Enemies at Home (8 page)

‘So tell me, Daphnus: would you have been willing to defend your master?’

‘I certainly would. Saving him would have been ideal for me. He would show he was grateful. I could have got my freedom and a nice little pension out of that.’

‘Good point! What about your brother, Melander?’

‘He would have joined in with anything I did.’

‘Are you close?’

‘No, but he’s a bit slow and I look after him. My master was ready to sell him, but kept him on as a favour to me.’

Daphnus thought a lot of his own worth – though I could believe he was useful to Valerius Aviola, so his confidence might be justified.

‘Are you to be freed by your master’s will, Daphnus?’

His eyes widened. ‘Never thought of that!’

‘Don’t get excited. If you are executed for murdering the man, it will never happen.’

When Melander shambled in, I could see the fraternal likeness, along with differences. He had a similar long face, mostly nose, but much less intelligence in his dark eyes. He told me they were twins, clearly not identical. They were born in the household; their mother was now dead. My notes gave them different ages, but that was wrong; Melander said they were both twenty.

He was a contrast to his lively brother. I wondered if he had been starved in the womb, as I believe can happen with twins, or if he suffered in a long birth process. Though not literally an idiot as Daphnus had called him, he lacked personality. He said he could write, but only if he was told what to put.

Other people amaze me. I would have made this one the tray carrier and trained up his sharper brother to do secretarial work, not the other way around.

Maybe Aviola did not care about correspondence and record-keeping. Not my family’s style. Some of mine are literary by nature, while even the rest keep tight control of their accounts because they are constantly being creative with their taxes. You have to get everything right when you’re fixing your declaration. Not that I ever would. Fortunately, as a woman I don’t have to.

Melander gave the impression his brother had rehearsed him. Both twins would go on swearing they had been oblivi-ous to the intruders. I kicked the scribe out.

Hoping to refresh my spirits, I had the philosopher fetched.

Big mistake. His principle was that life is a turd we have stepped in, then we die. I could not tell which school of thought he belonged to, though it must be a gloomy one.

He had been bought by Mucia Lucilia on a whim at the slave market two years ago, merely as a fashionable accessory. He described her as a nice enough woman, but she made no intellectual demands of him, nor indeed of herself. Once she had boasted to all her friends that she owned a philosopher, Chrysodorus was simply forced to look after her very old, sick, smelly lapdoggie, a pampered thing called Puff.

He had been sleeping in a store room.

‘Alone?’

‘I can never be alone, dear. My duties are ceaseless. I shared the space with Puff.’

‘Because you love her really?’

‘No. Because no one else will have her near them.’

‘No hope of her sleeping on the end of her doting
domina
’s bed?’

‘Not after the mistress married. Aviola put his foot down.’

‘Pity. She might have nipped the intruders.’

‘I doubt it. If thieves burst in, Puff would run away.’

‘And would you have done the same?’

He was enough of a philosopher to know this was a critical question. He sighed. ‘I would defend life, wretched though it is. One needs to be civilised – though god knows what for.’

‘To avoid crucifixion or being eaten by a lion, Chrysodorus … There must have been noise. Didn’t the dog waken?’

‘The dog is stone deaf.’

‘And you?’

‘I sleep the heavy sleep of doomed humanity. In explanation: since the dog snores atrociously, I have prevailed upon a medicine-man to give me a sleeping draught. He prescribes for the dog officially, but slips me a potion too.’

‘This doctor is on the staff?’

‘Aviola’s.’

‘Sent to Campania?’

‘Correct. Fortunately he left me supplies. Puff had been fed unsuitable titbits at the feast, so she was farting like a furnace-stoker. That became a night when I needed a sleeping draught merely to continue to exist.’

I tried to look sorry for him, though I am fond of dogs. ‘I have not seen a pooch at the apartment. What happened to her?’

‘Puff has been brought to me. My earthly suffering never ends.’

‘What will happen to Puff now your mistress has passed away?’

