Hero of Rome

XXII

For the first time she could remember Maeve was frightened. Since her mother died when she was six years old, her father had been the cornerstone of her life, dealing with every girlish tantrum and adolescent obsession with the same good humour with which he laughed off the peaks and troughs of his ever-changing fortunes. Even the arrival of her first red moon had been greeted only with a sharp ‘tut’ and a call for Catia, her personal slave, to explain the intricacies and burdens of a woman’s existence. It was for her sake, she knew, that he had stayed on his farm and kept his father’s sword in its place on the wall when the young men followed Caratacus to their deaths. As she grew older she had seen the pain the decision had cost him and the damage to his honour that was so clear in the contemptuous glances of Camulodunum’s women. But he had been prepared to bear it. For her.

When Claudius declared Camulodunum a Roman colony and renamed it Colonia, Lucullus had fought desperately to keep what was his. He hadn’t always succeeded — he had mourned Dywel as keenly as she had — and some of the alliances he made had cost him more than he would ever admit. But he had protected her. When he took the Roman name Lucullus she had been ashamed, but she never allowed it to show. He was her father and she loved him.

Yet now she barely recognized this shell of a man with empty, staring eyes; a fat man grown suddenly thin.

‘I am ruined.’ The words were said in a whisper. ‘They will take everything, and when they have it all I will still owe them more than I can ever repay. I am ruined.’

It had started when Petronius, the quaestor, had arrived at the villa just before noon. At first Lucullus had been genuinely pleased to see his business partner, believing this was at last the delivery of the outstanding rent money for the insulae in Colonia. But it took only a few moments for Petronius to reveal the true reason for his visit.

‘I have had word from Londinium,’ the lawyer said solemnly, handing over a wrapped scroll with a broken seal. A few minutes later the quaestor left and her father retired to the room he called the tablinum, from which he ordered his business. She found him there four hours later, amidst the innocent bills and records that concealed the labyrinth of his finances and, she finally learned, the bottomless pit of his debt that now threatened to swallow the Celtic trader alive.

They sat together in the little room until the sun drifted below the horizon and they were left in darkness. By then Maeve had long given up her attempts at reassurance, and the only words that passed between them from one hour to the next was the little man’s shocked whisper: ‘I am ruined.’ Every attempt to move him was a wasted effort. He had become a human shipwreck with the jagged rocks of failure buried deep in his belly and every wave dragging him closer to destruction.

Her inability to help him left her feeling a sort of growing paralysis. She had to do something. Anything. Lucullus had insisted she learn to read Latin as well as speak it, so she could assist him with his business affairs, and eventually she left the tablinum to study the letter. It was dated a week earlier and as she read it, line by line, she was overwhelmed by first fear, then fury and finally dread. The contents were almost beyond belief. The letter contained a warning from the new procurator in Londinium, Catus Decianus, to his friend Petronius of fundamental changes in the way the province was to be governed and financed.

She had heard the name Seneca hailed by Lucullus as the great benefactor who had set him on the way to prosperity. Now this same Seneca had decided to call in every loan he had made in the province with immediate effect. Catus Decianus was commanded to maximize the return on all his investments, convert them to currency and send them to Rome. And that wasn’t all. State subsidies, loans and investments were also being withdrawn. It took time for her to understand the true enormity of what she was reading.

Now everything would belong to the imperial treasury and the native rulers of southern Britain would be reduced to penury, and their people with them, robbed even of the chance to pay off the loans with the fruits of the earth they tended and farmed.

If that was not enough, her outrage grew as she realized exactly why Petronius had shown the letter to her father. The quaestor had never hidden his greed from his Trinovante business partner; indeed that was what had made him an ideal foil for Lucullus. Now he saw the opportunity to lay hands on the insulae in Colonia and — she gasped at his audacity — the whole estate, this house, the farms and the hunting grounds, at a bargain price from his ‘friend’ Decianus. Worse, when she read the letter again she realized it contained another, more sinister message. It was an invitation to Lucullus to commit suicide. Was that not the Roman way, to avoid disgrace by taking one’s own life? And how much more convenient for Petronius’s transaction if the former owner was dead.

She felt like riding into Colonia and confronting that thieving, conniving… No. She could imagine the cold stare if a woman, and a British woman at that, dared to challenge the quaestor. He might even have her whipped. Only one person could help her. She called for one of the slaves.

