I captured both her hands and held her tight. ‘It’s all right, Gwellia,’ I murmured in her ear and felt her sobbing cease. Then, in a complete reversal of her mood, she collapsed upon my neck and — in full view of the servants — hugged and kissed me tenderly.
In the end, I had to extricate myself and say with what dignity I could muster, ‘I am glad to see you too. It has been a worrying day.’ I was on the point of telling her that we’d lost Minimus, but decided that this unhappy news could wait. For one thing, I was not certain that I wasn’t being overheard by unseen listeners behind me in the wood, and I did not want my wife’s distress to give any satisfaction to the kidnappers. So, instead, I went on in a normal tone, ‘But we should not linger out here on the lane. I’ve come to lend a hand. Give me that lamb you’ve got there on the handcart, Maximus: that will lighten the load for you and balance it as well.’ I gestured towards the unattended cart which showed an increasing tendency to topple to the right.
Maximus obeyed, though he struggled under the dead weight of the animal. It was a big lamb and bulky, though the fleece had been removed — there was always a separate market for sheepskin in the town — and he is small and slight, despite his name. But he contrived to help me drape it round my neck, so that I was carrying it on my shoulders as the shepherds do. The sheep was surprisingly heavy — I have felt a new respect for shepherds ever since, though the creature was stiff and perhaps more difficult to manage than a living animal. When I had it balanced, I gestured to the slave to hand me back my makeshift staff, which I had dropped on to the ground when Gwellia ran at me.
Meanwhile, the others had begun to rearrange the cart, which was still piled high with purchases for Amato’s naming day. It was an awkward load: metal trinkets from the silversmiths, the whole family’s garments from the fuller’s shop where they’d been newly cleaned (everyone is expected to wear white at a Roman naming day) and incense for the shrine. There were leather bags and wooden boxes full of foodstuffs too: special sweet cakes from the baker’s shop as well as dates and figs and every kind of fruit. There was also a small amphora full of wine, another one of oil, and even a cage of white doves for the cleansing sacrifice, which had been balanced precariously on the top of all of this — no wonder Junio had wanted an extra steadying hand.
However, with the heavy carcass now removed, the rest was soon arranged and roped securely into place. Junio and Maximus between them pushed the cart and, with Kurso carrying the doves, and Gwellia the torch, our little procession set off in the direction I had come — back towards the roundhouses again.
Only then did I outline the happenings of the day. I kept it very brief and did not mention Minimus at all. The corpse that they’d heard about was the pie-seller, I explained. When the tanner saw me, I was on my way to Lucius’s mother to tell her the news, and then I’d hurried over to put Pedronius’s pavement down. ‘I didn’t want to lose the Apollo contract too,’ I finished. ‘And then I found a gig to drive me home from there, so we didn’t pass through the gates.’
‘So that’s why we didn’t find you in the shop,’ Junio exclaimed. ‘And why no one had seen you at the gates. I did think to enquire.’ He looked at me for approval. I had trained him in my methods while he was my slave. ‘I was expecting that you would catch up with us. I wondered why you hadn’t, even if you left Glevum a long time after us. This is the way you usually come and, as you can see, we were not moving fast.’
They would have been slower still without a light, I thought, using my staff to help me as I picked my way among the muddy potholes and roots along the lane. But all I said was, ‘You must have been alarmed, especially after that peculiar message saying I was hurt.’ Then, suddenly conscious of the distant wolves again, I added, ‘Gwellia, tell me about this mysterious messenger.’
She had nothing to add that I’d not already heard from Kurso, in fact, but I heard her out, knowing that she would be comforted by simply voicing it and also distracted from the terrors of the night.
Junio looked across at me and caught my eye. As usual, he had understood my ploy and he took up the tale as soon as she had stopped — though he had very little to report. He had spent the day exactly as he’d planned, making his purchases, collecting the clean clothes and paying a visit to the local priest of Mars, who was to perform tomorrow’s ritual. ‘The pontifex made it very clear to me,’ he added wryly, ‘that he was not coming out of duty — he would not normally come out all this way — but simply because he was “a friend of Marcus’s”. No doubt he hopes to be rewarded when your patron returns.’
‘Then I hope he isn’t disappointed,’ I remarked. ‘Marcus is famously careful with his wealth.’
‘He’s promised to officiate in any case,’ my son replied, ‘and to make the preliminary sacrifice for cleansing Cilla and the roundhouse from the impurities of birth. He doesn’t even want a fee, he says — though he does want you to make a point of telling His Excellence all this. By the way, he says there’s been a messenger and Marcus is already on his way. The letter came to the curia today, apparently.’
I was about to say that I had heard as much from Quintus earlier when Gwellia put in unexpectedly, ‘And to the villa too. One of the servants came to the roundhouse shortly after noon, in great excitement, to tell us the news. The travellers are expected back here in a day or so — though not in time for the bulla feast, of course. But Marcus has sent a gift ahead of him in honour of the day — a beautiful silver trinket for little Amato.’
‘That was very generous of my patron,’ I said, privately suspecting that his wife had organized that piece of thoughtfulness. Marcus is not given to expensive gifts and I had not expected him to send a present for the naming day, even if he knew that it was happening.
He might well not have known. I had written every moon, as he had requested, to keep him informed of what was happening in the town, and obviously in my last I had told him of the birth. However, such letters took a long time to arrive, and since, as Cilla had remarked, the bulla day is traditionally held only nine days after a boy is safely born, I could not be certain that Marcus had received the message yet. I had sent an invitation for him to the villa, naturally — since he was my patron it would have been an insult to do otherwise, even if he was not in residence — but I had hardly expected such a generous response.
So I was more than a little startled when Gwellia said, ‘They are going to send someone to attend on his behalf, though the servant that I spoke to did not know who it was. Marcus suggested it himself apparently, since he cannot be here in person.’
I was surprised and said so.
Gwellia shook her head. ‘It is the sort of thing that Marcus sometimes does — he’s sent you to represent him at a social function before now.’
‘But I am a citizen, and that is different,’ I protested. ‘Marcus has had the villa closed up while he is away and there are only servants there — no one of any proper status as a representative.’ Not that I had any objection to welcoming a slave — after all, I had once been captured into slavery myself — but Marcus would have felt the impropriety of a low-born substitute.
Gwella smiled. ‘So he’ll send the most senior person in the household, I suppose — the chief slave himself, I shouldn’t be surprised. That would be quite fitting really, since Cilla was a maidservant at the villa once. It would be awkward for Marcus to be here as her guest. I know that you and Junio are the official hosts — you as the head of the family, and Junio as the child’s father — but Cilla will be present and the roundhouse is her home. And a very humble one he thinks it, I’ve no doubt. So he’d feel that a high-ranking servant is a perfectly appropriate emissary.’
She was right, of course, but I said stubbornly, ‘Marcus was the magistrate who invited her to dine, and thus enabled me to set her free. And she is a Roman citizen by marriage now, so there can no impropriety in her inviting him. As to it being a humble roundhouse, why should he object? Ours is very similar and he has been there several times.’