from the shore of the Lethe using sheer determination and vegetable broth. After she had saved him I came home from a trip to Baetica to find a bond between them that was as strong as if Ma had fostered an orphaned duck.
Anacrites' respect for my mother was only slightly less revolting than her reverence for him.
It was Ma's idea to foist him on to me. Believe me, the arrangement would only stay in place until I found someone else. In any case, Anacrites was officially on sick leave from his old job. That was why I could hardly appear at the Palace listing him as half my partnership: the Palace was already paying him to do nothing on account of his terrible head wound, and his superiors must not find out he was moonlighting.
Just one of those additional complications that keep life sweet.
Strictly speaking I already had one partner. She shared my problems and laughed at my mistakes; I was assisted in doing my accounts, solving puzzles, and even sometimes conducting interviews by my live-in love, Helena. If nobody took her seriously as a business associate it was partly because women have no legal identity. Besides, Helena was a senator's daughter; most people still believed she would leave me one day. Even after three years of the closest kind of friendship, after traveling abroad with me, and bearing my child, Helena Justina was still expected to grow tired of me and flee back to her forn1er life. Her illustrious father was the same Camillus Verus who gave me the idea of working for the Censors; her noble mother, Julia Justa, would be only too happy to send a chair to fetch Helena home.
We lived as subtenants in a dire first-floor apartment on the rough side of the Aventine. We had to wash the baby at the public baths and have our baking done at a pie shop. Our dog had brought us several rats as presents, which we reckoned she had caught pretty close to home. This was why I needed decent work, with healthy incomings. The senator would be delighted that his chance remarks had given me the idea for it. He would be even more proud if he ever found out that in the end it was Helena who obtained the work for me.
“Marcus, would you like Papa to ask Vespasian to offer you work with the Censors?”
“No,” I said.
“I thought not.”
“You mean I'm pigheaded?”
“You like to do things for yourself.” Helena replied calmly. She could be at her most insulting when she pretended to be fair.
She was a tall girl, with a strict expression and a searing glance. People who had expected me to find myself some bonny piece with lambs wool where her brains should be were still surprised at my choice, but once I had met Helena Justina I reckoned on sticking with her for as long as she would have me. She was neat, scathing, intelligent, wondrously unpredictable. I still could not believe my luck that she had even noticed me, let alone that she lived in my apartment, was the mother of my baby daughter, and had taken charge of my disorganized life.
The gorgeous armful knew that she could run rings around me, and that I loved to let her do it. “Well Marcus, darling, if you won't be going back to the Palace this afternoon, could you possibly assist me with an errand on the other side of the city?”
“Of course,” I agreed handsomely. Anything to put myself out of reach of Anacrites.
Helena's errand required us to take a hired carrying chair for a distance that made me wonder if the sparse coins in my arm purse would cover the fare. First she dragged us to a warehouse that my auctioneer father owned near the Emporium. He allowed us to use the back end to store things that we had picked up on our travels which were waiting for the day when we had a decent house. I had built a partition to keep Pa out of our section of the warehouse, since he was the sort of entrepreneur who would sell off our carefully chosen treasures for less than we paid for them, then think he had done us a favour.
On today's escapade I was just a passenger. Helena made no attempt to explain. Various shapeless bales that were obviously none of my business were collected from store and piled on a donkey, then we skirted the Forum and headed over the Esquiline.
We traveled north for ages. Peering through the ragged modesty curtain of our conveyance I saw we were outside the old Servian Walls, apparently aiming for the Praetorian Camp. I made no comment. When people want to have secrets, I just let them get on with it.
“Yes, I've taken a lover in the Guards,” said Helena. Joking, presumably. Her idea of a rough entanglement was me: sensitive lover, loyal protector, sophisticated raconteur, and would-be poet. Any Praetorian who thought to persuade her otherwise would get my boot up his arse.
We went right around the Camp, and came on to the Via Nomentana. Shortly afterwards we stopped and Helena jumped out. I followed, in surprise because I expected to find her among the winter brassicas in some out of season market garden. Instead, we were parked at a large villa just beyond the Nomentana Gate. It looked substantial, which was a puzzle. Nobody who had enough cash for a decent house would normally choose to live so far outside the city-let alone within spitting reach of the Praetorians. The occupants would be deafened when all those big bastards were drunk on pay day, and the incessant trumpets and tramping would drive most folk demented.
The location was neither city nor country. There was neither hilltop panorama nor river view. Yet we were looking at the kind of high, blank walls that normally surround luxurious amenities owned by people who don't want the public knowing what they own. In case we doubted it, the heavy front door with its antique dolphin knocker and well-tended urns of formally clipped bay, announced that somebody lived here who felt like quality (not always the same thing as actually being it, of course).
I still said nothing, and was allowed to stay helping to unload the bales, while my dearest skipped up to the forbidding portal and disappeared inside. Eventually I myself was led indoors by a silent slave in a firmly belted white tunic, then passed through a traditional short corridor to an atrium where I could hang about until required. I had been labeled a supernumerary who would wait for Helena as long as needed: true. Apart from the fact I never abandoned her amongst strangers, I was not going home yet. I wanted to know where I had come and what happened here. Left alone, I soon obeyed my itchy feet, and set off to explore.
It was nice. My word, it was. For once taste and money had combined successfully. Light-filled corridors headed in every direction to gracious rooms painted with decorous, slightly old-fashioned frescos. (The house seemed so quiet I brazenly opened doors and looked inside.) The scenes were architectural cityscapes or grottos with idyllic pastoral life. The rooms housed padded couches with footstools, side-tables positioned for convenience, elegant bronze candelabra; the occasional statuary included one or two busts of the old unnaturally handsome Julio-Claudian imperial family and a smiling head of Vespasian, apparently predating his accession as Emperor.
I reckoned the place had been built in my lifetime: that meant new money. The lack of painted battle scenes, trophies or phallic symbols, together with the preponderance of women's chairs, made me guess it could be a wealthy widow's house. Objects and furniture were expensive, though chosen for use rather than purely decorative. The owner had money, taste, and a practical outlook.
It was a quiet home. No children. No pets. No braziers against the winter coolness. Apparently almost unlived in. Nothing much going on today.
Then I caught a low murmur of female voices. Following the sound, I came to a colonnade of grey stone pillars forming an enclosed peristyle garden, so sheltered that the rampaging rose-bushes still bore occasional flowers even though it was December. Four rather dusty laurels marked the corners and a huge stone fountain bowl stood silent in the center space.
Strolling out into the garden casually I cam upon Helena Justina with another woman. I knew who she was; I had seen her before. She was just a freed slave, an ex-secretary from the Palace-yet potentially the most influential woman in the Empire today. I straightened up. If the rumours about how she used her position were true, then more power might be wielded on the sly in this isolated villa than in any other private house in Rome.
3
THEY HAD BEEN laughing quietly, two straight-backed civilized, unselfconscious women braving the weather as
