A Pattern of Blood

Chapter Sixteen

‘Well, master,’ Junio said, as soon as we were in the street again, ‘that was an interesting visit. What, if anything, do you deduce from that?’

We were dodging between the wheels of ox carts and I stood aside, under the portico of the baths, to answer his question.

‘What do you think I deduce?’ I said wryly. ‘Julia has been lying to us, obviously. Marcus will take that badly.’ In fact, I was ashamed to find how badly I was taking it myself. Julia was a beautiful and wealthy lady, and however much I admired her independent spirit — and her more obvious charms — it was not up to me to be swayed by that and decide that she was automatically innocent. Those bloodstains were certainly suspicious. ‘Pluto take her, and the whole affair!’ I said savagely. I must have sounded harsher than I meant. Junio looked dismayed, and a passing bather, going into the building with his slaves, looked at me in surprise. I regretted my outburst instantly. ‘So, what do you deduce yourself?’

Junio gave me a doubtful look, but he answered the question soberly. It was the game we sometimes played, having him predict my conclusions, but it had a purpose: it not only taught him to reason clearly, but it often helped me to see things in a new light. ‘Certainly the lady did not get those stains from putting powder on her cheeks. Could they be from Sollers’s treatment, do you think? Did he bleed her, for instance?’

I shook my head dubiously. ‘I do not think so. The treatment he described to me did not involve bleeding the patient, and I think he would have mentioned it if it had. In any case, he is practised in the art. If he did bleed her, he would not have splashed her over-tunic in that way. And it cannot be accidental bleeding. Sollers favours gentle methods. My owner’s first wife was treated for childlessness, and during her treatment her cries used to petrify the household. They gave her fearsome fumigation, till she sobbed with inner scalding from the vapours, but even then I do not recall hearing that the treatment drew blood.’

‘Of course,’ Junio said suddenly, ‘Julia may not have been wearing the stola when she went to see Sollers. We know she went to her room to beautify herself. Perhaps she changed there into the Grecian coat you tell me she was wearing later. It might have made the treatment easier.’

It was an obvious possibility once he had suggested it, and I rewarded him with a smile. ‘Well reasoned, Junio.’ I refused to admit, even to myself, how much my pleasure was due to the fact that I could now find an explanation which left Julia innocent. I also refused to contemplate what I already knew — that she had been in the kitchens the night before, and could easily have tampered with the food. Julia would never have tried to poison me, I reasoned. If anything, she seemed to be drawn to intellect, and to find me flatteringly attractive.

(Foolish, I told myself. However warm and intimate her smiles, Julia would never have time for a humble pavement-maker — she belonged to men of substance and standing. And to Mutuus, some inner voice prompted hopefully — but I quelled it at once.)

All the same, Junio had a point. If Julia had taken off her robe, and left it unattended while she went to consult Sollers, then anyone could have taken it from her room. It was unlikely, but possible all the same. Maximilian, for example, had visited her room by his own admission. Perhaps he tried to implicate her by staining the stola with blood.

I was so pleased with this hypothetical solution that I felt positively benign. ‘I must find a moment to ask Sollers what she was wearing at the consultation,’ I said. ‘In the meantime, I see the baths are opening for male customers. I think I can afford a quadrans to go in.’

Junio gave me an impudent grin. ‘Going to indulge yourself, then, master? Do you wish me to go and fetch a towel and strigil for you, so that you can bathe?’

I thought about that for a moment. Allowing Junio to leave me unattended would cost me an extra as or two. Without him I should have to pay one of the attendants to oil my back, and another to watch my garments in the changing room. There is a merry little trick which is often played upon unwary bathers in Glevum: itinerant fraudsters come to the baths in old tunics, and leave wearing someone else’s new one. I did not imagine Corinium was any different, and my wardrobe was not so great that I could afford to take the risk.

On the other hand, I wanted to discover, if I could, exactly what Maximilian had been up to the day before. He had come here, I was fairly sure of that, because he had been attended by four of his father’s slaves. But the public baths are places for meeting people as much as for performing ablutions. I was particularly interested to know if Maximilian had spoken to anyone, and if so, what he had said about the day’s events.

