Enemies at Home

48

I was starting to like her.

It was not even late morning, but each of us could see what the other poor dears needed, so selflessly volunteered to ease their troubles. A triumph of generous sisterhood.

Galla took upon herself the rights of the mistress of the house; she marched to seek out the necessaries. Without Myla, there would be no one to serve us, but we were unswayed by that sad irony. Fauna sat with Graecina, while I helped Galla. We speedily collected portable tables, beakers, a water jug, spices, honey and the best wine we could find. Galla knew where the cellar with the good stuff was and, more importantly, where Aviola hid its key. The store still contained amphorae.

Quite unexpectedly, somehow we four women gelled: sitting together unattended, while we talked over the recent crises, unburdened ourselves of dark feelings and drank — daintily yet deliberately.

Most of the time I work alone, but the concept of a feminine gathering is familiar to me. I can hold my own when the gossip is flying amidst the heady mix of giggles and bared fangs. I do have two sisters and a beloved mother, a matron who we say needs taking out of herself. That is not hard to achieve. Helena Justina can easily be persuaded to jolly up for us: she looks restrained but this is deceptive, just as it was with Grandmama. Mother knows how to measure out a bowl of extremely strong liquor, call it a libation, hand it round with a dish of almond fingers and see it happily poured down throats. Or in a crisis, not to bother with the almond fingers but to send out for a large cauldron of belly pork and peasemould for soakup purposes.

At one point that morning I remembered Horace’s witches: Medusa-haired Canidia and Sagana, ganging up to cruise graveyards as they dripped blood into trenches, searched for children to murder for their marrow bones, and rattled their own false teeth. To escape this ludicrous fancy, I grabbed the flagon and poured us all another round.

It was such good wine we did not spoil it with the honey and spices.

‘Did she do it? I have an aedile breathing down my neck-’ (That could be nice, I thought madly). ‘I need to work out the truth now.’

‘Did she buggery!’ That was Fauna who, when under the influence of carefully aged but ready-to-drink Caecuban wine, did not mince words. ‘This is tasty — is it supposed to be white or red?’

I knew. I had family who would rave on for hours about classic wines, though often while quaffing some liver-dissolving rotgut that even the most lacklustre caupona would refuse to serve. ‘It comes as white, but you have to keep it in store for many years, during which time it turns fiery-coloured. Most attractive, as you see. I’ve never had a chance to become an expert, but I would say this is just about right!’

Since we were not a literary circle, I kept to myself the delicious coincidence that Caecuban was Horace’s tipple of choice. Perhaps his scary witches came into being after he had swigged a chalice. Or several.

‘Absolutely ready to drink,’ Galla agreed, quaffing as if it were a religious duty. Apparently, when new, the wine had been a wedding present from her father-in-law. Maybe he read poetry. She admitted a quiet feeling of satisfaction that she was doing Valerius Aviola out of his cherished, laid-up treasure, when he had thought that by divorcing her he kept it from her. Fauna took that as a good reason to have more. Even Graecina smiled.

‘So did Myla do it?’ I wondered again.

‘No, Albia. She did not.’ Fauna seemed to have appointed herself the judge in our case. She was well able to hand out opinions while pouring at the same time. Hardly a wobble. Well, hardly any spilled. ‘That night the robbers came, she was three days from giving birth. I know there are plenty of people, men that is, who will say that pregnant women can get wild and out of control, but poor old Myla always swelled up as big as you can get so she was helpless. By the time she could have manoeuvred herself into position to strangle anybody-’

‘Two people at that,’ I reminded her.

‘Yes, and if there was a tussle, the row would have brought other people running and she would have been dragged off.’

‘You are right, my dear.’ I thought Fauna’s reasoning was good, though I wished she would calm down a little. Listening to her was a strain. I was preoccupied, trying to work out what I thought myself. (This was a reason why I did work alone; other people’s ideas were generally a pointless hindrance.) ‘I really doubt she attacked Aviola and Mucia — not even if she knew they were in bed making love, which had been her role. Nor can I see her picking up a plank of wood and battering the door porter.’

‘I’ve never seen the lazy slug pick up anything,’ scoffed Galla.

‘Quite. Polycarpus, poor man, is harder to rule out, because she had given birth by then, so she would have been more active physically. She may also have had a motive, if she blamed him for sending her to the slave market.’

Graecina roused herself. ‘He had no choice; the master ordered him.’

‘Was that the cause of your spat with Myla today?’ I asked, bringing her into the discussion now she seemed willing.

‘I knew she was difficult, so I wanted to avoid the subject. But she jumped out at me, demanding answers, because someone had at last convinced her she was now going to be sold.’

‘That was me last night,’ I admitted. ‘I started a conversation — one I never finished — to test whether she was involved. I thought I was giving her plenty of leeway to justify herself. I doubted she was a killer. But the house is to be closed and the slaves moved on, so it was time she faced up to her situation.’

‘I don’t suppose you were unkind. Myla never faced up to anything,’ Galla Simplicia reassured me. She nursed her beaker, as she began to reminisce. ‘My children used to come home to me after seeing their father and tell me all the latest. Every time one of her own youngsters was taken away, it was the same old story. Myla would refuse to believe it was going to happen, even though she was warned. Every time, right until the last minute she kept saying the master would intervene and stop it — which he never did, because every time he saw her Myla was too attached to them already.’

‘He wasn’t daft; he could see if a brat of hers stayed, she would make it a source of trouble in future.’ Fauna seemed to know.