‘A vicious rumour whispers I am to be freed in Mucia Lucilia’s will – but legally compelled to take care of the dog. So, believe me, Flavia Albia, I gained no advantage from killing my mistress! The one joy I will take from being led into an arena is that I may feed bloody Puff to a wild beast as an appetiser.’

‘Then you can die happy?’

‘Happiness is an overrated concept.’

I would have liked to dispute that, but Chrysodorus seemed too glum to enjoy theoretical argument. Which may be overrated, I accept – though it’s better entertainment than listening to a string of people lying to you.

Well, they were slaves. You know the saying: I blame the owners.

I went and inspected Puff. She was the kind of dog you see in cities that are full of small apartments: a tiny, fragile-boned ratty thing, which seemed to be parts glued together from different varieties, none of them pretty. A woman’s lapdog – for a woman with no sense.

I did not pat or speak to Puff. She was no use to me. Dogs, like women, do not possess legal capacity and cannot bear witness in a Roman law court.

To change the script from masculine blather, I called Olympe as my next interviewee. I had heard her singing, in a low, unmistakably Lusitanian style. No one appeared to be listening.

She was scared, tiny and pretty. She looked her age, around fifteen, though she had more bust than Daphnus had suggested; she held herself in with a band. Her main instrument was the lyre, though she told me she could play the double flute passably. Mucia Lucilia had once heard her performing among a band of travelling entertainers, Olympe’s relatives, and offered to buy her. She had not been a slave before, but was sold into bondage by her family. It happens. I had once lived among people who were planning to do that to me.

Olympe had convinced herself that one day her relatives would be in funds and come to look for her. So she was dimmer than she looked, because I guessed they never would.

‘Don’t bank on it. You have a marketable skill, girl. Use that to make something of your life.’

Like Chrysodorus she was an exotic acquisition, though unlike him her mistress did frequently call on her skills. Olympe had played and sung at the feast. Afterwards she was tired, she claimed. She closeted herself with Amaranta in one of the good bedrooms. She heard nothing, though if she had, she would not have known what to do.

‘You could have yelled, Olympe. Called for other people to help.’

‘But I never knew I needed to.’

The robbers must have passed right outside the room where Olympe and Amaranta were asleep; that thought reduced her to helpless trembling. Olympe was the first of the accused slaves to show fear. She cried. She rushed across the room and clung to me. She begged me to help. She was terrified of facing trial (such as it would be; I didn’t disillusion her) and of the fate that a conviction would bring.

I was calming her when Manlius Faustus put his head around the door. He signalled that he would not disturb me; I mimed back that I had nearly finished. It had been a long session. He must have seen I was tiring; he sent in some basic refreshments.

What I liked about this aedile was that, having commissioned me, he made no attempt to muscle in on my interviews but left me to continue in my own style.

I next saw Amaranta, a neat, sad girl with many plaits and ribbons. Like Olympe, she was conscious of the threatening situation, though bore it with quiet resignation. I would not have classed her as a beauty, but she had enough vivacity to appeal to lustful male slaves. She possessed the manner of a very clever waiting-maid, and I reckoned she could deal with men.

I called her a girl because of her status; she was about my own age really, and said her mistress was the same. She had served Mucia Lucilia for ten years, helping her wash, dress, arrange her hair, put on jewellery. It was an intimate relationship. She tweezed Mucia’s eyebrows, cut her nails, made arrangements for sanitary cloths during her monthly periods. She had learned her moods, her hopes of making a good marriage, her annoyance that the trip to Campania had had to be delayed.

‘Yes, tell me: what caused this delay?’

‘We were not told.’ She paused slightly, and I wondered.

That night she must have been the last person other than Aviola to see Mucia alive. She had helped her mistress undress. She locked up the jewellery in its casket. Then, as I had been told by Olympe, the maid retired to one of the good bedrooms on the far side of the courtyard, in company with the young musician. They had the door closed, which Olympe had not explained, though Amaranta admitted it was to deter male slaves from wandering in.

‘Do you get much trouble?’

‘Nothing I can’t handle.’ I believed that.

I asked about her hopes for the future; did she want to marry and have a family?