‘Towel, strigil and oil, if you can find some,’ I said to Junio. ‘When you return, look for me on the stone benches outside the warm pool. Tell the attendant you have come for me and then he should not charge you to enter, but here is a quadrans for you, just in case. You can take the wine and bread back to the house for Rollo when you go.’

‘And I will inform the funeral guild for slaves,’ Junio suggested. ‘The chief slave told me where to find the house.’

I nodded. ‘And. . Junio?’

‘Master?’

I took out a little money and gave him my purse. ‘Look after this for me.’ I dropped a coin in his palm. ‘And here is the money for a honey cake for yourself. I think that you have earned it this last hour.’

He gave me a huge grin and disappeared into the crowd before I could change my mind. I watched him until he was out of sight, then paid my quadrans and went inside.

I love the public baths. Like underfloor heating, they are one of the best things the Romans ever brought with them. Of course, I am rarely in a position to enjoy them — not because of the entry price; baths rarely cost more than a tenth of an as even in the most expensive towns — but because in the ordinary way I have business to attend to. People like Quintus may attend to their affairs while sitting in the hot room with their friends, but a man who lays pavements cannot do it at a distance. My ablutions normally consist of the kind of minimal rinse and oiling I had received this morning.

It was with some anticipation, then, that I took off my toga and tunic and left them on the stone shelf in one of the little alcoves in the changing room, under the eye of a disreputable-looking attendant, who looked at my as coin with disdain. A man in a toga, his demeanour seemed to say, should be more generous with his tips. I had intended to ask the fellow about Maximilian, but it was clear that any gossip from this source would have to be bought, so I left my precious clothes with him, together with a veiled promise that there would be a further tip if I returned to find them intact.

That brought a sullen smile to his face, and I left him to it and went into the warm pool where I was soon soaking myself luxuriously. The room was disappointingly empty, however, since it was just past noon and few of the male customers had yet arrived. I would have to gain my information, if any, on my way back from the hotter sections. If necessary, I would have to bribe the youth guarding the tunics, although somehow I didn’t trust him. Cloakroom attendants are often casual opportunists, like the boys who offer to hold your horses in the street, rather than sober servants of the baths, and I had an uncomfortable feeling that I had seen this one somewhere before. Remembering the problems with missing tunics at Glevum, I even got up and gazed at him through the intervening arch. However, he was sitting on a stone bench looking bored, and my clothes were still clearly visible where I had left them, so I went back to my bathe.

I stayed for a little in the warm steam of the tepidarium, and then, as there was still no sign of Junio, paid the attendant for a phial of oil and went — perfumed but still dripping — into the dry heat of the laconicum.

It is not, in general, my preferred routine, insofar as I can be said to have a routine at all in a public bathhouse. When I go, I usually prefer the hot steam room, but if Quintus was to bequeath a new caldarium to the populace, it followed that the present one was less than satisfactory, so I chose the drier alternative. I sat for a few moments, feeling the heat opening my pores and making the oil run in little rivulets on my skin, but I am no Roman, and I cannot sustain those temperatures for long. I was about to return to conditions where I was less likely to sizzle, when the inner door opened and the man who had passed us on the entrance steps came in. He splashed a little oil on himself, as I have seen cooks baste a chicken, and sat down with care on the marble seat.

He was, from the snow-white toga he had worn when he arrived, a candidate for public office, and would not normally have given me a second glance, but in a bathhouse every man is equal, except perhaps the Jews. (Of course there are those, more Roman than the Romans, who affect special little tunics to bathe in, but even they would probably desist if they heard the comments which follow when they leave. Common opinion is that such men have something — or nothing much — to hide.)

He gave me an affable nod.

I decided to endure cooking for a little longer. ‘Very quiet in here today.’

He smiled. I noticed that his armpits were red and angry where he had just had them plucked in the inner room. He must have been a braver man than I am — I could never willingly have endured that torment, and I had not heard him so much as scream. ‘You should have been here yesterday.’

I gave him my full attention. ‘You were here then? Did you see Ulpius Maximilian here? The son of the decurion?’

The look of boiled affability faded. ‘You are a friend of his?’

‘Not really. I had business connections with his family,’ I said. It was stretching a point, since I had not yet officially acquired the contract for the pavement, but it raised my status in my companion’s eyes.

