Enemies at Home

8

The aediles’ office was close to the temple. I had been there before. It held unhappy memories, about a man I should never have tangled with. (Let’s face it, all my bad memories concern men in that category.) Luckily, the offender no longer worked there. I could revisit the scene with indifference.

I learned Manlius Faustus was out but expected back, once he finished working the streets to monitor the public. Pity the public; he was a stickler.

The slaves were loafing in the courtyard, looking relaxed; that was typical of slaves. There was nothing they could do about their predicament; other people owned their lives and would decide their fate. The threat of death had stopped worrying them, at least for the time being.

Although the aediles were given no personal guards, their building contained strongboxes full of fines from the many who broke regulations (well, those who were spotted) so the place had protection. Its guards were temporarily keeping an eye on the Aviola slaves.

‘We lost one this morning.’

‘Careless! Someone run away?’

‘Died on us. The porter who was beaten up. He’s still on the premises if you want to have a look at him.’

‘I may as well.’

Nicostratus lay dead on a pallet, covered with a cloth, which did little to allay the stink of his rotted wounds. I could learn little about him from his corpse, except that he had been short, dark and hairy — and cruelly treated. The battery was pointless; why would thieves stop and beat up a porter so badly, when a couple of well-aimed blows is usually enough to have such a man whimpering in a corner? Or couldn’t they just have slipped him a few coins to lose himself for half an hour?

Were these robbers in love with violence? And had the porter’s beating fired them up, so they went on to attack Aviola and his bride too? But that would mean the murders were unplanned.

‘Someone knocked all hell out of this one! Did anyone try to look after him when he arrived here?’ The guard pulled a face. Fairly neat bandaging had been carried out on the dead man and one of his legs had a splint. ‘Manlius Faustus let him be seen by a doctor?’

‘But of course! Faustus insists we treat them all tenderly. We want them in good condition for the arena beasts, don’t we? There’s no fun if convicts are submissive and limp.’

I did not suppose having the man fit for the lions was Faustus’ motive.

‘Will someone ask the doctor to come and have a word with me? Dromo can take a message, if you give him directions. The patient may have said something, while he was being treated.’

Dromo did go, only to return bitterly complaining that the doctor was a bad-tempered Greek who had been horrible to him. That did not surprise me. I sympathised with the doc.

The man sent me a verbal message that he had better things to do than attend the dead. However, to satisfy Manlius Faustus, there was also a written report. The doctor described Nicostratus’ injuries, including a broken leg, a hole in his skull, and various traumatic wounds that appeared to have been inflicted by a blunt flat-faced weapon, such as a plank. Splinters of wood were in the wounds.

In the doctor’s expert opinion (his phrase), the savagery used on Nicostratus differed significantly from the controlled force required to strangle the other two victims.

In answer to my query, the patient gave up the struggle after a week of drifting in and out of consciousness, during which he never said anything about the attack.

Thank you, Hippocrates.

By the time Dromo brought me this, I was interviewing the slaves one by one, in the room Faustus used as his office. Afterwards, those I had seen were kept separate from those I had yet to see, so they could not confer.

Some owners acquire slaves who are all of a type. Not these. The nine survivors were a mixed bunch, all heights, colouring and weights. I reckoned they varied too in their levels of intelligence, skill and willingness. The young men had hair to their shoulders, normal practice, and all wore simple patched tunics in neutral colours. They looked fit and tidy, products of a decent home. In conversation none of them really told me much about Aviola or Mucia, though they spoke well of both.

Before we started, I reminded the group that the law said slaves had to give evidence under torture. I would not be doing that. ‘- Not at this stage.’ They knew what I meant.

I saw Phaedrus first, the other door porter. He was a sturdy, fair-haired young man with north European origins, a Gaul or German. He had an open face and honest manner — which generally signals a lying witness. According to him, although I had been told Nicostratus was the night porter, it was the other way around. Phaedrus was to have been on late duty but had stayed in the kitchen, having his supper first; it was when he went to relieve his colleague that he found Nicostratus and raised the alarm.

‘So were you in the kitchen throughout the robbery and murders?’

‘Yes, but I heard nothing.’

‘Phaedrus, I have been in that kitchen. I know the layout. Are you sure you never heard the intruders breaking in and attacking Nicostratus?’

‘No. They must have put him out cold with the first blow.’

‘Then they continued knocking him about? Unlikely! You heard no one come across the courtyard?’

‘They must have tiptoed through the columns on the opposite side.’

I agreed that fitted with them going over to the dining room to take the silver. ‘Would you have run to help if you heard a commotion?’

‘Of course I would have! Sorting trouble is my job.’

