A maid hurried in, flustered, and took the old woman by the arm. As she was led away she was still saying, “There are men in the woods!” and the maid was trying to reassure her.
Caratius turned to the Medicus. “I’m sorry. My mother is having a bad day.” He cleared his throat. “You may have understood her talking about stealing. Please don’t take offence. She’s not well.”
Tilla said, “Have you lost some silver?”
Caratius shook his head. “My mother remembers many things, but not in the right order. My grandfather’s stock of silver was lost sixty years ago. If it ever existed. I’m sorry you were disturbed.” He clapped his hands and a servant stepped out of the corner to stand at his shoulder. “We’ll have the beef.” He turned back to his guests. “Now, as I was saying…”
As he went back to talking about the Council, Tilla was distracted by a whispered conversation in the doorway behind her. The servant who was supposed to be fetching the beef hurried back into the room and murmured something into his master’s ear. Caratius hissed in British, “Can’t it wait?”
The servant did some more murmuring. Caratius’s body jolted as if someone had just shot an arrow into his back. He looked at the Medicus. Suddenly efficient, he said, “Investigator, you need to come with me.”
Before she could say anything, the Medicus gave her a look that said if she tried to follow, he would be very angry indeed. On the way out she heard Caratius giving someone orders to bring lanterns. She needed her shoes.
The hall was empty. Behind the farthest door she could hear the mother’s anxious voice and the maid still trying to calm her. The main door was open. Servants and farmworkers had clustered out in the yard. All had their backs to the house and were standing looking toward the darkening woods.
What had the servant done with her shoes?
As she entered the kitchen a tabby cat leapt off the table, onto the sill, and out the open window. The steaming joint of beef sat abandoned on the table in a pool of congealing grease. The platter held the small clean wipes of tongue marks.
She found the shoes set back from the fire. The damp leather was cold and clammy around her feet. She had just closed the window shutters to keep the cat out when Caratius’s mother wandered into the kitchen. The maid was close behind, looking almost as desperate as her charge. “Your little boy is a man now, mistress. He will make sure you are safe.”
“You’re lying to me!” insisted the mother. “Everybody lies to me. What have they done with my son? Where’s my bag? I saw the warriors!”
“Your bag is here, mistress. You have everything you need. Your son is safe. We’re all safe now. Come back and eat.”
“Where’s Father? Father is still down there. He thinks he can talk to them.”
The maid shot Tilla a look of despair across the gloom of the shuttered kitchen.
“Your Da is in the next world with mine, Mother,” Tilla assured her.
The woman backed away. “Who are you?”
“A friend,” Tilla told her. “Your Da and mine are in the next world talking about the breeding of horses and my brothers are arguing with them and my mother is asking why they always have to shout.”
“We don’t care about horses. Father is a silversmith. We live behind the workshop. Who are you?”
“She’s a friend, mistress,” said the maid.
“A friend?”
“Yes.”
The old woman’s grip was surprisingly strong. “Where are your children?”
Tilla said, “I have no children.”
The woman shook her head. “No, no. Always know where your children are. Always have a bag behind the door. See?”
She held out the bag. It did not smell good. “Bread and cheese, a blanket and a-a-”
“A comb,” prompted the maid.
Trying to coax her toward the door, Tilla said, “Very good.”
“Yes. Somebody will always take you in if you comb your hair and look respectable. Mother says so.”
As they passed, the maid murmured in Tilla’s ear, “I think it’s seeing those men set her off. She thinks she’s a child again. Her father was killed when the Iceni raided the town.”
“What’s that? What is she saying?”
There was nothing wrong with the old woman’s hearing. “We are all safe here, Mother,” Tilla assured her.
“That’s what they told us. The warriors will never come here. The army will stop them.”
“The army has stopped them.”
“Put your shawl over your nose when you run through the smoke. Hold Mother’s hand.” The bag fell to the floor as the thin hands went up over her face. “Don’t smell the man with his clothes on fire. Don’t hear them calling for help.”
“It is over now.”
“Can you hear the other mothers?” The vein tracks on her hands glistened with tears. “Listen! They are calling for my lost friends who went out to play.”
Tilla swallowed. She put an arm around the thin shoulders.
“Always keep a bag by the door,” whispered the old woman. “Always know where your children are.”
By the time Tilla and the maid had settled the mother with a large cup of strong beer (sometimes, according to the maid, it was the only way), it was dark. Tilla went out onto the porch. She could hear the voices of the men returning from the woods. There were three lanterns bobbing about by the track. A couple of them headed off toward the stables. The third came back toward the house. She unfastened the safety strap on her knife. In all the fuss with the mother, she had forgotten the Medicus altogether. Anything could have happened. “Who is there?”
“It’s all right, Tilla.”
She relaxed her grip on the knife. “What is happening?”
She could make him out now, on the left of a group of five or six men. Dias was one of the two supporting a stumbling Caratius. Caratius, unusually, seemed to be having trouble with his words. “I still can’t believe… To think that… Out there all this time… How terrible this must… I never thought anyone would stoop to this!”
The Medicus was talking to him in the way he spoke to his patients. “Don’t worry about it tonight,” he was saying. “Just go indoors, keep warm, and have a hot drink with some honey in it.”
“Whoever did this has no fear. No fear of gods or men. We are all in danger.”
As he came into the light, Tilla could see a leaf caught in the long gray hair and mud smeared across his face. All of the men seemed to have muck on their clothes and boots and there was a smell about them that she did not like. The Medicus followed them into the house. As he passed Tilla he murmured, “I’ll just get him settled, then we’re going straight back to town.”
“But what-?”
“While they were rounding up that horse in the woods,” he said, “they found the remains of the missing brother.”
38
Ruso woke to a sense that there was a heavy burden lurking just beyond the comfort of his bed and that when he opened his eyes he would have to get up and shoulder it. Sooner than he wished, the sound of a horse whinnying in the stables brought back the memory of last night: the ghastly journey to town in the dark, enveloped in the smell that none of them would ever forget. Gavo driving the borrowed cart with a subdued Tilla beside him. Dias riding next to Ruso, quietly taking charge of transporting the body in a manner so professional that Ruso began to wonder if he had been mistaken about him. Maybe Dias was no more than an ambitious young man with an overactive love life.
There had been no thought of taking Bericus’s remains to lie indoors next to Asper. The cart had been left in
