be married off whenever and to whomsoever the family deemed appropriate. When a decent man could keep his household in order by threatening them not only with a sound beating, but with execution.
He had to concede that the beheading of unruly relatives seemed a little harsh, but obviously one would exercise discretion. The point was, in the old days, a man had commanded respect. What would his ancestors have done, had any of them been faced with a scowling Marcia, arms folded, demanding, ‘You said you were going to talk to somebody. So have you talked to them?’
‘Not in the way you mean,’ said Ruso, lowering himself on to the bench.
‘Gaius, you promised — ’
‘Sit down.’
‘But you said — ’
‘Sit down, Marcia.’
‘But you promised you would — ’
‘Sit down.’
‘I’m not going to sit down if you shout at me!’
‘I wasn’t,’ said Ruso, who hadn’t been and was not sure why he had got himself into an argument about sitting down when she could hear what he had to say quite well standing up. ‘But if you don’t listen to me, I will shout like a centurion ordering his men on a parade ground. And then your mother will come out and hear what I’m going to say.’
His satisfaction as she slumped down beside him on the bench was short-lived. He had, he realized, effectively promised not to tell Arria. Still, Marcia was listening now. At least he assumed she was listening, although she seemed to have found something that urgently needed gouging out from beneath one of her fingernails.
‘Are you particularly short of money for some reason, Marcia?’
‘We’re all short of money in this family. Lucius is mean and so are you.’
‘Because I’ve been told,’ he said, ‘that you’ve been trying to borrow against your dowry.’
‘Who told you that?’
‘Never mind. Is it true?’
‘Is it true?’ The wide hazel eyes that reminded him of Arria met his own in an expression of innocence and outrage. ‘Of course it’s not true! How could I? I haven’t got a dowry. That’s the whole point!’
‘That would be one of the reasons you’ve been refused, I expect,’ he ventured, still unable to believe that Probus’ guard would have invented such a tale.
‘I haven’t — I can’t believe I’m hearing this!’
‘So you can assure me you haven’t been trying to raise money on the quiet? Because obviously that would be very embarrassing. Not only for me as your guardian, but for the whole of the family.’
‘You’re always trying to raise money. You and Lucius. Everybody knows.’
‘That’s different.’
‘Well, I haven’t! And I think you’re horrible even to think I might. What would I need money for?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Who was it? I bet it was that barber, wasn’t it? I bet he said it just to stop you complaining about that haircut.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with my haircut, and it wasn’t the barber. Look, I’m sorry about the dowry. Maybe I should have explained what’s going on.’
‘I know what’s going on, Gaius. Lucius made a mess of paying Claudia’s husband, so he was threatening to take us to court in Rome to get all of our money — not that we’ve got any, according to Lucius — then he came over here and dropped dead, and now everybody’s saying you poisoned him.’
Ruso cleared his throat. ‘Well, I suppose that’s more or less it.’
‘But I shan’t believe them, Gaius. Do you know why? Because I don’t go round listening to gossip.’ She got to her feet. ‘And neither should you. Can I go now?’
He watched his sister stalk back towards the house, the sunlight filtering through the leaves over the pergola and dappling the linen of her tunic. Perhaps, prejudiced by the mother’s past excesses, he had misjudged the daughter. That must be the answer, because the other possibility was not fit to contemplate. Surely a veteran of his wide international experience could not have been so easily outmanoeuvred by an almost-sixteen-year-old girl?
38
Ruso seemed to be doing no better at finding out who had poisoned Severus than he had at disciplining Marcia. ‘Who, how and why?’ might be the right questions, but he did not like the answers he had found so far and he was running out of places to search for new ones. He had even toyed with the idea that the man might have poisoned himself, only to dismiss it as a sign of his own desperation.
He scowled at the crack in the side of the pond. The news of the death would not even have reached Rome yet. There was still time for him to sort out this mess. Meanwhile, he needed to clear his head. He needed a change of scene. He needed to get back to work. He might be a man hovering on the brink of ruin, but he knew how to wield a scalpel. There was one man in town who might be glad to see him, and just possibly that man might know something about poisons.
As he was reaching for his stick, a figure he did not recognize strolled in through the gate, patted the dog on the head and made for the house. Arria appeared in the doorway and bustled down the steps to meet him, crying, ‘There you are!’ and holding out a hand to be kissed.
Moments later Ruso found himself being introduced to Diphilus the builder, a man on the oily side of handsome. He was, as Arria announced with joy, available for dinner tomorrow evening. Ruso suspected Diphilus was the sort of man who was available for dinner any evening as long as he wasn’t paying for it.
‘Are you available for clearing drains this morning?’
‘Gaius is just out of the Army,’ said Arria, as if she had to excuse him. ‘Wounded by those dreadful Britons.’
Diphilus smiled at them both and said he would be honoured to look at the drains of a war hero. Arria looked delighted. Ruso, feeling outnumbered, went across to the stables. He would probably get more sense out of the mule.
Two early shoppers had paused to chat in the shade of the Forum wall. Ruso was relieved to see that the latest exhortation to support Fuscus, partially obscured behind them, was not long enough to begin with ‘G. Petreius Ruso, Veteran of the …’ His relief was short-lived. Glancing back over his shoulder as he rode past, he saw the wall from a different angle.
He had just made out ‘The town poisoner says vote for …’ when the shorter of the two women shouted, ‘Oi! Who d’you think you’re staring at?’
Ruso urged the mule on down the street, pursued by a cry of ‘We’re respectable married women! You keep your eyes to yourself!’
The games were not taking place for another two days, but as he squinted up at the glaring white stone of the amphitheatre he could see small silhouettes moving about on the parapet, slotting in the masts for the sails that would be pulled across to shade the audience from sunstroke. Below them, other shapes appeared and vanished again, hurrying around the stone lattice of arches and corridors that formed the massive and elegant oval in which Fuscus’ entertainment would take place.
A cart piled high with animal cages was being manoeuvred in beneath the carved bulls’ heads that adorned the main entrance. Whatever was in the cages was smelly but silent, and hidden by a sailcloth that had been thrown over the top as a rough shade. Ruso rode on around the outside of the building. As he passed, some sort of animal noise — a roar or a bellow, it was hard to say which — echoed from deep within the arches. The mule pricked up its ears but plodded on past the municipal slaves busy sweeping the flagstones. Presumably whatever had made the sound would have its blood mixed in with the sand of the arena in a couple of days.
Further around, someone was applying fresh paint to the entrance numbers on the sides of the arches. Traders were unloading their vehicles. A sweet stall, a fritter vendor and a souvenir salesman had already claimed
