Murder in the Forum

Chapter Eight

In the morning I awoke to find the sun well risen in the sky, and the sounds of the day’s business issuing noisily from the shops and streets nearby. Junio (who had waited up anxiously for my return) had already risen and gone downstairs from where the delicious smell of hot oatcakes fresh from the street vendor, the intermittent sound of stone on chisel, and a murmur of urgent voices wafted up to me.

It seemed I had a customer.

I struggled up from my comfortable bed of rags and reeds, splashed a little water on my face and hands from the bowl which Junio had set for me, straightened my tunic, donned my belt and sandals and made my way down the rickety ladder to the back kitchen-cum-workroom of my humble shop.

The oatcakes were there, visibly cooling on a wooden platter beside the hearth, where a cheerful fire was already burning. I looked at them longingly, but Junio’s voice from the front shop beyond the flimsy partition drove any immediate thoughts of breakfast from my head.

‘I tell you he is sleeping, and must not be disturbed.’

Not a customer, then. Junio knew better than to turn away business. Nor a message from Marcus either — that would have brought Junio pounding up the stairs to fetch me, whatever the hour. I was puzzled. A man in my situation rarely receives social calls.

‘And I tell you I must speak with Libertus. There is some chance that he might vouch for me.’

I frowned. I recognised the voice. Those clipped Italian accents were unmistakable — my visitor was the sallow youth I had met the night before. And he wished me to ‘vouch’ for him. That sounded ominous.

I stepped around the partition, the sudden daylight almost dazzling my eyes. ‘Greetings, Octavius. You have found me, as you see. In what way did you hope that I could help you?’

The thin face looked hollower than ever, but the youth smiled and the work-roughened hands reached out to grasp mine urgently. ‘Libertus. Have you heard the news? Of course you have. You were there, you must have seen it. Perennis Felix is dead. Poisoned. The whole city is talking of it. I did not know what to do, and then I thought of you. I found out where you lived, and came to find you at once, before they came to arrest me. You can at least bear witness that when I left the banquet he was still alive.’

I disentangled myself from his grasp. So, attempts at hiding the possible poisoning had failed. Poor Marcus, he would be first in line for questioning. Some of the magistrates would enjoy that. A great man gains many enemies in the course of his duties. And of course, if my patron were questioned, I would certainly be next. He had spent the day with me. I closed my eyes momentarily.

When I opened them, Octavius was staring at me anxiously. ‘You had not heard?’

‘I had not heard that he was poisoned,’ I said, choosing my words carefully. ‘Who told you as much?’

‘A servant at the hiring stables this morning,’ the young man said hotly. ‘I called to see if. . I called there early on private business, and was told that Perennis Felix was already dead. Something he ate at the feast. I knew what conclusions everyone would draw. And, of course, I had made myself conspicuous by talking that stupid old dodderer with the dogs into letting me attend the banquet.’

So he was there as Gaius’s guest. That explained one mystery at least. But at the moment I had other concerns. ‘And the stable-hand said poisoned? You are sure? It appeared to most of us that Felix had simply choked on a nut.’

‘Clutching his throat and vomiting, he said. He gave a lively description.’ His face cleared. ‘Although, when I come to consider it, he did not actually mention poison. I simply supposed. .’ Octavius gave an embarrassed shrug. ‘He even called after me, but I did not stop to listen. I thought the authorities would already be looking for me. Zetso saw me at the banquet last night, and he knew-’ He stopped. ‘But of course, if Felix merely choked. . Libertus, I am sorry to have troubled you. I have been foolish, I think.’

I glanced at Junio, who had given up all pretence of cutting the piece of marble he was holding, and was listening with interest. I caught his eye and he raised an eyebrow questioningly. I nodded, and he disappeared inside to clear a place in the workroom and set out a pair of folding stools. I smiled approvingly. Like me, Junio had found the young man’s words singularly intriguing.

I took my visitor gently by the elbow. ‘From what you say about your early start, Octavius, I imagine you have not breakfasted? I do not suppose you returned to your lodgings?’

‘It is of no consequence. I rarely eat in the morning. A beaker of water and a piece of fruit perhaps.’

‘Then you will stay and breakfast with me? I have more robust Celtic appetites, and there are some fresh oatcakes which are not yet entirely cold.’

He shook his head with a kind of frantic haste. ‘No, thank you, no. You are very kind, but there are things that I must do urgently.’

My grip on his elbow tightened. ‘Octavius,’ I said, ‘I am sure you want to speak to your accomplice, whoever it is,’ I had the satisfaction of seeing his face pale, but I went on inexorably, ‘but first you will talk to me. It seems to me you have something to explain. First you appear at a banquet where it seems you have little business to be, and you disappear again with scarcely a word. Next you go skulking around the hiring stables at daybreak and rush away in a panic when you hear that Felix is dead. If I were a magistrate I would find this very suspicious. And then you lay a trail to my door by asking half of Glevum where I live. You owe me an explanation, at least.’

Octavius looked at his sandal-straps and shook his head.

