Ennianus, assured me he would love to be some help but apparently he had a bad back that not many people knew about. I said it was lucky that selling baskets didn't call for much bending and lifting, then he shambled off.
I didn't need him. I rolled my tunic sleeves up to my shoulders and set to like a man who has something disturbing to forget about. Although autumn had arrived, the nights were still light long enough for me to put in an hour or two of heavy work. The whole first-floor apartment was crammed with dirty old junk though I came across no dead bodies or other unpleasant remains. It was hard work, but could have been much worse.
Smaractus must have let his handymen use this place sometimes as a materials store. There were half- buckets of good nails lurking under the warped scaffold boards and bits of mangled joist timber. One of his halfwits had left behind a perfectly decent adze that would find a welcome place in my own toolbag. They were a feckless lot. Dustsheeting had gone mouldy through being folded up while wet. Pulleys had rusted solid. Paint had gone hard in uncovered kettles. They never took home an empty wine flask or filthy food wrapper if they could stuff it under the unusable tangles of hoisting rope. There were unopened sacks of substances that had set like rock so it was impossible to identify the contents; nothing was labelled, of course. Smaractus never bought from a regular builders' merchant, but acquired oddments from contractors who had already been paid once by some innocent householder who had never heard of demanding to keep spare materials.
I cleared one room and used it to store any stuff I could reclaim. By the end of the evening I had made good headway and felt pleased with my work. One more stint would reduce the apartment to a shell, then Helena and I could start thinking about what was needed next. I had not found many bad mending jobs to do. The decor would probably be a pleasure to tackle once I had braced myself to start. Living in the kind of hovels I did, I had never had much call to be a dado and fresco man so this would be something new. Everywhere needed a furious scrubbing, but it struck me that while I was attached to the Fourth Cohort I might be able to wangle help from the fire-fighters to bring the water in…
On my final trip down to street level I found I had been donated an old bench and a soaking-wet counterpane in my rubbish skip. I turfed them out, then covered the skip, and roped it too. I went to the nearest baths to cleanse myself of dust and sweat, mentally adding sweet oil and a strigil to the list of things I would bring across next time I came to work. After I rinsed the dirt from my hair, I also added a comb to the list.
It was dark when I made my way back up Fountain Court. I felt tired but satisfied, as you do after hard labour. My muscles were stretched, but I had relaxed at the baths. I felt on top of life. Playing the thorough type, I stepped over to look under the cover and check my skip again.
In the gloom I nearly didn't see what was there. If I had still been tipping rubbish in, I would not have noticed a thing. That was somebody's intention. Rome being the city it is whoever put the young baby in the cart meant him no good. He was cute, and gurgling trustingly, but a baby who gets dumped by his keeper does not easily acquire another not unless he is grabbed by a woman who is purposely watching the middens in case someone abandons an unwanted newborn. Nobody in Fountain Court felt, that desperate. Whoever ditched this little one had left him to die. They would not have expected anybody else to pick him up and take him home.
Since it was me who found him, that was what I did.
XXV
ONLY YOU COULD do this!' Helena groaned.
`Your lucky day!' I told the babe. `Here's a nice lady who only wants to cuddle you. Listen to me. She's a pushover for big brown eyes and a showy grin -'
`This is no good, Marcus.'
`Very true. I'm determined to be firm. I'm not allowing other people's unwanted goods in my rubbish skip. I paid for it, and I've got plenty of clutter to shift for myself-'
`Marcus!'
`All right, but once I picked him up and took him out, what was I supposed to do? Lay him down in the gutter and just walk off?'
Helena sighed. `Of course not.'
`He'll have to find himself a, berth somewhere. This is just a temporary reprieve.' It had a callous ring.
I noticed Helena made no attempt to come and take the child. He stared at me, as, if he realized this could be the big tricky moment in his life. He was quite a few months old, enough to take notice of his surroundings anyway.
He looked healthy. His hair, which was dark and slightly curled, had been trimmed neatly. He wore a proper little tunic, in white, with embroidery at the neck. He had been wearing it much longer than he should, however. That kind of babywear usually belongs to families where the children are changed regularly, almost certainly by a nurse; this baby had not been cleaned up, perhaps for days. He was soiled and sore. I was handling him gingerly.
`Poor little fellow needs a bath.'
`I'll find you a big bowl,' snorted Helena. She was definitely not going to help.
`Luckily you've come to a home where the women are fierce but the men understand it's not your fault,' I told him. When I talked, he hardly seemed aware of me. I tickled his chin, and he did condescend to wave his feet and hands about.
He was a very quiet baby. Something about him was too subdued. I frowned, and Helena, who had by then brought me a bowl of warm water, looked at me closely the way she did when she thought I was drawing conclusions. `Do you think he has been mistreated?'
I had lain him on his back on a tunic on the table while I took the clothes off him. He was not afraid of being handled. He was plump, a good weight. There were no bruises or unhappy marks on him.
`Well, he looks unharmed. But there's something odd,' I mused. `He's too old, for one thing. Unwanted babies are abandoned at birth. This lost mite must be nearly a year old. Who keeps a child so long, looks after him, grows fond of him – and then carefully pushes him under a canvas in a rubbish skip?'
`Someone who knows it's your skip!' suggested Helena dryly.
`How could they? I only got it tonight. And if they wanted me to find him, why wait until I'd finished work, covered it up, and could not be expected to look inside again? I only found him by accident. He could have died of exposure or been gnawed by rats or anything.'
Helena was examining a loose cord around his neck, a twisted skein of coloured material. `What do you think this is? It's very fine thread,' she said, unravelling it partially. `One of the strands could be gold.'
`He's had an amulet probably. But where's it gone?'
'Too valuable to throw away with the child!' Helena Justina was growing angry now. `Some person felt able to abandon the baby – but made sure they kept his bulla.'
`Perhaps they removed it because it might have identified him?'
She shook her head sadly, commenting, `This never happens in stories. The lost child always has a jewel very carefully left with it so years later it can be proved to be the missing heir.' She softened slightly. `Maybe his mother cannot keep him, but has preserved his amulet as a memento.'
`I hope it breaks her heart! We'll make sure we keep his tunic,' I said. `I'll get Lenia to wash it, and I'll ask her if any of the laundry girls have seen it before. If they have they are bound to remember the embroidery.'
`Do you think he's a local baby?'
`Who knows?'
Somebody knew. If I had had more time, I might have traced his parents, but the rubbish-skip babe had picked the wrong moment to be dropped on me. Working with Petronius on the Emporium heist was going to take up all my energies. In any case, finding parents who don't want their babies is a dead-end job.
I had done the child a favour, but in the long run he might not thank me for it. He had been found in a district so poor that we who lived there could hardly keep ourselves alive. On the Aventine, three times as many children died in infancy as those who survived, and many of the survivors grew up with no life worth speaking of. There was little hope for him, even if I did find somebody to take him in. Who that could be I had no idea. Helena and I had our own troubles; at this stage we were certainly not available to foster unknown orphans. There were too