‘Go swiftly to Colonia and seek out Tribune Verrens. Ask him to call on the trader Lucullus as soon as it is convenient. Hurry now!’

She fell asleep thinking of the young Roman and when she opened her eyes she was lying on a couch in the room with the paintings of Claudius. The light streamed in through the gaps in the shutters, creating intricate dappled patterns on the walls and floor. The familiar setting reassured her and for the first time she felt hope. Valerius would protect them. Her father would normally have left for Colonia by this time but when she checked his bed he was still in it, the coverlet clenched to his chin and his eyes tight shut. She guessed he wasn’t asleep but decided to leave him in any case. There would be time later to face the harsh new realities of their life.

She washed and dressed, taking care with her appearance. The blue dress today because it was the one Valerius liked. Would he still love her now that she was poor? With a sudden clarity she realized it didn’t matter. She saw that their relationship, which had first smouldered, then blazed into a white heat of an intensity she had never known, was a fleeting thing and, like the snows of winter, must pass in its own time. He never talked of it, but she knew he would shortly be returning to his legion, knew even, thanks to her father, that he was due soon to be recalled to Rome. In the first glow of their love she had dreamed of travelling there with him and becoming the mistress of a Roman household, but as the months passed she understood that it could never be. Her experience of the world was limited to Colonia and the estate looking out over the river, but she had seen the way Petronius and the others of the city’s equestrian class looked at her father; the sneering glances and contemptuous smiles. Lucullus accepted their disdain because he had no other option; hid his resentment and his anger behind the mask of his smile. How much worse would it be in Rome? Valerius’s family might tolerate her as his wife, but they would never truly accept her. And Rome, for all the wonders he described, was an alien place. This was her land. These were her people.

Two hours later she heard the sound of horses on the track from Colonia and she rushed out to greet Valerius. Her spirits lifted at the sight of the unmistakable figure of a mounted Roman soldier outlined against the low sun.

‘This is the house of Lucullus, augustalis of the Temple of Claudius?’ The voice was detached but the speaker managed to invest the simple question with a measure of threat that sent a shudder through Maeve. Not Valerius, but who? And why? Only now did she notice the other riders who accompanied the soldier, along with four open-topped ox carts trundling along behind.

‘Answer me. I don’t have time to sit here all day.’

She stared up at the rider. She might be frightened, but she would not be cowed. She was a Trinovante maiden and mistress of this house. ‘It is the home of Lucullus,’ she confirmed, trying to keep the anxiety from her voice. ‘And I am his daughter.’

The legionary grunted and slid from his horse, allowing her to see his face for the first time. The eyes that stared at her were close-set and cold. Very deliberately he allowed his gaze to run over her body, lingering on her breasts and hips. It left her feeling somehow violated, as if his eyes were his hands, which were large and rough with long, dirt-caked fingernails. He had coarse, angular features and at some point his prominent nose had been broken and poorly set. Pock marks dotted his sallow skin. This man has been angry from the day he was born, she thought.

‘Good.’ He pushed roughly past her. ‘Fetch your father out here. Vettius? Get to work. Remember, everything of value.’

Maeve watched in astonishment as the men trooped by her into the house, each carrying a large basket. They were a combination of soldiers and slaves and she had never seen a more brutish-looking group of individuals.

‘Wait! What are you doing?’ she protested. ‘By whose authority do you act?’

The soldier turned slowly and removed his helmet. He looked at her with a slightly pained expression as if uncertain who she was. In the same instant her world pitched upside down and she found herself on her back in the dirt, staring at the sky. Every nerve in her body jangled and her vision was shot with lightning bolts. It took a moment to realize she’d been punched. Her face was a mass of pain beneath the right eye and she could already feel her cheek swelling. Tears blurred her vision as she struggled to sit up.

The pock-marked soldier stood over her and she wondered distractedly if he was about to kick her. ‘If I have to repeat myself,’ he warned, ‘I’ll have you trussed up and scourged. At last.’

Lucullus walked stiff-legged from the villa with the bewildered air of a man woken in the middle of a nightmare. He wore the fine toga presented to him when he had been voted to the priesthood and didn’t seem to notice that the men were laughing at him. They moved briskly back and forth between the villa and the carts loaded with the household treasures he had collected to make himself more Roman. Now the Romans were stripping him of everything.

