That wasn’t altogether the picture I had gleaned, but the nurse could clearly see no defects in her beloved charge. I leaned closer still, and murmured, in a gentler tone, ‘I am not suggesting this is Lavinia’s fault. If someone gave her orders which she could not ignore — purporting to be from her family, perhaps, or from the Vestal shrine — wouldn’t she obey them, if she is as dutiful as you say?’
There was a longish silence while the nurse considered this, staring at a creeping damp patch on the wall. Then she turned an ashen face to me — even in the dim light I could see that she’d turned pale. ‘Now that you say that, citizen, there is one possibility that occurs to me…’
‘Well, tell him, for Mars sake!’ Priscilla, behind me, was exasperated now. ‘And then perhaps we can all get to our beds. Don’t contradict me, Trullius,’ she went on, as her husband made a noise as though he would protest. ‘You said yourself, it’s too late to do anything tonight.’
I turned back to the nursemaid. ‘You were going to say…?’
She shook her head. ‘It’s only an idea, and I’m not quite sure of it. I need time to think it out. It will make no difference for an hour or two — even my captors both agree we can’t do anything further tonight. I’ll tell you in the morning, supposing I’m alive.’ She gave me a wan smile. ‘I have had nothing to eat or drink all day, and a damp kiln is not kind to aging bones. But, citizen, to find out if I am right in what I think, I’ll need to see the things that Lavinia left behind — the clothes that were made into a shape inside the bed. Provided that nobody has moved them up to now?’
Trullius stepped forward. ‘We haven’t moved a thing. We wanted to have proof of how we found the room — something to show the family and the authorities. But if you want the garments that were left inside the bed, that’s easily arranged. I’ll have them brought to you.’
She shook her head again, more violently. ‘It’s most important that they are not touched!’ She looked at me. ‘I’m sorry, citizen, I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before — only at that stage there was no talk of Druids. It simply looked as if she’d run away. But now…’ Her voice was cracked with tears, and it was a moment before she gained control. ‘We had a secret, Lavinia and I. A private way of doing things her father didn’t know. He was very prone to punish — and severely, too — if he thought that she’d done the slightest thing amiss, though sometimes I could talk him out of blaming her. So we had a little game. If there was any chance of trouble she would leave certain things arranged…’ She trailed off again.
‘You mean she may have left a message? In the way she piled the clothes?’ I was incredulous.
‘It sounds ridiculous, I know. But she’s too young to read and write, and it isn’t always possible to talk when there are slaves about — at least without it reaching the master in the end. I always told her…’ She turned to me again. ‘Citizen, there may be nothing there to find. Certainly there won’t be anything to tell us where she’s gone. But if she thought she was in danger, she would try to let me know. I don’t suppose…?’
Trullius’s woman made that snorting sound again. ‘Surely she’s not proposing that I should let her go and look?’
I looked at Trullius. He shrugged. ‘Why not? Her hands and feet are bound. We could loosen them a bit and take her upstairs to the room. She couldn’t get away. In fact, I think we could leave her there to sleep. If she’s tied up, she can’t climb out of the window-space — especially in the dark.’
‘And you were offering a slave on guard, I think.’ I said. I saw him hesitate. ‘If there is an extra charge for this,’ I added, ‘I’m sure Publius will pay.’
I wasn’t sure of this at all, in fact, but the suggestion did the trick. ‘I’ll go and wake a stable-slave, then,’ he muttered in my ear, and we heard him scuffling to the stable in the dark, and — a minute later — rapping loudly on the door.
His wife was clearly furious with me. ‘You will be asking me to feed this wretched slave, next, I suppose?’ Then, when she saw my nod, she added, ‘Are you sure that you don’t want me to give up my bed for her?’
The nursemaid turned her head to look at me. ‘I beg you, citizen. Take me to the room. Starve me if you like. But let me spend this night there, where my darling was. Bind my feet by all means, or chain me to the bed. Though I have to warn you, I may need my hands, if I am to find what I am looking for. It may not be obvious to the casual glance…’
‘Tell us what it is, and we will search for it.’ The voice was sharp, but Priscilla had seized the woman by her two bound arms and was jerking her forward and out into the night.
‘You wouldn’t know what you were looking for. I hardly know myself. But I’ll know it when I see it.’ The nurse was on her feet now, and stood there tottering. ‘I may have to wait for daylight to find it, anyway. Though, even then — you understand — I make no promises. If she was abducted, it is a different thing. If anyone but Lavinia made the model in the bed or knotted the cloths to make the rope, then obviously there will be nothing there to find.’ She managed half a shrug. ‘Our best hope, in that case, is that she managed to throw some garment down, in a way that did not alert her kidnappers.’
She was surprisingly tiny now she was upright, no higher than my chest-clasp as she looked up at me, but there was nothing little about the anguish in her eyes. ‘Believe me, citizen. I am as anxious for her safety as you are yourselves. I swear by all the gods — on my own life and Lavinia’s if you wish — that I won’t try to run away.’
‘You will not have the chance. You’ll be guarded anyway.’ There was a muffled commotion in the stable, as I spoke. The door creaked open and a shadowy form appeared, a blacker shape against the darkness of the night. Trullius said something and the figure disappeared again, to return a moment later with a sleeping-mat and what proved to be an unlit taper in its hand.
When Trullius brought the stable-slave over to the light, I got a look at him. He was a young man, tousled and more than half-asleep, but from the look of the brawny muscles in his arms — as he straightened the outer tunic which he’d hurriedly pulled on — he was more than a match for the tiny aging nurse. Even a Druid might think twice before attacking him, I thought, as he pulled out a knife and cut the ropes around the nurse’s legs.
I surrendered the oil-lamp to the lady of the house. She allowed her husband to light the taper from the flame, and she set off towards the kitchen-block, while we filed back through the painted passage and the dining-space into the entrance-way where I’d first been received. This time, however, I was ushered up the stairs.
‘This was Lavinia’s bedroom,’ Trullius said, stopping at the first door on the landing, and hustling the nursemaid roughly into the room beyond. I followed them and had a look around.
There were two beds in there. I should not have been surprised — I’d heard that Audelia and her cousin had shared the room — but I somehow had supposed that they had shared a bed, as people in a guest house generally do. But these were individual, proper sleeping frames, with goatskin mattresses and woven blankets too — though on the bed beside the window-space these had been thrown back to reveal a pile of clothing carefully arranged to look at first glance like a sleeping form. A travelling box, in which the clothes had evidently been packed, was standing empty by the window-space.
The nursemaid saw my glance. ‘That was Lavinia’s, of course. It held her dowry too — though it seems that it has disappeared as well. Through there, do you suppose?’
She nodded to the window-space. The covers from the other bed had been deftly knotted into a sort of rope, secured firmly around the bed-frame at one end, the rest of it still snaking downward towards the inner court.
I walked across to get a better look. The knotted rope extended almost to the ground, but it was not strong enough to take a lot of weight. A supple climber, or a child, might manage to descend. I shook my head and glanced around the room. I wondered anyone would want to run away from here.