‘Aviola could be a soft fool,’ his ex-wife agreed. ‘But he always had a keen instinct for self-preservation. He never intended to get stung, not for a slave’s brat. Still she created whenever one was sent away. Every time, a mighty scene.’

‘And no doubt each poor child had to endure screaming and a tug-of-war …’ I stretched my legs out in front of me, waggling my toes. An old informer’s trick; it helps you think − or so I am told by untrustworthy old informers. ‘When I talked to Myla last night, she had convinced herself the latest baby could have a free life. She was clearly desperate for manumission herself. She had blotted out any other possibility.’

Galla nodded. ‘Inflated ideas. But never going to happen. Aviola wasn’t one of those ludicrous childless men who fall for a girl’s smooth talk because the silly brute is desperate for an heir. He had his family, thanks to me. That didn’t stop Myla. My son Valerius came to me in tears once, when he was about ten years old, because Myla had been telling him one of her spawn was his little brother and would be sharing our life.’

‘You had a row over it, did you?’ Fauna demanded, eyes bright.

‘One of many.’ Galla’s slurred voice said she was becoming tipsy, though she remained in control as she repeated it in dreary reminiscence. ‘One of very many … Still, for all our disagreements, I would not have wished Aviola dead, and certainly not in that way. Juno, our life together was not all bad and he is my children’s father. They are devastated by the way he died.’

‘Myla was not guilty of murder.’ I won’t say wine makes me belligerent, though I had become decisive. ‘But I cannot exonerate the other slaves. The master and mistress of the house were killed while a bunch of them did nothing — nothing to intervene, nothing to try to save their owners.’

‘That’s what I can’t understand!’ declared Fauna, waving an arm so her cheap bangles jingled, a tintinnabulation of glass-eyed Cleopatra snakes and faux silver charms. ‘It’s natural to go and help. Surely anybody would?’

‘I suspect there was simply no time to react.’ Even awash with honeyed and fiery Caecuban, I could still try to be fair. ‘I learned just now that from the moment the shouting began to when the couple were discovered dead was a very short period.’

‘Fair enough then!’ Fauna liked rapid judgements.

‘I disagree. Even if they couldn’t stop it happening, they ought to have rallied to capture the killer afterwards.’ Galla could be thoughtful. Perhaps that explained why people had previously accused her of murderous schemes: they believed she had worked out a thoughtful plan to remove the couple …

I jumped and shifted restlessly. ‘So afterwards, what did happen to the killer? Wouldn’t they try to make a getaway? But how? Nicostratus was by the front doors, and there is no other way in and out. I know Nicostratus was there, because he let Libycus back in. Nobody was seen leaving. Polycarpus came down, which was just after the deaths, and he was spotted. There was a fixed number, smaller than usual, in the apartment. This says to me that all along the killer was one of those slaves.’

‘Well, that’s depressing!’ Galla was acerbic — and a pragmatist. ‘If my darling ex-husband had taken a grip instead of shilly-shallying, if he had sent them all to be sold at the right time, none of them would have been present to do him and Mucia in!’

‘I thought you didn’t like her,’ Fauna murmured.

‘Known her for years. She was a nice woman.’

I suggested, ‘Plenty of people have told me your late ex was a nice man.’

‘He had his good points.’

‘Many do.’

‘If you can overlook them farting in bed all night.’ Fauna spoke with such deep feeling we could tell it was from experience.

As Galla and I tried to keep straight faces, I said I had no need to ascertain whether Valerius Aviola suffered from night-time wind. The fact was, or seemed to be, that by staying in an apartment staffed by disaffected slaves, he had put himself in the classic position of ‘wrong place, wrong time’. That did not excuse what one of them did to him. Even though his policy of shying away from telling his slaves their fates outright may have caused the tragedy, neither he nor his bride deserved such violent, frightening deaths.

What were the slaves so worked up about anyway?

In Rome, standing naked on a plinth in the slave market could be a gruesome experience, but there were degrees of indignity. Amaranta, who was attractive, and Olympe, who would undoubtedly be advertised as an exotic virgin, must feel trepidation, but the rest were house-trained, well-kept, healthy specimens, and Chrysodorus was educated. A decent trader would emphasise their qualities. He would treat them well, make them look smart and obedient, so they appealed to discerning buyers who wanted useful assets. For most of those slaves, the chance of ending up in a worse home was balanced equally by that of ending up somewhere better.

‘No more uncertain and dangerous than getting yourself married!’ as Galla put it. We were all rather silly by that point.

Not too silly for me to wonder, ‘Did the killer of Aviola and Mucia then kill Nicostratus? The story goes he was attacked first, by the robbers as they burst in. That depends on robbers being here, and on them committing the murders. Suppose this: suppose everything was, as the vigilis Titianus always said, an inside job. The stranglings came first. Then came the plank attack on the porter. Perhaps the killer tried to leave and Nicostratus got in the way — on purpose even, since no one has ever suggested he was incompetent. The rope had been left behind around Mucia Lucilia’s neck, so another weapon was needed.’ I thought of a quibble. ‘Mind you, in any apartment that had been used for a wedding yesterday and was decorated up for a dinner party tonight, why would a plank of wood be lying around?’

‘Oh, some homes are very untidy!’ sniffed Galla Simplicia, eagerly disparaging this one that had ceased to be hers.

‘Not with my husband in charge!’ Graecina corrected her. She spoke with the tight, demure manner of a woman who had been resolutely drinking even more than the rest of us. I blamed the pain from her scalds for that.

We all sat silent for a time, in deference to the late Polycarpus. We were drunk, but nonetheless capable of good manners.