Ovid

'Just look at the lines again and answer me one question. Who died first? Augustus or Fabius?'

'I can tell you that now. My uncle outlived the emperor by a month. You know that.'

'Sure. So read the poem again.' She did, and her startled eyes stared into mine. 'You see? Now tell me again.'

'But this reads as though it was Uncle Fabius!'

'Yeah, that's right. Ovid got the deaths back to front.'

'But why should he do that?'

I shrugged. 'Tomi's a long way from Rome. News travels slow, sometimes it gets garbled. What's a month either way? There're a dozen reasons. But that's not the point.

'So what is?'

'Your stepfather's reaction. He says Augustus was already beginning to waver but Fabius's plea-in-form for a pardon never got made, so the whole thing came to nothing. We know that that was because the emperor died first, but Ovid took it the other way round.'

I’m sorry, but I still don't see what you're getting at.'

'It's simple. Ovid thought your uncle had been the first to go and blamed himself for his death, right?'

'Yes, but…'

I stopped her. 'So what made him assume that Fabius's death was connected with a plea for his recall? And knowing what his own crime was, why shouldn't he be right?'

24

I found a letter waiting for me from Gaius Pertinax when I got home.

Pertinax was the guy I'd thought might know the inside story on the Julia scandal. Not Paullus's Julia. Her mother, Augustus's daughter, who'd been exiled when the City Watch had caught her putting it around one night in the Market Square while her husband Tiberius was off sulking in Rhodes. Harpale had claimed that she'd been innocent, too. What she had to do with our little mystery I wasn't sure — that particular scandal had broken ten years before Ovid went to Tomi — but it was a lead all the same. And we had less of them than a eunuch has hard-ons.

I'd known Pertinax all my life. He was an ex-subordinate of my grandfather's when the old man had been city prefect forty-odd years back and the two had hit it off like fish sauce on broad beans. Not that Granddad had held the job for long. According to family tradition (Uncle Cotta, not my father) he'd thrown it up because it was, and I quote, "a major pain in the arse". Not that that was how he'd expressed it to Augustus. The official reason he gave was that it was "undemocratic". Which I suppose was as strong as he could make it without putting a knot in the imperial knickers.

Unlike Granddad, Pertinax had his daily bread to earn. He'd stuck with the city service and when the Elder Julia had been arrested he'd had one of the top jobs with the Watch. As a regional commander no less. For Region Eight, the Market Square area…

Yeah. Pure gold, right? If Uncle Gaius couldn't tell me what had happened that night then no one could.

He was retired now, of course. Long retired, to a farm in the country about thirty miles down the Appian Way where he grew the best pears and apples you've ever tasted. I used to go there with my grandfather at harvest time when I was a kid, and Pertinax took quite a shine to me. He still sent me a bushel or two out of his crop in the autumn, and I'd call in whenever I was down that way to see how the old guy was doing.

So when the Julia thing came up I'd sent a runner to Pertinax's place with a note asking him if I could come down and milk his brains, subject unspecified. This was the reply. It was short and snappy: Uncle Gaius could've given a Spartan lessons in prose style.

Gaius Attius Pertinax to Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus. Greetings.Come when you like. Bring fish.

I grinned as I read it. Some people's weakness is money, others power, others women. Pertinax's was fish, and he would sell his soul for a sturgeon. When he came to dinner with my grandfather (which he did on average about once a month) Old Corvinus would send Philip his cook down to scour the fish market in the Argiletum for the widest and best selection money could buy. It cost him, too — good fish costs an arm and a leg in Rome and always has done — but then my granddad was generous to his friends. I'd never understood why Pertinax hadn't settled further south when he retired; at Naples, say, where the seafood would draw Jupiter himself down banging his dinner pail. Maybe he'd thought too much perfection was dangerous. Or maybe he just liked growing good apples better.

When I'd read the note I sent Bathyllus out for a barrel of Baian oysters and the biggest sturgeon he could lug home without giving himself a hernia, packed off another minion to tell Perilla where I was going and why, and ordered up the carriage.

The journey was uneventful. Not knowing how busy the Appian Way would be after the holiday (it wasn't, especially) I'd taken the big sleeping coach. Thirty-odd miles may not seem a lot, but I'd been caught out before on a slow road and unless you want to risk being rolled or eaten alive by fleas at a quaint wayside inn or have acquaintances en route (I didn't unfortunately. Or not ones I'd've willingly spent an evening with, anyway) it's a sensible way to travel. Apart from the coachman and my body slave Flavus I took the four Sunshine Boys. Three of them could ride without falling off. The fourth usually landed on his head, which didn't seem to worry him much and provided harmless amusement for the rest of us. I had a private bet with myself (which I won easily) that he'd go arse over tip at least once per mile.

Pertinax was looking pretty fit for his seventy-odd years, brown as a berry and with less of a gut on him than I had. When he saw the sturgeon his eyes lit up like a twenty-lamp candelabrum.

'Slow-steamed with coriander,' he murmured as two of his lads levered the fish out of the boot. 'Perhaps with a celery-mint sauce. What do you think, Marcus?'

'It's your fish, Uncle. Have it how you like.'

'I'm your debtor, boy. Let's see what Nestor has to say.' Nestor was his cook. 'What's in the barrel? Sea-urchins?'

'Oysters.'

'Baian oysters?'

'Would I stick you with less?'

'Holy Neptune! I haven't had Baian oyster stew since the Winter Festival. You're a true Roman, lad. And a gentleman, which isn't the same thing.' Pertinax was from Cremona. 'Come inside. I've a jug or two of good Rhodian that's just asking to be drunk.'

I followed him in. The place looked different from the last time I'd been there.

'You've made some changes,' I said.'

'That's right. I've had another solar built on, to catch the afternoon sun. We'll go in there now. Rejigged the baths at the same time, so you can wash the dust off properly before we eat.'

Maybe Pertinax's farm was a working one, but he'd never been a sour-faced Cato. And taking an interest in building had kept him going since his wife had died three years before.

'Decoration in the dining room's new too. Chap I got in from Naples. Tell me what you think.'

'Let's have the wine first,' I said. 'I've got a throat like a short-legged camel's scrotum.'

Pertinax chuckled. 'You've your grandfather's turn of phrase, boy. And his priorities. Make yourself comfortable while I have a word with Nestor about dinner. I'll send in the wine, don't you worry.'

I lay down on one of the couches in the solar and examined the wall paintings. Pertinax's late wife wouldn't have approved. She had gone in, I remembered, for still lifes. Grapes and hanging pheasants, those were her limits. Nymphs and satyrs were definitely out. And these nymphs and satyrs would have had her reaching for the whitewash. I wondered if Uncle Gaius was fitter even than he looked.

The wine came, with a bowl of last season's apples, wizened now, but hard and sweet inside. They brought back memories.

'Good? The wine, I mean.'

I looked up. Uncle Gaius had come in while I wasn't looking and was helping himself to a cup from the jug.

'Very good,' I said, and meant it. 'I always think Rhodian's overrated but this stuff's not. Where do you get it?'