Graveyard of the Hesperides

XXIII

A public slave came down the Argiletum, sweeping. When I say he came down the road, it was a slow progress, with many stops to stand still and gaze around pointlessly.

I had somewhere in mind to investigate. Not wanting to alert any bar staff to my intention, I asked the slave if he knew Mucky Mule Mews. Normally no one spoke to him. I politely ascertained that he did understand Latin, since it is not always certain that they can talk our language. Some public slaves look after temples or imperial baths, so they tend to be of acceptable quality, but the rest are cheap labor given menial, dirty tasks that even the poor don’t want; many public slaves are as bad as that implies. This one was sent out every day by himself, so someone must trust him. Still, where would he run to? Who would pay him anything for his snaggled old broom if he stole it?

He grew jumpy in case I was suggesting he ought to have used his broom in the mews. I reassured him. Once his panic receded, he gave me directions. I thanked him, donated a copper for his pension fund and set off. His directions were wrong. I have no reason to think he did that on purpose, though my father, who is deeply suspicious of everyone, would have been certain.

Once I realized, I asked again of passing locals. I had reasoned Rufia lived fairly close to her work, so the alley I wanted must be nearby. It was. Nothing had been lost, except a few moments’ anxiety on my part because I dislike ending up somewhere I don’t know, without planning to be there. In the end I found the place.

It was no worse than Fountain Court, but I was so used to my own horrors I barely noticed them. Not so here. Even if the road sweeper had been ordered to this deplorable cul-de-sac, one man with a besom could never have achieved much. There must be a stable hereabouts. I had never seen such high piles of mule dung. They looked old; they smelt fresh. Any mules who created these deposits were probably half-wild and spiteful-tempered. Their drovers could well be the same.

I looked around, making sure I knew where the exit was and how deep the potholes on the way to it were. I did not want to find myself stuck down this lonely alley with a feral animal-driver, let alone a bunch of them. I knew what they would be like. No teeth, big whips, depraved ideas. If Rufia had had to make her way down here every night in the dark, I knew why she had become aggressive. I felt weary and angry just imagining what she went through.

Perhaps late at night when she came home, the drovers would all be snoring in the stable. And perhaps they were in truth sweet-natured, honest heroes who would come running to the aid of any female in distress … I would not want to test their response to screams. The swine would come running all right-every man of them pulling up his tunic, whooping with glee, ready to join in the gang rape.

It was very quiet at the moment. I felt glad of that.

At first I thought no one could live here. Blank black walls loomed above me on both sides. Gradually I began to spot dark doorways in the filthy walls that shadowed the dank, unpaved lane. There were arched windows too, their brickwork caked with centuries of dirt and pigeon guano. Shops may have lined the street once, but were long gone; nor could I hear any sounds of manufacturing. I pulled my skirts in tight, trying to avoid puddles of ominous liquid. I wished I was not wearing jewelry. I took off my necklace and put it away in the satchel where I kept my note tablet.

It struck me that nobody knew I had come here. Tiberius would say I should always tell him where I was going; he would be right. I must learn to do it. Well, one day perhaps, but I had survived on my own for twelve years so I saw no urgency for change. I had no intention of living in my husband’s pocket like his little pet mouse. He would have to get used to that.

If nobody else knew I was coming here, at least no one with bad intentions would have trailed me; no one would have come ahead to lie in wait. Only the people who lived here posed any danger.

They did not seem to exist. It was excessively quiet. To reach this place I had only walked down a short side street, yet the racket on the Vicus Longus was completely muffled by the intervening buildings. Though the mews was grimy and oppressive, as a professional myself I could see that a woman who worked late and who wanted somewhere to sleep undisturbed by day might find the isolation helpful. Rufia could have overlooked its sordid aspects, much as I did at Fountain Court. It would take a brave acquaintance to come bothering her at home. Any stalkers who followed her unbidden might give up at the end of such a horrible alley. In view of the time since Rufia had disappeared, I nearly gave up myself. What was the point of hoping somebody here would remember her?

I jumped: a shadow came out from a doorway. Quite suddenly I was passed by a little arthritic old woman with a basket on one arm. Such an ordinary apparition, her sheer normality was startling. I pulled myself together to run after her, calling out: “Granny, stop, will you!”

She looked round, squinted at me with near-blind eyes, then told me to get lost. If she could have scuttled away, she would have done. Instead, she kept going, at her slow but steady pace. Here was a ninety-year-old biddy in flat shoes and a ragged stole going out for a melon and a pinch of powder to take away her pains. She had no intention of talking to a strange young woman, let alone of being helpful.

“You must have known Rufia!”

The only reply was a humph. She would have said that if I had asked the way to the Forum, told her she had come into money, or pretended her landlord wanted to put up her rent. Her own long-lost love child would have received the same angry rebuff. She managed to creak up into the side street ahead of me and was gone on her way.

Human contact revived my confidence. I started knocking on the dismal doors, even though my first attempts brought no answer. Eventually I summoned a housewife who claimed no knowledge of the barmaid and I believed her, but she did suggest another woman, who pointed out where Rufia had once lived.

“Did you know her?”

“Not to speak to.”

Further questions were clearly unwelcome.

