delicately poised tier of mortgages allowed them to live in a tolerable style. For instance, when they had invited us to dinner, they sent their carrying chair for Helena and the baby. We stuffed it full of presents and Julia’s toys. I carried the baby. Helena was bringing letters from her brother, a bright sprig called Quintus Camillus Justinus whom I knew fairly well.
Helena had two brothers, both younger than her and both heavily bossed by her when they strayed too close. The elder, Aelianus, had been betrothed to an heiress from Baetica in southern Spain. The younger, Justinus, ran off with her. I had gone to Tripolitania, funded by the senator, with a brief to find the eloping pair. I knew it was thought to be my fault that Claudia Rufina had decided to swap brothers. Untrue, of course: she fell for the one with better looks and a more attractive character. But I had been involved in first bringing her to Rome as a prospective bride for Aelianus, and the senator’s wife had long held the opinion that anything touched by M. Didius Falco was bound to go wrong. In that, Julia Justa was following the views of my own family, so I made no attempt to disprove her theory. May as well live with the grief you know.
Helena and I had found that under the stress of desert conditions the young lovers had fallen out, but we ignored their finer feelings and cobbled them back together. We persuaded Justinus to cut his losses and marry Claudia (and her money), first sending the couple on a visit to Spain in order to reconcile her wealthy grandparents.
Justinus had been searching for silphium, the extinct luxury condiment. He had hoped to rediscover it and make millions. Once that mad plan had failed, the only way I could prevent him running off to be a hermit was to lure him into replacing Anacrites as my partner. He had no qualifications, and since he had now gone off to Spain indefinitely, at my third attempt to find a partner I had stuck myself with one who knew absolutely nothing-and who was not even available.
Helena had decided we could all share a house (which might explain why she had told the Flamen Pomonalis that we lived on the Janiculan). Knowing her, she had probably bought a place already. Watching her work around to telling me would give me hours of secret fun.
You might think that securing a Baetican olive oil fortune and a pleasant wife for their talented boy would earn me laurel wreaths from Justinus’ parents. Unfortunately, it still left them with the problem of their disgruntled elder son. Aelianus had lost the money, lost his bride, and had to stand down from the senate elections for a year, all because his brother had made him look a fool. Whatever his parents felt about the resolution to his brother’s life, Aelianus was the one they now had sulking at home. A young man in his twenties, with no occupation and very few manners, can dominate a household even if he spends most of his time out on the town.
“It seems best to let him alarm the neighbors with his rowdy friends,” murmured the senator on our arrival. “So far he has not actually been arrested or brought home on a trestle covered in blood.”
“Is Aulus joining us for dinner?” asked Helena, using Aelianus’ family name yet trying to disguise the fact that she hoped not. The dutiful elder sister, she always wanted to be fair, but of the two boys, Justinus was much more like her in temperament and attitude.
“Probably not,” Camillus Verus, her father, replied. He was a tall, shrewd, humorous man with sprouting gray-tinged hair that his barber had still not successfully tamed. I noticed a hunted air when he spoke of his sons.
“At a party?” I asked.
“This may sound hard to believe, but I have been trying to get him into one of the priesthoods-give him some honors to his name. If he is where he is supposed to be, it’s the Sacred Grove of the Arval Brothers. This is the main day of their annual ceremonial.”
I whistled approvingly. It seemed the polite thing to do. The chosen clique presided over festivals and religious holidays, with an additional remit to pray for the good fortune of the imperial family. The Arval Brothers’ activities derived from the dawn of history, when they had prayed for the health and fruitfulness of crops-in token of which, they all wore chaplets of corn tied on with white ribbons. The thought of the rather gruff Aelianus bedecked with a corn-ear crown made a hilarious climax to a good dinner. But frankly, if a son of mine wanted to join the corn-dolly brethren, I would lock him in the broom cupboard until the fantasy sweated out of him.
“So-tell us your news, Marcus.”
I announced my elevation and brushed aside congratulations like a good modest Roman. “I warn you, sir, my conversation is limited nowadays to ways of worming poultry. My life is now fixed by the ritual events of the goddess Juno’s calendar.”
“What-no more informing?” I caught his eye briefly. Decimus, as I was sometimes emboldened to call him, was a close friend of Vespasian, and I never knew quite how much he knew about my official work.
“Stuck with the birds.”
He grinned frankly. “You deserve the status, but can’t you ditch the aviary?”
“I am supposed to feel honored.”
“Bugger that!”
Helena’s mother gave him a sad look, and decided to lead me to my dining couch before her rude husband infected her newly respectable son-in-law with disreputable views. Until now, I had been the dangerous republican and Decimus the conventional Curia hack. I felt slightly unnerved.
As we reclined, Julia Justa placed olive bowls and saffron prawns before me with her long beringed hands. Helena leaned over and stole the prawns. “Tell me, Marcus,” said her mother, resplendent in white and gold that glittered almost as much as her new, worrying friendliness. “I have always wondered-how exactly do they persuade the Sacred Geese to stay on their purple cushion when they are being transported in a procession?”
“I’ll find out for you. I suspect they make them hungry first, then a man walks alongside with a fistful of grain to bribe them to sit still.”
“Like taking a child to a party,” said Helena. Her mother looked approvingly at ours, who was sitting quietly in the arms of a slave, chewing her pottery rattle; she had even tactfully chosen to gnaw a toy her grandparents had bought for her.
Planning her moment. Little Julia knew how to disrupt mealtimes. She had learned new skills since the estimable Camilli last had a chance to dote on her.
“Isn’t she good!”
Helena and I smiled the shameless public smiles of experienced parents. We had had a year to learn never to confess that our cutelooking dimpled baby could be a screaming troublemaker. We had dressed her nicely in white, combed her soft dark hair into a sweet curl, and now we were waiting with our nerves on edge for the inevitable moment when she decided to roar and rampage.
It was, as always, a good dinner, one which would have been more enjoyable had I felt able to relax. I liked Helena’s father and no longer disliked her mother. They seemed to have accepted that they were stuck with me. Perhaps they had also noticed that I had not yet lived up to expectations and made their daughter unhappy, nor had I been thrown in jail (well, not lately), barred from any public buildings, lampooned in any scurrilous satires, or featured in the rogues’ gallery in the Daily Gazette. Even so, at these gatherings there was always a risk somebody would say something offensive. Sometimes I thought Decimus secretly hoped for the thrill of it. He had a wicked streak. I knew it well; he had passed it on intact to Helena.
“Papa and Mama, you can help us with something,” said Helena over the dessert course. “Do either of you know anything about Laelius Numentinus, the Flamen Dialis, and his family?”
“What’s your problem with a flamen?” her father demanded.
“Well, I have had an early run-in with the silly old bastard,” I hedged, “though it was not face-to-face.”
“Naturally. You’d be at arm’s length, held off with his precious wand.”
“No, he has been retired; his wife died and he had to stand down. Not that it stops him complaining, apparently. The first thing that greeted me in my new post was a crisis caused by his displeasure at unwanted goslings scampering about the Capitol. I managed to avoid meeting him, or I would have been very brusque.”
“After a lifetime of being protected from close contact with the real world, he can’t be good with people-or birds.” Decimus had a definite scorn for the flaminical caste. I had always liked him. He had no time for hypocrisy. And although he was a senator, I reckoned he was politically straight. No one could buy him. That was why he had no money, of course.
He knew few of the right people either; he admitted that Laelius Numentinus was simply a figure glimpsed at public ceremonies.
“What happened to the goslings, Marcus?” asked his wife with amusement.
