I refused to speak; the senator's termagant daughter taunted me. "Didius Falco! Isn't this journey a pointless exercise?"
Still on my stool, I leaned my elbows on my knees and waited for her to explain. My obstinate interrogator ignored my curiosity.
"It may be," I said finally. I stared at the floor. Then added, as the confrontation continued in silence, "Look, ladyship, I shall not ask whatever is the matter with you because frankly I don't care. Unpleasant females are a hazard of my work. I have come to a place I hate on a dangerous errand because it is the only throw your father or I can attempt"
"That would be a good speech if it came from an honest man!"
Then it's a good speech."
"Lies, Falco!"
"You'll have to elaborate. You think me useless. I can't help that; I am doing my best."
"I should like to know," sneered the senator's daughter in her unlovely way, "whether you are dragging out your contract for mere profit, or whether this is deliberate sabotage. Are you a traitor, Falco, or only wasting time?"
Either I was dense, or she was crazy.
"Just explain, will you?" I instructed her.
"Sosia Camillina saw one of the men who abducted her go into a house she knew. She wrote and told me though not whose house it was. She said she had told you."
"No!" I said.
"Yes."
"No!" I was horrified. "She may have intended to tell me"
"No, she said she had."
We both stopped talking.
Something must have gone wrong. Sosia was skittish and excitable, but despite her inexperience she was bright as Scythian gold. She would not overlook anything so important; she was too proud of her discoveries, too eager for me to know.
My mind raced. She could have written another note, but if so where was it? Two unused tablets of her pocket-book were with her when she was found, she had left another one in my room, and we had no reason to suppose the fourth had been used for anything more serious than a shopping list at home. Something had gone wrong. "No. Lady, you will have to take my word." "Why should I take your word?" Helena Justina scoffed. "Because I only lie when there is something to gain." Her face cracked into pain. "Did you lie to her? Oh my poor cousin!" I shot her a look that stopped her for a moment, though it was like trying to calm a runaway ox by holding out a handful of hay. "She was only sixteen!" exclaimed the senator's daughter, as if that said everything.
Well, it told me what she imagined I had done, and why she held me in such formidable contempt.
With an exasperated explosion, Helena Justina sprang to her feet. She seemed to enjoy rushing out of rooms. She swept past with a curt goodnight. It surprised me to receive even that.
I stayed on my stool for a while, listening warily to this unfamiliar house. Though I tried not to think about Sosia, simply because I was so tired I could not bear it, I felt burdened with troubles, desperately lonely, and a very long way from home.
I had been right: nothing in Britain had substantially changed.
XXIV
Flavius Hilaris explained his plan next day.
Unsettled in a strange house, I had heaved awake as soon as people began to stir. I put on four layers of tunics and edged cautiously downstairs. A slave with a raw cough pointed out the dining room, where a murmur of serious voices stopped immediately I appeared. Aelia Camilla greeted me with her flooding smile.
"Here he is! You emerge early for a man who arrived so late!" She was on her feet ready to go about her household tasks, but first set a breakfast plate for me herself. The informality in this official house was tipping me off balance.
Hilaris himself, with his napkin under his chin, passed me a bread basket. The crab-faced young woman Helena was there. I half expected her to withdraw demurely with her aunt, but she stayed, glowering, with her hands locked round a beaker. Hardly a demure flower.
"Having been stationed here," her uncle began at once, being the single-minded type who burrowed into business as soon as he trapped an audience, "I expect you've kept abreast of recent events."
I adopted the pious expression of a man who keeps abreast of events.
Fortunately, the procurator was accustomed to starting meetings with a local resume. He could hardly approach his dinner table without calling for an up-to-date price list of in season vegetables. He brought me abreast himself:
"Precious metals were the main reason for investing in Britain, as you know. We have ironworks in the Southeast forests, organized by the navy in their rag taggle way." Ever at heart an army man, I grinned. There is gold in the far western mountains, and some lead in the central Peak District, though its silver yield is low the prize mines are in the southwest. The Second Augusta once ran them direct, but we ended that in the process of encouraging self-government by the tribes. We keep fortresses at all the mines to give us an overview, but lease out their day-to-day management to local contractors." I was trying not to wriggle with mirth at the procurator's evident enjoyment of his work. No wonder the establishment never took him seriously! "In the Mendips, an entrepreneur called Claudius Triferus holds the franchise now, creams off his percentage, then ships the balance to the Treasury. A British native. I shall have him apprehended once I know how the ingots are lifted and shipped."
I finished eating, so to aid digestion sat up cross-legged on my couch. Flavius Hilaris did the same. He had the pinched look of a man with stones, who from anxiety or embarrassment never found time to let his doctor examine him.
"Your job will be to investigate the theft, Falco. I want to plant you in the mines, establish you among the work force"
"I had my eye on a management post!"
He let out a disparaging laugh. "All filled up with senators' dim nephews out here for the boar hunting sorry, Helena!"
As a senator's daughter she might well have objected, yet she forced a cranky smile. I meanwhile became a mite preoccupied.
My new job demanded stamina. Mines are worked by the grimmest types of criminal. Slave gangs labour there from sunrise to sunset, it's heavy work, and although the lead seams in the Mendips lie fairly near the surface, what those mines lack in physical danger they make up for in the utter desolation of the spot.
"Falco?" asked Flavius. "Pondering your good luck?"
"Frankly, I'd prefer to sit in full formal dress without a sun umbrella, in some blazing hot amphitheatre where the gatekeepers ban wine jars and the musicians are on strike, watching five hours of an inaudible Greek play! To whom," I enquired fastidiously, "do I owe this bracing winter holiday?"
Hilaris folded his napkin. "I believe Helena Justina first had the idea."
I had to smile.
"May the gods protect your ladyship! I trust you'll explain to my little grey-haired mother when my back's broken and they bury me in a bog? Do you answer to the Furies, madam, for wreaking this hard vengeance on me?"
She stared into her beaker and did not reply.
I caught her uncle's quizzical eye.
"Helena Justina answers to herself," he said briefly.
It seemed to me that was her problem. To say so achieved nothing, and I had no wish to criticize her father Decimus. No man can ever be entirely to blame for the women in his house. That was something I knew long before I possessed women in my own.
XXV
Flavius Hilaris made arrangements to have me taken west, which I thought decent of him until I grasped what his arrangements were. He sent me round by sea. He owned a town house in the middle of the south coast and an estate with a private summer villa even further west; for passing to and fro between his properties he had acquired a clinker-built Celtic ketch which he jovially called his yacht. This old and robust barnacled hulk was not exactly fit for dreaming in the August sun on Lake Volsinii. It probably seemed a good idea to him, but I made my own arrangements after that.