Persona Non Grata (4 page)

7

T
HE SHUTTERS OF his father’s old study opened with a screech that briefly silenced the chirrup of the cicadas outside. Sunlight spilled across the floor and threw the iron studs on the old wooden chest into sharp relief. Ruso crossed the room and slid one hand under the rim of the lid. Locked. Of course. Lucius would be wearing the key around his neck, just as their father had.

Ruso lowered himself onto the trunk and sat tapping out an impatient rhythm on the lid with both hands. He had traveled a thousand miles to find out exactly what sort of crisis his family had fallen into. Now the details were only inches away, but he had no access to them. Just as there had been no access to the details of the horrendous debts his father was incurring in a misguided attempt to bolster the family’s good standing and satisfy Arria’s demand for a nice house. Those too had been locked away in the dark secrecy of the trunk.

He got to his feet and limped across to the window. The air outside was no cooler. A couple of the cicadas had started singing again. He gazed north across the green of the vine trellises to where distant wooded hills were dark against the sharp blue of the sky. Closer, something was shaking the leaves of the vines. He heard voices. Someone laughed. The top of a ladder appeared above the green, then sank away again. The farm slaves would be scrambling up amongst the trellises, cutting the grapes with curved knives and tossing them into baskets.

Three fat bunches dangled almost within reach of the window. Ruso wondered whether it was a good year for the vines. Lucius would know. Despite having spent most of his childhood here, Ruso had deliberately avoided learning anything about farming. It was an obstinacy of which he was no longer proud. Still, no amount of farming lore would help if the family really were about to be the subject of a seizure order.

He had once accompanied his father to the auction of a bankrupt neighbor’s property. It was like seeing an old person stripped naked in the street: All the neighbor’s battered pots and pans, ancient bath shoes, blankets and bedsteads— even a baby’s discarded feeding bottle—lay shabby and exposed in the sunshine, while strangers glanced over them, wrinkled their noses, and walked away. His father had stayed, bidding much too high for an old cart and a couple of hoes with worm-eaten handles while the neighbor stood grimfaced and his wife wept. At the time, Ruso had been too young to understand that his father was offering them the only kindness that was then possible.

His thoughts were interrupted by a soft knock at the door. He had given orders that he was not to be disturbed, unless Lucius— It wasn’t.

It was his sister-in-law.

“Cass!”

“Gaius! They told me you were here. What a lovely surprise!”

Surprise? Evidently Lucius had not even told his wife about that letter. When Ruso managed to extricate himself from the hug he said, “Thanks for all the parcels.”

While Lucius had sent urgent appeals for cash, his wife had softened them with gifts of winter woolens and jars of food from home and pictures drawn by the children.

She stepped back. “You look tired. I’ve told the bath boy to light the fire. Lucius will be home soon. He’s doing some business in town. How are you? We heard about that dreadful rebellion in Britannia. Is that how you hurt your leg?”

“Not exactly,” confessed Ruso. “It was an accident.”

“Oh, you poor thing! But is it true they had to send extra troops in?”

“It’s mostly sorted out now,” he assured her. He was not sure whether he was allowed to reveal that Hadrian had sent in the fresh troops not just as reinforcements but as replacements for serious losses. “I haven’t seen you to congratulate you on, uh—” He suddenly realized he did not know the name of the dribbling toddler.

“We called him Gaius, after you—didn’t you know? Everyone says he looks just like you.”

“Do they really?”

“Oh, yes!” Cass beamed at him, evidently thinking it was some sort of compliment.

“The children seem very . . . lively.”

“They’re dreadful, aren’t they?” she agreed, as if it were something to be proud of. “But we’re so fortunate. Five healthy children! Every day I give thanks for them. You never know, do you? Polla had a terrible fever a while ago, then little Lucius broke his arm, and last month Sosia was ill—Arria was so cross about the cushions but she couldn’t help it, could she? We tried everything. It was a pity you weren’t here, Gaius.”

“Mm.”

“They’ll be so glad you’re home. They do miss their uncle Justinus terribly.”

“Justinus? Is he away somewhere?”

She stared at him. “But Lucius told you, surely?”