‘You don’t shy from a rumpus?’

‘I would have been straight in.’

‘So what made you deaf? Was anybody else with you?’ The blond belligerent looked shifty but said no. ‘Oh, come on, Phaedrus. You can do better than this. What was taking up so much of your attention that you missed all the racket? Were you playing around with somebody?’

Phaedrus had no answer, or none he would give me.

I asked about working with Nicostratus. Apparently they hardly knew each other, but got on well. It was routine for a house to have two porters, since one could not stay alert both day and night. (‘Alert’? In my family, we reckon door porters are dopey at all times.) Phaedrus let slip that he himself was an incomer from Mucia’s household.

‘Really? It’s common on marriage for staffs to merge,’ I mused. ‘Sometimes they don’t gel, and that causes upsets.’

‘Oh, not us!’ maintained Phaedrus, looking innocent. Maybe the young men bonded. They were both in their twenties, Nicostratus slightly older. They could have palled up, talked about gladiators, discussed women (shared one?). A woman could well explain why Phaedrus was oblivious to noise that night.

‘So were you very upset when you discovered Nicostratus so terribly hurt? How do you feel about him dying today?’

His face changed then, showing true distress.

I let him go.

Who next? I chose the gardener.

Diomedes was short, lumpy in the body, big-eared and almost bald. He readily agreed that he was not over-taxed in his duties, though he claimed to hanker for the wider acreage of the country villa in Campania. At the Rome apartment he was a general handyman. He supplemented the water carrier, fetching extra buckets from the local fountain. He nailed things and cleared gullies. He went up ladders to wash shutters − which presumably meant he looked in through windows and saw room contents. He would have known the silver existed.

I told him Polycarpus had said Diomedes was asleep in the garden. ‘The robbers went through to the dining room, then the bedroom. So you are the person most likely to have seen them. What do you say?’

Diomedes said shamelessly that there had been wine at the feast, to which he and Amethystus helped themselves. So yes, they were slumped in a corner of the peristyle, but he bragged that both were completely ‘crocked’. They would not have woken if the robbers had trampled all over them and left boot-prints on their heads.

I bought the story. He was clearly a sloppy workman, yet I found him free of guile.

How trusting, Albia! You ought to know how that works: the ‘honest’ suspect makes a small confession − to hide a bigger one.

Amethystus obviously came next. Taller and leaner, he carried his years better than Diomedes. It could have been because he had lighter work indoors, although I noticed he had more scars from punishment beatings. As he told it, his life was hard. He not only mopped marble and swept up detritus, he was constantly moving furniture, fetching and carrying, and being sent on errands outside the home, usually for heavy goods that, poor thing, he had to transport unaided.

He confirmed Diomedes’ story. These two were old cronies who often got at amphorae while they were standing unattended outside dining rooms; this pair had even been known to raid the stores, if they thought they could get away with it. On the night in question, in the free and easy atmosphere that followed the wedding, these unreformed wine-stealers had cheerfully managed to make themselves paralytic. Amethystus heard nothing. His only memory was of waking woozily to find everyone else running around in panic, with the master dead. Had they been sober, according to him, he and Diomedes would have given the intruders a good thumping.

I would have to ask my uncles about this: what penalty pinching fine wines carried for these slaves — and would their blind intoxication exonerate the drunks from their obligation to protect their master’s life?

Next I sent for Daphnus, to see whether as server at the feast he knew about amphorae being raided. Unsurprisingly, he did. I wondered if he had a tipple himself.

This tall young man was snappy and smart, the only one who had somehow obtained an ornament (a cheap amulet, hung on a thong) and better shoes than the general issue (probably his master’s cast-offs; they looked too big for him). He had oiled hair and he oozed ambition.

He was the first to check my role. ‘Are you the one who is going to get us off?’

‘That depends on your story, Daphnus, and whether I believe it. Even if I do, I shall need to pin the deaths of your master and mistress on somebody else before you can be reprieved.’

He looked crestfallen.

His work consisted of delivering refreshments to the family and visitors, and serving formally at table; when the chef was absent (the chef was among the staff sent to Campania), Daphnus even carved the meats, a task in which he considered himself an expert. He must have been indoors doing that when the two others siphoned off half an amphora, he maintained.

‘Would you have reported them, if you saw them do it?’

‘Oh yes,’ he assured me, unconvincingly.

He told me he wanted to make something of himself, gain his freedom, start a small business. If Polycarpus could manage that, Daphnus reckoned anybody could.

‘What do you think of Polycarpus?’

‘Complete crook. He came from nowhere, has no aptitude or skills. It’s all a big bluff. He gets other people to run around and do the business, then takes all the credit.’

