"Nemesis" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davis Lindsay)

VII

Modestus and Primilla lived at Antium, nearly thirty miles away. I dreaded announcing to Helena that I was going on a trip. The baby’s death still gnawed. It was the wrong time to leave home. However, some god was on my side. Some deity with time on their hands in Olympus decided Falco needed help.

I entered my house with a cautious step. After working the key gently, I let the door swing to with care, glad no one was acting as door porter. I had the classic bearing of a guilty bastard slinking in and hoping to avoid notice. It was the ninth hour, evening, the period when busy men return, freshly bathed and ready for a good dinner. In houses all through Rome such men were about to have ructions with tired wives, layabout sons or indecent daughters.

Drawing upon six hundred years of a Roman’s right to behave crassly, I flexed my shoulders. This house was where Pa had lived for twenty years but quite unlike the Janiculan spread. Crammed against the Aventine cliff on the Tiber’s bank, our town house lacked the depth to allow a classic atrium with an open roof and vistas across peristyle gardens. Here, we lived vertically. I felt easy with that because I had grown up in the tall apartment blocks where the poor fester. We lived mainly upstairs because sometimes the river flooded in. Plain rooms off the corridors on the ground floor were non-domestic and silent at this hour. I walked across the empty entrance hall and went up.

Albia, my foster daughter, rushed down towards me. She was trying not to trip over the hem of a blue gown she thought particularly suited her. Her dark hair looked more fancifully arranged than usual, though with a lopsided tilt as if she had pinned it hastily herself. She burst out excitedly, ‘Aulus has come home to Rome!’

Well, that could be good. Or not. He was a promising fellow. Still, she was too happy about his arrival. Something would have to be done. Helena was not up to it; this would be my problem.

Aulus Camillus Aelianus was Helena’s brother, the elder of two. Though neither was a disaster, as pillars of the community this pair wobbled. Aulus once loathed me because I was an informer, but later saw sense. He was maturing; I liked to think he benefited from my patronage. Like his brother Quintus, he worked with me sometimes, when I felt strong enough for in-depth training of the hare-brained. Lately Aulus had been away studying law, first in Athens then Alexandria. This could either make him more useful to me, or give him a separate new career.

I was aware Albia and he had struck up a friendship. As a father who expected the worst, it made me glad Aulus was spending time abroad, since he was a senator’s son and Albia was a foundling from Britain with a bleak history; they had no scope for romance, and anything else was unthinkable. On our recent family travels to Greece and to Egypt I had noticed Helena try to keep them apart, with limited success. Albia saw no problem. Aulus was something of a loner, and taking his time getting suitably married, so he liked having Albia to giggle with. He must know it could never go further. They were chums. It would pass. It had to.

‘Aulus is here?’

‘Come and see him!’ Eyes bright, my innocent fosterling rushed ahead of me into the salon where we received visitors.

I detected a strained atmosphere at once.

Helena was sitting in a basket chair, her feet very neatly together on a footstool. She looked pale and weary. Our small daughters, Julia and Favonia, were lolling against her knees. Those scamps had been subdued since we lost the baby. Even at four and two, they had a good sense of trouble. Now Father was home but for once they did not hurl themselves upon me, shrieking. Their dark eyes came to me, with the open curiosity of children who recognised a crisis; my intelligent tots were watching closely what would happen now.

‘Aulus!’ Albia had cried out with joy too readily. He grinned, but it was sheepish. He was a poor actor. Albia’s chum had come home looking indefinably hunted.

Albia tensed. She was very bright. I moved alongside and took her hand, like any fond father in company. But Albia was not like other people’s daughters. She had come from the rowdy streets of Londinium, a harsh, remote city. Her Roman sophistication was a cloak she soon hurled off, immediately anyone upset her.

Seated on a couch, Aulus was a couple of years short of thirty, with a flop of dark hair, athletically built. Right beside him — when there were various other seats available, some more comfortable — perched a silent young woman. If there was trouble in the room, she was it. I kept tight hold of Albia.