‘Then,’ I said brightly, giving his elbow a warning squeeze, ‘perhaps I should send Junio for the aediles? No doubt they will be interested in your doings. Your early morning visit to the stables, for instance.’

Octavius pulled his arm away. ‘But there is nothing to explain. It seems that Felix was not poisoned after all. Besides, who would pay any attention to me? I am a humble tile-maker — not a powerful tyrant protected by imperial favour like Felix.’

I glanced at him sharply. An interesting choice of words, I thought. I said, slowly and firmly, ‘Octavius, I understand that you come from Rome. That it is a big city, and no doubt they do things differently there. But this is Glevum. Here, everyone of importance knows everybody else, and everything unusual is a wonder. Your arrival — as a visitor from Rome — will have been noted, and commented upon, by every pie-seller, amulet-maker and horse-dealer in the city. Just take a look around you.’

Octavius glanced nervously up and down the street, where at this very moment a dozen urchins were ogling us, while a fat peasant woman with a basket of turnips on her back was whispering to a man with a loaded donkey, openly nudging him and nodding in our direction.

‘So,’ I said. ‘Shall I send for the aediles, or will you settle for the oatcakes? Before they are completely cold?’

Octavius looked at me sorrowfully. ‘It seems,’ he said, ‘that I have little choice.’ He allowed me to steer him round the partition and into the inner workroom, and looked round him in dismay at the tile chips and the half-finished mosaic ‘pattern piece’ which covered half the table. I do not normally receive visitors in those dusty recesses — in fact I do not normally receive visitors at all — but these were special circumstances. Octavius, as I now knew, had a careless tongue and I wanted to get him inside the shop before he got us both arrested.

‘Now then,’ I said, when he was comfortably settled and furnished with a cold oatcake. ‘Perhaps you can tell me what it was that really brought you to Glevum? And don’t tell me that it was merely to visit the tile factories. You followed Perennis Felix, did you not?’

The youth turned as scarlet as his complexion allowed. ‘In a manner of speaking.’

I sighed. Evidently extracting information was going to be hard work. I wished, fleetingly, that I had Marcus with me. One look at those wide purple stripes and aristocratic features, and people are falling over their sandal-straps to furnish information, before he calls on unpleasant official means of whetting their memories for them. It is a system that has worked well for us in the past. Today, however, I was on my own.

Or almost. Junio stepped forward with a beaker of water for me and our best drinking cup full of watered wine for the Roman. As he handed me mine, he murmured deferentially, ‘Forgive me, master, that there are no honey-cakes for you this morning.’

I looked at him in astonishment. I rarely buy honey-cakes, though the oatcake-baker sells them.

Junio shot me a warning glance, and continued smoothly, ‘The vendor told me she had sold them all. A Roman lady arrived last night, after the city gates were shut. She was obliged to stay at a lodging house just outside the walls.’

I nodded. There are a number of these, some official, some private and none of them very salubrious, making a living from unfortunate travellers who find themselves benighted outside the walls. ‘And?’ I enquired.

‘The establishment does not offer food, but the owner recommended these honey-cakes and the lady sent out this morning and bought half a score of them. By the time I got there, there were none left. I am afraid you lost your honey-cakes to the daughter of Perennis Felix.’

Old gods of tree and stone, rain blessings on the boy! He had found a way to alert me to his news without transgressing the social code which forbids a slave to interrupt his master. It was significant news, too. One glance at Octavius’s face was enough to tell me that. He had turned pinker than a skinned swan on a skillet. A little taper lighted in my brain.

‘This would be Phyllidia, I presume?’

The skinned swan turned pinker than ever.

‘So she was the reason you fled from the banquet — no, don’t deny it, you muttered her name as you left.’

Octavius flushed deeper yet, but his answer was spirited enough. ‘What matter if I did? I was breaking no law. Phyllidia hoped to arrive yesterday, but she was so late that I had given her up. As it seems that Felix had done too: he said at the banquet that she was on her way.’

I remembered Marcus’s description of the girl. ‘A face like a cavalry horse and a whine like a donkey.’ Yet something in the way in which Octavius spoke her name gave me the distinct impression that he had a much more flattering picture of her.

I made a stab at the truth. ‘So you had arranged to meet Phyllidia?’ He did not deny it, so I pressed my advantage. ‘Did her father know?’

‘Her father? By Hercules. .’ It was as if I had lifted the boards from a sluice-gate. Octavius had previously said little, but now the words poured out in such a torrent that I found myself leaning backwards. He swore by all the gods of heaven and earth — and a few from the underworld as well — that her father was a tyrant, a monster in human form, heartless, unfeeling, merciless. ‘If he is dead, so be it,’ he finished angrily. ‘It was no more than he deserved.’ He bit savagely into his oatcake.

In general I received the feeling that young Octavius did not altogether care for Perennis Felix. ‘I think, citizen,’ I said slowly, ‘that you had better tell me this story from the beginning. How did you come to meet Phyllidia?’ It was a reasonable question. The daughters of Roman dignitaries do not normally consort with plebeian tile-makers.

