she had formed the opinion, without justification and without evidence, that I was a spoiled, pampered brat.

She was less happy when she realized I did not care about the dull work, and even enjoyed the diversion. After that, scarcely a day passed when she did not summon me to her private sitting-room, with its silk hangings and plush cushions and clutter of gilded furniture, to complain of my wickedness. Why had I scrubbed the walls of Sericus’s room without her permission – did I suppose I now owned the house? Why had I spoken disrespectfully to Albinus of the bishop, who was a dear friend of the family? What had I been muttering about to Claritas the housemaid in the courtyard? What had the cook been saying about her?

If I said nothing to these outbursts, she accused me of being sullen and recalcitrant. If I answered her, she complained that I was insolent.

One afternoon, when I was sitting with Sericus in the damson courtyard, I wondered bitterly what my uncle could find to like in such a woman.

Sericus glanced up from the scroll that lay spread across his lap and mine and said, ‘He is losing his hair and going fat. And she is young.’

This was tart for Sericus, but we had been reading Terence that day, which always put him in a good mood.

‘It seems a poor trade then,’ I said. ‘I had rather have no wife at all than one like that.’

‘Yes, well; his choice is not yours. There are some men for whom the bloom of youth is everything.’

He said no more, and we bent our heads back to the scroll.

But presently, when he thought I was not looking, I saw a private smile pass across his old lined face.

It is in the nature of youth to hope. During those first months, whenever I heard a knock on the door, or a carriage in the street, my ears pricked up, listening for the messenger with the summons from my father to return home. But the weeks passed, and no messenger came, and as autumn advanced I ceased to say to myself each morning, ‘Maybe today.’

One day, when the first winter storms had closed the sea-lanes and Balbus was at home more than he cared for, I swallowed my pride and asked if he had heard news of my father.

He shook his head and ruffled my hair. ‘Perhaps soon, my boy; perhaps soon. I expect we shall have something of him in the spring.’

But though he had spoken kindly, I noticed he did not meet my eye.

He had told me, soon after I arrived, that more than one hundred thousand people lived in London. It seemed an almost impossible number to be gathered all together. The best place to live was westwards, on higher ground across the stream called the Walbrook. It was this fine suburb that Lucretia coveted, with its large mansions, high walls, and hidden gardens. And it was the old dock quarter, whose noises could be heard even from the house, that she detested most of all – a warren of steep shadowy alleyways, climbing the hill between tenements, taverns, brothels, and cheap eating-houses.