Caveat emptor

39

There was no need to go to the stables to find Rogatus: Outside the mansio the overseer’s bandy legs were stationed next to a vehicle whose roof was being loaded with luggage.

“You wanted to see it before it went out, boss.”

The carriage was old and much repaired. Ruso walked all around it, conscious that Dias was watching him and wishing he knew what he was looking for. There was a fresh scrape along one side at about the right height for the overhanging oak. Other signs of damage to the woodwork could have been caused by wear and tear. There were no marks that looked like weapon scars. Rogatus, who clearly thought this was a waste of time, said he could see nothing, either.

“Perhaps,” said Ruso, crouching to squint along the shadowy line of a mud-spattered axle and wondering who wanted him out of town, “you could remind me exactly what Asper said about where he was going.”

“He was on the way to your office, boss,” replied the man without hesitation. “He’d got the tax money ready to go.”

Noting that he had now become boss instead of sir, Ruso said, “Did he mention calling on anyone on the way?”

“Not a word, boss.”

“And you’ve no idea why he was setting out so late?”

“I never asked. He could have made it before dark, though.”

Ruso moved to the front and eyed the hefty team of four who would pull the carriage to its next destination. “Are these-?”

“That’s them,” Rogatus confirmed.

One horse was munching thoughtfully on its bit. Another bent its neck to rub its muzzle against an itch on its left foreleg. None looked highly strung. Rogatus had rightly described the carriage as a “heavy old vehicle” and Ruso suspected the weight must be near the limit of their strength. Evidently the overseer did not believe in wasting horsepower. This was not a carriage that could outrun a mounted enemy, and he could see why it had not been stolen for a fast getaway.

He approached the weather-beaten native who was loading the luggage. “Are you the regular driver?”

“It’s no good talking to him, boss,” put in Rogatus. “He don’t know a thing.”

The native sniffed, wiped his nose on the back of his hand, and swung a heavy bag up into the carriage. “At least I know how to drive.” Continuing in Latin that was effective rather than elegant, he added, “Him over there, he tell me there is no work for the day, then he give my team to some fool who lose them on the road and he think I will not find out.”

Rogatus pretended not to have heard. “Like I said before, boss, I was doing the tax man a favor. Most of us around here”-plainly this excluded the sniffing driver-“know how to show a bit of respect to authority.”

“Hah!” said the driver before Ruso could answer. “It is himself he is doing the favor to. The tax man drives, and the driver gets no wages.”

“The driver might get some wages,” said Rogatus, “If he got off his backside a bit more often.”

The driver tutted. “It is lucky I am a patient man,” he said, shaking his head as if contemplating the horrors that would ensue if he were not. “Without me here, his stables will fall to pieces.”

Rogatus gave the smallest of shrugs, as if the driver were not worth the effort of more. “Good luck getting any sense out of that one, boss. I tell you, if the rest of him worked as hard as his mouth, he’d be a wonder.”

The driver stabbed a rude gesture toward Rogatus’s departing back before bending to lift the next trunk. Ruso could imagine returning in twenty years’ time to find the pair of them toothless and shriveled with age, propping up opposite ends of the same bar and still complaining about each other over their beers to anyone who would listen.

The driver gasped a few choice words in British as he heaved up the weight of the trunk. It landed on the floor of the carriage with a crash. “What is it women put in these things?” he demanded.

“Crockery,” said Ruso.

The driver stepped back from the door. “You want a look, then? Have a look.”

Ruso climbed in, and out, and learned nothing other than the fact that today’s passengers had vast amounts of luggage. He was outside on the driver’s seat assessing how well he could see approaching robbers when a boy’s voice announced, “That’s a new driver.”

Ruso turned and recognized the officer’s family he had seen stopping to use the latrines at the posting station yesterday. He explained his presence with, “I’ve just finished checking your vehicle.”

“He is here to ask questions,” the real driver explained. “The last man who take it is murder on the road and the horses run off.”

The woman gave a small squeak of terror and clutched at both children.

“No problems, mistress,” the driver continued, giving her a grin that displayed a solitary tooth and slapping the nearest horse on the neck as if to show how dependable it was. “All safe with me today.”

Ruso climbed down, fixing him with the same look that had frightened Albanus’s young followers and the innkeeper’s wife. The driver did not seem to notice.

“Was it the natives?” asked the girl, peering wide eyed from behind her mother’s skirts.

“Of course it was,” the boy said. “I bet they tied him up and stuck a big spike through his-”

“No they didn’t!” said Ruso and the mother in unison.

At that moment the riders who had been escorting the family yesterday clattered out of the stables and halted, two in front of the vehicle and two behind. Ruso had just promised the mother that she would be perfectly safe when Serena’s voice called out from the top of the mansio steps, “Of course you’ll be safe! I hope Ruso hasn’t been frightening you with some silly nonsense about the natives?”

The woman was looking up at Serena with the expression of a stray dog begging to be taken in.

“Absolutely not,” insisted Ruso.

“Good,” said Serena. “There’s no need to worry about the natives down here. You’ll meet the dangerous tribes in the North.” After these words of doubtful comfort, she added, “Have a good journey!”

“You’ll be fine,” Ruso assured the woman. “You’re on the main road and you have a good escort.”

“But that poor man who was-”

“He was a native himself,” said Ruso, knowing that would reassure her. “He was known to be carrying a lot of money and he had no guards with him.”

The woman said, “Why not?”

“That’s what I’m trying to work out.” He glanced across at Dias, who seemed to be more interested in the maid sweeping the steps, and wondered whether he knew.

Before leaving he stepped back inside the mansio and told Serena and the cousin that if there were any urgent messages, he would be out at the cemetery with Dias to supervise a postmortem examination and then he was going to report to the Council.

Dias, who must have overheard, greeted him with something that might have been a smile. Or a smirk. Without knowing what the man was thinking, Ruso had no way of telling the difference.