“The letter must have got held up. What’s happened?”

She shook her head. “We don’t know,” she said. “That’s the worst part. My brother went on a merchant ship from Arelate down to Ostia back in June and . . .” Her voice trailed off. “The ship never arrived,” she said. “They could be shipwrecked on an island or something, couldn’t they? Waiting to be rescued.”

Since it was now September, Ruso could not pretend that this was likely.

“If it was pirates . . .” Her voice trembled and faded away.

Ruso hoped she was not going to cry. He was never sure what to do with women when they cried.

She swallowed. “We would just like to know.”

“I’m sorry.” The last time he had met Cass’s brother was in the house of Ruso’s former father-in-law, where Justinus was a respected if somewhat put-upon steward. “What was he doing at sea?”

“Probus sent him to oversee some sort of business deal. You probably heard about it. The
Pride of the South
.” She paused, evidently expecting this would mean something to him.

Ruso did not want to tell her that ships went down every day. That unless the
Pride
had been carrying something valuable, or somebody famous, it was unlikely that anyone except her owners and the families of the crew would mourn her loss or even bother to remark upon it.

“We were on a different sea,” he explained. “He’d have been going south. We came down the west coast and across.”

“What about the men on the river barges? Didn’t anybody say anything at all?”

“They might have thought it was bad luck,” he said, trying to soften the blow of public indifference.

“He was so excited about seeing Rome,” she said. “He had some wine from the senator’s estate to deliver. He dropped in on the way to Arelate to say good-bye.”

“I’m so sorry,” said Ruso, and meant it. “I liked Justinus.”

She hesitated, as if she was wondering whether to continue. “Lucius says I ought to give up hope,” she said. “He says we should build the tomb and call his spirit home and let it rest.”

Ruso, scenting a marital dispute, said, “He’s probably worried about you.”

“He’s right, isn’t he? If we don’t do it . . .” She did not need to explain. Her brother’s spirit would be left wandering lost and alone, unable to find peace.

“There really aren’t many pirates out there these days, Cass. If there’s been no word in three months—”

“I know! I know all that. I was going to say yes to having the tomb built, but . . . oh, now I don’t know what to do!” She glanced around to make sure the door was closed. “Gaius, you know Probus better than any of us. If I tell you something, will you promise to keep it a secret?”

Ruso hoped his face did not betray his rising sense of foreboding at the mention of his former father-in-law.

“Probus came to see me a couple of weeks ago. He wanted to know whether I was sure my brother was dead.”

Whatever Ruso had been expecting, it was not this. “Why?”

“I don’t know. He seemed to be angry about something, but he wouldn’t say what.”

Ruso refrained from pointing out that in his experience, Probus usually looked angry about something.

“So I said to him, You were the one who told me the ship was missing in the first place, and all he said was
Yes
. When I wanted to know why he was asking, whether he’d heard something, he just told me to forget all about it and not say anything to anybody.”

It certainly seemed odd, not to mention deeply insensitive. “Do you want me to talk to him?”

“No! He’ll know I’ve told you. What’s the matter with him, Gaius? Why would he ask a question like that? It was as if he thought Justinus might have run away. So now I don’t know what to do. If we call his spirit to a tomb and he’s still alive somewhere—what would happen to him?”

Ruso, who had no idea, said nothing.

“I wanted to go into town and ask Probus what he meant but Lucius says fussing won’t bring my brother back and if I’m not careful I’ll upset Probus and then we’ll be in more trouble.”

Ruso reflected that Lucius was probably right. The familial ties with Probus might be severed, but they still owed him money, and the last thing they needed was a hostile creditor.

“I was hoping you might know something.”

“It’s not unusual for ships to vanish, Cass,” he said, realizing she had probably never seen an expanse of water bigger than the swimming pool at the town baths in Nemausus. “You can’t imagine how vast the seas are if you haven’t seen them. It could have been hit by a freak wave, or gone too close to the rocks, or . . .” Catching the expression on her face, he realized this speculation was not helpful. “There are lots of things, really. Nobody would know until it didn’t turn up at the other end.”