‘Isn’t that what his job requires?’

‘Fair enough.’ Daphnus shrugged, as if there was no real animosity between him and the steward, only envy.

‘But he got on well with your master.’

I thought I detected a slight delay, before Daphnus agreed Polycarpus was held in good regard by Aviola.

Daphnus had ‘worked his rocks off’ at the feast, he said, so he claimed he knew nothing about the burglary because he had passed out from exhaustion in one of the slaves’ cells, with the door closed. The scribe, Melander, was with him. They only woke when Phaedrus hammered on the door and yelled that someone had killed the master.

‘Is Melander your special friend?’

‘He’s an idiot. But he’s my brother.’ Daphnus executed a big theatrical start, jumping back with his hands in the air. ‘Oh! Flavia Albia, I do hope you didn’t think me and my beloved bro was in there bum-fiddling?’

‘That’s a new word for it … No,’ I replied, smiling. ‘I’d put you down as a ladies’ man.’

‘Yes, but fat chance! We are not supposed to mingle with the women — and anyway who was available? Olympe’s a child; I like them when their busts have grown. Myla was the size of a granary, and I ask you! I wasn’t that desperate.’

‘Then I take it you are not the father?’ Daphnus acted out a look of indignation and disgust, so I suggested, ‘I wondered if Myla was the household donkey — ridden by everyone?’ Many homes have one of those, but Daphnus would not comment on who slept with Myla.

I pointed out that of the potential conquests for the lad-about-the-colonnades, he had not mentioned Amaranta, Mucia Lucilia’s maid. ‘Nice!’ he agreed. ‘Old enough, a looker, tantalising hints of past experience — and, sadly, taken.’

I laid down my stylus on my waxed note tablet. ‘By? …’

‘Onesimus.’

Not a name on my list. ‘And he is?’

‘Came from the other household. Lucilia’s pet steward. Sent off to Campania. But he reckons he is in with the ornamental ornamenter.’

‘To which she says?’

‘Nothing! Very discreet woman.’

‘And you like her?’

‘Lots of people like Amaranta. If you want to know who she likes, you will have to ask her.’ Daphnus, an unashamed chancer, admitted, ‘I was biding my time. I like to play the game, but I reckon there were other people in the queue ahead of me.’

‘Care to say which people?’

He shook his head − then the cheeky chap gave me a speculative, flirty once-over, to which I returned my standard get-lost glare. This young man would try it on with anyone, though he gave up easily. As young men go, he was typical.

‘So tell me, Daphnus: would you have been willing to defend your master?’

‘I certainly would. Saving him would have been ideal for me. He would show he was grateful. I could have got my freedom and a nice little pension out of that.’

‘Good point! What about your brother, Melander?’

‘He would have joined in with anything I did.’

‘Are you close?’

‘No, but he’s a bit slow and I look after him. My master was ready to sell him, but kept him on as a favour to me.’

Daphnus thought a lot of his own worth — though I could believe he was useful to Valerius Aviola, so his confidence might be justified.

‘Are you to be freed by your master’s will, Daphnus?’

His eyes widened. ‘Never thought of that!’

‘Don’t get excited. If you are executed for murdering the man, it will never happen.’

When Melander shambled in, I could see the fraternal likeness, along with differences. He had a similar long face, mostly nose, but much less intelligence in his dark eyes. He told me they were twins, clearly not identical. They were born in the household; their mother was now dead. My notes gave them different ages, but that was wrong; Melander said they were both twenty.

He was a contrast to his lively brother. I wondered if he had been starved in the womb, as I believe can happen with twins, or if he suffered in a long birth process. Though not literally an idiot as Daphnus had called him, he lacked personality. He said he could write, but only if he was told what to put.

Other people amaze me. I would have made this one the tray carrier and trained up his sharper brother to do secretarial work, not the other way around.

Maybe Aviola did not care about correspondence and record-keeping. Not my family’s style. Some of mine are literary by nature, while even the rest keep tight control of their accounts because they are constantly being creative with their taxes. You have to get everything right when you’re fixing your declaration. Not that I ever would. Fortunately, as a woman I don’t have to.

Melander gave the impression his brother had rehearsed him. Both twins would go on swearing they had been oblivi-ous to the intruders. I kicked the scribe out.

Hoping to refresh my spirits, I had the philosopher fetched.

Big mistake. His principle was that life is a turd we have stepped in, then we die. I could not tell which school of thought he belonged to, though it must be a gloomy one.

