Rosemary Rowe - The Ghosts of Glevum

That was the understatement of the season. Ever since it had been announced that Governor Pertinax had been promoted to the more prestigious African provinces, Glevum had been alive with rumour of all kinds. There were as many versions as there were inhabitants. You could take your pick. There had been a new governor appointed. There had not. Someone had actually set sail for Britannia, but had fallen overboard. Or had been pushed. A man had been selected by the Emperor, but had since been executed. Or proved to be a woman in disguise. Or both.

The only fact on which the gossips all agreed was that no new governor had so far appeared. The date for the expected handover had come and gone, amidst a flurry of Imperial messengers. Pertinax had finally departed to take up his new post, but in the absence of a successor it appeared that he was still nominally in charge, and interim running of the province had devolved upon his regional representatives. Hence this hurried meeting of the local great: Praxus, Mellitus and Marcus were the chief military, fiscal and legal authorities in the area. It was not a natural alliance, and probably one of them would emerge as paramount. No wonder my inebriated friend was worried about where to place his loyalties.

He looked at me contemptuously. ‘Rumours! Huh!’

‘Well,’ that was the florid trader sitting on my left, ‘someone told me only yesterday, in strictest confidence, that Jupiter has turned the governor-elect into a goat, and we are waiting for the gods to turn him back.’

‘It can’t have been Proconsul Fabius then,’ another man chimed in. ‘No point in turning him into a goat. No one could have told the difference anyway.’

There was a murmur of relief and mirth at this. It was safe to laugh. The Proconsul Fabius in question was securely dead. He had been a favoured candidate for governor — I was fairly sure of that, from information I had gleaned at Marcus’s — but he had been executed recently for an alleged plot against the Emperor. (Not all rumours are necessarily false.)

However, I did not tell my companions that. Instead I took advantage of the change of mood to divert attention to the honoured guests, who were showing signs of getting to their feet. ‘Well, councillor, it seems you have your wish. The feast appears to be coming to an end, so you will be able to make good your escape.’

The last glass had gone straight to the old man’s head. ‘All right for you,’ he grumbled indistinctly. ‘The journey’ll be colder and wetter than the Styx for all the rest of us.’

He had a point. This banquet was being held at Marcus’s country house, but only Praxus and Mellitus — and their attendants, naturally — were house-guests here, able to stay at the villa overnight. Most of the other diners would have to make their way back to the city, several miles away. Of course (since wheeled carriages were useless in the town, where they were only permitted to move about at night) most would have hired litters awaiting them by now — the poor carriers already half perished with the cold — but travel on a winter’s night like this was always dismal in the foggy damp and chill. I was glad that I had my cosy little roundhouse less than half a mile from here — so close that it had once formed part of the estate, until Marcus had given it to me as a reward for solving a politically embarrassing crime for him. I had no expensive carrying chair to take me home, but at least I would not have very far to walk.

‘Beshides. .’ the old ex-councillor began, but he got no further. The house-party was already on its feet, and the newly appointed priest of Jupiter, a self-important youngish man with a face like a moon and a hairless head to match, was already making his way towards the portable altar in the corner of the room. I am not a believer in the Roman pantheon, preferring the older darker Celtic gods of fire and stone, but as a citizen I am expected to observe the formalities, and in any case one can never be too careful with the gods. I rose obediently to my feet with everybody else while the closing libation and food-offering were made. The deities do very well out of official banquets such as this, I thought: sacrifice and invocation to begin, the usual oblation to the Lares halfway through, and now — since the guest of honour was a military man and Jupiter is the army’s patron god — this final offering to Jove. The household slaves would profit too, since they are traditionally permitted to enjoy any part of the sacrifice the immortals do not seem to want.

My tipsy friend the councillor was finding it quite difficult to stand by now, at least without the help of my restraining hand. And he was not the only one. Various guests were looking flushed, and either scowling with drunken concentration or smiling inanely as they swayed. Marcus’s best wine was having its effect. Even the mountainous Praxus, ridiculous in his wispy pale blue robe, was clearly feeling the effects, and as soon as the solemnities were over he gave a brief nod to the assembled company and lurched off noisily towards the little chamber which Marcus had set aside as a vomitorium for the night.

Marcus caught my eye across the room, and raised his brows. He had visited the vomitorium earlier himself, of course, as many other notables had done, but only for socially accepted purposes — to tickle the back of his throat with one of the thoughtfully provided feathers and genteelly regurgitate his food so as to make room for more. Stumbling out to void your stomach because of too much drink is not the behaviour of a well-bred man.

Praxus had chosen an inconvenient moment for his exit, and there was an uncomfortable pause. It would be improper for the rest of us to move before the official party had withdrawn, and that was impossible until Praxus reappeared. The senior magistrate who had sniggered earlier, a corpulent decurion who notoriously enjoyed good drink, picked up his cup and sipped at the remnants of his wine, and after a moment more diners did the same. Others dabbled their fingers in dainty water bowls, removed their wreaths, untucked their linen napkins or otherwise made preparations to depart. Nobody was talking very much.

Mellitus, who was rumoured never to visit vomitoria — too mean to give anything away, the wits said — compressed his already sour thin lips into a firmer line and sidled up to Marcus. He gave his mirthless smile and murmured something — clearly disapproving, but inaudible.

Marcus nodded, and signalled to a slave. Then he appeared to reconsider and went out towards the vomitorium himself.

I knew the little room. Of course I did — I laid the pavement in there myself, in the days when the previous owner used it as a cramped and wholly unsuitable librarium . It was tiny, a windowless and charmless space, distinguished only by the heavy door which had once been fitted with a complex lock, and — if I may say so — by a fine mosaic floor.

Marcus — who had added extensions to the house, including a new study for himself elsewhere — had little use for that tiny room these days. It was generally used as an ante-room for slaves except on occasions such as this when it furnished a near-perfect spot for accommodating the huge glazed bowl on its stand, the supply of goose feathers in their great brass pot and the bucket of perfumed water for rinsing lips and hands when the purpose of one’s visit had been fulfilled.

Even then, it was not quite ideal. Once a diner had arrived to use the facility, there was no space in there for anything else, not even for the usual attendant slave. The luckless boy whose function at such feasts was to stand by and periodically empty out the bowl and replenish the water in the pail was generally obliged to wait outside, in the verandahed colonnade which — as in many country homes built in the Roman style — ran round the courtyard garden and linked the series of individual private rooms in the rear wings to each other and to the central portion of the house. The colonnade was open on the inner side, so waiting out there in the biting draught must have been a cold and thankless task tonight.