Rosemary Rowe: A Pattern of Blood

I glowered at him. He was right, again. Wealthy and influential Romans like Marcus do not usually invite mere pavement-makers to dine with them privately in their country villas. Obviously Marcus wanted something. And it was clearly something significant. Generally, if Marcus wanted me to do something, he simply sent for me and ordered me to do it.

‘I imagine,’ I said loftily, ‘that it concerns the librarium mosaic at his new country house. It needs repairing, and I assume that he is about to offer me the commission. After all, I was responsible for his getting the villa in the first place.’

‘And for seeing that he needed a new pavement to go into it,’ Junio reminded me cheerfully. ‘Perhaps you are right. No doubt he thinks you owe him another. After all, it was you who ordered the new floor to be dug up.’

‘Only in order to solve a murder!’

Junio grinned. ‘True. Though you know what His Excellence is like. He probably thinks a dinner invitation is better than payment.’

He had a point there, too. The problem in dealing with Marcus is that he affects to regard me — at least for payment purposes — as a valued artist and thinker, to whom mere money would be an insult. In fact, such insults would be very welcome, if only to buy food and candles and to pay the rent, all of which are getting more expensive by the year. There are mutterings everywhere that the Emperor himself will have to ‘do something’ soon, though I doubt, myself, that the boorish, addle-pated Commodus will ever bestir his imperial self sufficiently to introduce a double denarius or to restrict the price of wheat. In the meantime, a poor tradesman has to count every sestertius . I was not, however, about to admit that to Junio.

‘Marcus knows everyone of importance in the whole of Glevum,’ I said, with some justice. ‘He has already put a number of valuable contracts my way. If his pavement is admired, I shall have wealthy clients clamouring at my door.’

‘That would be a sight, indeed!’ Junio agreed. I could see his eyes dancing at the mental picture of those ‘wealthy clients’ coming to my shop in person. My workshop is outside the colonia walls, down on the marshy lands beside the river where the rents are cheap, away from the fine Roman paving and lofty buildings of Glevum proper, with its forum, fountains and fine open spaces. Rich citizens rarely come here. I could imagine them, pot-bellied and self-important, wrinkling their fastidious noses at the mingling smells from the tannery and tallow-maker’s, and trying vainly not to trail their togas in the mire. Despite my anxiety, I found myself suppressing a smile.

Junio was thinking of togas too. ‘I suppose you will be wanting to wear your formal dress for the occasion?’

I groaned aloud. I had not worn it to Corinium, but this dinner with Marcus was a different matter. ‘I’ll have to wear it, I suppose. Poor unbleached woollen thing that it is.’

Marcus himself would undoubtedly be sporting a dazzling white linen affair imported from Rome, with a broad stripe of deep imperial purple round the edge — a reminder, if anyone doubted it, that he is of patrician blood. Marcus’s family name is Aurelius, and though that is a very common name, he is widely whispered to be related to the Emperor. He has never confirmed this rumour, but he hasn’t denied it, either. Personally, I don’t question the truth of it — at least, not when Marcus is listening.

‘You will want your toga cleaned, then, master.’

I had forgotten that. My toga still had an unofficial stripe of its own — a rim of grime around the bottom from the last time I’d worn it, visiting an important customer up a narrow lane in muddy weather. Junio had wanted to take it to the fuller’s earlier, but I had demurred because we had got so behind in the shop.

I looked at Junio in dismay. ‘What am I to do? There isn’t time to send it to the fuller’s and have it bleached before tomorrow night.’

Junio shook his head, grinning. ‘Well, this is a chance to try that famous Celtic “washing mixture” you brought back from Corinium. We’ll see if it’s as good as you claim.’

I hadn’t brought it from Corinium, in fact. I’d got it from a Dubonnai farm I knew, which I had visited on the way home to arrange to buy their distinctive red stone for tiles. I was made welcome, as usual, in the cheerful smokiness of the roundhouse, and I struck a bargain for the tiles over a pitcher of honeyed mead with the owner, sitting around the central fire, attended by dogs and chickens, toothless women and bold-eyed girls. The Dubonnai (or ‘Dobunni’ as the Romans call them) had been making soap, and hearing that I remembered it from my youth, with typical Celtic generosity they insisted that I take some home in a pottery jar. It was not identical to ours — I was seized into slavery from the south-west of the island — but it was very similar.

Junio was intrigued when I showed him. He had never heard of soap. He was half-Celt himself, but had been raised by Roman owners who preferred more civilised cleaning methods.

I waxed eloquent about it, extolling its virtues and reminiscing about my own roundhouse and how my young wife and my grandmother used to save goose grease to soften their hands, or to boil up with lye from the wood ashes into a washing mixture. I remembered it vividly — a strong, sticky substance vigorously applied by my grandmother to clothes, cooking implements and even, occasionally, to people.

Junio had been fascinated. He usually was when I started talking about my younger days. He had been born in servitude, and couldn’t remember his own family. Or he affected to be fascinated — perhaps he was only humouring his master.

Whatever the truth, I was not hugely enthusiastic about having this untried substance used inexpertly upon my only toga, but there was little else to do, and after my paeans of praise for it, I could hardly back down now. So we set to work with the soap.

It was smelly and caustic and irritated the skin, but it was fairly effective, rubbed into the hems, though we used a whole amphora of fresh drinking water to rinse them off. How Gwellia and my grandmother would have laughed at our efforts! I remembered my wife standing knee-deep in the river, skirt looped up to her waist, rinsing her small-clothes in the running stream. How beautiful she had been, with her plaited hair and laughing eyes, her bronzed thighs glistening with wet. But it did not do to think of that. I dragged my attention back to the toga.

I wore it next evening to Marcus’s villa. It was not altogether dry, since there was too much stone dust in the back workshop to dry the thing off properly in front of the cooking fire, and we had been reduced to stretching it out to air in front of the window space upstairs.

Marcus had sent a cart for us, because the villa was some miles from Glevum, so we rode like rich men. I had been to the house before, when it was owned by a retired centurion, but I was struck again by how imposing it looked in the twilight, with the lanterns at the gatehouse, the surrounding farm and the villa itself glimmering with candles, a long, low building with lofty rooms. Of course, it had been built to impress. The visitor was intended to marvel at its opulence and realise that no expense had been spared. I realised.

I felt more than usually at a disadvantage, though, as I was shown into the echoing marble atrium to wait, in a toga that was still slightly moist at the edges and which gave off a warm, steamy smell in the heat of the braziers and the underfloor hypocaust heating. If I had known what was in store for me, I would have felt more doubtful still.

The slave at the inner door looked at my damp hems with disdain, but a toga is still a toga. He announced me with a flourish — all three Roman names, as befitted a citizen. ‘Longinus Flavius Libertus has arrived, master.’ He gave me that look again. ‘The mosaic-maker.’ That was to put me in my place. Important citizens do not have trades, they live on the income from their lands and ‘managed’ businesses. He didn’t mention Junio, of course, who was following me to take my cloak, any more than he would have mentioned a pet dog if I had happened to bring one with me.