Of foreign appearance, the young woman wore layers of expensive drapery in dark silk-shot linen. Her gold necklaces and ear-rings were rather formal for an unannounced visit to friends. Aulus must have brought her from Athens, but if she was Greek, she was not bearing gifts.

‘Marcus!’ Family gatherings were Helena Justina’s strong point; she could direct bad-tempered relatives like a theatre producer getting an uncoordinated chorus into line. ‘And Albia, my dear — here’s a surprise.’ Over our children’s heads, her dark eyes sent me complicated messages. Without appearing to hurry, she began unhappily: ‘Aulus has come back to Italy to settle down. He thinks he has learned enough; he wants to use his knowledge.’ That, and his talent for upsetting everyone, I reckoned.

‘So who’s your new friend?’ I asked him bluntly.

He cleared his throat. ‘This is Hosidia.’ He looked hopelessly at Albia.

‘Hello, Hosidia.’ I don’t discriminate. I use the same brisk tone for tipsy barmaids showing their bosoms, hard-hearted females who have knifed their mothers, and Athenian dames who are looking down their nose as if they think I am the slave who cleans the silver. This Hosidia appeared to be costing up our metalware — the comport with the honey-glazed nutty titbits and the small but exquisite drinks tray. (Thanks to my father’s perfect taste, our best service was small, but second to none.) If she had been under investigation, I would have put her on the suspects list. I really did not like the way she was assessing my pierce-patterned wine strainer.

‘Marcus Didius Falco,’ Aulus introduced me formally. He sounded unsure how Hosidia would react. I thought he could not know her well; nowhere near well enough, if I had judged this situation right.

Helena wanted Aulus to come clean, but as he held back she said politely, ‘Hosidia is the daughter of my brother’s tutor, Marcus. You remember the famous professor, Minas of Karystos, don’t you?’

Jupiter help us! I raised an eyebrow, which Hosidia could take as admiration of her papa’s intellect if she chose. In front of his daughter, I refrained from saying, ‘That disgusting boozer, never in the classroom, trying to kill his students with his terrible all-night parties?’

Minas of Karystos was a decent court prosecutor when he could stand up straight, though that was rare. I knew Decimus Camillus, my father-in-law, was appalled by the shameless fees Minas charged.

Perhaps this explained the son’s recall, Camillus senior had decided to staunch the haemorrhage of cash. He can’t have banked on the tutor’s daughter.

Helena was looking overwrought. ‘Marcus, would you believe my little brother has gone and got married?’

‘No!’ Call me a cynic, but I believed it all too sourly.

Aulus would have been an easy mark. He thought himself astute, but that just put him in more danger.

I saw it all. Albia, however, was taken aback. After one wild glance, she wrenched her hand free from mine and tore from the room.

Nobody commented on Albia running out. I thought Aulus jumped, but he stayed put.

Helena continued bleakly, ‘The wedding happened in a rush, because of Aulus coming home. Minas is delighted — ’

Minas must have set it up. However big a rissole Minas of godforsaken Karystos was in Athens, the glory of Greece had passed away. Rome was the only place for any ambitious professional. Marrying off his sombre daughter to a Roman senator’s son must have been in the mind of the unscrupulous law teacher from the moment he grabbed his new pupil, fresh off the boat, and promised to make him a master of jurisprudence.

Demonstrating to the newly-weds how a good husband arrives home, whatever shocks await, I crossed the room sedately, then bent and kissed my dear wife’s cheek. In the style of a good Roman marriage, she was the companion who shared my closest secrets, so to demonstrate our private affection to Aulus and his bride, I murmured a love greeting in Helena’s neat ear. I managed not to nibble her lobe, though I considered it, which may have shown in my face.

‘Seems Albia may want to leave town,’ I then muttered. ‘I could vanish to Pa’s villa maritima for a few days. Call it executor business. Shall I take her away for some breathing space?’

Helena kissed me back formally like a matron who knows the father of the family is up to no good. ‘Let’s talk later, darling.’

In the style of a good Roman marriage, I took that as settled.