He had been bought by Mucia Lucilia on a whim at the slave market two years ago, merely as a fashionable accessory. He described her as a nice enough woman, but she made no intellectual demands of him, nor indeed of herself. Once she had boasted to all her friends that she owned a philosopher, Chrysodorus was simply forced to look after her very old, sick, smelly lapdoggie, a pampered thing called Puff.

He had been sleeping in a store room.

‘Alone?’

‘I can never be alone, dear. My duties are ceaseless. I shared the space with Puff.’

‘Because you love her really?’

‘No. Because no one else will have her near them.’

‘No hope of her sleeping on the end of her doting domina’s bed?’

‘Not after the mistress married. Aviola put his foot down.’

‘Pity. She might have nipped the intruders.’

‘I doubt it. If thieves burst in, Puff would run away.’

‘And would you have done the same?’

He was enough of a philosopher to know this was a critical question. He sighed. ‘I would defend life, wretched though it is. One needs to be civilised — though god knows what for.’

‘To avoid crucifixion or being eaten by a lion, Chrysodorus … There must have been noise. Didn’t the dog waken?’

‘The dog is stone deaf.’

‘And you?’

‘I sleep the heavy sleep of doomed humanity. In explanation: since the dog snores atrociously, I have prevailed upon a medicine-man to give me a sleeping draught. He prescribes for the dog officially, but slips me a potion too.’

‘This doctor is on the staff?’

‘Aviola’s.’

‘Sent to Campania?’

‘Correct. Fortunately he left me supplies. Puff had been fed unsuitable titbits at the feast, so she was farting like a furnace-stoker. That became a night when I needed a sleeping draught merely to continue to exist.’

I tried to look sorry for him, though I am fond of dogs. ‘I have not seen a pooch at the apartment. What happened to her?’

‘Puff has been brought to me. My earthly suffering never ends.’

‘What will happen to Puff now your mistress has passed away?’

‘A vicious rumour whispers I am to be freed in Mucia Lucilia’s will — but legally compelled to take care of the dog. So, believe me, Flavia Albia, I gained no advantage from killing my mistress! The one joy I will take from being led into an arena is that I may feed bloody Puff to a wild beast as an appetiser.’

‘Then you can die happy?’

‘Happiness is an overrated concept.’

I would have liked to dispute that, but Chrysodorus seemed too glum to enjoy theoretical argument. Which may be overrated, I accept — though it’s better entertainment than listening to a string of people lying to you.

Well, they were slaves. You know the saying: I blame the owners.

I went and inspected Puff. She was the kind of dog you see in cities that are full of small apartments: a tiny, fragile-boned ratty thing, which seemed to be parts glued together from different varieties, none of them pretty. A woman’s lapdog — for a woman with no sense.

I did not pat or speak to Puff. She was no use to me. Dogs, like women, do not possess legal capacity and cannot bear witness in a Roman law court.

To change the script from masculine blather, I called Olympe as my next interviewee. I had heard her singing, in a low, unmistakably Lusitanian style. No one appeared to be listening.

She was scared, tiny and pretty. She looked her age, around fifteen, though she had more bust than Daphnus had suggested; she held herself in with a band. Her main instrument was the lyre, though she told me she could play the double flute passably. Mucia Lucilia had once heard her performing among a band of travelling entertainers, Olympe’s relatives, and offered to buy her. She had not been a slave before, but was sold into bondage by her family. It happens. I had once lived among people who were planning to do that to me.

Olympe had convinced herself that one day her relatives would be in funds and come to look for her. So she was dimmer than she looked, because I guessed they never would.

‘Don’t bank on it. You have a marketable skill, girl. Use that to make something of your life.’

Like Chrysodorus she was an exotic acquisition, though unlike him her mistress did frequently call on her skills. Olympe had played and sung at the feast. Afterwards she was tired, she claimed. She closeted herself with Amaranta in one of the good bedrooms. She heard nothing, though if she had, she would not have known what to do.

‘You could have yelled, Olympe. Called for other people to help.’

‘But I never knew I needed to.’

The robbers must have passed right outside the room where Olympe and Amaranta were asleep; that thought reduced her to helpless trembling. Olympe was the first of the accused slaves to show fear. She cried. She rushed across the room and clung to me. She begged me to help. She was terrified of facing trial (such as it would be; I didn’t disillusion her) and of the fate that a conviction would bring.

I was calming her when Manlius Faustus put his head around the door. He signalled that he would not disturb me; I mimed back that I had nearly finished. It had been a long session. He must have seen I was tiring; he sent in some basic refreshments.

What I liked about this aedile was that, having commissioned me, he made no attempt to muscle in on my interviews but left me to continue in my own style.

