The Silver Pigs

XXIV

Flavius Hilaris explained his plan next day.

Unsettled in a strange house, I had heaved awake as soon as people began to stir. I put on four layers of tunics and edged cautiously downstairs. A slave with a raw cough pointed out the dining room, where a murmur of serious voices stopped immediately I appeared. Aelia Camilla greeted me with her flooding smile.

"Here he is! You emerge early for a man who arrived so late!" She was on her feet ready to go about her household tasks, but first set a breakfast plate for me herself. The informality in this official house was tipping me off balance.

Hilaris himself, with his napkin under his chin, passed me a bread basket. The crab-faced young woman Helena was there. I half expected her to withdraw demurely with her aunt, but she stayed, glowering, with her hands locked round a beaker. Hardly a demure flower.

"Having been stationed here," her uncle began at once, being the single-minded type who burrowed into business as soon as he trapped an audience, "I expect you've kept abreast of recent events."

I adopted the pious expression of a man who keeps abreast of events.

Fortunately, the procurator was accustomed to starting meetings with a local resume. He could hardly approach his dinner table without calling for an up-to-date price list of in season vegetables. He brought me abreast himself:

"Precious metals were the main reason for investing in Britain, as you know. We have ironworks in the Southeast forests, organized by the navy in their rag taggle way." Ever at heart an army man, I grinned. There is gold in the far western mountains, and some lead in the central Peak District, though its silver yield is low the prize mines are in the southwest. The Second Augusta once ran them direct, but we ended that in the process of encouraging self-government by the tribes. We keep fortresses at all the mines to give us an overview, but lease out their day-to-day management to local contractors." I was trying not to wriggle with mirth at the procurator's evident enjoyment of his work. No wonder the establishment never took him seriously! "In the Mendips, an entrepreneur called Claudius Triferus holds the franchise now, creams off his percentage, then ships the balance to the Treasury. A British native. I shall have him apprehended once I know how the ingots are lifted and shipped."

I finished eating, so to aid digestion sat up cross-legged on my couch. Flavius Hilaris did the same. He had the pinched look of a man with stones, who from anxiety or embarrassment never found time to let his doctor examine him.

"Your job will be to investigate the theft, Falco. I want to plant you in the mines, establish you among the work force"

"I had my eye on a management post!"

He let out a disparaging laugh. "All filled up with senators' dim nephews out here for the boar hunting sorry, Helena!"

As a senator's daughter she might well have objected, yet she forced a cranky smile. I meanwhile became a mite preoccupied.

My new job demanded stamina. Mines are worked by the grimmest types of criminal. Slave gangs labour there from sunrise to sunset, it's heavy work, and although the lead seams in the Mendips lie fairly near the surface, what those mines lack in physical danger they make up for in the utter desolation of the spot.

"Falco?" asked Flavius. "Pondering your good luck?"

"Frankly, I'd prefer to sit in full formal dress without a sun umbrella, in some blazing hot amphitheatre where the gatekeepers ban wine jars and the musicians are on strike, watching five hours of an inaudible Greek play! To whom," I enquired fastidiously, "do I owe this bracing winter holiday?"

Hilaris folded his napkin. "I believe Helena Justina first had the idea."

I had to smile.

"May the gods protect your ladyship! I trust you'll explain to my little grey-haired mother when my back's broken and they bury me in a bog? Do you answer to the Furies, madam, for wreaking this hard vengeance on me?"

She stared into her beaker and did not reply.

I caught her uncle's quizzical eye.

"Helena Justina answers to herself," he said briefly.

It seemed to me that was her problem. To say so achieved nothing, and I had no wish to criticize her father Decimus. No man can ever be entirely to blame for the women in his house. That was something I knew long before I possessed women in my own.