Maeve struggled to her feet and ran to her father’s side as the leader drew a scroll from a pouch on his sword belt and read from it in a disinterested drawl.

‘By the authority of the procurator this estate is now imperial property, held as security for the repayment of one million, two hundred and twenty-three thousand sestertii loaned to the merchant Lucullus by the senator Lucius Annaeus Seneca. You have seventy-two hours to repay the debt or such portion of it as you are able, or face certain penalties deemed appropriate by the state. Signed Catus Decianus, procurator.’

Maeve gasped at the magnitude of the debt and Lucullus was jolted from his torpor. ‘But I cannot,’ he whispered. ‘No man could raise such a sum in three days.’

The Roman came close enough for Maeve to smell his foul breath. He smiled and she was reminded of a festering sore.

‘Three days, old man. I see no gold in those baskets, so you must have it hidden somewhere else. I’ve never come across a Celt yet who didn’t like the glitter of gold. So dig up your treasure and sell everything you’ve got and bring the proceeds to the procurator’s office in Londinium. Maybe you could even sell yourself.’ He laughed. ‘We done yet, Vettius?’ he shouted.

‘Unless you want the furniture.’

‘Every stick.’

‘And the slaves?’

‘Round them up. If we leave them they’ll only clear off. They can all carry something. Come here.’ Fire streaked across Maeve’s scalp as the soldier wrapped his hand in her hair and hauled her roughly towards one of the wagons. She kicked out at him and screamed in fury but she was powerless against his strength. Her father shouted a protest which was instantly cut off and she felt a momentary panic that he’d been harmed. ‘Stay where you are, you old fool,’ the legionary warned. ‘Vettius would like nothing better than to gut you, but you can’t pay up if you’re dead. You won’t be tempted to run if you know she’s keeping us company. Three days and you’ll get her back, and she might even be in the same condition.’ A hand slipped surreptitiously inside her dress and cupped Maeve’s breast, making her gasp in outrage. ‘Or maybe not,’ he said.

They tethered her hands to the rear of the wagon and as the soldiers and slaves completed their task it lurched off slowly in the direction of the Londinium road. She felt an agonizing tug on her wrists and stumbled helplessly behind, with only time for a single glance back to where her father knelt in the mud with tears running down his cheeks.

Her mind still whirled from the blow she had received, but she willed it to think rationally. There could be no question of escape; she was too tightly bound for that and where would she run to in any case? She was a hostage for her father’s return with the payment. But he could never pay back the full amount and what if it was true and there was no money? What would her fate be at the hands of these evil men? She remembered the touch of the officer’s fingers on her body and her skin crawled. She closed her eyes and a groan escaped her lips. Valerius, why did you not come to me?

Red-eyed and almost sleeping in the saddle, Valerius led his men into the legionary tent lines at Colonia two hours after dawn. They had ridden through the night with the aid of a full moon which showed the road ahead like a shining silver pathway between its pair of ditches. As he rode, he had composed in his mind the report he would send to the governor. Cearan had convinced him that only by supporting Boudicca could Rome ensure lasting peace with the Iceni, but Suetonius Paulinus might not be so easily persuaded. Paulinus had the reputation of a man of bull-headed single-mindedness. He was unlikely to appreciate being distracted from his campaign against Mona by what he would regard as the political gossip of a disaffected Iceni lord.

Nevertheless, the letter had to be written, and when Valerius dismounted he hobbled to the cohort’s headquarters tent and called for a stylus and wax tablet before sitting down at the collapsible campaign table. It wasn’t until he finished that he realized how exhausted he was. If he could only close his eyes for a few seconds it would help. His last memory was of the golden boar amulet nestling against the opaque marble of Maeve’s flawless skin.

An hour later, the clerk found him slumped across the table and called for his centurion. Julius looked down at the sleeping figure with affection.

‘Should we wake him?’ the clerk asked.

Julius shook his head. ‘Leave him. He deserves some rest. Lunaris reckoned they covered forty miles in the saddle last night.’

‘There was the message.’

Yes, there was the message. Julius reached towards Valerius’s shoulder, then hesitated. No. The message said he should call on Lucullus at his convenience. It would be more convenient when he woke.

‘Let him sleep,’ he said. ‘It can’t do any harm.’