Ruso and the Root of All Evils

9

Finally, Tilla was alone with her headache. The Medicus’ nephews and nieces had been rounded up by their mother. The older girls had grown bored with her and gone about their own business, and the cook, eager to get this stranger out of his kitchen, had handed her a cup of water and suggested that she go and sit in the garden.

She glanced both ways down the long stone porch that shaded the front of the house. There was no sign of the man whom she called the Medicus, everyone else called Ruso and now his family — confusingly — seemed to know as Gaius. She supposed he was somewhere talking to the brother, finding out at last why they were here.

She crossed the porch and went down the steps into a garden where roses and lavender grew in beds corralled by little clipped hedges, as if they might otherwise make a dash for freedom.

The path led under the dappled shade of a long wooden frame that she thought might be called a pergola. The word was one of the many new things she would have to learn here. She already had the word for the insects hiding up amongst the leaves. Cicadas. The Medicus had promised her she would grow to love the song, but so far the terrible grating screech made her feel as though she was having her back teeth sawn off.

Tilla sank on to a stone bench that looked out over a cracked concrete pond. The water had evaporated long ago, leaving a black flaking coat that might once have been algae. She gazed at a plinth, where a rusted bracket reached for a statue that wasn’t there, and tried not to think how far she was from home. Everything was as the Medicus had described it: the sunshine, the olive grove outside the gates, the tall vines, the winery … but her mind had taken his words and painted its own pictures. In those pictures nothing was quite as big, or as hot, or as foreign. Or as badly maintained.

The people were not what she had been expecting, either. The fine fleece that had taken much of the journey to spin would stay bundled up in the luggage. She did not want the humiliation of presenting it as a gift and having to watch the stepmother find something polite to say about it.

While they were travelling she had tried to understand exactly how the Medicus’ family had managed to get itself into such debt, but his attempts to explain how loans worked had only caused more confusion.

‘Imagine,’ he had said, ‘that you borrow a cow for a year. You drink the milk every day. When the time comes to give the cow back, you give back the cow, and the calf it’s produced, as thanks for having had the use of it.’

She had said, ‘What if there is no calf? What if the cow dies?’

‘That’s the advantage of money,’ he said, looking as though he thought he was clever. ‘It doesn’t deteriorate.’

‘Then what is the problem?’

He had scratched one ear as he did when he was thinking and admitted that borrowing money could not really be explained in terms of cows. ‘Basically, you have to make the money make more money,’ he said. ‘Instead, Arria and my father chose to spend the money on a temple to Diana and Home Improvements.’

‘So it is as if she slaughtered the cow before it calved, ate the meat and boiled the hooves down for glue, and now she has no meat or a calf to give back.’

He had pondered that for a moment before agreeing that it was near enough.

Now that she had seen the house, she understood at last what Home Improvements were. Mosaics on the floor. A hall for welcoming guests that was painted with pictures of pale women with skimpy clothes and vacant faces and muscular men leading bulls to be sacrificed. Cupids dancing around the dining room. Then there was the carved head of the Medicus’ father set on top of a lump of marble, and lots of silly little polished tables with spindly legs. What could you do with things like that? You could not milk them or eat them. They would not keep you warm in winter. She could not understand how anyone had the energy to bother, or indeed why.

The water was cool in her throat. She dipped her fingers into the cup and wiped them across her forehead. Then, since nothing seemed to be moving out here except a few bees, she tipped the rest over her head, unpeeled the tunic that was stuck to her damp back and stretched out along the length of the bench. She put her fingers in her ears and closed her eyes. She wished she could close her nose to the smell as easily. The scent of the flowers could not disguise the fact that something seemed to have gone wrong with the drains. Just as the children’s excitement at her arrival could not make up for the shock of realizing that nobody here knew who she was. In Britannia, she had thought that she was an important part of the Medicus’ life. Now it was plain that, even though she had been in the room with him when he wrote many of his letters home, not one of them had mentioned her.

Letting one hand trail down, she ran a finger over the parched lichen that had formed on the stone leg of the bench. She found herself picturing the brittle thorns she had seen by the roadside, offering nothing but crops of white snails so maddened by the sun that they climbed up nearer to it to bake themselves under the brilliant sky. She pushed the picture away. It was making her feel hotter. Instead she tried to imagine herself paddling in the willow-fringed shallows of the river at home. It did not help.

Arria’s insistence that she be led away to be fed and watered had probably been kindly meant. The half-sisters had taken the trouble to show her around the umpteen rooms of the house, dutifully pointing out decoration and glass windows, and she had done her best to think of a new way of admiring each one. She had wanted to ask about the farm: are you worried that the soil is baked so dry? When does it rain? How many cows do you have? What else can you grow apart from grapes and olives? But the girls did not seem interested in the farm. When they were not showing off the house they seemed to do nothing but talk about clothes and boys and get in the way of the staff.

Tilla was reflecting that at least the Medicus had found time to warn her about them, if not the other way around, when she felt a painful jab in her ribs and opened her eyes to see those same half-sisters standing over her.

‘She’s awake!’ exclaimed Marcia, who had no right to be surprised since she was the one who had just poked her.

Tilla blinked as her eyes adjusted again to the glare filtering through the leaves.

‘Good news,’ announced Marcia. ‘Mother says you can chaperone us into town tomorrow.’

‘It’s not our turn for the tutor tomorrow,’ said Flora, the younger of the two. Then, as if Tilla might not know what a tutor was, she added, ‘In our family you have to learn poetry, even if you’re a girl. And music.’

‘It’s a privilege,’ put in her older sister. ‘But we won’t have to put up with it much longer, hopefully. Anyway, after we’ve bathed and had dinner you can spend tonight unpacking, or whatever it is you do for our brother. Then if you get him to give you some money we can all go shopping.’

Tilla sat up, rubbing her eyes. ‘Shopping?’ she repeated, wondering why anyone would want to tramp around buying things in this heat. Surely the family had enough servants to fetch whatever they needed?

The girls looked at each other. Marcia said, ‘What did I tell you? She doesn’t understand.’

‘Don’t you have shops in Britannia?’ asked Flora.

Marcia said, ‘They probably don’t have money, either. Come on, Tilla. We’ll show you what a bath-house is before the others get in there and mess it up.’