I next saw Amaranta, a neat, sad girl with many plaits and ribbons. Like Olympe, she was conscious of the threatening situation, though bore it with quiet resignation. I would not have classed her as a beauty, but she had enough vivacity to appeal to lustful male slaves. She possessed the manner of a very clever waiting-maid, and I reckoned she could deal with men.

I called her a girl because of her status; she was about my own age really, and said her mistress was the same. She had served Mucia Lucilia for ten years, helping her wash, dress, arrange her hair, put on jewellery. It was an intimate relationship. She tweezed Mucia’s eyebrows, cut her nails, made arrangements for sanitary cloths during her monthly periods. She had learned her moods, her hopes of making a good marriage, her annoyance that the trip to Campania had had to be delayed.

‘Yes, tell me: what caused this delay?’

‘We were not told.’ She paused slightly, and I wondered.

That night she must have been the last person other than Aviola to see Mucia alive. She had helped her mistress undress. She locked up the jewellery in its casket. Then, as I had been told by Olympe, the maid retired to one of the good bedrooms on the far side of the courtyard, in company with the young musician. They had the door closed, which Olympe had not explained, though Amaranta admitted it was to deter male slaves from wandering in.

‘Do you get much trouble?’

‘Nothing I can’t handle.’ I believed that.

I asked about her hopes for the future; did she want to marry and have a family?

Amaranta was non-committal about who she might share her life with, but readily said that she was on good terms with Mucia Lucilia, who had promised to free her as soon as she reached her thirtieth birthday. That was close enough for her to look forward to it patiently, but Amaranta was now frightened that Mucia’s death meant she would be sent to a slave market instead. Assuming she escaped the murder charge.

‘You don’t know what was in her will?’

‘No. What are our chances, Flavia Albia?’

‘Slim,’ I said honestly. ‘A judge is likely to say all of you should have rushed to help your master and mistress. I shall conduct experiments, but any prosecutor will claim you should have heard their cries.’

Amaranta had been giving this thought. ‘What if they never called for help? — I don’t believe they did.’

‘We would need to explain why not — though, without being indelicate, it could be they were so involved with each other they were slow to realise intruders had come into their room. Do you know — were they passionate?’

‘They liked it,’ replied Amaranta matter-of-factly. I waited. ‘Quite a lot, from what she told me. After the wedding, she was a happy woman next morning, looking forward to more.’

‘Had they been to bed together before?’

‘A few squeezes and fumbles. Not the full thing. So it was only their second bout of proper play. And they would not have been expecting anyone to interrupt. We were all told to keep away.’

‘I imagine they had the bedroom doors closed too — or didn’t they care who heard them?’

‘My mistress was modest. I shut the doors for them. If the room became too airless, they could always be opened afterwards.’

Slave-owners barely climbed out of bed to pee in the pot. Their attendants put them to bed, where they generally stayed until the attendants got them up next morning. ‘Your master or mistress would call out for someone, if they wanted the doors to be opened?’

Amaranta had nodded before she saw the implication. ‘Libycus!’ She cheerily landed the master’s attendant in trouble. ‘He was supposed to stay within earshot, in case anything was wanted during the night.’

I dismissed her, and called in Libycus.

His black skin said he had been named for his country of origin, though he must have come here as a child or been born here because, like all the Aviola slaves, he was thoroughly Romanised.

Libycus had been as close to his master as Amaranta to her mistress, turning out Aviola smartly each day, having first listened to the man’s mental anxieties and washed his bodily crevices. He chose clothes. He acted as barber. He wielded the ear-wax scoop and toothpick, and applied pile ointment between the buttocks.

Yes, he was supposed to remain close, always on call. He, more than anybody else, should have been in a position to intervene when Aviola was attacked. He did not want to tell me why he had not done so. In the end, I squeezed it out of him.

‘I wasn’t there.’

‘Not nearby?’

‘Not in the house.’

‘What? Are you allowed to leave the house during the night?’

‘No.’

He hung his head while I absorbed this. Then Libycus mumbled his confession: thinking Aviola was unlikely to want anything, he had gone to one of the shops on the apartment’s street-side, where he sometimes met with friends. It was his last chance to socialise before he was taken to Campania for an indefinite period. He and two other men spent some time drinking, chatting and playing dice. When he came back, everything was over.

‘Did Nicostratus open the door for you to go out?’

‘Yes, he let me out, then he or Phaedrus was going to let me back in.’ Libycus pleaded, ‘I don’t suppose being somewhere else will get me off?’

‘You know the answer. Quite the opposite, Libycus. You had abandoned your master, against orders.’

I felt sorry for him. But the fact was, he was even more likely to be convicted than the others.