could hear. “This isn’t more of that Christos business, is it? Finding widows and orphans to look after?”
“You think without Christos I would leave a woman to give birth in the street?”
“Of course not.” He gestured to her to go first down the stairs. “But you do seem very attached. You barely know the woman.”
“If I was living with the Catuvellauni and my husband was killed-”
“I know. But be careful how much help you promise.”
“There is a housekeeper to look after her when she gets home.”
“Good. You can’t fight her battles for her, Tilla.”
The silence that followed was punctuated by the eerie sound of wailing from the storeroom. To his surprise, Tilla paused at the foot of the stairs and kissed him on the cheek. “You and I should never part in anger,” she said. “Hear how it is for her now, begging his forgiveness.”
He said, “I’ll raid Valens’s medicines. See if I can find something to calm her.”
“She should not be left alone with the baby.”
“Did I really hear her say he was the cause of all this?”
“That,” said Tilla, running a finger along the crinkled curl of the baby’s ear, “is why she should not be sent home alone with you, little one. There is a storm inside her mind. Whoever caused this, it was not you, was it?”
16
The evening chill was creeping up from the river as Ruso went in search of Tetricus the boatman. He was the only person who might know what had happened to Julius Asper between his leaving Verulamium with a brother and possibly seven thousand denarii, and his lone arrival, destitute and fatally injured, at the Blue Moon.
Valens was busy seeing patients. He had offered Ruso an escort of apprentices as if he were doing him a favor, insisting that nobody in his right mind would wander the passages behind Londinium’s riverfront when the workshops and warehouses were closing for the evening. Thus it was a group of three that picked its way along the deserted wharf just after sunset and turned left into a narrow street. Forty paces farther and a right turn took them into the gloom of the weed-fringed alleyway leading to the home of Tetricus the boatman.
A couple of urchins who were bouncing a ball off the high wall of the grain warehouse fled at the sight of them. Ruso could make out several doorways opening onto the alley. The nearest was a patched construction with a heavy plank nailed across the rotten section at the bottom. He was about to knock when he was startled by the tall apprentice whispering, “Sir!” in his ear.
“What?”
“Sir, I think we’ve been followed.”
Ruso glanced back along the empty alleyway, wondering if the body and the coded letter had overexcited the youths’ imaginations. “Really?”
“He looked suspicious, sir. He was wearing a hood.”
To be wearing a hood on a clear spring evening was certainly unusual, but whoever it was had gone about his business elsewhere by the time Ruso and his escort retraced their steps to the street. The only people now in sight were an old man hobbling toward them on two sticks and a heavily made-up girl in a doorway. The girl had not seen anyone in a hood, but it was a pleasure to meet three such handsome men, and would they like to come and join her friends for a drink?
Ruso told her they were busy and drew the apprentices out of earshot. The tall one looked disappointed. The short one looked relieved. It occurred to Ruso that any sensible boatman seeing these three handsome men arriving at his front door would lock up and hide under the bed.
“Stay here on the corner and keep a lookout for your man in the hood.”
The tall boy nodded. “We’ll get him for you, sir.”
“I don’t want you to get him,” explained Ruso. “Just watch where he goes. Stand well away from that girl, stay together, don’t wander off, and don’t talk to anybody while I’m gone. Understood?”
“Will you be all right without us, sir?” The short one was evidently taking his duties seriously.
“Make a note of the door I go into,” said Ruso, who felt a more pertinent question was whether they would be all right without him. “If I’m in trouble, I’ll whistle for you.”
The tall one looked delighted. The short one said, “Then what do we do, sir?”
“I want both of you to run and fetch Valens,” said Ruso, who could imagine what their parents would say if he got them involved in some sort of fracas. “And if you’re in trouble, come and get me.”
He made sure they were stationed up on the street corner before rapping on the door in the alley.
Nothing happened. He knocked again. This time the voice of an old woman shouted something in British that he was fairly sure translated as, “Bloody kids! Clear off!”
He explained who he was. The second reply was even shorter than the first: a summary of the woman’s views on men who worked for the tax office.
The only reply from the second building was the yapping of a small dog. He was about to knock on the third when a scrawny man appeared from a door farther along. His gait reminded Ruso of rolling waves and swaying ships.
“You’re the procurator’s man, right?”
Ruso nodded.
“You want to have a word with them clerks of yours, boss. I told ’em it was the one with the pot outside.”
Ruso glanced past him and saw that a fat olive oil amphora had been half-buried outside a doorway to house a straggly bush. “Tetricus?”
The man jerked his head toward the door. “Best get inside, boss, eh?”
Ruso followed him into a drab room with a table, a couple of stools, and a sagging curtain hiding what he assumed was a bed against the far wall. Most of this faded into darkness as the door crashed shut, a bar clunked into place, and the room was lit by only the faint yellow square of a window covered with oiled cloth.
“Can’t be too careful ’round here, boss,” explained the boatman, striking a flint and eventually managing to light a smelly candle. “So, I’m getting it after all, eh?”
“Getting what?”
“You’re the one who was looking for him, right? Offering money for information leading to the finding of? Well I come back specially to hand in the information, like a good citizen, and a fat lot of thanks I get for it. It weren’t my fault he went and died later on.”
Ruso frowned. “You’ve already talked to the office about this?”
“This afternoon,” explained the boatman. “Jupiter’s balls, didn’t they tell you anything? Useless buggers. You want to sack the lot of ’em. Specially that snotty one with the lisp.”
The unlucky Tetricus must have arrived at the office to claim his reward while Firmus had been out observing the postmortem. “So,” he said, “you came back specially from somewhere today to report a sighting of Julius Asper-”
“Yesterday, it was,” explained the man. “I seen him yesterday morning, but I didn’t hear you was looking till today. Then I come downriver as quick as I could and I went straight to the Forum to hand in information leading to the finding of, and that bunch of tight arses made out they didn’t know nothing about a reward. Then I go for a bite to eat and find out he’s gone and died and you lot have been down to the Blue Moon. You’re not giving them the money, are you?”
“No,” said Ruso. Avoiding the wavering light of the candle, he was trying to assess where the man might have hidden any stolen coins.
“None of that moving the body business had nothing to do with me, right? All I did was find him on the river and give him a tow down to the wharf.”
“Where did you find him?”
“In the marshes on the north bank, about seven or eight miles up past the double-span bridge. Saw him at first light. Looked like a loose boat was drifted into the reeds. I went in after it, and there he was. He weren’t
