The Ides of April

XXXIX

Some informers lead different lives from mine. Those big names will be insulted by satirists and historians, but hardly care because they retire on their profits to luxury villas with delicious cliff-top settings above gem-like azure seas. I mean the famous faces who prosecute in notorious court cases. True, they are despicable tools of despotic emperors, but they can balance public loathing against the simple joy of fine working conditions. Their offices are elegant. Discreet staff pad about, carrying silver salvers. Their hours are short and convenient. When they have to travel, assuming an emergency where no agents can be sent on the errand for them, it is in immense style and comfort, all plush litters and an enormous entourage, with many stops for sustenance, which will include vintage wines and potted lobster, served by naked Numidian boys under a demountable canopy. With tassels.

As a one-woman outfit, this was not my way. But for my father stepping in to loan me a ride, I would have been standing at the roadside on the Via Appia, trying to hitch a lift in a haycart. Those haycart drivers are all beasts, believe me.

Instead I was graced with a certain Felix and his mule, Kicker, the deathless team that made up the auction house's secret money-moving cart. This was by definition ramshackle. It had to look fifty years old with a rickety axle, a vehicle so unsophisticated nobody could be using it for anything other than transporting three chickens and a very smelly woolsack. In reality, the axle was well-oiled and the wheels were new. It had a false floor, beneath which lay a reinforced compartment to hold treasure and/or coinage in bulk. Kicker had knock-knees, but if you fed her as much fodder and water as she wanted, she could be a deceptively smooth mover. Felix was the most inappropriate person ever named Happy or Fortunate, living proof that nobody can tell how a babe-in-arms will turn out when they are imposing its lifetime label. We used him because he could be relied on in roadside inns; everyone would shun this glum-face, so he never got sozzled in the wrong company and told prospecting highway robbers he was carrying money. The hens, who had been named by my sisters, were called Piddle, Diddle and Willykins. They were devils for pecking passengers.

Felix collected me from the old laundry, with Postumus already looking unhappy in the cart. Wheeled vehicles were not supposed to work in Rome in daylight hours, but exceptions were made for builders' carts so Felix had long mastered the art of keeping a plank in the back to look legal. I told my brother this was so we had a handy plank with us, ready to lay down across any marshy ground when we stopped on the journey to pee behind a bush. Postumus was horrified; he could not bear teasing.

Some boys would have brought their toy charioteers to play with harmlessly. He had his ferret. It was called Ferret. That was the kind of wild imagination my little brother not only had, but was proud to own.

I asked Felix, who confirmed my fears that ferrets and chickens do not mix. Indeed they don't. We spent the entire trip with Ferret going crazy as he tried to get at the three hens.

I remember visiting Aricia as a young girl. My parents had gone to the shrine of Diana at Nemi, during one of their official top-secret missions. Nobody can talk about some of their mad adventures. My pa won't be able to publish his memoirs for about two thousand years.

When we stayed there before, it was a grim mid-December stopover at a hideous inn. This had given me a poor impression of a place that I now found to be extremely prosperous. As the first staging-post on the well-travelled route between Rome and southern Italy, Aricia was in a prime position to persuade folks to part with cash while they were still in a good mood. Hanging up on the outer rim of the Alban Hills, its climate was airy. Its situation was equally fine, with gorgeous views down a sweet valley that must be an old volcanic crater, views that extended away to the sea in the misty distance. These benefits, combined with its closeness to the city, had drawn many Roman families of good name and even better finances to have second homes in the area. For their culinary delight, rich volcanic soil furnished the market stalls with excellent vegetables, there was a fabulous local dish of pork cooked with fennel, wine was made and the mountain strawberries were justly famous. A further bonus was the start of a three-mile sacred way through the woods to Nemi, with its beautifully sited lakeside shrine to Diana in her role as the goddess of painless childbirth. Fashionable medical services on offer included conception guidance for the freeborn rich, who flocked in droves.

Obviously much advice at this shrine involved intercession with the goddess and prayer, expensive processes to buy, but possibly supplicants were also told, "Have more sex," which made the visit worth the money. I bet it worked too. Nemi certainly had a wonderful reputation, plus an income to match.

My father reckoned if they were bribed an extra fee by the childless, the priests would help out. He's appalling.

But so often right.

At Aricia was a virtually forgotten shrine to Ceres. Also a fertility divinity, although unlike Diana specifically not virginal, Ceres in her wheat-stalk crown was honoured with busts and seated statues, nursing two young children. Abundant motherhood depressed the couples struggling to have babies who came to Nemi, so this shrine was short of benefactors. It lacked all the elegant facilities at Diana's nearby complex.

Nor did being dumped among its dilapidated acolytes hold much appeal for the spinsterish maid of Laia Gratiana. I found her moping. If she had been dumped here for her own safety, she was certainly not grateful.

I had left Felix and our luggage at what I hoped was a different travellers' mansio from the one my parents cursed previously. I had to bring Postumus with me. You can't leave a boy with a ferret on his own at an inn. With his surly, insulting attitude, he was bound to be grabbed by kidnappers in mistake for a consul's son and shipped off to a village in Sardinia. The bandits would be stuck with him, as he complained about the conditions they held him in and criticised their inefficiency at negotiations. We would pay no ransom. The crestfallen gang would end up desperately pleading for us to take my brother off their hands. Worse, Postumus would soon be running the racket, a task that would suit him, but that was no life for a ferret and, as a convinced animal lover, I had to think about Ferret's future.

