Master and God

10

Safety.

The apartment. Four quiet rooms. Dim light. Life went on here on a decent domestic basis, orderly, ordinary, private. Someone was trying out a floor rug in the corridor. Not a success. It was tripping up clients and the cleaning slave loathed it; the experiment would be discontinued.

All the internal doors were closed. Street noises were muffled: shouts; harness bells; chickens in cages; children’s squeals. Indoors, silence.

An island of serenity in a troubled world. Few people knew his link to this place. Nobody knew he was here.

Having the apartment was starting to matter.

Flavia Lucilla opened a door suddenly and bounced from her workroom, her mouth full of hairpins. Annoyed, she found the soldier standing just indoors, key still in his hand. ‘Vinius!’ Hairpins scattered.

Once again his unexpected arrival had startled her. He, too, wished she had not been here. Without a word he strode to his room, closing the double doors. He stood there, leaning back against the wood, desperate, shaken by today’s experience.

Lucilla knocked briskly, trying to push open the doors. A furious Vinius faced her, snarling: ‘We need some rules around here! Doors open: permit to treat. Doors shut: bloody well keep out!’

She returned to her client. The woman sensed a desire to be rid of her. She hung on, asking questions about maintenance of her new hairstyle, wondering about lotions, describing dull antics of grandchildren.

Once freed, Lucilla prowled about, making it obvious she was now alone, but no sound came from the soldier.

Hours later, she was finishing in the kitchen when she heard Vinius emerge quietly and use the facilities. He came in. Though a little more benign after her supper, Lucilla cold-shouldered him. He barely seemed to notice. A married man, he was used to the silent treatment.

He stared at his shelf as if he had never seen the things that now stood there. She had presumed he chose them: two sets of ceramic redware bowls in three sizes, small, medium, generous; knives and spoons wrapped in a dinner napkin; a small frying pan with a folding handle; another flat pan with two handles; a set of four beakers; two pottery lamps (with designs of ducks, nothing pornographic); and a flagon of lamp oil. All were new. All had arrived the same day as the furniture she had seen in one of his rooms: a bed-frame with a neat pile of folded blanket, sheet and pillow; a stool beside the bed; a chest. The chest was locked; she had tested it shamelessly, then scurried from the room as if she feared Vinius had an invisible gryphon watching his belongings.

Conscious he needed rehydration, Vinius selected a beaker. In a world of his own, and with his one-eyed focussing trouble, when he turned on the bronze tap he partly missed the water flow. Splashes went everywhere; he stood transfixed.

Lucilla dropped one hand on his wrist to steady the beaker. She turned off the tap. Vinius greedily swallowed down the half cup.

Lucilla had recognised there was some real crisis. She touched his arm again, using the back of her hand so it was as neutral as the touch of a medical orderly. ‘You’re freezing cold! Are you ill?’

He stared dully. ‘Shock… I had a shock.’

Amazed, she saw his teeth chatter briefly. She took control; she steered the man to her workroom, where she sat him in one of the armchairs. She fetched the blanket from his room, shook it open and draped it over him, saying she would make him a hot drink. Vinius allowing her to take charge was sufficiently uncharacteristic to cause concern.

It took time to heat anything on the small cooking fire. While he was alone, Vinius roused himself a little, looking around. He stood up, clutching the blanket, and went to the open door which led onto a veranda; it ran around four sides of an internal courtyard but had been sectioned off with trellis outside their apartment, providing a small place to sit out, dappled with sunlight on this long summer evening. He heard voices below, must be old man Cretticus, talking to a slave.

Back indoors, Vinius deduced much about Flavia Lucilla’s life. Her situation had changed from when he first met her, scratching an existence, with the blowsy mother he had suspected was almost a prostitute, Lucilla then a girl who seemed only one step from the same fate. Clearly she had talent. Apart from what he had heard about her from Melissus, he could tell from this workroom. Two exuberantly curly female headpieces sat on a shelf, one of them half-finished. She had assembled kit, all organised with systematic neatness on shelves or in trays in a way that appealed to a soldier. The Empire permitted social advancement, but that was commonest among men who could rise from slave to free citizen through business, then with enough application and patronage reach the equestrian rank and even senator. Flavia Lucilla was a rare woman to seize on the possibilities. Vinius was not surprised, but impressed by her swift progress.

He was back in the chair looking meek when Lucilla returned, bringing heated wine with honey and a hint of spice. Vinius cradled the cup in both hands. He gulped, then shuddered, but it hit the spot. ‘You’re wonderful!’

