Shadows in Bronze

LX

When Petronius Longus stopped snoring and roused himself, conflicting emotions fought in his face. He took in the fact we had come down the mountain in a very different mood from when we had left. While he was sleeping Helena and I had finished his wine (though that did not matter at the price here); now she and I were tangled together like puppies in the shade. As a man with a hard grasp of the social rules, Petronius was visibly torn.

'Falco, you'll have to be careful!'

I tried not to laugh. In ten years of watching my contorted relationships, this was the first time Petro had bothered to give me brotherly advice.

'Trust me,' I said. (It was what I had told Helena. I blocked out how at the crucial moment when I tried to restrain my efforts, she had cried out and would not let me go -)

Petro growled, 'For heavens' sake, Marcus! What will you do if there's a mistake?'

'Apologize to her father, confess to my mother, and find a priest who keeps his prices down… What do you take me for?'

My shoulder was aching, but nothing could make me shift. The joy of my life had her head on my heart and was profoundly asleep. All her troubles had been drained away; her tranquil lashes were still spiky from her helpless tears afterwards. I could easily have wept myself.

'The lady might see things differently. You ought to stop this!' Petro advised perversely, now that this expedition up the mountain had ensured I never could.

His wife woke on the bench beside him. Now I watched Silvia interpret the scene: Helena Justina tucked against my side with her knees under mine; Helena's hand clasping my own; her fine hair, crumpled by my arm; the depth of her sleep; my own unsmiling peace…

'Marcus! What are you going to do?' she insisted in a worried undertone. Silvia liked everything to be neat. 'Finish my commission, and put in a claim for payment as rapidly as possible…' I closed my eyes.

If Silvia thought we had started something scandalous she must have blamed me for it, because when Helena awoke the two of them went off together to wash their faces and reorganize themselves. When they came back it was with the secretive, satisfied air of two women who had been gossiping. Silvia had her hair wound on the nape of her neck the way Helena usually wore hers, and they had knotted Helena's with ribbon. It suited her. She looked as if she ought to have been doing something typically Athenian on a black-figure vase. I would have liked to be the free-spirited Helena lying in wait to catch her just around the vase handle…

'This is confusing,' Petro joked. 'Which one was mine?'

'Oh I'll take the one with the topknot, if you like.'

He and I exchanged a look. When one of two friends is married and the other stays a bachelor, rightly or wrongly the assumption is that you operate by different rules. It was a long time since Petro and I had been out together on such easy terms.

Anyone who knew Petronius and his interest in wine also knew that he would seize on this opportunity to make a few purchases for domestic use. True to his usual thoroughness, once he found a crisp white at a few coppers an amphora (with a petillance he described to me lovingly, as connoisseurs do), Petronius Longus acquired as much as he could: while I left him on his own he had bought a adleus. Seriously. A huge barrel as tall as his wife. At least twenty amphorae. Enough to put a thousand flasks on the table if he kept an inn. (More if he watered the drink.)

Silvia was hoping I would dissuade him from this mad bargain, but he had already paid. We all had to wait while he burned his name in the cask then made complicated arrangements for coming back with Nero and the cart, which was the only way be would ever get his culleus away from here. Silvia and I asked how he intended to transport his family home now (not to mention where they would live, if their house was full of wine), but he was lost in euphoria. Besides, we knew he would manage it. Petronius Longus had done stupid things before.

Eventually we rode back.

I had the one with the topknot. She sat in front, intensely quiet. When we reached the villa letting her go was almost impossible. I told her again that I loved her, then I had to send her in.

Petronius and Silvia had tactfully waited at the estate entrance while I took Helena up to the house. When I rode back with the hired donkey they stayed politely silent.

‘I'll see you when I can, Petro.' I must have looked grey.

'O Jupiter!' Petronius exclaimed, swinging down from his mount. 'Let's all have another drink before you go!' Even Arria Silvia forbore to complain.

We broke into a wineskin, sitting under a pine tree in the dusk. We three drank, not too much but with a certain desperation now Helena had left us.

Afterwards I walked up to the house, reflecting that love was as hard on the feet as it was on the pocket and the heart. Now I noticed something I had missed before: a chink of harness under the cypress trees led me to two rough-coated, saddle-sore mules, tethered away from the track with nosebags on. I listened, but caught no other sign of life. If revellers – or lovers – had come up the mountain from the coast, it seemed odd that they should travel so far onto a private estate for their happy purposes. I patted the animals, and went on thoughtfully.

By the time I arrived at the villa again, it was an hour since I had brought Helena back.

Any murderer or coffer-thief could have got into that house. The servants who greeted Helena had long disappeared. No one was about. I went up, confident at least that her bedroom would be well staffed; a safety measure I had insisted on. It meant I myself could only expect five minutes being polite to her but I was looking forward to a silly charade in front of other people, playing her surly bodyguard, all gristle and grim jokes…

Reaching Helena's room I opened the heavy door, slipped in and closed it silently. It was an open invitation; I had to fix a bolt on the door. The outer space was dark again, with the same lights beyond the curtaining.

She had company. Someone spoke, not Helena. I should have left. I was asking for every kind of disappointment, but by then I felt so desperate to see her that it carried me straight into the room.

The green dress lay folded on a coffer; her sandals were tumbled askew on a bedside rug. Helena had changed into something darker and warmer with woollen sleeves to the wrist; her hair was plaited on one shoulder. She looked neat, grave, and impenetrably tired.

She had come home so late she had her dinner on a tray. She sat facing the door, so when I batted in through the curtain her shocked eyes watched me frantically absorb the scene.

There was a man with her.

He was sprawled in a chair with one knee over its arm, casually scoffing nuts. Helena seemed more sullen than usual as she chewed at a chicken wing, though she was getting on with it as if the presence of this person in her bedroom was commonplace.

‘Hello,' I stormed angrily. ‘You must be Barnabas! I owe you half a million bits of gold-'

He looked up.

It was certainly the man who had attacked me in the warehouse, and probably the one I had glimpsed harassing Petro in the ox cart on the Gapua Road. Then I stared at him harder. After three months of chasing the man in the green cloak, I finally discovered who he really was. The freedman's old mother in Calabria had been right: Barnabas was dead.

I knew this man. He was Helena Justina's ex-husband; his name was Atius Pertinax.

According to the Daily Gazette, he was dead too.