floor. A hall for welcoming guests that was painted with pictures of pale women with skimpy clothes and vacant faces and muscular men leading bulls to be sacrificed. Cupids dancing around the dining room. Then there was the carved head of the Medicus’ father set on top of a lump of marble, and lots of silly little polished tables with spindly legs. What could you do with things like that? You could not milk them or eat them. They would not keep you warm in winter. She could not understand how anyone had the energy to bother, or indeed why.
The water was cool in her throat. She dipped her fingers into the cup and wiped them across her forehead. Then, since nothing seemed to be moving out here except a few bees, she tipped the rest over her head, unpeeled the tunic that was stuck to her damp back and stretched out along the length of the bench. She put her fingers in her ears and closed her eyes. She wished she could close her nose to the smell as easily. The scent of the flowers could not disguise the fact that something seemed to have gone wrong with the drains. Just as the children’s excitement at her arrival could not make up for the shock of realizing that nobody here knew who she was. In Britannia, she had thought that she was an important part of the Medicus’ life. Now it was plain that, even though she had been in the room with him when he wrote many of his letters home, not one of them had mentioned her.
Letting one hand trail down, she ran a finger over the parched lichen that had formed on the stone leg of the bench. She found herself picturing the brittle thorns she had seen by the roadside, offering nothing but crops of white snails so maddened by the sun that they climbed up nearer to it to bake themselves under the brilliant sky. She pushed the picture away. It was making her feel hotter. Instead she tried to imagine herself paddling in the willow-fringed shallows of the river at home. It did not help.
Arria’s insistence that she be led away to be fed and watered had probably been kindly meant. The half- sisters had taken the trouble to show her around the umpteen rooms of the house, dutifully pointing out decoration and glass windows, and she had done her best to think of a new way of admiring each one. She had wanted to ask about the farm: are you worried that the soil is baked so dry? When does it rain? How many cows do you have? What else can you grow apart from grapes and olives? But the girls did not seem interested in the farm. When they were not showing off the house they seemed to do nothing but talk about clothes and boys and get in the way of the staff.
Tilla was reflecting that at least the Medicus had found time to warn her about them, if not the other way around, when she felt a painful jab in her ribs and opened her eyes to see those same half-sisters standing over her.
‘She’s awake!’ exclaimed Marcia, who had no right to be surprised since she was the one who had just poked her.
Tilla blinked as her eyes adjusted again to the glare filtering through the leaves.
‘Good news,’ announced Marcia. ‘Mother says you can chaperone us into town tomorrow.’
‘It’s not our turn for the tutor tomorrow,’ said Flora, the younger of the two. Then, as if Tilla might not know what a tutor was, she added, ‘In our family you have to learn poetry, even if you’re a girl. And music.’
‘It’s a privilege,’ put in her older sister. ‘But we won’t have to put up with it much longer, hopefully. Anyway, after we’ve bathed and had dinner you can spend tonight unpacking, or whatever it is you do for our brother. Then if you get him to give you some money we can all go shopping.’
Tilla sat up, rubbing her eyes. ‘Shopping?’ she repeated, wondering why anyone would want to tramp around buying things in this heat. Surely the family had enough servants to fetch whatever they needed?
The girls looked at each other. Marcia said, ‘What did I tell you? She doesn’t understand.’
‘Don’t you have shops in Britannia?’ asked Flora.
Marcia said, ‘They probably don’t have money, either. Come on, Tilla. We’ll show you what a bath-house is before the others get in there and mess it up.’
10
Ruso dropped the lid of the trunk and sat on it as if he could keep the family’s troubles trapped inside. He said, ‘I might have guessed the Gabinii were involved in this somewhere.’
Gabinius Fuscus and his cousin had been friends of their father: the sort of friends who insisted on lending him large sums of money. Their offers were so cordial that Publius Petreius had failed to extract any details about when they would want the cash back, or how much interest they were expecting. Since his death, their unpredictable demands for repayment had been causing the Petreius brothers major headaches. While the brothers had struggled to remain solvent, Gabinius Fuscus had risen to become a senior magistrate on the local city council, and his even wealthier cousin was now a Senator down in Rome.
‘Is it just one of them, or both?’ asked Ruso.
‘Neither,’ said Lucius, propping his elbows on the worn surface of the desk and cradling his head in his hands. ‘Well, both. Indirectly.’
Ruso waited, wondering if Lucius’ inability to define the problem might be part of the reason he had failed to solve it.
‘At least the Senator won’t be bothering us,’ said Lucius. ‘Not in person. He’s too busy down in Rome, trying to find ways of undermining Hadrian.’
‘Good.’
Lucius looked up. ‘No, it isn’t. In the meantime he’s let a shark called Severus loose to manage his estate.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘Some distant relation from Rome, apparently. Everybody reckons they’ve sent him and his sister up here to get rid of them.’
‘And this Severus is the one who’s trying to get the seizure order?’
‘Severus,’ said Lucius, snatching up a stylus and emphasizing each word with a stab of the point into the desk, ‘is a Devious, Vindictive, Lying Bastard.’
‘Ah.’
‘That money was all there, whatever he says. I put it in front of him myself.’
Ruso decided not to interrupt. If he listened for long enough, Lucius would start to make sense.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said Lucius. ‘You’re thinking, why didn’t you wait while he counted it?’
‘You know what the Gabinii are like.’
Lucius tossed the stylus aside. ‘When your wife’s in floods of tears and your son’s howling in pain, Gaius, it’s hard to care what the Gabinii are like.’
Lucius had been sitting where he was sitting now, counting the money for the latest instalment of the loan repayment, when there was a commotion in the entrance hall. News had arrived that Cass’s brother was drowned. While everyone was absorbing this shock Little Lucius, aged four, wandered into the yard, climbed up a ladder and fell off the roof of the stables.
‘His arm was bent the wrong way at the elbow. The doctor thought he might have to amputate.’
‘Nasty,’ agreed Ruso. ‘Nobody would blame you if you miscounted.’
‘I didn’t!’ snapped Lucius. ‘Severus took advantage. We rushed into town to find a doctor and I just stopped off at the estate to dump the cash on his desk. The evil bastard must have been able to hear the child crying, but he left me standing there while he chatted to his steward. When I told him I was in a hurry he took the money and said, “Don’t let me hold you up; I’ll send the receipt over later.”
‘Ah,’ said Ruso.
‘And he smiled when he said it.’
‘Ah.’
‘Only instead of a receipt we got a demand saying it was two hundred short, and when I didn’t fall for that, he said he’d take us to court.’
‘I see.’
‘I thought the Senator might want to know he’d got a crook running his estate, so I went and told Fuscus what was going on. Fuscus told me to go home and not to worry about it, so I didn’t.’ Lucius cleared his throat. ‘Only he didn’t do a thing. It should never have come to a court hearing, Gaius. Severus was lying. I thought if I