Amaranta was non-committal about who she might share her life with, but readily said that she was on good terms with Mucia Lucilia, who had promised to free her as soon as she reached her thirtieth birthday. That was close enough for her to look forward to it patiently, but Amaranta was now frightened that Mucia’s death meant she would be sent to a slave market instead. Assuming she escaped the murder charge.

‘You don’t know what was in her will?’

‘No. What are our chances, Flavia Albia?’

‘Slim,’ I said honestly. ‘A judge is likely to say all of you should have rushed to help your master and mistress. I shall conduct experiments, but any prosecutor will claim you should have heard their cries.’

Amaranta had been giving this thought. ‘What if they never called for help? – I don’t believe they did.’

‘We would need to explain why not – though, without being indelicate, it could be they were so involved with each other they were slow to realise intruders had come into their room. Do you know – were they passionate?’

‘They liked it,’ replied Amaranta matter-of-factly. I waited. ‘Quite a lot, from what she told me. After the wedding, she was a happy woman next morning, looking forward to more.’

‘Had they been to bed together before?’

‘A few squeezes and fumbles. Not the full thing. So it was only their second bout of proper play. And they would not have been expecting anyone to interrupt. We were all told to keep away.’

‘I imagine they had the bedroom doors closed too – or didn’t they care who heard them?’

‘My mistress was modest. I shut the doors for them. If the room became too airless, they could always be opened afterwards.’

Slave-owners barely climbed out of bed to pee in the pot. Their attendants put them to bed, where they generally stayed until the attendants got them up next morning. ‘Your master or mistress would call out for someone, if they wanted the doors to be opened?’

Amaranta had nodded before she saw the implication. ‘Libycus!’ She cheerily landed the master’s attendant in trouble. ‘He was supposed to stay within earshot, in case anything was wanted during the night.’

I dismissed her, and called in Libycus.

His black skin said he had been named for his country of origin, though he must have come here as a child or been born here because, like all the Aviola slaves, he was thoroughly Romanised.

Libycus had been as close to his master as Amaranta to her mistress, turning out Aviola smartly each day, having first listened to the man’s mental anxieties and washed his bodily crevices. He chose clothes. He acted as barber. He wielded the ear-wax scoop and toothpick, and applied pile ointment between the buttocks.

Yes, he was supposed to remain close, always on call. He, more than anybody else, should have been in a position to intervene when Aviola was attacked. He did not want to tell me why he had not done so. In the end, I squeezed it out of him.

‘I wasn’t there.’

‘Not nearby?’

‘Not in the house.’

‘
What?
Are you allowed to leave the house during the night?’

‘No.’

He hung his head while I absorbed this. Then Libycus mumbled his confession: thinking Aviola was unlikely to want anything, he had gone to one of the shops on the apartment’s street-side, where he sometimes met with friends. It was his last chance to socialise before he was taken to Campania for an indefinite period. He and two other men spent some time drinking, chatting and playing dice. When he came back, everything was over.

‘Did Nicostratus open the door for you to go out?’

‘Yes, he let me out, then he or Phaedrus was going to let me back in.’ Libycus pleaded, ‘I don’t suppose being somewhere else will get me off?’

‘You know the answer. Quite the opposite, Libycus. You had abandoned your master, against orders.’

I felt sorry for him. But the fact was, he was even more likely to be convicted than the others.

W
hen I emerged into the courtyard, stiff limbed and boggle-eyed, I noticed that the slaves were being fettered and taken indoors, to stop them running away in the night.

Faustus was talking to Dromo. (No chance
he
might abscond.) I was so tired I lost my discretion and snapped, ‘Do you have a serious sinus condition, Manlius Faustus, so you can’t notice smells? Why don’t you send your messenger for a bath sometimes?’

Dromo looked shifty. Faustus sniffed and winced, then looked guilty too. ‘As far as I know, Flavia Albia, all our household receive bath house money.’ He fixed Dromo. ‘What do you have to say for yourself, boy?’ Slaves are called ‘boy’ even if they are seventy years old. I had never heard Faustus do it before, but he wanted to indicate annoyance.