Octavius shrugged. ‘There was work to be done on the roof of one of Felix’s villas. It is a few miles from Rome, not far from where I have my factory. I brought some tiles. Felix was not there, though I had devoted half a day to travelling at his request, but his daughter was. She received me kindly — very kindly. I think that she was glad to talk to someone. Do you know, citizen, the poor girl was almost a prisoner in that house. Felix dragged her away from the city, where she had at least acquaintances and diversions.’

‘After the fall of her relative the Prefect?’

If he was surprised at my deduction he did not betray it. ‘So he claimed. But I do not think Felix was ever in danger. He is too much a private favourite with the Emperor, and more interested in money than politics. Commodus would not willingly have lost him. He supplied too many boys and wines, and trinkets for that concubine of his.’

I nodded. Marcus had said the same. Felix would have enjoyed finding the boys, I thought. ‘Phyllidia did not like the country?’

Octavius’s face darkened. ‘If she had a life like any other young woman, she might have liked it well enough. But her father prevented it. After her mother died she had no companions, no diversions, not even proper attendants, only an old crone of a handmaiden who reported her every move. Felix would not even permit her an amanuensis to write letters to her friends, and she could not do it herself. She never had an education — though the old monster could well have afforded it, even for a daughter.’

‘So, you and she became friends?’

‘Much more than friends. If she had been a commoner, or a slave, I would have married her. I almost had hopes that Felix would countenance a match. He has tried for years to find a husband for her, without success, and she is no longer young. Even a marriage to me would have been something. I made an approach to him.’

‘But he would not agree?’

‘Agree? He beat her when he heard of it, threw me out and used his influence almost to ruin me. And yet I could not see what more he hoped for. Phyllidia is a good-natured girl, but she is no beauty and she lacks the sparkle and education necessary for patrician society. Thanks to her father, she cannot even play an instrument or recite the poets. She might have married once, when she was younger, but the suitor wanted a huge dowry, and her father was too miserly to meet it. I would have taken her with none.’

He said it with such simplicity that I was touched. I too, had once loved a woman in that way, although my Gwellia had been skilled, and such a beauty that a dozen men would have offered for her hand, whether she brought them land or horses or not. Besides, I reminded myself, this interest was not wholly selfless. Dowry or no dowry, Phyllidia would presumably inherit a sizeable fortune one day.

In fact, she was probably about to do so. I looked at Octavius with interest, but he was still grumbling about Felix.

‘Some auspex had told him that Phyllidia would one day be wealthy and wed, and for once her father decided to believe the auguries. He tried to make a match for her with a dozen men, all rich and in their dotage — all seeking favour with the Perennis family, of course. But Phyllidia learned to be so stupid and sullen that even they refused her in the end. It was the only way she could protect herself. And then there was this plot to marry her to Marcus. The Emperor had approved it himself, Phyllidia said, and though she wept and pleaded, Felix was implacable.’

This was a new view of Phyllidia. Marcus would hardly be flattered either, I thought.

‘Felix arranged a coach and a chaperon and paid an armed custos to accompany them. There was nothing Phyllidia could do. She was just another consignment of goods, she said, being delivered to the buyer. Felix was to go ahead to Britain — he had some private business in Eboracum — and she was to follow and meet up with him in Glevum.’

At the mention of the northern colonia my spine prickled. I had learned, not long ago, of a Celtic slave called Gwellia living in Eboracum. I said, ‘So you followed her on horseback?’ I could understand the impulse. Given the faintest opportunity, I would make the long and dangerous journey to Eboracum — and I could not even be sure that this Gwellia was my wife.

Octavius nodded. ‘We were to make one more appeal to Felix, and if that failed, we had agreed. . we threatened. . But it is of no importance now. Her father is dead. And nobody poisoned him. So I must find Phyllidia and tell her the news. She has probably jumped to conclusions and is worrying about me.’

‘Octavius,’ I said, ‘you are a freeman and a citizen, and I cannot detain you. But I will give you a warning. Be careful that tongue of yours does not betray you. There are sharp minds in Glevum, and Commodus will not be happy at this death. The authorities would gladly find a culprit. I do not know how you planned to poison Felix, though I can well see why. I sincerely hope for your sake that you did not succeed.’

Octavius stared at me. ‘But. . you said that Felix had merely choked.’

‘I said that he appeared to choke, and for the moment I am prepared to let the public believe it. But there are some indications, citizen, that it may not be true.’

His stare widened ‘You mean, he may have been poisoned after all? Dear gods!’ Octavius put down his drinking vessel, and before either of us could stop him he had bolted for a second time out of the door.

Junio made to go after him, but I restrained him. ‘Let him go, Junio. He has caused enough speculation in the street by calling here already. He will not get far.’

Junio picked up the drinking cup. ‘You think he murdered Felix?’

I sipped at my water. ‘I do not know. I think he fears he may have done. Either that, or he thinks he knows who did. But it is fruitless to call him back. He will tell us no more for the moment, and anyway, this way I can finish his oatcake and’ — I gestured towards the drinking cup — ‘you may drink the rest of that if you wish.’

Junio was raised as a slave in a Roman household, and he actually likes watered wine in the morning.