Rosemary Rowe - The Ghosts of Glevum

It was the little secretary I had seen earlier.

I half opened my mouth to speak to him, but before I could utter a word he gaped at me, looked away, pulled his cloak-hood up again and was hastening away into the rain with the tic in his face twitching like a newly landed fish.

After a startled moment, I went after him. He was so keen to get away that I was sure he knew something he didn’t want to tell. He was a younger man than I was, and he was hurrying, so he had reached the Apollo fountain outside the fish market before I managed to catch up with him.

‘Officer!’ I panted, as I reached his side. He did not deserve the title, but a little courtesy never went amiss.

He stopped. I thought for a moment he would hurry off again, but he simply stood there in the rain and refused to meet my eyes. ‘What do you want? Why are you following me about?’ he said.

I did not manage an answer straight away — I was out of breath — but he scarcely gave me time in any case before he was saying with a righteous air, ‘If it is about your patron, there is nothing I can do. I told you what the garrison commander said.’

I looked at him. It was a risk, of course, and might easily result in my own arrest, but I had noticed his manner at the garrison. This was a nervous and unhappy man. I decided it was worth a try. I moved closer to him, slipped my hand beneath my toga-folds, and took out a denarius from my purse.

‘Nothing?’ I held up the coin.

He looked at it contemptuously — at it, I noticed, not at me. ‘Nothing.’

I added a second coin to the first. ‘Not even a message to His Excellence?’ I said. Another risk. It is never a good idea to increase a bribe — it only makes the price go up again — and even if it succeeded this time there might be other men to pay.

‘Don’t you understand plain Latin, citizen? There’s nothing I can do. Now, will you go away? I have an official errand to complete, and interfering with it is an offence against the law.’

But he was weakening. I could see it in his face.

‘Perhaps there is just one thing I could say. .’ He tried to keep his face expressionless, but his eyes were on the coins.

I hesitated. This could be a trap. ‘And that is?’ I took out another coin and placed it, with the others, on the side of the water trough as if in sacrifice towards the god. Such offerings are not entirely unknown, and that way it was not officially a bribe. The secretary looked from me to them, balanced invitingly on the wide stone edge, and ran his tongue around his lips. He took a step towards me, and as he did so the corner of his cloak sent one of the coins rolling in the trough.

That did it. He stooped and snatched the others in his hand. ‘Go away,’ he hissed. ‘Right away if you know what’s good for you.’ He looked at me, his little sly eyes bright. ‘Now, that’s all I’ve got to say. It’s dangerous for me to talk to you. Leave me alone before I call for help, and have you taken into custody.’ And with that, he turned and trotted off in the direction of the centre of the town.

And there was nothing for it but to let him go! Three precious denarii wasted and I had got myself soaked through to no avail. I dared not even fish into the fountain for the missing coin. The rain had eased and people were coming back into the street. Bribery was clearly not among my skills. Junio would have made a better job of it.

Junio! I must go to him. He must be wondering where I was by this time, or even whether — with Marcus under lock and key — I had succeeded in getting myself arrested too. Well, I would go and find him at the workshop and then we would go home and consider what to do. I pulled up my toga-folds to form a hood, turned towards the centre of the town, and hurried on, past the forum and basilica, and out of the north gate on the farther side.

My little shop was there, beyond the walls, in the straggling suburb which had grown up on the marshy river margins to the north-west of the colonia in the last hundred years: a swarming assortment of muddy narrow lanes lined with ramshackle buildings, many let out as poky rooms and workshops such as mine. In fact mine was more tumbledown than most, since rioters had recently set fire to it and attempted to burn the building down. Fortunately my expensive contribution to the fire watch had brought buckets and beaters quickly to the scene, and most of the lower floor was saved, though it was a different matter in the upper room which had once been my sleeping quarters. The beams up there were badly charred, the roof had fallen in, and the access ladder had entirely gone. It was almost impossible to live there now, even without the imminent danger of collapse: that was one reason why my wife and I had been so glad to have the roundhouse to rebuild, and why we’d moved out of town.

None of the damage to the shop had made any difference to the rent, of course, despite my representations to the landlord. He was a wealthy man, who’d had several of these tenements thrown up; a city magistrate, so there was no point in taking him to court. A contract was a contract, he declared: I had agreed to rent ‘from ground to sky’ — and that was exactly what I had possession of, even if the ‘sky’ began a little closer now. Nor would he make any repairs, although he did agree that I could have some done. Entirely at my own expense, naturally.

I was thinking rather bitterly about all this as I turned into the lane where the workshop stood, sandwiched between a candle-maker’s and a tannery. It was a narrow thoroughfare, always full — as now — of slaves and tradespeople: men with donkeys, boys bent double under piles of smelly skins, and blowzy women touting hot greasy pies from trays. The gutters streamed with mud and all the effluvium of trade. Not an area where citizens in togas often came — I usually wore a humble tunic here myself. Already I was attracting curious stares.

I ignored them and was walking swiftly to my door when suddenly I saw a sight which stopped me dead. Someone was standing in the entrance to the shop, frowning down at my stockpiled heaps of marble chips and stones. It wasn’t Junio. It was a stocky figure in military dress.

Bullface. I would have recognised that profile anywhere.

Almost without conscious thought I turned on my heel and began to walk even more swiftly back the way I’d come. I managed (with an effort) to control myself and neither looked back nor broke into a run, although the temptation to do both was very strong. I expected at every instant to hear a cry or the clanking of armour in pursuit, but I reached the end of the lane without incident.

Even then I did not pause, but turned into an even narrower alleyway, another and then another, till I reached an area I did not know, a world away from the familiar streets of the colonia or from the fine tombs along the Londinium road.

I was in a passage between two disused shops, which was used as little more than a refuse heap. The meaner streets of town are full of middens of this kind, the waste allowed to rot and wash away, or sometimes collected by the enterprising poor to sell as fertiliser on the great estates. No one had collected in this alleyway for years.

The winter sun had not penetrated here and the ground was wet and slippery with frost. I was sure that Bullface would not come looking for me here. But I was taking no chances. I slithered over noisome mounds of rotting kitchen waste — bones, chicken-heads, cabbage-stalks and worse — and only then did I lean against the wall to catch my breath and try to make some sense of what I’d seen.

What was Bullface doing at my premises? It was no social visit, that was clear. Yet I had come more or less directly from the garrison and no one had attempted to detain me there, so there was presumably no official warrant out yet for my arrest. But there was something about the presence of Praxus’s bodyguard which alarmed me very much — more than an ordinary member of the town watch would have done.