David Wishart - The Lydian Baker

Purple laver…

I blinked and set the letter down on the table beside my wine cup. Some things — what Perilla's philosopher pals would call the Eternal Verities — never changed. They included death, pestilence and Mother's whacky recipes. In the four months we'd been away we'd piled up enough ways of cooking lentils to open an Egyptian cookshop, and some of the other stuff she recommended for a full and healthy life you couldn't put a name to even in hieroglyphs.

'Hey, Perilla,' I said. 'You any idea what purple laver is?'

The lady looked up from the book she was reading. Chrysippus's Studies in Grammar . That's one advantage of living in Athens, if you can call it an advantage: there're more libraries than even Perilla can shake a stick at. Serious ones, with not an Alexandrian bodice-ripper in sight. Listen hard and you can hear manuscripts crumbling all over town. Readers, too.

'It's a kind of edible seaweed, dear,' she said. 'Imported from Gaul, I believe.'

'Is that right, now?'Gods! In that case this was one recipe our chef Meton was definitely not getting his hands on. I'd enough problems with the local cuisine without letting the weird dietary habits of blue- rinsed Gauls into the act, and that bastard would slip me a batch of Mother's laver cakes just for the fun of telling me what I'd eaten and watching me go green.

'How is Vipsania?' Perilla had laid the book aside. Maybe she couldn't take the excitement.

'Thriving. She's off tomb-bashing with Priscus in Caere.' Priscus was my stepfather. The guy was well into his seventies, a good two decades older than Mother, but fit as a flea despite looking like a prune buried in sand for six months. Rooting around old tombs and collecting antiquities was his life, and although they were different as chalk and cheese she wasn't complaining. Maybe it did have something to do with what she fed the old bugger on, but even so I didn't want to know. If the gods had meant us to eat seaweed they wouldn't have invented the Baian oyster. 'Marilla's fine as well, she says. And Marcia sends her regards.'

Perilla's face softened. Our prospective daughter was still where we'd left her, on Marcia Fulvina's farm in the Alban Hills. The adoption hadn't got all the way through the courts yet but it was practically settled, and the kid's father had taken his one-way trip down the Rock for incest before the year was out. No tears there. I was only sorry I hadn't been in Rome to give him the final shove myself.

'It'll be lovely to have Marilla here,' Perilla said. 'To be a family at last.'

'Yeah. Yeah, it will.' I'd caught the tone, and it still wrenched at my gut, even after years of marriage: Perilla needed Marilla as much as she needed Perilla. It isn't easy, knowing you can't have kids of your own, and the Princess was all right. I took a swallow of wine, braced myself, and picked up the letter again.

Incidentally, Marcus,' [Mother wrote] 'I have a favour to ask. Rather an unusual one. Before we left Titus learned of a certain statue which has come up for sale and which the poor lamb is simply desperate to add to his collection. He's written his own letter which I've enclosed, so I won't go into details here, and he's also provided a note for delivery to Simon. [Simon was our local banker. Priscus dealt with his brother in Rome.] I know very little about the piece myself, but from what Titus says it is rather special, and he'll be terribly disappointed if he doesn't get it; so do try your very best for us, my dear, because I was hoping to lure the old buffer down to the fleshpots after he's done his wretched tombs, and the last thing I want is for him to be sulking all through the holiday. Goodness knows fleshpots are no fun at all when Titus is in one of his moods, and after Caere I always find I need a break. Oh, and speaking of fleshpots I don't know if you ever met Catullina Gemella…

There followed a good half page of prime Roman gossip. Jupiter! Eat your heart out, Tullius Cicero! Maybe I should keep Mother's correspondence to hand down to posterity as an epistolary antidote. As well as a culinary curiosity. I sighed and reached for the wine.

'Meton says that dinner is ready, sir.' Our major-domo Bathyllus had oiled in on my blind side, bald scalp gleaming like Hector's helmet.

'Namely?'

'Apple and calf's brain casserole, tripe in a honey-ginger sauce and a fennel pottage.'

'Great.' Thank the gods for good, plain, seaweed-free cooking. 'We'll be through in a minute, little guy. Once I've finished my pre-dinner drink.'

Bathyllus looked pointedly at the level in the jug, gave a sniff and padded out. Bastard.

'Did Vipsania have any other news, Marcus?' Perilla said.

'Priscus wants me to agent for him. There's a statue he's got his eye on.'

'Really?'

'Yeah.' I sank a quarter pint of Setinian. 'You'd think the guy would have enough junk already to last him without sending to Athens for more.'

'Everyone needs a hobby. And at least his is harmless.'

I grinned. 'Unlike Catullina Gemella's.'

'Whose?'

'Never mind.' I reached for the second roll: Priscus's letter. Something fell out. I picked it up and glanced at it. 'Gods alive!'

'What's wrong?' Perilla got up quickly and came over to stand behind me. I was staring at the banker's draft. Harmless the old bugger's hobby might be, but it wasn't cheap, that was for sure. There were numbers there I didn't know existed outside of a population census.

'You think the City Council's hocking Phidias's Athene?' I said.

'Don't be silly, dear.' Perilla bent down for a closer look. Her breath caught. 'Oh. Oh, I see what you mean.'

I swallowed. Priscus might have a fair bit stashed away — apart from his tomb-bashing forays he lived pretty simply, and Mother had her own money — but he'd given Simon authority to release the price of a villa on the Janiculan, with maybe a racing yacht thrown in. No ordinary statue would cost that much. No ordinary statue even came close. So what the hell was Priscus playing at?

I opened the letter itself. Where Mother's writing sprawled across the page like the tracks of a drunken spider Priscus's was tiny enough to give a literate ant migraine. The guy might be willing to spend several millions on a bronze wrestler or a hunk of Parian that some big-name Greek had restructured with a chisel four hundred years back, but he could squeeze more words into a square foot of paper than anyone else I knew:

'Titus Helvius Priscus gives greetings to his stepson Marcus Valerius Messalla Corvinus.

Vipsania will have mentioned the Baker statue to you, Marcus. Tremendously exciting, and certainly, assuming it's genuine, the antiquarian find of the century. If I can acquire it I shall die a happy man. Naturally the price, great as it is, represents only a fraction of the piece's true worth, and as you'll readily appreciate I pay it gladly.

I took another mouthful of wine. 'Readily appreciate', hell: I'd never understand antiquarians, not if I lived to be ninety. Personally if I ever lost what few marbles I'd got and splashed out the price of a villa on a statue I'd be happy if my nearest and dearest didn't poison my gruel.

'Corvinus, hold still, please,' Perilla murmured. 'How do you expect me to read if you keep jiggling about like that?'

'Sorry, lady.' I straightened the letter and read on:

I will not insult you by describing the Baker to you, since you will of course know of it already.

Yeah, sure I did; I carried a run-down of every work of art from Achilles's shield to the Wart's latest portrait in my head. Describing them in painstaking detail was my favourite trick at parties.

The obvious stumbling blocks are authenticity and provenance. My historian friends are divided over when the statue actually disappeared from the Delphian treasury, but the terminus ante quem can be no later than one hundred and thirty years ago while the terminus post quem is the period of the Phocian depredations of the Third Sacred War, dating back some two hundred and fifty years before that; consequently…'