With a sniff at his cliche, she took the second wicker chair, pushing a cushion into the small of her back. She was wearing the same blue dress as last time, but with casual slippers. Her hair was different, looped in a heavy plait behind her head; Vinius thought it too severe but guessed the style was temporary. She positioned her feet on a footstool, pair to one Vinius had kicked aside, then laced her fingers together, leaning her chin on them. ‘I think you ought to tell me what happened.’

‘Can’t do that.’

‘I am a hairdresser, Vinius. We see everything and say nothing.’

Vinius remained stubbornly silent to begin with. He gazed around Lucilla’s room, as he had done while she was brewing his hot drink. To delay answering her question, he indicated a large divided basket in which were laid hanks of human hair in different colours.

‘Imported,’ Lucilla explained, matter-of-factly. She kept talking to settle him: ‘The blonde comes from Germania, the blue-black from India. Don’t worry; I pick it all over and give it a wash before I bring a bundle into the house. Expensive stuff, but I get access to the importers and special rates because of who I work for… Sometimes I wonder about the story behind it. For a woman in abject poverty, selling your hair beats selling your body — and, unlike a virginity, you can grow it back and sell it more than once.’

Vinius at last smiled faintly. He did not remark that, as he knew from the vigiles, in the sex trade repeat virginities were two a quadrans.

Next, he cocked his head at a stone bust of a male head, stylised yet familiar, alongside which lay a hairpiece on which Lucilla had been working after her client left. It was not one of her fanciful fondant crests for her ladies, but a flat band of cloth onto which she was slowly knotting a dense row of identical formal curls. ‘Is that-?’

‘If it is, you’ll see him wearing it, won’t you, Praetorian?’

She rose, and planted the hairpiece on the model’s smooth crown; she made a mock obeisance, then snorted. She put away the bust in a cupboard, where she must normally hide it out of sight.

They were connected closely through their work, with its demands of confidentiality. Anyway, the death of Paris was public. Vinius made his decision. ‘I killed a man today — at least, helped somebody do it.’

Lucilla took his empty beaker, lest it slip from his fingers and shatter. She resumed her chair, sitting very still. Oddly, she felt no fear at all at the fact he said he had killed someone. ‘Who’s dead?’

‘Paris,’ said Gaius Vinius in a drab voice. ‘Paris, the actor-dancer. Paris who may have been the Empress’s lover.’

‘Or not!’ commented Lucilla. ‘Paris who was merely suspected by her husband, the maniac.’

We live in dark times.

We have seen nothing yet.

Gaius told her what had happened and his part in it. Lucilla merely asked, ‘What was your thinking, when you involved yourself?’

‘Paris was going to die anyway. No need to prolong his agony. He was terrified, but he meant to resist, and whatever you think of theatrical types, he was extremely fit and athletic — which Domitian is not. I didn’t want to let the public see Paris being mangled. There would have been screaming. And scrabbling around on the ground. It would have lasted a long time. Blood everywhere. Maybe the Emperor himself wounded.’

‘I see,’ said Lucilla.

Words were coming freely now. ‘We bundled Domitian off the scene as fast as possible. My centurion told me to lie low — a good man, old school. We work very closely… He is scared I may have to take the blame.’

Lucilla considered. ‘No. No, it won’t happen. The Emperor will want to see himself as a hero.’

‘He killed an unarmed man!’

‘A soldier’s viewpoint, Vinius. Anyway, you will be deleted from his version.’

‘He may want me deleted permanently.’

‘Then your centurion is right. Disappearing will help Domitian misremember how things happened. Soon you won’t count.’

‘I just did my job.’

‘Oh how conventional.’ Lucilla’s jibe was gentle and Gaius smiled at it.

He finished his drink, feeling it reheat his body-core as intended. He was at ease with the girl now, any predatory interest in her neutralised. All it took, apparently, was just one kindly brew to reposition Flavia Lucilla among his grandmother, aunts and the mother he could not remember. Or he viewed her, perhaps, as a man might think of an elderly prostitute who was content to listen, or some friendly landlady, detached from his real life but with a warm heart.

She saw him just as before: a typical man, a menace, a potential lecher, an idiot.

Vinius remained at the apartment for the next three days, but Lucilla rearranged her appointments so she saw her customers in their own homes — as a favour to him, as she saw it — and she spent a lot of time elsewhere with Lara. She and Vinius barely saw each other.

After the Praetorian returned to the camp, the apartment seemed somehow less empty to her. She had accepted that they shared the place. He would be coming back and, on the whole, Lucilla no longer minded.