I crossed the alley, nearly turning my ankle in a rut. Thumping the door eventually brought a fragile, stooped man, who said I should speak to his wife. He closed the door on me. Just when I was about to give up and leave, it reopened; she emerged, looking fearful.

“It’s all right, I’m not a door-to-door fishwife, so you don’t have to pretend you have no call for razor clams.” She looked baffled. I reined in my wit. “Forget it. I am so sorry to bother you. I am an investigator. I have been told that Rufia used to live here.”

I could have pretended Rufia was a friend, but I was too young for the claim to look convincing and I knew too little about her. Everyone thinks informers are constantly adopting disguises, but you can tangle yourself up for no purpose that way, while you inhibit witnesses. So I use an honest approach.

Unexpectedly, the woman unbent. I wondered if she had been waiting all these years for somebody, anybody, to show an interest. But perhaps not, because she asked, “Menendra sent you?”

I was startled. “No. I’ve never met her.”

“I don’t like that one.”

“Any reason?” I demanded, recovering.

“No. Better come in then.” She let me through the door. I saw a room to one side that must be where she lived with her husband; I could hear him wheezing inside. Narrow stairs led upward. “You can take a look, if you have to. But I’ll come in with you. It isn’t right. There’s all her things.”

“Have you kept her possessions all this time?” I was amazed. “Was she your lodger?” I asked. As we went up the woman confirmed it, though she was too breathless to elaborate. “And you have never re-let the room? Really?” They were clearly as poor as most people in Rome. If the old fellow had ever worked, he was past it now. She looked younger, though none too sprightly.

“I didn’t like to. I’m not in a hurry to have other people. We get by. And who knows?”

Who knows what? I was struck by the oddity of this, but we had reached the top landing so I wanted to give all my concentration to where Rufia had lived. There were no more stairs beyond us even though I had seen from outside that the building had further stories. Anyone who lived higher up must have another entrance. I guessed that when Mucky Mule Mews had had more life, this part had once been a self-contained shop or a workshop, with living quarters above it.

The peeling door was not locked. The landlady pushed it open, then sent me in first. She followed only as far as the threshold, watching closely, but she let me enter to look around unhindered.

Sometimes such a room can feel as if its occupant, the dead person, has only just left that morning. Not here. There was no sense of her.

“Have you touched anything since Rufia disappeared?”

“No, it’s all just the same.”

Despite the landlady’s claim that I would find “all her things,” there was not much.

“Did anyone else ever come and take away possessions?”

She shook her head. I gazed at her, not so much doubting her as puzzled. She was, as I now took in properly, a worn, faded soul who looked as if she had worked hard all her life, probably for other people. She had thin colorless hair, scraped untidily together, brown liver spots, bony hands, a scrawny neck poking out of the loose opening to a dingy tunic. While she stood watching me, she plucked at her long sleeves and reorganized her tunic neck, pulling it tighter as if she felt cold.

I turned back to my survey of the room. It was small, of course. As a single working woman, I might have lived somewhere like this, had I not been fortunate to have a father with a tenement he wanted to fill. Otherwise I too would have spent my days in a dire cubicle that was part of someone else’s home, with no cooking facilities, a bucket for washing and sanitary purposes, a small high window I could not see out of though it had a pigeon looking in, one bed, one cupboard, a stool, a hook behind the door and a moth-eaten rag floor mat. Most of those, I guessed, came with the room.

So what was Rufia’s? An inventory of personal possessions could be written in three lines. Of course a barmaid would earn little and own little. But if I assumed Rufia had gone to work in her clothes the day she died, she had left behind hardly any other personal items. No spare tunic (well, that might be correct on a barmaid’s wages), no accessories, no cloak for winter.

At least she owned her food bowl, beaker, cheap bent cutlery. There was a pair of beaten-up backless slippers, kicked under the bed, one with a sole long gone. She had had small feet. With no other clothes to guide me, I could not picture the rest of her. On the rag rug, I noticed a hairpin. That was surprisingly nice. Probably some ordinary bone, though it masqueraded as ivory. I picked it up. Sniffed it, finding no relic of perfume, not that there could have been after all this time.

“Tell me about her.” I was holding the hairpin on the palm of my hand. “Was Rufia a girl who used cosmetics?”

“Don’t they all?”

“Where are her paints and powders then?” For heavens’ sake, everyone owns at least a pot of cream. Rufia almost certainly had to wash the Hesperides’ bowls and beakers, because I could not imagine Nipius and Natalis doing that; so she would have had dry, cracked hands.

“I told you, I’ve taken nothing!”

“I was not accusing you.”

“She kept her stuff at the bar where she worked, I suppose. That was where she would have wanted to look nice. Nice for the customers.”

Hmm! “Did she ever have a boyfriend?”

“I never knew of one.”

“And she never wore jewelry?” People who do, however basic it is, generally have more than one piece so they can swap around.

“Don’t look at me! She had a bangle that she always wore. I never took it.”

Fine.

“I was just thinking,” I said sadly after a while, “this is so little to show for a life.”

The woman from downstairs settled; she liked me showing sympathy. “I took her pillow. That was all I ever came and took out. For the old one down below, when he has trouble sleeping. I could have returned it if she ever came back.”

“She is never coming back.” I wondered whether to say we thought we had found Rufia’s body, but stalled at the woman’s next remark.

“No. That’s what the other one said.”