Ruth Downie - Caveat emptor

Gallonius threw his towel along the bench under the window. His lips made the sound of a deflating bladder as he slowly collapsed himself to a seated position. “Sorry about Caratius,” he said. “Still thinks he’s in charge of the place.”

Ruso, feeling overdressed, said, “I gather he comes from a long line of influential men?”

Gallonius chuckled. “On one side only. His other grandfather was an ordinary craftsman like mine. And the famous one with the Roman education is nothing to be proud of. He failed to organize any defenses for the town and then ran off as soon as there was trouble.”

Ruso had the word Boudica? on the tip of his tongue when he remembered the procurator’s injunction.

“Things are much better organized these days,” Gallonius continued. “These days we elect our Council in the Roman way.”

“So I see,” said Ruso, noting that Caratius’s family seemed to be at the top no matter what system was in place. “Asper didn’t have any other duties, did he?”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know,” said Ruso, not wanting to explain about the reference to evidence in the unfinished letter. “Security? I’ve been told about the woman, but I wondered if there was any other way he might have made enemies.”

“His contract was to collect the taxes, which wouldn’t make him popular. Are you suggesting it wasn’t a robbery?”

“Just trying to get the full picture.”

“Our own guards deal with security. Within the limits of the Constitution, of course. For anything else we consult the governor.”

It was a speech designed to reassure visiting officials. “So what do you think happened to your money?”

Gallonius’s forefinger sank into the soft flesh of his chin as he stroked his beard. “You could say it was taken by robbers,” he said. “Or you could say that Julius Asper realized he had made a foolish mistake over the woman, tried to run off with the money, and chose the wrong accomplice.”

None of this was anything new. Ruso noted that the indigestion look had reappeared. “What else could you say?” he prompted.

Gallonius lifted a towel from the stack farther along the bench and wiped his forehead. “I wouldn’t say it,” he said. “And I wouldn’t even want to think it. Not of a fellow magistrate.”

“If you have any proof that-”

“If I had any proof, Investigator, I would offer it for the good of the town. As it is, we’re relying on you.”

When Ruso escaped to the relative cool of the exercise hall, he found two burly guards in the familiar red tunics waiting by the main door. One of them was the big youth again. He introduced himself as Gavo and announced that they were at the investigator’s service. Neither showed any surprise when he asked them to escort him to Julius Asper’s house, where he intended to make sure they were out of earshot when he told Tilla he had just agreed to dine with Camma’s estranged husband.

Tilla knew people were lying to her. She knew because she would have done the same if a Catuvellauni woman had turned up at home and started asking questions about one of her own neighbors: even one as distinctive as this Grata seemed to be. She wished she had thought to ask Dias where the housekeeper had gone. Instead she had hoped that if she hung around near the water-pipe on the corner for long enough, she could strike up a conversation with somebody who could tell her. But the Catuvellauni townsfolk had come and gone, shaking their heads as they splashed water into their jars and buckets and sometimes over their feet. Several people knew who Grata was, but none admitted to knowing where to find her.

Tilla glanced around the streets that had been busy when they arrived. Most of the carts had gone now, taking their owners home from market. There was still plenty of light but the evening chill was beginning to creep in, and there was hardly anyone about. People who needed water had already been to fetch it. Now they were in their homes preparing their dinner. She should get back. Camma should not be left too long on her own. She bent to heave up the two buckets she had taken from the deserted kitchen.

At that moment she saw a small brisk woman in her midtwenties hurrying from the direction of the Forum. The woman was dressed in the fine-woven plaid of a local, but her coloring spoke of ancestors in one of those impossibly hot and dry places across the sea. Tilla lowered the buckets to the ground.

The woman walked straight up to her and said in British, “Who are you, and why are you asking for me?”

Tilla explained, adding, “Camma was expecting to find you at the house.”

Grata tilted up her chin. “The master and his brother disappeared,” she said. “ She went off to Londinium, and I’m left with people banging on the door at all hours shouting “where’s our money?” And they were the polite ones. The council came around wanting to know where he was and searching the house and then I woke up in the middle of the night with a bunch of drunks outside trying to piss through the window.”

Tilla said, “When we got there, people were stealing the furniture.”

“I told them to clear off,” Grata said, as if that might have kept everyone out once she had left. “More than once.”

“I am sorry for you. But now she is back, your mistress needs you. She has a man to mourn and a new son to look after.”

The woman hitched the basket up her arm. “He was my master, but she was never my mistress. I’m not a slave, you know.”

The refusal to call Camma by name or show any interest in the baby was not promising, but Tilla pressed on. “I did not mean to insult. But she needs help, and I will be gone in a day or two.”

“I’ve got a job in a bakery now. You’ll have to find somebody else.”

“Do you know anybody?”

The silence suggested that no one else would want the job, either. “She should go back where she came from.”

Tilla said, “She can’t.”

“It’s no good you looking at me like that. She made her choice. Ask anyone: They’ll tell you the same.”

Tilla tried again. “I can’t pretend that Camma did a wise thing,” she said. “But I’m asking you-”

“Look, it was a job. I kept house and I got paid for it. It was all fine till she came along causing trouble. I tried to tell him, and so did his brother, but he wouldn’t listen.”

Tilla tried a different approach. “Do you know what happened to them?”

“What’s it to you?”

“Nothing,” admitted Tilla. “But it is to Camma. Who do you think would want to hurt them?”

Grata shrugged. “How should I know?”

“I heard there was trouble about the baby.”

The dark eyes narrowed. “You’ve been hearing a lot. For a Northerner.”

“Northerners have ears too. Do you think that magistrate she married-”

Grata’s slender hand clutched at her arm. “I don’t think things about magistrates,” she hissed, “and if I did I wouldn’t be fool enough to talk about them with strangers in the street. They were asking for trouble, and they got it.”

“I’m sorry. I am only a midwife trying to help a patient.”

Grata released her grip. “I’ve no quarrel with you. You don’t know what you’re meddling in.”

“I have a husband to go back to. I promise there will be money to pay you if-”

“How many times? I have another job!”

Tilla shook her head. “I am sad to find this is how things are in the South.”

“Hah! Well, maybe it’s all very friendly up where you come from, but round here if you want to fit in, you have to behave like a decent woman.”

There was something about the words that recalled Tilla’s own loneliest moments in faraway Gaul. “It is not easy being different,” she said. “I am sorry to have wasted your time.”