‘Remind me why I thought it was a good idea to come home.’
‘She is not your wife now. You do not have to listen.’
‘It’s not Claudia,’ he said, ‘it’s all the others.’
She held out the platter so he could pull off a blob of cheese. ‘Tell me about the others.’
As far as she could understand, a difficult meeting with the old wife had been followed by a useless trip to town, where he had been kept waiting for hours, practically accused of murder, heard alarming rumours about his sister and found his name was ‘slapped up all over the bloody walls’.
No wonder he was upset. Clearly gossip travelled just as fast here as at home. ‘You should write something back!’ she said. ‘It is not your fault that man died.’
‘The writing’s got nothing to do with Severus,’ he said, adding, ‘at least, not yet. But if I don’t find out who really poisoned him, they’ll soon think of something worse to put up there. It’s because of the election.’
She said, ‘The what?’ but he had moved on complain that he had barely closed the gate on his return when he heard Marcia and Flora shrieking at him from their bedroom window that Arria had locked them in and was trying to starve them, and he must get them out right now.
Inside the painted entrance hall he had found Cass and a gaggle of small loud people begging him to make Arria let Galla back into the house to look after them. When he tracked down Arria she would not talk about any of these things unless he would agree a new date to have dinner with the widow next door. Then he escaped to the yard and found the farm slaves pleased to see him because the brother had gone out somewhere, and they wanted someone to tell him it was all wrong to have women treading the grapes.
‘Actually…’ He paused, as if he had only just noticed, ‘Why are you in here? You haven’t really been treading grapes, have you? You don’t have to listen to Arria.’
‘I am here because Galla is made to work in here,’ she explained. ‘And it is not fair. You must tell your stepmother.’
‘Ah.’ The Medicus closed his eyes. Then he laced his fingers together and placed them behind his head. ‘I think,’ he said slowly, ‘I am becoming a god.’
She frowned. ‘It is the wine in the air.’ Or perhaps the smell of the cheese.
‘The last reported words of the Emperor Vespasian.’
She wiped up the last smear of the cheese with the final crust of bread and waited for him to explain.
He said, ‘Do you know what emperors do, Tilla?’
That was easy. ‘Send soldiers to steal the land and make us pay taxes.’
‘They spend half their waking hours listening to people who want things. As, it seems, do gods. Maybe it wasn’t as much of a transition as everyone thought.’
‘They all want you to be a god who comes home across the sea and mends everything.’
‘Apparently, though none of them invited me. How d’you think I’m doing so far?’
‘Terrible. Now I have seen what peace is like, I understand why you come to Britannia.’
‘I wish we’d never left.’
‘You do not have to worry about that man,’ she said, reaching forward to pick a flake of bread-crust from the front of his tunic. ‘I can tell you who poisoned him. It is the father of your old wife.’
He opened his eyes. ‘Probus? What do you know about Probus?’
‘He paid for the ship where Cass’s brother was drowned.’
‘But why would that make him want to poison Severus? I mean, any more than anybody else would?’
She explained what the fish-sellers had said about the ship when they thought there was nobody around to hear them.
The Medicus listened carefully, then said, ‘I can’t see Probus handing over money to a man who knew nothing about choosing a vessel, even if he was his son-in-law.’
‘But — ’
‘I’ll look into it, but I’d imagine Severus only borrowed the money. If the ship sank, he’d have had to pay it back.’
‘Perhaps he was killed because Probus was angry at losing his servant Justinus.’
The Medicus did not look convinced.
‘Or perhaps because he did not pay the money back.’
The Medicus shook his head. ‘Respectable bankers don’t go around murdering people who owe them money, Tilla. It’s bad for trade.’
‘Not even to remind the others to pay?’
The Medicus eyed her as if he was not sure where she had heard of such a thing. She said, ‘I understand about borrowing. I am not a stupid barbarian like you think.’
‘I’ve never thought you were stupid.’
She noticed he did not say anything about her not being a barbarian.
‘Probus isn’t like the Gabinii,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t own enough muscle to make trouble and he doesn’t have huge sums of money stashed away. He has to take in cash so he can lend it out. Nobody’s going to trust their savings to a violent man.’
This was something she had not considered.
‘In fact, if Severus was fool enough to send Cass’s brother to sea in a leaky old bucket, Cass had more reason to want him dead than …’ His voice tailed off into silence.
‘She did not know about the ship being bad.’
‘But she was there.’
‘Where?’
‘She was around when Severus came to visit. She knew what he was threatening to do to the family. She gave him the drink.’
This was not what Tilla had intended. It was hard to believe that such a fond mother could be a secret poisoner. On the other hand, how far would a woman go to protect her children? Tilla did not want to think about it. She folded her arms. ‘If you are sure it is not that Probus man, then I think you should be very careful,’ she said. ‘It could be your old wife.’
‘Claudia? Never.’
‘How do you know?’
‘She’s not that sort of person.’
‘Nobody is that sort of person all the time. Her husband is a bad man. We know he steals money from your family and he is no good at choosing a ship, and she has to live with this man every day. You think yours is the only little sister he tries to sleep with?’
‘That’s a reason for divorcing him,’ he said. ‘Not murdering him.’
It was always hard work making the Medicus look at something he was trying to avoid. ‘If a wife wants to keep the husband’s money but not the husband,’ she explained, ‘he must be dead. Not divorced.’
Again, he looked askance at her, as if he was wondering how she had thought of something like that. ‘But he didn’t have any money,’ he said. ‘He didn’t own any of the property on the estate and after the ship sank he must have owed a huge amount to Probus.’
That was something she had not thought of. She said, ‘Did you tell her what he said at the end?’
‘Yes.’
‘So now you can tell me. Perhaps I can help.’
She heard him take in a breath. ‘It’s awkward.’
Tilla wound a strand of hair around her forefinger. The little he had told her about the old wife had suggested he was relieved to be rid of her, but the business between men and women was always complicated, and there was no way of knowing whether he had told the whole story.
Nobody here had known that the Medicus had a British woman until she had arrived. Everyone here thought he was single. Claudia, when she found out her second husband was much worse than the first one, could have sent that letter herself, waited until she had the Medicus back in Gaul, and then murdered her husband. Now the Medicus was stupid enough to defend her. It all fitted together, and it made a shape Tilla did not like.
She slid the finger out and let the hair unravel into a ringlet. The shape in her mind twisted into something worse.
‘If a woman poisons her husband, she said, ‘she must pretend that it was not her who did it. So she might