‘I see,’ he murmured sympathetically. ‘And now you will be seeking payment from the heir? The death of Quintus Ulpius is a bad business, in more respects than one. That young son of his is a wastrel. He owes money in all the wineshops of Corinium. He was in here yesterday, looking like a bedraggled traveller instead of a future councillor, whispering with that unpleasant creature who guards the clothes and slipping him money.’

It was the news I had been waiting for, and I got gratefully to my feet. ‘Then I must go and have a few words with the attendant myself,’ I said. ‘Good afternoon. Enjoy your bathe.’ I smiled at him and left hurriedly.

It felt cool in the tepidarium after the heat of the dry room. A few more minutes in there, I thought, and I could have saved the cooks the necessity of roasting the pig for the funeral feast. They could have stuffed baked plums and herbs into my mouth and served me up instead. To my delight, too, Junio was waiting for me, so I perched on a bench and let him strigil off the sweat, dirt and oil as I told him what I had discovered, and he then stood by with a towel while I plunged gratefully into the tepid pool.

I ignored the attractions of the entertainments — watching the wrestlers or losing my shirt on the fall of a dice — and finished my ablutions with a brief but bracing swim in the large cold pool outside, and went back shivering to claim my clothes. They were untouched, to my relief. I allowed Junio to dress me, and then, taking the attendant into a corner, took back my purse and drew out a few more quadrans for a tip. The attendant scowled at the size of the offering, but reached for it all the same.

I dropped the money into his palm. ‘By the way,’ I said conversationally, ‘what was it that Ulpius Maximilian was talking to you about yesterday?’

I had been prepared, secretly, to pay for the information; in fact, the poorness of the tip was caused, in part, by the need to keep some coins for the purpose. I need not have bothered, as it happened. The attendant looked at me in horror, as though I had offered to feed him to the wolves.

‘Well?’ I insisted. ‘And do not deny it — I have spies who saw you in conversation.’ I wondered, inwardly, what my companion of the hot room would think of being elevated to the role of spy, but this was not a time for niceties.

The attendant looked about him wildly as if seeking inspiration. ‘It was nothing. An argument about his clothes. He thought I had failed to guard them properly when he came to dress again. Nothing else, citizen, nothing at all.’

It was a more intelligent lie than I had expected. Nine times out of ten he would have been believed, and even a doubter would find it difficult to disprove the story. Now, however, he was unlucky. This was the proverbial tenth time out of ten.

‘No,’ I said, in the same conversational tone, ‘I dare say that you have a dozen such confrontations every day, but it was not what you were discussing with Maximilian. He sent his clothes from here directly to the fuller’s, and had his slaves bring fresh ones when he left, because he needed to leave here wearing mourning. He did not have garments in your changing room. Besides, he was seen to give you money. He would hardly do that if he was dissatisfied. No, he was paying you for something. And I don’t imagine he was trading in second-hand tunics.’

A look of panic crossed the attendant’s face. ‘Hush, citizen, I beg you, not so loud. It was a private matter. A favour that I did for him. He was paying me for my services.’

This fellow had a strange definition of ‘favours’, I thought, but the explanation was plausible enough. It was well known that attendants at the baths in any town — if they were not slaves, and sometimes if they were — turned a dishonest as or two by acting as pimps for local dancing girls. Sometimes, if they could afford it, they lent money at exorbitant interest to bathers who had lost all their cash at the poolside gambling games. It fitted the picture I had of Quintus’s son.

The attendant smiled at me hopefully. It was an unctuous, unwholesome, lopsided smile, and it was unmistakable. As soon as I saw it I realised where I had seen the youth before. This was the same fellow who had accosted us at the gates this morning, asking for Maximilian.

I taxed him with it at once. ‘So that was why you came to the house this morning? To ask for more payment? It must have been a significant favour.’ It was, I thought, a singularly inopportune moment to choose, when Quintus had just died. ‘Were you aware of what had happened to his father? You knew about the stabbing?’

The effect was extraordinary. The attendant turned first white, then pink, as if he had been plunged into his own cold pool, and sweat began to stand out on his forehead. His voice almost failed him as he croaked, ‘If you knew about it too, citizen, why didn’t you say so to begin with?’ He looked suspiciously to right and left as if the statues in their niches might be listening. ‘What is it you want, part of the money? There’s no need to come to me, citizen. Now that his father is dead, there should be enough for us both.’