Rosemary Rowe: A Pattern of Blood

‘Libertus, my old friend! Welcome, welcome.’ Marcus came bustling to greet me, his toga even more pristine and elegant than I had feared. Its dazzling whiteness was set off to perfection by the glint of the heavy gold brooch on his slim shoulder and the equally heavy seal ring on his outstretched hand. They could parade him around the forum, I thought, as an advertisement for the fuller’s — except for that imperial border. In fact, with his short-cropped fair hair, hooded eyes, patrician nose and fine features, he looked every inch an Aurelian. He was still a young man, but he had an effortless air of command. Perhaps the rumours about his ancestry were true.

All this effort at elegance was making me increasingly uneasy. What did he want with me? It was in any case an awkward moment. Normally, I would have made a formal obeisance, on my knees, but I was supposed to be his dinner guest. I compromised by bowing deeply over his hand and bending my knees slightly. ‘Excellence! I am honoured by your gracious invitation.’

It seemed to do the trick. Marcus smiled. ‘Nonsense! I wished to reward you, old friend, for your help.’ He made the slightest of gestures and two slaves came running, with a folding chair for him and a stool for me. Dates, figs and honeyed fruit, I noticed, were already set out for us on a magnificent inlaid table nearby, together with two cups and a jug of something which I took to be cooled wine. He waved a hand at them. ‘A little something to while away the time before dinner? A mere trifle.’

My heart sank further. I am not in a general way a lover of dried dates and figs — like many Roman appetisers they are too sweet for my taste — but since every item on that table, from the food and wine to the fine goblets with ‘Don’t be thirsty’ worked into the glass, had been especially imported from somewhere else, one didn’t have to be a tax collector to work out that this entertainment of Marcus’s was a very expensive ‘trifle’ indeed.

Junio — who had relieved me of my mantle and was now being led away to wait for me in the slave quarters, as the custom was — caught my eye and gave me an expressive look. Whatever my host wanted, his face said, it wasn’t a bread-and-apples matter.

I couldn’t ask Marcus what it was, of course. That would have been a breach of etiquette. Instead, I was obliged to perch on the stool and eat with a determined appearance of enjoyment and gratitude, while Marcus gossiped about his twin passions, pleasure and politics, and boasted about the exploits of his contacts in the army.

At last, however, he worked around to it, although by such a circuitous route that even then I didn’t see it coming.

‘My cousin, now,’ he said, ‘been made a doublarius already, and on the governor’s staff. Twice the pay — and at his age, too. He’ll go far. He was the one who sent me the wine. You like it?’

I made an inspired guess. ‘Rhenish?’ Wine is not my preferred drink, and my judgement is limited to an estimation of how much it looks like weak blood and how much it tastes like strong vinegar. However, I knew that Rhenish wine was much esteemed this year, and, since Marcus clearly expected me to say something, it seemed like a sensible guess. Even if I was wrong, I reasoned, I had paid him a compliment.

Marcus gave a nod of approval. ‘Not quite, not quite. But a good guess. Even better than Rhenish, in fact. It’s Falernian. From the vineyards south of Rome. Best wine in the world. That young scoundrel knows a good vintage when he samples it. They looted a cellar, apparently belonging to that rebellious legion in the north-west. You heard about that?’ He signalled to the slave, and I found myself contemplating another glassful of whatever it was. All I knew, I thought glumly, was that it wasn’t ale.

I shook my head. I had heard vague rumours, of course, but there are always rumours in Glevum, often incredible and usually contradictory. This legion or that has won a skirmish, or lost it. The governor is dead, is married, is coming to Glevum, has been visited by Jupiter himself in the shape of a butterfly. Even the truth tends to be so modified when passed on by word of mouth from traveller to traveller that I had come to pay little attention to rumour. If there was any serious trouble one would learn of it soon enough.

But obviously there had been truth in this. Marcus was still smiling, toying with his goblet, but there was no smile in his voice. ‘Oh, yes, quite a serious affair. Set on the governor and murdered his bodyguard. Left him for dead, I hear.’

I hadn’t heard that story. I put down my glass and gulped — not at the wine. ‘Left the governor for dead? You mean Pertinax? Your friend? The Governor of Britain?’ My mind was racing, trying to organise my thoughts as well as I could through the filter of Falernian wine. My patron derived his authority from the governor directly. If Pertinax fell, then Marcus fell with him, and any political assassin might strike at Marcus too. ‘That governor?’

Marcus regarded me with that affectionate intensity people reserve for the seriously stupid. ‘That governor.’

‘Oh.’ There seemed to be nothing else to say. Suddenly everything, the invitation, the wine, the exotic fruits — the whole expensive and uncalled-for occasion — seemed depressingly ominous. Marcus had used me before now to get to the bottom of various unpleasant incidents, such as the death of an ex-centurion or the theft of a quantity of gold, which seemed to him to threaten the dignity of Rome. He valued my discretion, he said. Now, I realised, he was about to ask me to be discreet again, but on a grander scale. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like it a bit. Meddling in that kind of murky politics is a certain short cut to an early grave — often by interestingly agonising routes.

I was considering the feasibility of pleading some unavoidable appointment — my own funeral, perhaps — when Marcus went on. ‘Of course, Pertinax has already ordered the punishment of the guilty legion. It will be severe, naturally. Part of the reason he was sent here was to instil discipline into the ranks.’

I breathed out again. If Pertinax had identified his attackers, perhaps my discretion would not be needed after all.

I had exhaled too soon. Marcus bit delicately into a particularly bilious-looking fig. ‘But something else has arisen from this. Something nearer home.’

I almost choked on my non-Rhenish wine.

Marcus regarded me benevolently. ‘Do I remember hearing that you visited Corinium about the last full moon? Something to do with trying to trace that wife of yours?’

I nodded, my mouth suddenly dry.

‘You didn’t, by any chance, hear anything about a stabbing? An acquaintance of mine, a fellow named Quintus Ulpius Decianus. He is one of the councillors there, a decurion. I have received word to say that he was attacked walking home from watching a chariot race. His slave was killed and he was wounded.’

I gulped. I am obliged by custom to attend upon my patron regularly. I had informed him of my visit to Corinium, but — apart from telling Junio — I had kept carefully discreet about the robbery. Now, it seemed, I was about to pay for that discretion.

‘Street robbers, wasn’t it?’ I enquired.

Marcus shook his head. ‘That seemed likely, at first. But there is something else. A friend had attended him to the races, and saw the end of the attack. Only the end, because he stopped to speak to a soothsayer. It was dark, of course, and he didn’t see the attackers properly, but as he came around the corner he saw someone standing over Quintus with a dagger. He shouted and gave chase, but he is not as young as he was, and by that time it was too late. Quintus was lying wounded on the chariot grooves, and his lantern-bearer was dead. One might have suspected the friend of staging the robbery, except that he saved Quintus’s life.’