The room which the public works officials had designated his private study was in fact used by Hilaris as an extra public office. As well as his own reading couch, shapeless with use, he kept a table with benches where meetings could be held. There were plenty of sconces, all blazing, for it was late. His secretaries had left him on his own, immersed in figure work and thought.
He poured me wine. Kind gesture, I thought, putting me at ease. Then with a shock I realized, maybe putting me off guard!
Our interview was conducted with exhausting thoroughness. Compared with this Hilaris, my client Camillus Verus was just a squashy plum. I had already deleted the procurator from my suspects list (too obvious), but he made a point of discussing the Emperor, to demonstrate where his sympathies lay.
"No better man for the Empire but this is new for Rome! Vespasian's father was a middle rank finance officer, yet now Vespasian's Emperor. My father was a finance officer and so am I!"
I warmed to him. "Not quite, sir. You are the leading civilian in a prestigious new province, with an Emperor who looks on you as a friend! No one but the governor carries more weight in Britain than you. Your father's highest position was as a third-grade tax collector, in a one-ox town in Dalmatia -" The only reason I knew this was because I had delved into his background before I came out. He realized that. He smiled. So did I. "And your father was an auctioneer he threw back at me. My father disappeared so long ago, not many people are aware of that.
"Possibly still is!" I admitted morosely.
He made no comment. A polite man, though one who had made sure before I came out to his province that he knew all about me:
"As for you, Falco, two years' army service, then five more as what the legions would call a scout the type of army agent native tribesmen hang as a spy"
"If they catch you!"
"Which they never did… So you were invalided out, recovered briskly perhaps so briskly it smacks of sharp practice then you took up your present work. My sources say you have a dozy reputation, though past clients speak well of you. Some of the women," he observed, looking down with a prim mouth, "have an odd look when they do!"
I let that pass.
Then he confronted me with what we had been skirting round since the interview began: "You and I," smiled the British financial procurator, "served in the same legion, Didius Falco."
Well, I knew that. He must have realized.
Twenty years apart. Same legion, same province. He served when the glorious Second Augusta were the crack troops in the British invasion force. Vespasian was his commander-that was how they met. I served in the Second at Isca, at the time when Paulinus the British governor decided to invade Mona Druids' Island to clear out that rats' nest of troublemakers once and for all. Paulinus left us at Isca, guarding his back, but was accompanied by our commandant among his advisory corps. We were stuck therefore with an incompetent Camp Prefect named Poenius Postumus, who called Queen Boudicca's Revolt "just a local tiff. When the governor's frantic orders arrived informing this half wit that the Iceni had swept a bloody swathe all through the south, instead of ha ring off to join the beleaguered field army, either from terror or further misjudgement Postumus refused to march out. I served in our legion when its glorious name stank.
"Not your fault!" remarked my new colleague gently, reading my mind.
I said nothing.
After the rebels were annihilated and the truth came out, our pea brained Camp Prefect fell on his sword. We made sure of that. But first he had forced us to abandon twenty thousand comrades in open country with no supplies and nowhere to retreat, facing two hundred thousand screaming Celts. Eighty thousand civilians had been massacred while we polished our studs in barracks. We might have lost all four British legions. We might have lost the governor. We might have lost the province.
If a Roman province had fallen, in a native rebellion, led by a mere woman, the whole Empire might have blown away. It could have been the end of Rome. That was the kind of "local tiff the British rebellion was.
Afterwards we witnessed what the barbarians had done. We saw Camulodunum, where the huddled townsfolk had melted in each other's arms during a four day inferno at the Temple of Claudius. We choked in the black dust of Verulamium and Londinium. We cut down the crucified settlers at their lonely country villas; we flung earth on the burned skeletons of their strangled slaves. We stared in shock and horror at mutilated women hanging like crimson rags from the trees in the pagan groves. I was twenty years old.
That was why, when I could, I left the army. It took five years to arrange, but I had never had second thoughts. I worked for myself. Never again would I entrust myself to orders from a man of such criminal ineptitude. Never again would I be part of the establishment that foists such fools into positions of command.
Flavius Hilaris was still watching me in my reverie.
"None of us will ever quite recover," he acknowledged, sounding pretty hoarse himself. His face had shadowed too. While the governor Paulinus was frightening mountain tribesmen, this man had been prospecting for copper and gold. Now his job was finance. Below the governor he sat on the second highest administrative notch. But ten years ago, at the time of the Revolt, Gaius Flavius Hilaris had occupied a more junior post; he was the procurator in charge of the British mines.
It could be him! My weary brain kept telling me that this clever man with the clear-eyed smile could be the villain I had come to find. He understood the mines, and he could fudge the paperwork. No one in the Empire was so beautifully placed.
"You must be exhausted!" he exclaimed softly. I felt drained. "You missed dinner. I'll send sustenance to your room, but do use our bathhouse first. After you eat I want to introduce you to my wife…"
These were my first dealings with the diplomatic middle class. Until then they had escaped me, for the simple reason that they led lives so lacking in deceit that they attracted nobody else's unkind attention and never needed to employ me for themselves. I had come expecting to be treated like a servant. Instead I found myself lodged incognito in the procurator's private suite, being offered a welcome more suited to a family guest.
Fortunately I had packed one set of decent clothes.
XXII
My billet was disturbingly cosy. I had a spacious room with a bed groaning under colourful quilts. Oil lamps flickered. Warmth filtered through the wall flues. There were seats with low square footstools, cushions, floor rugs, writing materials for my private use, late apples in a glossy ceramic bowl.
A dapper slave escorted me to the bath suite, another scraped me down, then back to find a pudgy boy struggling to unload a tray of silverware covering cold game and glazed ham. I packed in the victuals while I could. The boy waited to serve me; he seemed impressed. I winked at him then looked away in case he got the wrong idea.
As a compliment to my host I combed my hair. Then I rooted out my best tunic, a limp off-white article which according to my clothes dealer had only been worn by one other person before me. (My mother says always ask what they died of, but so long as there are no visible bloodstains, I don't. What dealer is going to confess that your predecessor had a flaky skin disease?)
Opening my baggage roll, I sucked thoughtfully at the remnants of ham that had trapped themselves between my teeth. It had been skilfully done, but during our talk in the study my props had been searched.
I found Hilaris reclining, minus his belt, in a warm family room. He was reading for pleasure, so had emerged from the study to sit with his wife. I identified her as the slender, rather ordinary woman in a crimson dress, slightly uneasy within her elegant attire. A baby slept on her own arm, while a little girl of two or three was sprawling over the knees of a younger woman in much darker clothing, who was by an oversight not immediately introduced.