“I tried asking the fish sellers in town,” she said. “They said perhaps it was sunk by a falling star. They didn’t want to talk to me.”

“I don’t know about the star,” he said, “but I’d imagine people who earn their living on the water don’t want to spend too much time discussing shipwrecks.”

“I don’t want to cause trouble, Gaius. I just want to know what’s happened to my brother. There’s nobody else left to look after him.”

“Of course.” Ruso was wondering whether he was witnessing the obstinacy of hope or whether there really could be something odd about the disappearance of the
Pride of the South
when a masculine voice out in the hall bellowed, “Gaius! Where are you, brother?”

Cass put a hand on Ruso’s arm. “Please don’t say anything to him,” she murmured. “He’s cross enough with me already.” She retreated to the door. Ruso heard a brief exchange in the hallway and a moment later she was replaced by a paunchy middle-aged man with thinning hair and bags under his eyes. Ruso opened his arms and braced himself.

8

T
HE LATEST HUG turned out to be less enthusiastic than the one from his sister-in-law. When they had clung to each other for what Ruso felt was a decent length of time, they held each other at arm’s length. Ruso politely informed the middle-aged man that he was looking well.

“No I’m not.”

“No, you’re not,” agreed Ruso, relieved that he had not been the first of them to say it. “I got your letter.”

“Gaius.” Lucius’s breathing was audible, as if the lungs were weighed down with the bulk of the paunch. “This is very bad timing.”

“I couldn’t get here any faster. I know you had to be careful, but you might have given me some idea of what the problem was.”

Lucius glanced behind him and closed the door. “How many people know you’re home?”

“How long has this legal business been going on?”

Lucius smoothed the top of his thinning hair. “We could probably keep it quiet. The staff won’t talk. Did you see anyone you knew on the road?”

Ruso frowned. “You didn’t say anything about coming home in secret.”

Lucius subsided onto the chair that Ruso still thought of as belonging to their father. “I don’t know what we’re going to do now. Not now that you’ve turned up.”

Ruso stared at him. “But you’re the one who wrote and asked me to come home!”

The tired eyes that reminded him of his own seemed to be displaying equal bafflement. “No I didn’t. That’s the last thing I would have done.”

Ruso pondered the remote possibility that the letter had said, ‘Do not come home.’ Surely he could not have misread it? Tilla’s views were of no help since Tilla could barely read her own name. But Valens had interpreted it as ‘come home’ too. “It was in your writing.”

Lucius shook his head. “The only things I’ve written to you about lately are Cass’s brother being drowned, and Marcia’s wretched dowry.”

“That’s not the letter I got.”

“No, you’d probably already left by the time it arrived. Are you sure this ‘come home’ was addressed to you?”

“Of course I am! And it looked exactly like your writing. You don’t think I’d travel a thousand miles on crutches because of a letter to somebody else, do you?”

“I suppose not.” The tone was reluctant rather than conciliatory.

Ruso sat on the trunk, propped his stick against the wall, and scowled as it slid sideways out of reach and clattered onto the floor. “This is ridiculous.”

“Did you bring this letter with you?”

“I burned it. So if you didn’t send it, who did?”

“I’ve no idea. I wish they hadn’t.”

Ruso shrugged. “Well, I’m here now.”

“Yes.” Lucius cleared his throat. “I suppose we’ll have to make the best of it. You’re looking well, anyway. How was Britannia?”

“Messy. Is it true someone’s trying to bankrupt us?”

Lucius leaned back in their father’s chair and folded his arms. “If I were to say no,” he said, “and ask you to go straight back to Deva for the good of the family, would you do it?”

“I can’t,” Ruso pointed out. “I had to wangle months of leave to get here.”

“So you can’t go back to the Legion.” Lucius managed to look even more depressed.

“Arria says somebody’s applied for a seizure order.”

Lucius let out a long breath. “There’s a law somewhere,” he said, “that says you can’t take out a seizure order against someone who’s away from home on public ser vice.”

Ruso began to grasp the nature of the problem. “Does that apply to an ordinary man in the army?”

“The last thing I would have done, brother, was to ask you to come home.”

“So it’s true then? We have a legal problem?”

“We do now,” said Lucius.