Caveat emptor

33

Tilla knew people were lying to her. She knew because she would have done the same if a Catuvellauni woman had turned up at home and started asking questions about one of her own neighbors: even one as distinctive as this Grata seemed to be. She wished she had thought to ask Dias where the housekeeper had gone. Instead she had hoped that if she hung around near the water-pipe on the corner for long enough, she could strike up a conversation with somebody who could tell her. But the Catuvellauni townsfolk had come and gone, shaking their heads as they splashed water into their jars and buckets and sometimes over their feet. Several people knew who Grata was, but none admitted to knowing where to find her.

Tilla glanced around the streets that had been busy when they arrived. Most of the carts had gone now, taking their owners home from market. There was still plenty of light but the evening chill was beginning to creep in, and there was hardly anyone about. People who needed water had already been to fetch it. Now they were in their homes preparing their dinner. She should get back. Camma should not be left too long on her own. She bent to heave up the two buckets she had taken from the deserted kitchen.

At that moment she saw a small brisk woman in her midtwenties hurrying from the direction of the Forum. The woman was dressed in the fine-woven plaid of a local, but her coloring spoke of ancestors in one of those impossibly hot and dry places across the sea. Tilla lowered the buckets to the ground.

The woman walked straight up to her and said in British, “Who are you, and why are you asking for me?”

Tilla explained, adding, “Camma was expecting to find you at the house.”

Grata tilted up her chin. “The master and his brother disappeared,” she said. “ She went off to Londinium, and I’m left with people banging on the door at all hours shouting “where’s our money?” And they were the polite ones. The council came around wanting to know where he was and searching the house and then I woke up in the middle of the night with a bunch of drunks outside trying to piss through the window.”

Tilla said, “When we got there, people were stealing the furniture.”

“I told them to clear off,” Grata said, as if that might have kept everyone out once she had left. “More than once.”

“I am sorry for you. But now she is back, your mistress needs you. She has a man to mourn and a new son to look after.”

The woman hitched the basket up her arm. “He was my master, but she was never my mistress. I’m not a slave, you know.”

The refusal to call Camma by name or show any interest in the baby was not promising, but Tilla pressed on. “I did not mean to insult. But she needs help, and I will be gone in a day or two.”

“I’ve got a job in a bakery now. You’ll have to find somebody else.”

“Do you know anybody?”

The silence suggested that no one else would want the job, either. “She should go back where she came from.”

Tilla said, “She can’t.”

“It’s no good you looking at me like that. She made her choice. Ask anyone: They’ll tell you the same.”

Tilla tried again. “I can’t pretend that Camma did a wise thing,” she said. “But I’m asking you-”

“Look, it was a job. I kept house and I got paid for it. It was all fine till she came along causing trouble. I tried to tell him, and so did his brother, but he wouldn’t listen.”

Tilla tried a different approach. “Do you know what happened to them?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Nothing,” admitted Tilla. “But it is to Camma. Who do you think would want to hurt them?”

Grata shrugged. “How should I know?”

“I heard there was trouble about the baby.”

The dark eyes narrowed. “You’ve been hearing a lot. For a Northerner.”

“Northerners have ears too. Do you think that magistrate she married-”

Grata’s slender hand clutched at her arm. “I don’t think things about magistrates,” she hissed, “and if I did I wouldn’t be fool enough to talk about them with strangers in the street. They were asking for trouble, and they got it.”

“I’m sorry. I am only a midwife trying to help a patient.”

Grata released her grip. “I’ve no quarrel with you. You don’t know what you’re meddling in.”

“I have a husband to go back to. I promise there will be money to pay you if-”

“How many times? I have another job!”

Tilla shook her head. “I am sad to find this is how things are in the South.”

“Hah! Well, maybe it’s all very friendly up where you come from, but round here if you want to fit in, you have to behave like a decent woman.”

There was something about the words that recalled Tilla’s own loneliest moments in faraway Gaul. “It is not easy being different,” she said. “I am sorry to have wasted your time.”

Grata shifted awkwardly. “Yes. Well, I’m sorry I can’t help. But-”

“I know,” said Tilla, crouching to heave up the buckets. “You have a new job.”