I saw outside the gate?’
She did her shy giggle at my ignorance. ‘Of course not. Though it was once all one estate. Cyra’s father left her the other portion when he died.’ She saw my puzzled face and went on patiently. ‘He was Audelia’s grandfather, of course — he had two daughters and no other heirs — and his land was subdivided between the pair of them.’
It was the obvious explanation, when you thought of it. I was about to say as much when the door was thrust open and we were interrupted by a shrill, reproving voice.
‘Modesta, why are there no refreshments for our guest? Go, see to it at once. How dare you stand about! This is no time for idle gossiping! I’m sorry, citizen, the child is not accustomed to receiving guests. When Lavinius gets home, I’ll see that she is whipped!’
FIVE
I stood up, almost scattering the writing-implements from the tabletop. I was ready to defend my young informant but the slave-girl had already scuttled from the room. The newcomer — who, like me had left her attendant waiting at the door — swept towards me with hands outstretched.
This was very clearly the mistress of the house. The high quality of the dark blue stola which she wore and the lighter blue embroidered over-tunic were evident even to my untutored eyes. Her purple slippers were of finest kid, the soft leather cut into a latticework of leaves which would have made my Gwellia sigh with jealousy. Yet in one respect my wife was much the more fortunate of the two.
The woman before me was not handsome, even for her age — she was far too thin and angular for that — and there was no sign that she had ever been a beauty in her youth. Her face was lined and sallow under the whitening arsenic-powder that she wore, though she had done her best to give some colour with wine-lees on her lips and a touch of enhancing lampblack painted round the eyes. The lustrous black hair, coiled into a fashionable chignon on her head, was all too evidently a wig, and wisps of her own greying mousy locks crept out from under it. Her form was tall and bony and her long-fingered hands so wrinkled, pale and fleshless that they almost seemed translucent as she held them out to me. I noted a very handsome jet-stone in her ring as I bowed over it.
‘You have a message for me, citizen?’ Her face was unsmiling and, glimpsing the smirking handmaiden behind her at the entrance-way, I wondered how much of my conversation with Modesta had been overheard.
However, it was too late to think of that. ‘You are Cyra, wife of Lavinius?’ I murmured to the ring, mentally thanking Modesta that I knew the name, at least. ‘I am the citizen Libertus. But I bring no message from your husband, I’m afraid. My patron Marcus Aurelius Septimus instructed me to come.’
No answer.
I straightened up and met an icy glare. ‘I was just explaining all this to your maidservant. I’m very sorry if I caused her to delay, but — far from failing to look after me — she was attempting to understand my task. Please do not punish her on my account.’
The shrewd eyes thawed a little, but the manner was still as unbending as a sword. ‘And why should His Excellence instruct you to come here?’ she said, without the shadow of a smile.
‘He hopes that I can help you to find your missing niece.’
‘I see!’ She gestured to the female attendant that I had noticed at the door. ‘A stool here, slave. I will listen to what this man has to say.’ The girl came gliding in, and from behind the table took a second folding seat, which she placed for her mistress in what little space remained. Cyra sat down and — dismissing the slave-girl with an impatient wave — indicated that I should do the same. ‘If you can find Audelia, citizen, I will offer a private blessing-tablet to the gods for you.’
Encouraged, I assayed a tiny joke. ‘Offering information would be more use to me,’ I said.
She did not smile. ‘I don’t know what useful information I can give. I have not seen my niece since she was two years old and I was not a great deal older — seven or eight, perhaps.’ She saw my startled look. ‘My sister, of course, had moved away from home and was living with her husband in Londinium by then.’
I was doing a little calculation in my head. It was not uncommon in Roman families for a daughter to be married at fourteen years of age, but even so — allowing for the birth of Audelia… ‘Your sister was a good deal older than you, then, I presume?’
Some might have thought this was a compliment, but the look that Cyra gave me would have withered stone. ‘Nine years my senior. Not so very much. My mother had more children in the years between — all boys — but the women of my family are not good at sons, it seems. Only we two females survived. My father was always cursing that he had no male as heir, though to have his granddaughter accepted as Vestal Virgin was some slight consolation to him, I believe.’
‘Yet your father did not send his own girls to serve the hearth-goddess?’
She gave a bitter smile. ‘He would have liked to. There is no doubt of that. But a Vestal Virgin must be perfect in all ways — physically as well as morally of course — and my sister had poor sight, the result of a spotted fever when she was very young. They would not permit her even to enter the lottery for a place.’
‘And you?’
She gave a thin-lipped smile. ‘They would never have accepted me, even if I had been fair enough of face to qualify. My poor mother died in bearing me and a girl must have two living parents — both freeborn Roman citizens — to be accepted at the shrine. So you see, we were not good enough! That only encouraged my father in his view. He did not regard daughters as of much account in any case. Indeed — perhaps because I cost my mother’s life — he could hardly bear to have me in the house.’
‘Yet he left you property, I understand?’
‘How do you know that?’ She shot a glance at me. ‘Your wealthy patron told you, I suppose?’ I did not disabuse her, and she went swiftly on. ‘As it happens, that report is true — though I cannot see what concern it is of yours, or what this has to do with the disappearance of my niece.’
‘If Audelia was kidnapped, as her bridegroom fears,’ I said gently, ‘the wealth of her family may have much to do with it.’
That sobered her. ‘I see. I’m sorry, citizen, I concede you have a point. Forgive me if I spoke more sharply than I meant. It was my father-’
We were interrupted by a tapping at the door, and Modesta reappeared with the promised tray of fruit, and a jug of something that looked like watered wine — a Roman drink of which I am not particularly fond. She set this down before me and I waved aside the drink, but — not wishing to seem churlish — I selected a few grapes before I turned back to Cyra.
‘Your father… you were about to say, I think?’ I prompted, tipping back my head to bite from my grape-bunch as I’d seen Marcus do.
‘It was at his funeral that I last saw my sister and her family.’ She had begun to fidget with the items on the desk, lining up the seal-stamp and the little pots of soot, gum and vinegar, like a rank of soldiers, as though this would somehow help her to control her evident emotion. ‘And afterwards, on the steps of the basilica, when the will was read.’
‘And you two girls inherited his lands?’
She gave a rueful smile. ‘This part of it, at least — the rest of his fortune went to distant male relatives in Rome. Even then, as the younger sister, I got the smaller part, and of course my inheritance was managed for me by a male cousin, till I wed. My sister was married — as I said before — and already had a child, so she got the villa and the larger piece of land, though in return she had to swear that she would offer Audelia to the Vestal temple to be trained, if there was no son to take charge of the estate.’
‘I take it there was not?’ I bit into a grape.
Cyra shook her head. ‘She bore a boy infant, three years afterwards, but it did not live and afterwards my sister did not conceive again. I told you that my family was not good with sons.’
I could not answer for a moment. The fruit — like my hostess’s tone — was uncomfortably sour. ‘But you do have a daughter, I believe.’
Cyra got abruptly to her feet and turned away, as if to hide the hurt and anger on her face. ‘To the disappointment of my husband, citizen. Of course I was lucky that he agreed to marry me at all — my inheritance
