not. If she gets in the forest, the gods know how she’ll fare. She’s not used to walking anywhere alone and there are bears and wolves about. And Paulinus has just gone out to feed the beasts, he isn’t here to help. Oh, Vesta and all the household gods preserve the girl! We cannot even be sure which way she might have gone. Did you see her, Muta?’
Muta shook her head. She pointed from herself to the intervening room and made a motion as of sweeping up. I had noticed that there was a bundle of tied brooms in there.
Secunda looked frantic. It was the first time I had seen her other than serene. ‘Then it must have been the window. I don’t know where to start. If only Paulina could tell us what she knows.’
Muta squatted down beside the deaf girl, leaning very close. She pointed to her eyes and then the window- space and made that running motion that she’d made before. Paulina beamed. She took the slate and smudged it with her sleeve, half erasing what she’d drawn on it. She took the chalk and started drawing something else.
‘It’s no good,’ Secunda said. ‘She doesn’t understand…’
But Muta had held up a warning hand. She pointed to the slate. It was a childish drawing but unmistakeable. It was a little building with a sort of doorway at the front. Secunda was about to turn away again and start the search, but Muta seized the chalk. She drew a sketchy picture of a cow.
Paulina rubbed it out and drew what looked like a long fat table on two spindly legs. She stared at it a moment, as if dissatisfied, then drew a spiral at one end of it.
I frowned at it a moment and then had an idea. Very gently, I took the chalk-stone from the child and gave the thing a head. I looked at Paulina, who smiled delightedly. I tried a pair of ears, and then a flattened nose — and the ‘table’ had transformed itself into a pig.
Paulina was grinning as though her face would burst. She took my arm and dragged me to the window-space where I could see the byre. It was not much like the picture she had drawn, but she pointed to the slate and then to it and then made the running motion which she’d seen Muta make. There was no doubt at all what she was telling us.
‘Lavinia’s hiding in the pig-byre,’ I announced, but the others had already worked it out.
‘Muta, go and find her. Better still, go and find the master and get him to come here. He can go and tell her that we know where she is, but that she can stay there until the gig has gone. You’d better warn him that the land-slaves mustn’t move the pig back to the byre. That sow’s a heavy beast. If it turns on Lavinia, she will certainly get hurt.’
Muta nodded and disappeared at once in search of her master. Secunda turned to me. ‘So I ask you once again, are you going to betray her, citizen?’
I could not answer her. ‘Do I not have duties, lady?’ I said, thoughtfully. ‘I am being paid.’
‘Duties to whom, exactly, citizen? You know now that the girl that we have taken in is not the child of Cyra and Lavinius, but of a Silurian widow who entrusted her to us.’ She held out those lovely pale white hands to me. ‘Libertus, you are a man of some intelligence. You will see that there is little to be gained by returning a girl — whatever her legal status may have been — to a cruel man who has in any case announced that he has rejected her. If she were dragged back there she would find herself at best obliged to sell herself to slavery — or at worst, reduced to being a beggar or a fugitive. I cannot believe that you’d connive at that — or even that you would tell Lavinius the truth about her parentage. Think what would happen to Cyra, in that case. It would serve no purpose, human or divine. Better that he simply believes the girl has run away.’
I have heard lawyers argue with less force. I looked at her with even greater admiration than before. ‘You have a point, of course,’ I said, slowly. ‘Lavinius has no natural claim upon the girl and he has publicly renounced his legal one. And as you say, her mothers — if I may use the phrase — were both content that she should stay with you.’
She could see that I was weakening and she sealed it with a smile.
I found myself saying, by way of self-excuse, ‘Besides, I was not actually required to find Lavinia at all — it was simply that I chose to do so while I had the chance.’
‘Then you will not betray us?’
‘That might depend,’ I said untruthfully, ‘on what you tell me next.’
TWENTY-FIVE
Secunda had recovered something of her tranquillity. She sat down on the bedframe and — watching Paulina who was busy with her drawing, as if nothing had occurred — said soberly, ‘We owe you a proper explanation, I suppose. What do you want to know?’
I looked round for a seat where I could sit, myself, but there was nothing in the room except a little clothes- chest with an oil-lamp on top and the straw mattress where Paulina was. I leaned against the wall. ‘Tell me how Lavinia escaped the lodging-house. Did she really climb through the window-space, as she just did here? When I first realized that she hadn’t run away, I thought the cloth-rope through the window was a ruse, intended to mislead.’
Secunda gave the smile that would excuse her anything. ‘You are quite right, citizen. The nursemaid made it and put it there (having made sure that there was no one watching in the court, of course) but not until her daughter had safely gone. We had taken Lavinia with us — she was hidden in the travelling box, asleep.’
I frowned. ‘But I thought you had your so-called slave-boy with you when you went? Several people mentioned seeing him — though nobody recognized him as the Lavinia they knew.’
‘That was not Lavinia, of course. That was a pauper’s child that we had hired for just an hour or two. His parents were delighted when we wanted him. We kept him with us till we were out of town, then let him go again and sent him home. He could not believe his luck. But by that time Lavinia was beginning to wake up.’
‘But how…?’ I was about to say, and then I understood. ‘She had been given the sleeping-potion in the phial. Of course!’ I have never had a child, but I can imagine that it would be hard to keep Lavinia quiet and still if she had been awake. ‘Cyra provided the potion for you, I suppose? I noticed her seal-mark on the wax seal of the flask. Though at that time I was more interested in the hemlock that the jug had obviously contained.’
‘Hemlock? In the flask?’ She sounded quite surprised. ‘Then the nursemaid must have put it there. Certainly there was no hemlock in it earlier.’
‘But there was hemlock somewhere. That’s what killed Lavinia’s mother and she drank it from the flask.’ I stopped lounging on the wall and pushed myself upright. Paulina glanced up at me and gave me a huge smile, then moved a little and patted the space that she had made.
I squatted down beside her, thinking how bizarre it was to be talking of such things, while this child was totally oblivious of all the tragedy. She was engrossed in drawing something now, something with sticks which might have been a tree. I looked up at Secunda, not unhappy to be sitting at her feet.
‘There was some hemlock left from what my husband gave the Druid girl,’ she was saying, thoughtfully. ‘It was still with her effects. The nursemaid asked to keep it, “just in case of an emergency”, she said, though at the time we hoped that everything was going to go to plan. She gave the sleeping potion to Lavinia and it worked beautifully.’
I was still trying to get a picture of events. ‘It must have been a strong one.’
‘Very strong indeed. Cyra warned us not to use the whole of it. I think the mother only used a half, but even that much had a fast effect, because when Paulinus and I got back from the slave-market, the child was sound asleep. Her mother had cut her hair off, while she slept, and put her in the half-empty box that we had left behind.’
‘I found a hair or two,’ I said. ‘I didn’t find a razor or a knife.’
‘We put it in the box beside Lavinia, together with the hair. We had thought of selling it to a wig-maker — hair of that length and colour would fetch a handsome price — but we decided it might cause remark. So we put that in there too. We covered her loosely with a rug that we had brought, and pulled the lid down — Paulinus had deliberately chosen one that didn’t fit, so that it stayed a little bit ajar — and he personally carried down the box and put it on the cart. And we drove off with it. It went off more smoothly than we dared to hope.’
I was aware of something tugging at my sleeve. I looked down. It was Paulina wanting to show me what she’d scratched onto the slate. A big head and fingers had sprouted on the tree — I realized it was meant to be a
