I myself popped indoors for the usual reasons. When I came out I went over to the well, walking with more sway than customary. I had a look, and came back to sit down. Sitting was a relief, frankly.
I could still talk. Any slurring of the tongue would be allowed to pass politely unnoticed among these wise, tolerant women.
I asked Fauna to go over again with me what she claimed to have heard on the night of the violence. ‘Fauna, around the time when Aviola and Mucia were killed, there was shouting by one person, probably male, then a silence. I am wondering how this fits in with you hearing more voices and seeing people running to and fro with lamps.’
‘I’m glad you asked me that, Albia darling!’
‘Why so?’
‘Since you came up to ours to talk to me, I have picked it over quite a few times with my handsome husband.’
‘Don’t forget, some of us have seen your husband!’ Graecina chuckled. ‘He wheels a veg cart at the Market of Livia,’ she informed Galla. ‘He looks more like a carrot than the carrots on his cart.’
‘Long, yellow and twisted!’ Fauna was the first to agree. ‘Don’t ask why I did it. Too many years ago to remember. There must have seemed to be a good reason at the time. Anyway … we worked it all out, Albia. The first voice, which sounded very disturbing, was what lured Lusius out of bed. By the time he got himself on the stool and looked out, the shouts had stopped and nothing else was happening. So the lummock comes grumbling back to bed, and since we are awake he wants to start some marital push-and-shove around the blankets. That must have taken some time, though not as long as old Lusius tells himself he can keep going …’
Galla, Graecina and I all looked at one another in a way that said we knew exactly what Fauna was saying but were too refined to let on. Mouths pulled down and raised brows.
‘So there were more noises later?’ I asked.
‘Oh yes. Toing and froing, whacking and thumping, cries, footsteps running, abuse, lights moving about, panic, who knows.’
‘This stopped eventually?’
‘Must’ve. We got bored edging each other off that stool to peer out. Lusius said if this was going to be their perman-ent way of life downstairs, he would demand Aviola buys us a second stool. Or better still a ladder.’
‘How long would you say the silence lasted, in between the noises, Fauna?’
‘Couldn’t tell you. In the quiet part we fell back to sleep.’
‘And the second burst of noise, how long did that last?’
‘Seemed ages, but may not have been. Not long enough for my twisted carrot to pull up his roots and go downstairs to complain.’
Fauna had no more to say. Perhaps because she had been talking about her husband, who gave them to her, she began to rearrange the armoury of tacky bangles that were lined up along her forearm. It was a ritual, twisting them and spacing them until the effect was to her liking.
Galla Simplicia was watching me. ‘What’s on your mind, Albia?’
I was thinking that I now understood a lot more about what must have happened. The first shouts, the loud agitated ones, ended in the murder. A silence followed, as the horrified slaves saw what had happened to their master and mistress and tried to decide what to do. I reckoned they all went into the oecus to talk, possibly because lamps were already lit there. They had told me the truth about having their supper. I accepted that most of them were there while Aviola and Mucia met their fates.
According to what Secundus and Myrinus said, by the time the slaves were discussing what to do, Polycarpus was in the apartment with them. As their supervisor, he may have taken the lead. I did not want to say this in front of Graecina, but her late husband must have been party to a hasty cover-up. Though the slaves were particularly vulnerable, what had happened could also reflect badly on him.
Graecina was now sitting with her eyes closed, frowning slightly so her dark eyebrows came even closer together than usual. It looked as if she was in pain. Was that physical pain from the scalding, or mental anguish? Had she herself known before now about what happened? Had Polycarpus shared the full story when he returned to his own apartment? Did he tell her or did Graecina guess parts of it?
Why didn’t Polycarpus and the slaves simply bring in the vigiles and wait for justice to be done? Because slaves know the rules. These slaves were bound to be accused. By the time Titianus told his tribune next day that he thought the crimes here had been an inside job, the ten slaves were ready to run for it to the Temple of Ceres the moment he pronounced them guilty — or better still, before he came to arrest them.
I now thought Polycarpus must have been right in there, helping them to get away. With his position under threat, bonds to his master were loosening, yet he still felt close to the slaves he supervised. His plight, if Aviola decided to have a new steward, was little different from theirs in being sold.
It was too soon for me to confront Graecina with what Polycarpus might have done. Luckily, or for me not so luckily, at this point we were interrupted. Just as we reached the most dishevelled point of our morning, we heard banging. Fauna was the first to gather her wits, so she went to see who it was while the rest of us made feeble motions of tidying our drinks tables and straightening ourselves up.
Fauna returned looking apologetic, followed by two visitors. With coy glances at me, Galla and Graecina immediately rose to their feet, Graecina exercising a lurch that nearly toppled her, until Galla caught her and they tottered in each other’s arms. Winks occurred. I took no part in that, for I was the object of my companions’ sniggers.
‘Albia’s boyfriend!’
‘Client!’ I corrected.
Standing this side of the atrium, with one fatherly hand on the shoulder of his pale slave Dromo, was the aedile Manlius Faustus. Both he and Dromo looked amazed at the scene they had interrupted.
51
In general, I prefer not to let my clients learn of any unusual measures I am forced to adopt in order to pursue facts.
Fortunately Tiberius Manlius Faustus already considered me wild and irresponsible, a barbarian beyond saving. There was no chance of me sinking any lower in his estimation.
Nevertheless, I wished old grey eyes had not walked in.
The aedile announced pointedly that a carrying chair was waiting outside.
Galla jumped to. Graecina suddenly became extremely tearful, so Galla insisted she go home with her so they could have a weep together. Fauna whispered a hurried goodbye and scurried off out there as if she had remembered a pot that might boil over. That left me on my own with the situation.
We could have been a bunch of carousing teenagers who had just heard someone’s mother come back into the house unexpectedly.
Cobnuts. I was a grown woman. I could do what I liked. It wasn’t as if we had set fire to a scroll box of Virgil’s Aeneid in order to fry a Lucanian sausage.
I did not try to tell him that. When the others had gone, Tiberius looked me up and down with his chilling stare and said I ought to sleep it off. He would take Dromo out for some lunch then they would come back when I was ‘more myself’, by which he meant sobered up. He made me hand over my door key, in case I was too comatose to let them back into the apartment.
‘You need to drink plenty of water.’
‘The house has run out.’
‘Then Dromo will go to the fountain and fetch more. Dromo, arm yourself with buckets from the kitchen. Better bring an extra one for Flavia Albia, in case we are due for an up-chuck.’
‘Not me.’
‘Shall we take bets?’ growled Faustus, at his most disparaging. ‘Just don’t heave your heart out on me, will you?’
I maintained that I would not dream of vomiting on him since the tunic he was wearing was bound to be his favourite, one woven by his grandmother with her own hands. (He was in his aedile’s white and purple, so I knew the tunic was not old. On the other hand, it was expensive and must require high-price laundering.)