Postumus said nothing during my interview; even Ferret stayed down inside his tunic and rarely poked his head out. My brother was never any trouble at work. He liked to watch whatever was going on and decide how much better he himself would have done it.

Venusia flapped around, trying to distract me by querying whether my dear little boy would like some fruit juice or a bowl of raisins. Postumus had never been a child who accepted juice from nagging ladies who treated him like a three-year-old. Even when he was actually three, he behaved like an old man, an old man who had several wives buried out under the woodhouse floor with hatchets in their heads. He gave Venusia his stare, the one that asked openly why did this stupid woman not know all he wanted was to be allowed to go into the sacred woods and find a hedgehog to dismember as bloodily as possible?

During their tussle over the juice, I had a chance to look at Venusia. I was shocked that she was no longer a girl. You tend to assume a lady's maid is a young person, whose conversation will be more fun for the lady and who can be bossed about or even beaten; the plaque I had been shown of Marcia Balbilla's had certainly portrayed her as youthful. Mind you, Marcia had freely admitted she had that depiction of Ino made more attractive for the salon wall than true-to-life.

Venusia was a woman of a certain age, that age being in my estimate forty-five. Not quite due for retirement (because maids have to flog away for years, patting the pimples of mistresses who are determined never to lose their assistants), but verging on loss of hope, I thought. Andronicus' description of her as a gargoyle went too far, but that was a man's dismissal of any older woman who was no flirty honeycake. She had an awkward body, a face spoiled by a prominent wart, and an uncompromising manner. From what I knew, Laia Gratiana was a match for her, but with other employers Venusia would have been a bully.

I explained I had come to ask about the incident with Ino. Venusia looked hostile. In the usual getting-to-know-you session, I slyly slipped in questions about when Laia and Faustus were married. "What did you think about that?"

"She could have done a lot better."

"You were not keen?"

"I never liked him."

Now I had seen her, I wondered if this was because Faustus for his part had not cared for Venusia? Any young husband may resent a maid who is too close to his wife, exercising an influence on her that he may see as unhelpful to him, especially if he and the wife are none too compatible in the first place. Venusia would be older than Laia by around ten years, possibly first trained by Laia's mother; she was a woman who had been placed in charge of a bride when the bride herself was still a girl. She might have deep-seated bonds to Laia's family that overrode the new bonds she should have to the marriage. Personally, I would have got rid of her. I don't only mean, if I had been Manlius Faustus. I would have done it if I had been Laia.

I decided immediately that there had been no relationship between Faustus and this woman. Even now, nearly a decade after the divorce, her dark eyes burned with contempt when she mentioned him. Just supposing at some early point she had thought him good-looking and nursed a passion for him, it must have been one-sided and had ended abortively. "I am told you have always been tremendously loyal to your mistress?"

Venusia sneered. "You mean, when he cheated, and I found out, I made sure she knew about it?"

"Yes, I did mean that. How did you find out, incidentally?"

"I noticed he was behaving as if he was up to something. I smelled the woman's perfume on him. I marched along and talked to the slaves at the other house. They soon told me."

"So they were fully aware of the illicit goings-on?"

Venusia scoffed. "Of course! You don't think it is ever hidden from the staff? People are fools to believe what they get up to on a couch never gets noticed."

"Oh, people are fools all right!.. Did Faustus make eyes at anybody else?"

"Not that I know."

"Never?"

"Once was enough. Laia Gratiana was too good to be messed about that way."

"You didn't regard him as a predator? He never made a move on you?

"You are joking!"

"Believe me, it has been suggested."

"By idiots!"

"Well, he does have supporters. His people make out his affair was a single, stupid mistake."

"Then he did it to the wrong person. She had me to look after her." Even now, Venusia was unforgiving. Laia too, presumably. I wondered how far, then and now, the maid's insistence on punishing Faustus had leached into the wronged wife's perception.

"Venusia, do you think Manlius Faustus blames you for the loss of his marriage?"

"We have nothing to do with him, so I wouldn't care to say." She said it anyway. "But no, I reckon he blames himself. Which is right. It was his own fault."

"So would he be harbouring a grudge against you still?"

"Oh, I don't suppose he likes me!" proclaimed Venusia proudly. "But I don't expect he ever thinks about it."

"He would not be a man to brood over revenge for many years?"

"Hardly!" Again, the woman sneered. "Too much effort. He never had that much staying power."

"A friend of mine suggested Faustus may have intended to harm you, but made a mistake and attacked Ino."

"It's rubbish. Who said that?"

"Someone from the aedile's office."

"Your fancy man!"

"You know Andronicus?" I was startled.

"I do not! I've seen him. The office is right by the temple. We recognise men who work there. I know he goes around with you." The maid sounded scornful. "It's the talk of the place."

I hate being the subject of gossip, though I kept my temper. I felt a strong need to move on. "Well, we were discussing Faustus. Are you frightened of him?"

"I certainly am not."

"So who are you frightened of, Venusia?"

"I am not frightened of anybody."

"Then why," I asked, "are you stuck out here in these thickets, a day's journey from Rome, in a run-down shrine with no passing trade? While your mistress is taking part in the year's most sacred ceremonies and must have a need for you?" There was not a flicker. "Tell me, Venusia, who are you hiding from?"